Welcome back to What I’m Hearing, and thanks to everyone who said hello during Grammy weekend. Turns out it was the right call to move forward with events as de facto L.A. fire fundraisers. I’m hearing that the organizers of Thursday night’s FireAid benefit will soon announce that they raised more than $100 million for relief efforts, with merch sales and the V.O.D. version still generating donations. Super impressive, and that’s on top of whatever the Grammys ends up raising. Tonight, some Grammys weekend chatter, but first, the lessons of the Emilia Pérez meltdown, plus a report from inside today’s first Blake Lively–Justin Baldoni courtroom showdown, and a look at Dog Man and the holes in the kiddie movie market. 🚨 Programming note: This week on The Town, Lucas Shaw and I named the real winners and losers at the Grammys, FireAid organizer Irving Azoff revealed which act said yes first, and Wicked producer Marc Platt offered a great piece of advice for pitching studios. Subscribe here and here. Not a Puck member yet? Click here. Got a news tip or an idea for me? Just reply to this email or message me on Signal at 310-804-3198. Discussed in this issue: Karla Sofía Gascón, Blake Lively, Beyoncé, Benny Blanco, Dan Loeb, Lady Gaga, Nicole Kidman, Melissa Nathan, Clive Davis, Zoe Saldaña, Bryan Freedman, Jody Gerson, Post Malone, Demi Moore, Ron Burkle, Jimmy Fallon, Caitlyn Jenner, Barry Manilow, and… some fun stuff from inside the Grammys. But first…

Who Won the Week: Kendrick Lamar

Yes, Beyoncé finally broke her Grammys album of the year “curse,” but that was kinda expected. Kendrick winning record and song, two of the top four awards, for a diss track that calls Drake a pedophile? A much more improbable feat. Runner-up: Yu Yang, director of China’s Ne Zha 2, which has grossed an amazing $430 million through the long Lunar New Year weekend and has a shot at becoming the first movie to earn $1 billion in a single market. Second runner-up: Michael Kives, the investor and former CAA agent, who finally settled litigation surrounding the collapse of FTX. The recovery trust called Kives’s firm a “bright spot in the FTX portfolio,” which maybe has something to do with its investment in SpaceX. Honorable mention: Demi Moore, Fernanda Torres, and the other best actress Oscar contenders, who all stand to benefit from the ongoing Karla Sofía Gascón tweetstorm implosion.

A little more on that…

I noticed Benny Blanco was at the Clive Davis pre-Grammy party without fiancé Selena Gomez on Saturday night. Gomez might have been busy, or she didn’t want to get asked about her emotional immigration video, which has become a target of the Trump White House. But I’m also guessing we won’t see as much of Gomez, Zoe Saldaña, and the rest of the Emilia Pérez talent during the so-called “Phase 2” of Oscar campaigning, which runs from now through February 18. Netflix dodged my questions about plans for the campaign, which is scheduled to rev back up with this weekend’s DGA Awards, PGA Awards, and Critics Choice Awards, all of which will showcase Emilia Pérez. I’m betting the talent will show up but do limited, if any, press. All except for Gascón, who a Netflix source confirms has “gone rogue” with her half-apology tour on social media and CNN en Español. She seems to be sticking with a combo of “I’m the real victim here” and “Anyone who knows me knows that I am not racist.” Neither Netflix nor Gascón’s agency, UTA, nor her publicists at The Lede Co. are guiding this strategy, I’m told. Yikes. Everyone in town seems to be shocked that the Netflix awards team and its leader, Lisa Taback, didn’t clean up Gascón’s social media accounts well before freelance journalist Sarah Hagi either stumbled upon them or was fed them by a rival campaign (or, more likely, a “stan” account). But what’s been more surprising to me in conversations with the top awards consultants is how little vetting of contenders happens at any studio or streamer. One after another, the strategists told me they rarely go deep on personal accounts unless there are preexisting red flags. That seems… crazy in this day and age, with social media increasingly weaponized, and with so much riding on these eight-figure campaigns. These consultants literally agonize over exactly where actors should sit on a guild screening panel, but they don’t look to see if maybe one of them has repeatedly attacked Muslims online? It’s also pretty easy to search their posts for the word “Hitler.” Oscar contenders seem especially vulnerable to the dreaded “resurfaced tweet” because many of them go from complete unknowns to semi-ubiquitous media personalities in a matter of months. Did anyone know or care about Lupita Nyong’o or Eddie Redmayne or Charles Melton or Jean Dujardin or Lucas Hedges or Yalitza Aparicio or, say, Karla Sofía Gascón, until their respective awards campaigns turned them into main characters of the celebrity industrial complex? No, so it’s kinda the responsibility of those campaigns to prepare and protect these people… even from themselves. Back in 2016, when Fox Searchlight paid a then-record $17.5 million for The Birth of a Nation, information about filmmaker Nate Parker’s college rape trial was just sitting on his Wikipedia page for anyone to see. After those resurfaced allegations derailed the movie, I remember a lot of “never again” hand-wringing about vetting key talent before jumping into bed with them. Seems everyone forgot. Maybe now they’ll remember.

