Greetings from NYC, which remains the capital of hot garbage on the sidewalk, and a big thank you to everyone who came out for our Puck event last night. A packed house! (More on that next week.)

Reminder: If this email was forwarded to you, it means you’ve been personally—personally!—selected to become a Puck member. Just click here to make that happen.

Let’s get started…

—All hail Bob Chapek? Disney’s C.E.O. and his new power-beard revealed about 14 million more Disney+ subscribers last quarter (although it’s flat in the U.S….just like Peacock!), hitting 152 million total worldwide and 221 million, which is more than Netflix when counting Hulu and ESPN+ and their overlapping subs. Predictably, the stock shot up, even as C.F.O. Christine McCarthy revealed downgraded guidance of 215 million to 245 million in Disney+ subs by fiscal 2024, off from 230 million to 260 million, thanks to the loss of cricket in India. But hold on, who actually believes the new projections with those major price hikes, inflation, a probable recession, unprecedented competition, and both Marvel and Star Wars losing a bit of luster recently? This downgrade seems like the first of a gradual diminution of expectations over the next year or so.

More: I talked to analyst Jessica Reif Ehrlich about the Disney price hikes and subscriber projections on my podcast, The Town (listen here), and about Disney’s long game with Kim Masters on The Business (here).

—Harvey’s bro gets his Scream money: Nearly five years after the implosion of The Weinstein Co., Bob Weinstein is getting paid. A Delaware District Court judge affirmed yesterday that Spyglass must pay Bob his 2 percent share of the 2011 film Scream 4, which grossed nearly $100 million worldwide and performed well on home video. Spyglass, run by Hollywood tough guy Gary Barber, purchased the Weinstein Co. library from Lantern, which got it out of bankruptcy. But Barber tried to wiggle out of his obligation to Bob, who had negotiated for a personal stake in the Scream franchise (Spy Kids and Scary Movie, too). Nevertheless, a bankruptcy judge, and now a district court, ruled that Spyglass assumed the obligation to Bob. And what about Scream 5, which grossed $140 million worldwide in January? When I asked about that movie last summer, a Spyglass rep swore that neither Weinstein brother has a stake in Scream post-bankruptcy. OK!

Instead, the former chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment and Direct-to-Consumer—and before that the top programmer at both NBC and Showtime, with successful producing stints in TV and Broadway in between—self-published the 414-page book and has been quietly mailing hardback copies to friends and former colleagues. It made its way to me, so I read it last weekend.

I was curious why Greenblatt would do a career-retrospective memoir now. After all, he’s still an active producer, with a Lionsgate deal, a Weeds reboot with Mary Louise Parker that will be set in Copenhagen, and a Broadway production of his pet NBC show Smash that will likely star Megan Hilty (“We just did our first reading,” he said). So I called him earlier this week. He was just back from a cruise in the Mediterranean and was ready to talk about the book and his various former employers. “David Janollari and I used to joke when something happened that we would ‘put it in the book,’” he told me. “And then I realized during Covid, when I had time on my hands, that I just need to write the book!”

Indeed, Greenblatt is kinda like the Where’s Waldo of the Peak TV era, running multiple networks during transformational times. So, I had to ask, what does he think of all the corporate drama at Warners both during and after he left? “AT&T was not the company to be the engine behind a global streaming company,” he said, chuckling. But, he added of former C.E.O. Jason Kilar’s controversial all-in-on-streaming strategy, “I was actually a proponent of putting the movies on HBO Max as soon as we could. We were trying to get a consensus in the business in figuring out how to do that. Then I left, and suddenly it was a done deal [that all the 2021 movies would go to Max concurrent with theaters] without talking to anyone. A consensus should have been built before doing it, but it helped HBO Max in that first year. It was just not executed in the best way.”

Greenblatt, who, in his short, hectic time there, was charged with launching HBO Max—and, with Kevin Reilly, executing its content strategy in a short window that was interrupted by Covid—said he’s annoyed when people say the Max launch was “rocky.” “It wasn’t disappointing in terms of subscriber numbers,” he said. “We didn’t have that Friends reunion, or Flight Attendant, and we didn’t have time to get a Mandalorian ready—we didn’t have a marquee show. And it was May 2020, the worst time in the world. But look at it now. It’s a success story. We just didn’t have enough time. If we had started planning it 18 months earlier, it would have been different. But AT&T couldn’t fight the government any faster than it did. And [AT&T C.E.O. John] Stankey promised the AT&T board he was going to do it.”

Greenblatt also said he was surprised when Stankey pulled the plug on WarnerMedia, spinning the whole thing off to Discovery under C.E.O. David Zaslav. “Financially, they were very worried about how much we had to spend to launch [HBO Max]. It was a real problem,” he said. “But I thought they would give it a few years to get on its feet. Things were moving in the right direction. There was growth, and the programming was coming online. And then suddenly it was, ‘Let’s pull the rug and get out.’” When I asked whether it’s impossible for Zaslav or any executive to balance the new urge to spend less on streaming while continuing to spur growth, he said, “It just might be. But if anyone can do it, it’s the HBO side of things. That’s what they’ve always done. That company was hugely profitable by doing just a handful of shows. There was never a volume strategy. We tried to apply that to the HBO Max side. But can you keep 150 million subscribers happy month to month with that strategy?”

It does make sense, as does Comcast figuring out what the heck to do with Peacock. “I think it’s hard to be half in it,” he said of the Comcast strategy. “I don’t mean you have to spend $15 billion a year on content. But if you’re in it, you’re in it, and you figure out how to put all that content into one service or you bundle it like Hulu and Disney+. You have to go all in.”

Greenblatt ends Rockford Files with the line “and now for my next chapter…,” and the more we talked, the more it seemed to me that, career-spanning memoir or not, he is ready for another executive job. He said he’s open, but he’d love a role that enabled him to say yes to creatives he respects without dealing with the corporate re-orgs and strategy shifts that have defined the past decade in the TV business. “It’d be ideal if I didn’t have any of that,” he joked.

See you Sunday,
Matt

Got a question, comment, complaint, or a nice summer salad recipe? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.