His Wicked: For Good opened to $147 million domestic ($223 million worldwide), nearly a third better than the $112 million for part one—a testament to fans getting what they paid for the first time.

Runner-up: David Geffen, the mogul who other moguls often talk to before they make big moves, stands to gain about $500 million from his fortuitous purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery shares before M&A suitors announced their interest, per Bloomberg. What a stock picker!

Honorable mention: Ryan Murphy, whose Kim Kardashian opus, All’s Fair, was renewed by Hulu today despite historically bad reviews and never cracking the top 10 on Luminate. Perhaps tellingly, no ratings data beyond the initial premiere tune-in was included in the announcement.

Related: Disney has now suffered two straight years of zero growth in streaming consumption, Lucas Shaw noted from Nielsen data. That’s despite Disney+ and Hulu raising their subscriber numbers to nearly 200 million total, thanks in large part to bundling. So if Disney is adding subs but not viewing time, that’s a content problem, right?

America may be headed toward the dumbest possible form of state-sponsored media. A few months ago, new Paramount owners Larry and/or David Ellison had conversations with the White House about possibly taking on Rush Hour 4 at the suggestion of Donald Trump. This would be to distribute the long-gestating sequel, not develop or finance, according to two sources.

It’s unclear whether those talks are still happening. A rep for Paramount declined to comment, and a source familiar with its distribution slate told me there’s certainly no closed deal for that title. But Semafor’s Max Tani reported last night that Trump has “personally pressed” Paramount to revive the franchise. And yes, with Brett Ratner directing.

Ratner, of course, helmed the first three Rush Hours before he was credibly accused of sexually assaulting multiple women in 2017 media reports. (He denied wrongdoing.) But lately he’s become royalty in Trumpworld, having hung out at Mar-a-Lago and the White House—he sends pics to friends, I’m told—and directed the Melania documentary that Amazon paid a still-unbelievable $40 million to release next year.

Ratner has been trying for years to get Rush Hour 4 going, with Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker returning. Warner Bros. wasn’t interested in doing a fourth, but the studio let producer Arthur Sarkissian shop the project elsewhere. There’s a script, but basically every studio and streamer has passed at some point—including Paramount, and also Sony, where current Paramount studio co-chief Josh Greenstein worked until recently.

Part of the reason is Ratner, of course. Few studio heads would want to stand next to him on a red carpet, no matter the potential money to be made via the film. And even that’s a big question: Tucker hasn’t headlined a studio movie since Rush Hour 3 in 2007, and Chan is now 71. (If you saw the most recent Karate Kid movie, Chan’s big fight scene took place in the dark.) Plus, the onerous terms from Warners required that any deal elsewhere be a one-picture license, meaning the rights revert to WB after the one-off movie, and Warners would be owed a big cut of first-dollar gross. Any prospective distributor was also required to provide a hefty theatrical release for the movie, according to two sources. Not very attractive.

Which brings us back to Paramount. I’m speculating here a bit, but Ratner and Sarkissian seem to think they can get Trump to pressure the Ellisons to release Rush Hour 4 as either a gesture toward their good relationship or an explicit or implicit condition of favorable treatment, especially in any acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. Would that work? Could the Ellisons be that shameless? We know Trump could.

“Brett ratner now. Oy.”
—Jeffrey Epstein, in a just-released November 1, 2017, email to his lawyer, likely noting an L.A. Times exposé of allegations against the filmmaker that was published that day.

Runner-up: “For those asking, sadly AMC would not play the movie, it’s going to be Landmark, Alamo, and other chains.”
—Rian Johnson, the Wake Up Dead Man filmmaker, lamenting on Twitter/X that his Knives Out threequel has been barred from major theater chains.

A little more on this: Come on, Rian. You’re super smart and savvy. You know that when you publicly say a theater chain “would not play” your movie, you’re telling your fans it’s kinda the theaters’ fault. Indeed, many of the responses to your tweet were of the “Hey AMC, just play the movie!” variety. But you know this isn’t AMC’s fault. You willingly sold two Knives Out sequels for about $450 million to Netflix, which does not offer exclusive windows longer than a couple weeks. And AMC, whose business is under attack precisely because Netflix can afford to pay you $450 million for two sequels to a big theatrical hit, chooses not to self-immolate by playing your movie. What would Knives Out 3 have done in theaters if released over Thanksgiving by Lionsgate, which generated $300 million worldwide in 2019 for the first movie? Even the follow-up, Glass Onion, did about $15 million during a one-week experiment in limited release in 2022. No shame; $450 million is a ton of money. We all understand why you and your partners took it. But there’s an easy way to ensure that Knives Out 4 and all your future movies play in AMC’s theaters and thousands of others worldwide for a long time: Take less money up front and sell them to a theatrical distributor.

