Welcome back to What I’m Hearing, coming at you from my secret summer retreat. Happy Father’s Day to all the dads, including my own, and happy Juneteenth Eve. Hopefully your office is closed tomorrow.

Shameless plug: Thanks to Time, which just named The Town one of the best podcasts of 2023 so far, and this very newsletter “essential for anyone even vaguely interested in the business of Hollywood.”

On that note: This week on The Town, Lucas Shaw and I debated Netflix’s “transparency,” Terry Press evaluated Warner Bros.’ touchy marketing of The Flash, and Rebecca Keegan analyzed the Pixar box office problem. Don’t miss an episode by subscribing here or here.

Discussed in this issue: David Zaslav, James Gunn, Pat Sajak, Sherri Shepherd, Zoe Saldaña, Chris Hemsworth, Brian Robbins, Ezra Miller, Pete Docter, Tony Vinciquerra, and Judge Judy’s “Nepo-Verse”…

But first…

Now a little follow-up on this weekend’s box office carnage…

In fact, in some ways, it’s almost better for the fresh leadership if the leftover films flop, thus proving the need for fresh leadership. Last thing you want is what happened at Paramount to Brian Robbins, who replaced the fired Jim Gianopulos in 2021, and watched as a string of Jim G greenlights became hits. It was only when Babylon imploded, in late 2022, that Robbins arguably became C.E.O.

In this instance, however, I’m talking about The Flash, the $200 million-plus Warner Bros. release that just shat the bed with a $55 million opening weekend and $130 million worldwide—well below expectations (including mine; R.I.P. my box office over/under win percentage). Months ago, Warner Discovery C.E.O. David Zaslav and DC co-head James Gunn now-infamously proclaimed Flash the greatest superhero movie they’d ever seen. Not “we loved the film and hope audiences share our enthusiasm.” Not “Andy Muschietti is a visionary filmmaker and really knocked it out of the park.” This was supposed to be The GOAT. They owned it.

In fact, Zaz and Gunn set the bar so high that fans of the recently disappointing DC franchise pounced rather than note the improvement over dreck like Black Adam. “Such an amateur move,” one top film producer texted me last night. “[Zaz] doesn’t know any better, but Gunn should have.”

Is that the main reason that Flash failed? Of course not. I think it’s a mix of all the micro-problems with this film, plus the macro issues facing big-budget movie-making in general. This was supposed to be the big liftoff weekend for the box office; now it’s an autopsy report. The media won’t say it yet, but unless something changes fast, this first “post-Covid” summer is turning into a big disappointment. Let’s look at the issues with Flash and the larger movie landscape:

• The Ezra Miller Situation hurt, but not how you think: I still don’t believe regular people followed the Miller scandal or made their moviegoing decisions based on it. And hard-core DC fans did ignore it and show up, generating a strong $9.7 million in Thursday previews. Then the movie fell off a cliff. More likely, Miller’s lack of star power and relatively low profile were bigger factors than any scandal.

  Remember that when Gal Gadot was introduced as Wonder Woman, she traveled the world doing press and getting people excited. Miller was in rehab. Plus, Warners lost marketing tie-ins thanks to the scandal, and I’m betting the cast wasn’t thrilled to do interviews where they were forced to talk about The Ezra Miller Situation. For instance, Warners is saying that co-star Michael Keaton was unavailable because he’s shooting Beetlejuice 2 in London. Sure, but that’s a WB movie, and if Keaton wants to promote, he’ll promote.