Quote of the Week

“Tonight, I will perform my only good song.” —Post Malone, before singing “Sunflower” at the Clive Davis pre-Grammy fundraiser on Saturday night. Runner-up: “This was not started by us.” —Bryan Freedman, attorney for Justin Baldoni, in court today against Blake Lively’s team, employing the I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I rhetoric that has defined the It Ends With Us war.

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Now Eriq Gardner has a report from inside the New York courtroom on today’s first pretrial conference in Baldoni v. Lively…

Eriq Gardner

What is typically a procedural snoozefest got off to a dramatic start in an overcrowded courtroom, with Judge Lewis “Brother of Doug” Liman preemptively ordering attorneys to address their own conduct in fueling the media circus surrounding this case. Just this past weekend, Justin Baldoni’s attorney, Bryan Freedman, uploaded his client’s entire 224-page amended complaint—including a highly unusual 168-page “exhibit timeline”—to a specially created (and very public) website. For a case not expected to go to trial until March of next year, fireworks have already begun. If there’s a headline from the hearing, it’s that Blake Lively plans to add new claims and new defendants. Michael Gottlieb, her lead attorney, didn’t specify who else might be dragged into the war, although he hinted that the move may scramble Baldoni’s legal representation, which raised my suspicion that Freedman himself could be named. Freedman, recovering from the flu, responded forcefully when his behavior came up, reading the Lively team’s own press statements about Baldoni aloud in court. Notably, Freedman’s new complaint includes the allegation that Lively has been “colluding” with The New York Times for months, citing metadata from the paper’s original December story about the It Ends With Us “smear campaign” as evidence. Judge Liman stopped short of issuing a gag order, but he did adopt a rule restricting any out-of-court statements that could taint the proceedings. He made clear he wasn’t thrilled about doing so, saying he didn’t want the case “devolving into litigation over comments by lawyers.” But that ship may have sailed. As Gottlieb left the courtroom, he grumbled that this was now an “arms race.” Liman also threatened to move up the trial date if those involved could not behave. I’m sure the judge hopes to preserve the sanctity of the jury pool, but I find it nearly inconceivable that this case will be ready for trial a mere year from now. Both sides seemed ready to dive into discovery, telling the judge about the ongoing reputational harm to their respective “female-run businesses” (i.e., crisis managers Melissa Nathan and Leslie Sloane) and the need to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars in damages ASAP. “Yes, that’s why you sued, I get it,” retorted Liman. What about those not inside the courtroom, like The New York Times, which hasn’t been served yet? Surely, the Times will want to protect its source discussions. I could see the paper filing motions on this front. If the litigation indeed devolves into lawyers becoming defendants—at very least, they’ll be witnesses—this will get very messy.

My Reading List…

Today’s Paramount news that a Skydance assistant probably tried to tell David Ellison but he immediately put his fingers in his ears, jumped up and down, and screamed “I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!”: CBS News staff is threatening to resign, and 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens won’t apologize for the Kamala Harris interview edit, despite Shari Redstone’s move to pay off Trump to settle his lawsuit. [Puck] No, Sundance wasn’t great this year. Is the movie market just that bad? Programmers out of touch with audiences? Or is everyone just ready for the Park City era to end? [NY Times] Rick Caruso has recruited Netflix’s Ted Sarandos and Amazon’s Mike Hopkins for his foundation to help speed up L.A. rebuilding… and get him elected mayor next year. [L.A. Times] Russian tycoon Alex Shustorovich, who now controls the classical music agency IMG Artists, is trying to enforce a three-year non-compete against WME, which could cause the agency to lose Shakira, LCD Soundsystem, and a bunch of other music clients. [Financial Times] Bill Carter noticed that Jimmy Fallon delivered an entirely Trump-free monologue on a day with lots of Trump news. Honestly, this might be the right move for Fallon. Let the other guys have that audience and go for the Trumpers and those who just don’t want to hear about the guy. [Late Nighter] Billionaires Dan Loeb and Ron Burkle are fighting over an effort to take Soho House private, which seems like exactly the reason nobody goes to Soho House anymore. [WSJ] AMC has thankfully reversed its policy of not airing the Nicole Kidman ad before her movies after widespread Babygirl outrage. [WSJ] Now Scott Mendelson has an analysis of the latest box office riddle…

Turbulent Times in Toon Town

The success of this weekend’s ‘Dog Man’ is a reminder that animation sells, but the next major studio animation movie doesn’t arrive until mid-June. Why are theaters still being starved of wholly animated family movies?