12 percent
Share of the 280,000 movies with active distribution deals that are available on the top eight U.S. subscription streaming services. The rest are either scattered across smaller services, on ad-supported platforms, or unavailable entirely. [Reelgood]

$700 million
Combined cost to produce both 12-episode seasons of Andor, before tax incentives, according to U.K. public filings. [Forbes]

3 million
Estimated cumulative sign-ups for ESPN’s new streaming service from launch through the end of October. Fox One generated an estimated 2.3 million sign-ups. [Antenna]

$1,044,000
Current highest bid for a Bob Ross painting auctioned by Last Week Tonight With John Oliver to benefit public media, making it one of the most expensive works associated with a PBS personality. [LateNighter]

Now here are the highlights of my Cameron chat…

James Cameron might be the best interview in Hollywood. Not, like, someone who saves up an entire career for one great word vomit. Or people who like to pop off and drop F-bombs on politicians (De Niro) or rivals (Barry Diller). Or inadvertent greatness, like when that guy at the Times catches an elderly legend off guard and extracts all kinds of off-the-cuff comments that could get them canceled (Quincy Jones). No, I’m talking about consistency and clarity of insight, total authority, interesting anecdotes, willingness to get testy—and the confidence to have fun.

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Cameron, of course, has earned that confidence by directing three of the five highest-grossing films of all time (Avatar, $2.9 billion; Avatar: The Way of Water, $2.3 billion; and Titanic, $2.2 billion, not adjusted for inflation), all of which were nominated for the best picture Oscar (Titanic won). And by using his clout and fortune to explore his curiosities in space travel and the ocean floor. So last week I jumped at the opportunity to visit Cameron, 71, at his studio compound across from the Erewhon in Manhattan Beach, ahead of the press tour for Avatar: Fire and Ash. We talked about everything from his belief in performance capture (the “purest form of cinema acting”) to how much the new movie cost Disney (“one metric fuck-ton of money”) to the coming “Skynet” moment for A.I. The full chat is in two parts on The Town, but I distilled and pulled out some of the most interesting nuggets below…

On Netflix buying Warner Bros. Discovery…

Netflix would be a disaster. Sorry, Ted, but jeez. Sarandos has gone on record saying theatrical films are dead. It’s sucker bait. “We’ll put the movie out for a week. We’ll put it out for 10 days. We’ll qualify for Academy Awards consideration.” I think that’s fundamentally rotten at the core. A movie should be made for theatrical, and the Academy Awards to me mean nothing if they don’t mean theatrical. I think they’ve been co-opted, and I think it’s horrific.

On the streaming takeover of Hollywood…

Streaming got its foothold with the artistic base that they did by throwing crazy money at it and attracting the A-list talent, and then pulling the carpet out from underneath that, right? So now budgets are half or a third of what they were. The [bigger-budget] movies like Dune, Wicked, Avatar, or whatever, they’re not getting greenlit for streaming. And they’re also not getting greenlit by the theatrical side of the existing majors. It’s fallen through the middle.

On what annoys him when people talk about ‘Avatar’ movies…

What annoys me is when it’s misrepresented—especially in media—that, say, Sigourney Weaver voiced the character of Kiri. When you voice a part for, let’s say a Pixar film—we all love Pixar movies; I’m not dissing them. But when you come in to do that as an actor, you stand at a podium for a day or two or maybe three and you say the part, you act it out verbally. And then a team of animators goes off and does the physical character, the visual interpretation of that voice part.

That’s not what Sigourney or any of the other actors did. For making Avatar 2 and Avatar 3, we did 18 months of [performance] capture. They perform everything. Every breath is recorded. Every bit of movement, every hand gesture. If you saw the characters underwater, the actors were underwater. If you saw them riding a creature, they were riding a water jet.

On the allure of performance capture…

I would make the case that it’s the purest form of cinema acting, the purest form of acting in general. What you’ve got is photographic cinema, you’ve got capture-based cinema, and you’ve got theater. Those are basically your three thresholds for acting. And people judge as if 125 years of photographic cinema is best simply because it’s essentially first and the one we all grew up in. But it’s not best from an actor’s perspective. And most actors haven’t done capture, so they don’t know.

