Welcome back to a Leap Day issue of What I’m Hearing, in the calm before the storm of Oscars week. As always, if you were forwarded this email, click here to become a Puck member. And send me ideas or news tips by replying to this email.

Let’s begin…

• Iger delivers the dagger: Thanks to Disney’s recent stock bounce, Bob Iger had probably already won the proxy war with bored investor Nelson Peltz and the jilted exes Ike Perlmutter and Jay Rasulo. But Walt and Roy Disney’s relatives coming forward in the Times to endorse Disney’s plan is almost certainly a death blow. (I’m sure it was definitely a spontaneous move by the heirs and 100 percent not coordinated by Iger or Disney.) Even Abigail Disney, the Iger nemesis, who recently said he’s paid so much he “shouldn't be able to sleep well at night,” is now on record fingering Peltz as “the worst thing that could happen to the company.” Ouch. Short of reanimating Walt’s cryogenically frozen head to tell Peltz to go to hell, there’s not much more Iger can do here.
• Zaslav BonusWatch ’24: We’re getting closer! Warner Bros. Discovery served up a taste of C.E.O. David Zaslav’s compensation for 2023—let’s call it an amuse-bouche —in the form of an S.E.C. filing yesterday confirming Zaz & Co. blew past all their targets for free cash flow last year. Never mind that the company actually shrank in 2023, or that the share price of about $24 in 2022 had dropped to about $11 by Dec. 31. Last year’s infamous tweak to the comp structure means the executive team is still eligible for the maximum payout in P.R.S.U.s (performance-restricted stock units). Just doing the math, it’s well over $20 million worth for Zaslav alone, but the number will rise once his full compensation and bonus is revealed in the next month or so. As we count down the days, let’s all just be happy for Zaz.
• Speaking of C.E.O. pay: My buddy Adam Aron at AMC announced today that he wants his board to cut his compensation 25 percent in solidarity with all his underwater retail shareholders. That’s as Aron revealed the theater chain only lost about $400 million last year (about $575 million better than the year before). Adam isn’t giving back all that cash from shares he dumped at the height of the meme-stock craziness, but this is a start—if it actually happens.
• Love (and money) wins: I learned a fun tidbit today: SK Global, the former Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, which is now owned by the investment firm Centricus, put up a third of the $25 million budget of Sony’s surprise smash Anyone But You. The Sydney Sweeney-Glen Powell rom-com just crossed $200 million in worldwide box office, meaning a stodgy British financial institution is about to reap a windfall from its profit participation in a film about two half-naked hot people. Another heart-warming rags-to-riches story. (Sony declined to comment.)
• Speaking of heart-warmers: When I saw that Shane Gillis, fresh from his controversial SNL gig, sold a self-financed comedy series to Netflix, I had to find out the price. Per two good sources, Gillis spent $1.5 million to make the six-episode first season of Tires, then turned around and sold it to Netflix for $5 million. Not bad, and that’s on top of the seven figures that Netflix is paying for another stand-up special.
• Box office over/under: Warner Bros. is hilariously lowballing Dune: Part Two at $65 million domestic, but tracking services have it anywhere between $73 million and $80 million. Let’s split the difference and say $76 million, and I’ll still take the over based on the pre-sales and huge premium-screen reservations. Legendary was smart to ask Warners to push this one from November to March.

Maybe that seems weird, given that Iger and Disney Entertainment co-chair Alan Bergman just replaced Bailey, after 14 years running Walt Disney Studios, with David Greenbaum, head of the Searchlight specialty division. Or maybe Iger, who has always been good at the optics game (Sun Valley interview debacle notwithstanding), was just projecting a friendly transition via Hollywood’s preferred public forum for casual peacocking. (Greenbaum and Bailey were also seen lunching together at the Disney rotunda yesterday, the Burbank version of courtside seats.) But the truth is that Bailey indicated in his last contract re-up that this might be it, and pretty much everyone in town knew he had flirted with jobs at Amazon and Netflix. So Bailey was either gonna take a gig elsewhere, or Iger was gonna get annoyed enough with those flirtations—especially amid the pressure from the Nelson Peltz proxy warriors and recent underperformers, like The Little Mermaid and Haunted Mansion—and let Bailey go early.