Scott Mendelson

Dog Man, DreamWorks Animation’s $40 million adaptation of Dav Pilkey’s mega-popular graphic novel series, nabbed a robust $36 million domestic this past weekend—more than Captain Underpants, also adapted from a Pilkey kid-lit series, which opened to $24 million in 2017. Aside from being an unusually lucrative debut for an animated film in January, it is also the latest evidence that Universal’s non-Illumination animation label can mint new franchises from popular, but not ubiquitous, material. This follows recent successes like The Bad Guys ($250 million in 2022) and The Wild Robot, which earned $325 million last year and has a slew of award nominations. Both of the latter were also adapted from popular children’s books. A burning question: Why aren’t more animated kids movies trying to capitalize on the market opportunity? After Dog Man, the next cartoon from a major studio—Pixar’s Elio—won’t arrive until June. Alas, this isn’t exactly a new problem. In the earlier days of the Covid theatrical recovery, such as it was, theaters went months between DreamWorks’ Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, in December 2022, and Illumination’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie in April 2023, both of which were Universal releases. But that drought was more understandable given the holiday season.

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These days, the paucity is less explicable. Demand is clearly there. Theaters need animated films, period, and many of this decade’s top performers were films that justified a family trip to the theater. In fact, most DreamWorks toons tend to be exceptionally leggy, regularly earning 3.5-4.5x their opening weekends, and of course, much more in V.O.D. afterlife. Pixar’s Elemental famously legged out to nearly $500 million worldwide after being written off by many as a flop. And Disney’s Mufasa: The Lion King has now grossed $230 million domestic after opening to just $35 million in mid-December. Still, too few of the majors want to play in animation. Sure, Disney Animation and Pixar technically wage competitive and artistic war against Illumination and DreamWorks, but these are four shingles within two larger studios, limiting competition and forcing synergies and efficiencies. Blue Sky Studios, which made Ice Age and Rio, ceased to exist in 2021, after Disney bought Fox. During the pandemic era, Sony decided to lease several of its promising toons to streaming platforms, leaving its animation cupboards mostly bare aside from… Continue reading online…

The Feedback

Light feedback this week, but plenty of opinions on the Karla Sofía Gascón Oscars blowup. Some examples… “So I thought the Gascón tweet stuff was just standard Oscars oppo, but it turns out it’s from a way more dangerous source: Brazilians. [Gascón made negative comments about Brazilian I’m Still Here nominee Fernanda Torres.] This Oscars season could be a doozy as apparently Brazilian Selena and Ariana stans are seeing the awards as some sort of ultimate pop star referendum, so… expect more nonsense.” —A director “A public shaming campaign from Netflix and the Academy would give Karla Sofía Gascón an all-access pass to Caitlyn Jenner, Marine Le Pen, Alice Weidel, and other far-right extremists who openly embrace the LGBT community in service of the broader mission to purge Europe of Muslims. You could end up seeing her with Blaire White on YouTube and yukking it up with Milo Yiannopoulos on X. Knowing Hollywood, they’ll fuck up, shun her, and turn her into a much bigger star than she was before.” —A producer “I don’t know anyone voting for this performance, so can we just stop talking about it and move on?” —A writer

Finally… Some Fun Chatter From Grammy Weekend…

Beyoncé arrived at the show and was seated only a few seconds before she won for best country album, which caused more than a few heart attacks among the show’s producers. (Though, if Beyoncé & Co. had missed the moment, presenter Taylor Swift would have had to accept on her behalf, which would’ve made for a viral moment to rival the Bey “surprise” face.) … The Grammys team had been working with The Weeknd for about four months on the terms and conditions for his return after years of boycotts and criticisms. Given the number of people involved, it’s kinda shocking the surprise didn’t leak. … The telecast production’s entire communications system went down about an hour before the show, so no comms from truck to cameras to backstage, etcetera. (It was fixed before air.) … Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars changed up their planned song, “Die With a Smile,” on Thursday, going instead with “California Dreamin’” as an L.A. tribute. … Producer Ben Winston came up with the idea of doing commercials for L.A. businesses only about a week ago, so producers scrambled to put them together with Doja Cat, Charlie Puth, Anderson .Paak, and the Jonas Brothers. At the Clive Davis party/fundraiser, Jody Gerson, UMPG C.E.O. and MusiCares executive of the year, admitted to sneaking into the party “a few times” early in her career. … Barry Manilow, 81, was seen vaping.

Have a great week, Matt Got a question, comment, complaint, or movie roles CAA should pitch for Joe Biden? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

A professional-grade, insider-friendly tip sheet from John Ourand, the industry’s preeminent sports business journalist, covering the leagues, agencies, media deals, and the egos fueling it all.

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