On what generative A.I. can and can’t do…

It’s trained on everything we ever valued artistically. So, what you’re going to get is the average. It goes in a blender, and then it precipitates out as a single unique new image, but it’s based on a generic feedstock, if you will. What it can never do is create a unique, lived experience reflected through the eyes of a single artist, right? It won’t select for the quirkiness, for the offbeat. And I think what we celebrate is the uniqueness of our actors, not their perfection, not their kind of glossy, Vogue cover beauty, but their off-centeredness.

On who should police generative A.I.…

We as an industry need to be self-policing on this. I don’t see government regulation as an answer. That’s a blunt instrument. They’re going to mess it up. I think the guilds should play a big role. I mean, the actors certainly did, to the detriment of a lot of people [the 2023 strike], but they definitely drove a flag in the ground over this. I think we have to be self-policing.

We’ve got to talk about it. It’s not a question of what we can legally do, or even ethically, or morally, what we should do, [but] what we should embrace, how we should celebrate ourselves as artists, and how we should set artistic standards that celebrate human purpose. Because the overall risk of A.I., in general—not just Gen A.I., but A.G.I., any form of A.I.—is that we lose purpose as people. We lose jobs. We lose a sense of, “Well, what are we here for?” We are these flawed biological machines, and a computer can be theoretically more precise, more correct, faster, all of those things. And that’s going to be a threshold existential issue.

On his opposition to other forms of machine learning…

That’s Skynet. And it will be Skynet. They always talk about how it’s going to revolutionize medicine and economic efficiencies and there’s going to be this massive [sociological benefit]. Yeah, to the 5 percent of the population that survives the wars that are precipitated by A.I. being put in charge of weapons systems.

On whether he’d collaborate with his friend Elon Musk…

Maybe. I can separate a person and their politics from the things that they want to accomplish if they’re aligned with what I think are good goals. I just think it’s important for us as a human civilization to prioritize—we’ve got to make this Earth our spaceship. That’s really what we need to be thinking.

On the high cost of visual effects…

They’re starting to constrict the number of big, beautiful, imaginative films. A film like Avatar that was new I.P., not based on something that was in a comic book 40 years ago, not based on a bestselling book, just coming out of nowhere, would not get greenlit [today].

On being famously difficult to work with…

Famously is not the same as actually. I’m not! [I’ve aged like] a fine wine, right? I’m a lot more experienced and there’s been a series of evolutions on that. I was an asshole in the ’80s, absolutely. And you know what? That’s what got things done. That’s what needed to happen then. But once you have some stature, you have some responsibility to play within a system and respect other people’s viewpoints and their needs and all that. People are putting up hundreds of millions of dollars. They’re your partner, you’ve got to honor them.

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Sonny Hayes was poised for F1 greatness until an accident nearly ended his racing career. His second chance at glory is complicated by his rookie teammate’s competition and the burden of his own past. Starring Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, and Javier Bardem, and directed by Joseph Kosinski.

For your consideration - Best Picture and all eligible categories.
F1 is streaming December 12 on Apple TV. Subscription required.

On why nobody is doing big 3D movies like he is…

They’re doing it with conversion. So your Marvel films typically are released in 3D through conversion. It sucks, I know… [Shooting in 3D] is not a pain in the ass at all. On an Avatar set, 3D takes up about two minutes of my day, if that. Every once in a while, there’ll be something that we’re doing that’s a bit unconventional, maybe some splashing coming toward the camera, and I’ll go over and look at a playback of the take. That takes me an extra 30 seconds, and maybe that happens two or three times a day.

When the studio tells a production to shoot in 3D, everything that goes wrong on the movie is 3D’s fault. So that creates a sense, on the studio’s part, over a period of years, “We’re not going to mess with 3D. We’re going to do a conversion.” Now, conversion costs more money than the incremental cost of shooting 3D, which is not zero, but it might be 2 to 4 percent of your entire production budget. It’s not a big deal, as opposed to cramming a fast, bad conversion into your post schedule, and spending $5 million to $8 million doing that, just right out the window to a conversion house, to get a mediocre to bad result that the filmmaker has not put into their authoring. And at the same time, 95 percent of theaters have inferior light levels.

On when Disney’s Bob Iger weighs in with notes…

He’s interesting. He doesn’t weigh in until it’s something for me to show. His comment when he watched [Fire and Ash] for the first time, even though it was at 3 hours, 23 minutes, not including credits at that point, so it’s gotten about 18 minutes shorter since then. He said, “Yeah, I know you’re going to keep chopping away at it. But it’s magnificent.” He basically said, “I love this film.” And it was interesting because there were other heads on the Zoom that were bringing up notes. And he said, “Yeah, you know, I didn’t have a problem with that.” And he basically shot them down on their notes. And I was like, “Okay, we’re done here.”