I know it’s been gossiped-about that Bailey took multiple meetings with Netflix, but it was actually just one sit-down with chief content officer Bela Bajaria. I don’t think either party came away thinking it was the right fit. The Disney-to-Netflix executive pipeline hasn’t proven smooth; Tendo Nagenda, a senior film exec poached from Disney, lasted four years, and former ABC chief Channing Dungey ran Netflix original series for less than two years before exiting for Warner Bros. Television. Still, amid all the noise, it’s easy to imagine Iger looking at Bailey, his friend and Brentwood neighbor, and thinking, It sure looks like this guy doesn’t want to be here anymore.

Would Bailey have wanted a larger role at Disney? Maybe, but elevating him over his headstrong peers at the different film silos was a non-starter, I’m told. Plus, Iger has shown confidence in Bergman, despite the recent creative and business troubles at pretty much all the units he oversees—Marvel, Lucasfilm, Pixar, Disney Animation, and Disney Studios. Internally, people have chalked up the slide to a dilution of focus and resources during the Covid-era rush to seed Disney+ and Hulu with as much content as possible. Everyone was going 100 miles per hour, the thinking goes, while also working mostly at home and away from creative collaborators, and the output ramped up far beyond what the company was built to deliver. Disney made decisions without thinking them through or testing ideas properly, and the content ultimately suffered. But now, that thinking goes, Iger has returned, and the company is functioning with a normal cadence and work environment that will lead to greater intentionality, and ultimately better movies.

We’ll see. It’s still on Bergman—a longtime Disney business-side executive who was promoted to run the film units after Alan Horn retired with Iger, in 2020—to make that happen. Bergman was credited with actually getting things done in the brief Bob Chapek era, when everything had to run through the non-creative DMED unit. But the knock on Bergman is that, unlike Horn, he doesn’t have the juice to properly rein in the strong-willed executives managing those silos. Marvel’s Kevin Feige is probably the most successful film producer in the history of Hollywood. Pete Docter at Pixar has three Oscars as a filmmaker. Lucasfilm’s Kathleen Kennedy came to the job with 40 years of big-time producing experience with Spielberg and the blessing of George Lucas, himself. And Jennifer Lee at Disney Animation is responsible for Frozen, the company’s biggest animated franchise of the past decade. Try telling those people that their first cuts stink.

The truth is that Horn, and his unique mix of business and creative credibility, were probably not replaceable at Disney. Plus, despite overseeing these movie factories and billions of dollars in production budgets, Bergman’s big mandate under Iger 2.0 has been to course-correct some of the Chapek-era moves and help get to profitability in streaming, which the company is now on track to achieve. Maybe that’s distracting from the film product, but it’s a financial necessity if Iger wants to get Wall Street back on board with Disney.

Bailey, executing on Iger’s just-make-the-hits strategy, made a pretty staggering six billion-dollar grossers during his tenure (I’m counting The Jungle Book, which got to $965 million), all of which helped fuel the parks and products and all the ways Disney monetizes. He endured for 14 years—an eternity running a film production unit, and longer than even the nine years that Jeffrey Katzenberg lasted at Disney. And now he’ll go be a producer on Tron: Ares and either pursue his own company or wait for another studio gig to open up. So last night, if Iger was indeed annoyed, it was only because the Clippers gave away a big lead and lost.

Unless, of course, there is a perceived problem. And Disney, despite Iger’s courtside decorum, has one of those right now. Is Greenbaum, a career art-house producer and executive, the answer? After all, while Searchlight execs are giddy that their most recent release, the hard R-rated Poor Things, is crossing $100 million worldwide, that number would be downright embarrassing for pretty much any of the movies Bailey made in the past decade. Apples to oranges, of course, but you get my point: The stakes are much higher now, and the science of making huge, pre-branded tentpoles for a global audience is very different from making execution-driven specialty movies primarily for the awards crowd.

But that’s what’s kinda interesting about this hire. Disney Studios had an amazing run remaking its animated hits—Will Smith doing Robin Williams karaoke in Aladdin felt like an SNL sketch, but it grossed $1 billion—and now it’s pretty clear that audiences are demanding something more interesting and surprising. Since 2010, Disney’s live-action studio has created zero new franchises that were not based on a previous movie or Disney I.P. And after the studio whiffed on John Carter, The Lone Ranger, and Tomorrowland during that 2012-15 stretch, the live-action unit hasn’t really even tried much, with the exceptions of Spielberg’s The BFG, in 2016, and Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time, in 2018, both of which flopped. (Ken Branagh’s Artemis Fowl likely would have missed in 2020, but Covid relegated that one to Disney+.)