• The press landscape, in general, is challenged: Eric Handler, the box office analyst, emailed me last night: “I wonder if the big question which should be asked right now is: What’s the impact on the box office from the lack of promotional opportunities on TV for movie stars?” The Writers Guild strike has taken out late night shows, where summer movie stalwarts like Jennifer Lawrence, Scarlett Johansson, and Harrison Ford would normally flock. Instead, JLaw is making the podcast rounds, ScarJo appeared Sunday Today, and Ford is doing Conan O’Brien’s pod.
• The law of diminishing fan returns: We shouldn’t underestimate the impact of Gunn and his DC partner Peter Safran announcing that they are scrapping the current universe while they still have movies coming out. Why see Shazam: Fury of the Gods or The Flash or Blue Beetle or Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom if they won’t mean anything in the larger rebooted universe? It’s like finishing season one of a Netflix series when you know it’s been canceled. Gunn seems to recognize this problem, announcing recently that Xolo Maridueña’s Blue Beetle will survive the DC purge. It might be too late.
• Warners’ irrational exuberance: Given Zaslav and Gunn’s enthusiasm, the Warners marketing team hyped Flash soooo aggressively with fan screenings. The studio insists that the reaction to the film was extremely positive, yet Flash earned a B CinemaScore, on par with misfires and horror schlock. So all those screenings served to a) take a bunch of paying customers off the table; and b) possibly spread bad buzz, to the extent those events reached non-hardcore fans.
• Audience Extraction: Movies now need to be considered as part of the larger entertainment ecosystem, and this weekend Netflix dropped Extraction 2, one of its only real movie franchises, starring a summer tentpole regular, Chris Hemsworth. Judging its impact on Flash and the others is tough—the final episodes of Stranger Things’s Season 4 didn’t seem to hurt Minions: The Rise of Gru over Fourth of July last year—but I’m betting the Extraction numbers will be huge and that it did soften turnout at multiplexes. Point, Netflix.
• Is the summer movie market big enough?: This was the big question heading into the first “post-Covid” summer, where there is competition almost every weekend, and people know these films will be on streaming in a couple months. Will moviegoing expand to support all these titles? Increasingly, the answer seems to be, Not really!

  In addition to Flash, Pixar’s Elemental flopped with a $29.5 million opening, and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts dropped a whopping 67 percent in its second weekend. A lot of competition out there, and those limited IMAX and large-format screens, with their higher ticket prices, are becoming crucial to padding grosses (Elemental only earned 6 percent of its gross from them; Flash had about 40 percent, including some IMAX, but competed with Transformers). Part of that is because Across the Spider-Verse and The Little Mermaid are holding well (at least domestically for Mermaid).

  Big picture, if you look at the “ultimate” worldwide estimates going around the studios this weekend, the numbers for some big bets in theaters aren’t great:

  Flash: $345 million to $415 million
  Fast X: $690 million to $710 million
  Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: $575 million to $625 million
  Elemental: $230 million to $280 million
  Transformers: Rise of the Beasts: $387 million to $422 million
  The Little Mermaid: $515 million to $550 million

  Those are estimates, of course, but… that’s not good enough. Unless Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny or Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One overperform expectations, or there’s an out-of-nowhere surprise, like Barbie, this might be the first non-Covid summer without a single billion-dollar grosser in a looong time.

More: Kim Masters and I broke down the Disney date shifts on The Business here, and Peter Hamby and I debated the summer box office logjam on The Powers That Be pod here.

Merv was right. In 2023 dollars, paying about $700 million for two of the most enduring and profitable television shows in the history of the medium is a steal. Depending on the year, Wheel alone can generate more money for Sony Pictures Television, Columbia’s successor, than any of its other shows. The recently announced renewal of the Wheel slot machine rights with IGT will earn $220 million for SPT through 2034, per multiple sources.

So that’s why the retirement of Pat Sajak, the Wheel host since 1981(!), is such a big deal. Sajak, love him or hate him—I tend to think he’s a huge talent; mainstream likeability and chemistry with co-host Vanna White for more than four decades is not easy—is at least as synonymous with Wheel as Alex Trebek was with Jeopardy! And remember that the hand-off after Trebek’s 2020 death devolved into a farce, with the public bake-off, Aaron Rodgers (!), and the scheming producer Mike Richards trying to Dick Cheney himself into the job, only to be called out for past misogynistic comments and eventually paid to leave. Jeopardy! ended up going with two hosts, Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik, which seems to be working fine, at least ratings-wise. But a far from ideal process.

Sajak, alarmed by the Jeopardy! circus, has made it clear to Sony execs that he wants a clean transition, with a replacement clearly identified in the fall, and a public torch-passing before the end of next season, like Bob Barker to Drew Carey on The Price Is Right. He’ll remain a “consultant” for a few years and likely do nothing, and he’d also like a role on the show for his daughter, Maggie, to continue. (Sajak’s publicist, Bob Burton, didn’t respond to my email.)

Yes, Ryan Seacrest is talking to producers, but he’s not alone—tons of agents are suggesting their clients, and I’m told friendly factions have developed at Sony. (A Sony TV rep denies this.) One camp prefers Seacrest, a natural Sajak type with two decades of host experience on American Idol. A separate group wants someone diverse, who would represent a fresh reboot of sorts, similar to when Steve Harvey took over Family Feud and ratings grew. Sherri Shepherd, the actress and talk show host, has been discussed internally, I’m told.