On why he’s doing a 3D Billie Eilish documentary…

I’ve just admired her career from when she was 15. But my wife, Suzy, is into sustainability and plant-based foods. She’s kind of an entrepreneur. And she knows Billie’s mom, Maggie, very well. I said, “Maggie, why aren’t we shooting the Hit Me Hard and Soft Tour in 3D?” And she said, “I’ll ask Billie.” Now, I hadn’t met Billie at that point. Billie and I met, and I said, “Look, our goal here would just be to shoot your show. I don’t want to impose myself as a director.” In fact, I even offered her, “Why don’t we co-direct this? Because you directed the show. I’ll just show up with cameras and record it, essentially.” And it’s grown a little bit creatively beyond that.

On his interest in something like ‘The Wizard of Oz’ at the Sphere…

I like the Sphere as a format, and I’m looking for a way to actually do something myself. I want to see the decisions that they made around linear narrative with cutting to close-ups and medium shots and wide shots and how well that worked. I’m [also] vehemently opposed to people changing somebody else’s art.

On David Zaslav appearing in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ at the Sphere…

That’s fiddling while Rome burns.

Bill Cohan parses the latest financials and analyst projections and declares Paramount to be the likely winner of the Warner Discovery sweepstakes. [Puck]

Timothée Chalamet’s 18 minutes of schwapp-ing in an A24 meeting “offers a frighteningly accurate portrayal of modern marketing planning and its superficial cocktail of optics, bullshit, and tactification.” [Adweek]

Attention psychopaths and stalkers! Jay Penske is now selling tickets to sit next to your favorite stars at the Golden Globes. For only $70,000 per couple! This is what Kelly Bush Novak, Marcel Pariseau, and the anti-HFPA publicists fought for? [NY Post]

Even better, Penske’s own publication, Robb Report, is offering the $70,000 package, complete with tickets to a preparty where hopefully someone will be honored with a prepaid “Variety Impact Award.” [Robb Report]

Ian Krietzberg takes a look at Loti, the A.I. tool created to foil revenge porn that is now helping stars combat deepfakes. [Puck]

Whip out your tiny violin for the long story of how Dr. Phil’s media network crumbled. [L.A. Times]

‘Is the Marty Supreme Jacket the Defining Garment of 2025?’ [GQ]

A lesson of the Epstein scandal: The Illuminati is real [N.Y. Times]

Congrats to The Simpsons voice actress and OT 8 Nancy Cartwright, who finally got her Scientology Freedom Medal! [Underground Bunker]

Thursday’s analysis of Netflix’s pledge to keep Warner Bros. movies in theaters sparked smart responses. Plus, some thoughts on NBCU hiring Taylor Sheridan’s exec…

“It might sound crazy for Netflix to ‘pivot to theaters,’ but none of the companies it is competing with just have one business. Netflix can keep trying to add subscribers, but if Ted [Sarandos] and Greg [Peters] are truly creating the modern media and entertainment company, they need to be in many different businesses. Games, experiential, licensing, and, yes, maybe movie theaters.” —A filmmaker

“How about this: Netflix buys WBD and one of the theater chains. It puts its movies exclusively in its [owned and operated] screens for a short time and then on its platform plus its screens simultaneously. Antitrust concerns? Sure, but if Meta can own Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp…” —An executive

“I think the plan to supercharge [Peacock] is the NBA and Taylor Sheridan and MLB and Olympics and Bravo and Universal movies. If some big merger or J.V. can do even more, then great, but I don’t think Brian Roberts] makes decisions contingent on some other domino falling into place. He knows how often they can fall apart (E.A., as you reported, Time Warner).” —A former NBCU exec

“I get why NBCU gave him a deal, but it’s wild that anyone thinks that Chris McCarthy, who absolutely destroyed culture-shaping entities like MTV, Comedy Central, and VH1 by cost-cutting them into oblivion, can now turn around [and] build a producing business.” —A manager

Studio goliath Warner Bros. taking the holidays off could leave an opening for Angel Studios’ animated David, according to the latest early tracking chart from The Quorum…

Have a great Thanksgiving week,
Matt

Got a question, comment, complaint, or an early appearance of the Tom Cruise holiday cake? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

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