More than any of its film rivals, Disney has thrived on its familiarity and consistency, both of which were the envy of the industry—until one day they weren’t. Would Disney have made something as subversive and self-aware as Barbie? Probably not in live action. But putting a guy like Greenbaum in this role is, in my view, an admission by Iger and Bergman that they need to take at least a few interesting, out-of-the-box swings, or maybe try to reinvigorate the existing franchises with auteurish filmmakers who will take risks. If Ryan Reynolds’ Free Guy, a 20th Century movie, hadn’t been kneecapped by Covid in Summer 2021, that would have easily launched a Disney-style franchise. (With $330 million worldwide and great reviews, it still might.) That seems like the direction that Greenbaum will head. There’s no rule that Disney can only lean on its I.P. It was the safest way to go in the short term, but the short term ran out, so now what?

Plus, Greenbaum will now also oversee 20th Century and its leader, Steve Asbell—a much larger purview than Bailey had. In his meetings with Iger and Bergman, I’m told, Greenbaum pitched his philosophy as one question: Does this movie need to exist? Sounds simple, but it’s actually kinda radical for Disney. Was anyone asking for a second take on a Haunted Mansion movie? No, but it happened last year because everyone knows what the Haunted Mansion is. Does a live-action Moana need to exist when the original came out eight years ago and an animated Moana 2 is also happening? Probably not, but under the old model, that’s a no-brainer. Ditto the live-action Snow White and Lilo and Stitch remakes that are forthcoming.

Maybe this is wishful thinking, but I get the sense that Greenbaum’s first order of business isn’t to figure out how to make Tangled with Sydney Sweeney. It will probably take a while, and Disney certainly won’t abandon the pre-branded I.P. stuff, but the leadership seems to understand that when the old playbook isn’t working like it did, they’ve gotta at least try to do something about it.

Stuber justified those misses, of course, by a) squeezing the cherished minutes viewed out of even the most half-baked films with a major star to put on the tile, b) by getting Oscars for the prestige plays that did work, like Don’t Look Up and Roma and The Power of the Dog, and c) by attracting top filmmakers and actors to actually work at Netflix without the lure of a theatrical release. Remember, we now take it for granted that Leo DiCaprio or Martin Scorsese are willing to work at Netflix. Making a Netflix movie could have easily been like making a movie of the week for CBS in 1985. There’s no real difference, actually, except from the beginning, Netflix paid… Leo and Marty made tens of millions of dollars off Don’t Look Up and The Irishman, respectively. Stuber ponied up to establish the film studio, then the talent, and the entire industry, followed.

But now, for reasons often discussed in this space—from cost and quality concerns, to consumption data favoring series, to the willingness of cash-strapped studios to license top movie titles, to Bajaria’s personal taste—Netflix will be making far fewer titles. I’ve already heard that fees are coming down, too. Netflix is still willing to spend, just not as much and not on everything.

But that was probably a plus for Lin, the rare Harvard MBA film producer, whose Rideback company has made some very good movies (the Lego Movie franchise, The Two Popes) and less good but successful ones (It, and Disney’s Aladdin for Bailey), as well as last summer’s Haunted Mansion flop. Making 80 movies a year kinda sucks… just ask Stuber after a glass of wine. But 20 to 30? That’s what I’m told Netflix is hoping Lin will make—more manageable, and it would still be the most prolific movie studio in town.

They’ll probably be smaller films, too, for the most part; midbudget studio-style dramas and action pics, some comedies, and a few bigger-budget titles to throw some marketing behind, as well as an awards pic or two to stay in that game—not 10 a year, though, to flood the zone. Bajaria would also like Netflix films to dominate Nielsen’s year-end Top 10 streaming original movies list; this past year, only Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery charted.

Will the overall quality finally come up? That’s the big question. A couple producers I talked to this week were optimistic, given Lin’s commercial taste and track record. Amid so much chaos in the movie business, and a landscape where the top film executives at each of the three major streamers now report to execs reared exclusively in television, that’s at least one hopeful sign.

Got a question, comment, complaint, or thoughts on the 2010 romantic comedy Leap Year? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.