The Wheel audience demos are more diverse than Jeopardy!, and both shows are still drawing big numbers, with Wheel luring 7.7 million viewers during a week in May, per Nielsen. That’s now more than most primetime series. Amid a syndicated TV market that has been decimated by streaming, Wheel and Jeopardy! still perform, and likely will for a long time, thanks to the older audience that buys all those bogus memory pills and Carnival cruises. Jeopardy! and Wheel, once the outcasts of Sony, are now the Homecoming king and queen.

In fact, one of the biggest issues for Wheel is potential oversaturation. As ABC has requested more prime-time Celebrity Wheel of Fortune, which generates pennies for Sony compared to the syndication dollars, some insiders fear that leaning on the brand so much could dilute it, à la Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Regardless, it’s a great gig. Sajak and White work only four days a month, banging out six shows a day, and Sajak, 76, is said to make a little less than $15 million a year, plus more for the ABC primetime show, and Sony shuttles him back and forth to his home in Annapolis, Maryland. White, 66, makes much less, though in April she signed a lucrative endorsement deal with BetMGM to become the face of an online Wheel-branded casino.

Unlike with the public Jeopardy! Bake-off stunt, producers hope to keep the Wheel audition process secret. Good luck. Ultimately, the decision will fall to Sony’s entertainment chief Tony Vinciquerra, SPT’s new leader Katherine Pope, Suzanne Prete, the unit’s executive VP of game shows, and the show’s producers. And as for Merv, don’t feel too bad. His estate may be bought out of both Wheel and Jeopardy!, but his family still makes millions of dollars off the theme songs, both of which Griffin composed himself.

Elaina Plott Calabro explores how Lara Logan spiraled from 60 Minutes star to keynote speaker at the Gillespie County chapter of Moms for Liberty. [The Atlantic]

Ever wonder why that guy is so huge on YouTube? This breakdown of Mr. Beast’s videos explains the science behind his virality. [Twitter]

I didn’t think the San Francisco Chronicle website style guide allowed “asshole” in a headline, but I guess they made an exception for Pat Sajak. [SF Gate]

Judge Judy Sheindlin amusingly defends her “Nepo-Verse” of shows at Amazon Freevee, including a new one with her lawyer son. [NY Times]

Finally, a plug: I had a great time moderating Monday’s FYC panel with Bel Powley and the cast and crew of A Small Light, sponsored by NatGeo and Puck. [Puck]

“Funny to see you dance around the obvious: John Lasseter made Pixar work. Without him, we are seeing the results.” –A producer

“I remember reading Iger’s book, and he talked about buying Pixar because they were cleaning Disney Animation’s clock. It’s kind of ironic that a decade and a half after they were acquired, Disney is getting beat again by the upstarts.” –A manager

“Worth considering: the seeds for the current challenges at Pixar actually go back to the decision to ramp to more than one film per year in the mid-2010s (or even all the way back to 2001, when they targeted one film per year). Sure, the dynamics you laid out are certainly also meaningfully impactful, but I’d argue that their process was never meant to deliver three films every two years (or more).” –An executive

“Elemental may be the first movie that combines ramifications from streaming greed and #MeToo. Lasseter may have been an unlikeable groper who people were afraid of, but the absence of leadership at Pixar, and Chapek’s decision to treat them like the latest version of direct-to-video, has literally dismantled one of the few brands that actually put a moviegoer in a seat.” –Another executive

“I was struck while watching Across the Spider-Verse, how on Earth is Pixar not taking the creative and technical swings like that? Pixar used to be the place where you saw insane computer animation. I was re-watching Toy Story 2 with my toddler for the first time, and things like hundreds of bouncy balls going off were mind-blowing at the time. I wonder if taking risks on their stories has forced them to play safer with their technology and level of spectacle. Whereas Sony Animation can fall back on the safety of Spider-Man to make a risky Miles Morales-focused story with a brand-new and impossible art style (which now looks to be mimicked by Ninja Turtles and others).”–Another executive

“Pete [Docter] is a character/world guy, not a story guy. It’s not a surprise that the Pixar films he’s putting out are gorgeous to look at but boring to watch.” –An animator

“Pixar is full of self-righteous snobs who have looked down on the rest of the animation community for decades. Many of us are happy to see them flailing.” –Another animator

Correction: Communications exec Gary Ginsberg resigned from News Corp, he wasn’t fired as I said last week.

Got a question, comment, complaint, or a good pitch for someone I should interview? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.