May 25, 2026

Welcome back to What I’m Hearing, coming to you from the Dodgers/Rockies game on this very pleasant Memorial Day. Before you ask, yes, David Zaslav did attend Graydon Carter’s big event with Bryan Lourd and Dario Amodei at the du Cap in Cannes (sponsored by Claude!), but just the small dinner, not the party party, I’m told, and sadly no photos have been serviced. So it’s still unclear whether Zaz’s suit was cream-colored.

Tonight, a new study on teen moviegoing dares challenge my annual focus group results. Plus, pregaming the Imax sale, an update on the Tom Hardy/MobLand situation, CBS News’s final middle finger to Colbert, and much more.

Programming note: This week on The Town, Peter Hamby and I dissected the Spencer Pratt movement for L.A. mayor, and Hernan Lopez predicted a Hollywood pivot to vertical video. Subscribe here and here.

Not a Puck member yet? Just click here. Got a news tip or an idea for me? Just reply to this email, text me, or message me on Signal at 310-804-3198.

Also discussed in this issue: Josh D’Amaro, Jez Butterworth, Rich Gelfond, Miles Teller, David Ellison, Tom Hardy, Haley Nicole Johnson, Greg Gilreath, Tony Dokoupil, Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Sydney Sweeney, Jon Stewart, Adam Sandler, Jason Blum, Peter Kujawski, Sebastian Stan, Sandra Huller, Tom Cruise, James Gunn, Ted Sarandos, David Glasser, Tom Cibrowski, Steven Spielberg, James Murdoch, James Talarico, Gayle King, Kevin Goetz, Jordan Firstman, Chris Hemsworth, Pedro Pascal, Zendaya, Drew Goins, Cristian Mungiu, Renate Reinsve, Blake Lively, Paul Schrader, Chris Nolan, and… John Travolta’s berets.

But first…

Who Won the Week: Team Obsession

YouTuber turned filmmaker Curry Barker’s supernatural horror sensation pulled off an insane 39 percent increase at the box office in its second weekend, grossing $30 million for the long weekend and hitting $60 million domestic. The movie was made for less than $1 million.

Lots of other winners here: Producers Haley Nicole Johnson, James Harris, Christian Mercuri, and Roman Viaris. Adam Hendricks and Greg Gilreath at Divide/Conquer, which brought it to Jason Blum, whose Blumhouse Atomic Monster now has two YouTube-driven horror hits with Obsession and Backrooms tracking big for next weekend. (Divide/Conquer and Blumhouse Atomic are also already in post on Curry’s next movie.) And Focus’s Peter Kujawski, whose team paid a high-sounding $15 million for Obsession at Toronto and will now reap tens of millions of dollars from that deal—and the inevitable sequels.

Runner-up: Cristian Mungiu, the Romanian director, whose religious culture-clash drama Fjord took the top prize at Cannes, setting up an Oscar run for seven-Palmes-in-a-row distributor Neon and stars Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan.

Sidenotes from an uneventful Cannes: Really excited for six months of Jordan Firstman doing X-rated awards press for Club Kid. … Sandra Hüller is gonna be inescapable this season, with her Cannes standout Fatherland; Rose, for which she won best lead performance at Berlin; an Amazon campaign for Project Hail Mary; and she’s still got Tom Cruise’s Digger in the fall. And the Academy just changed the rule so she can be Oscar nominated more than once. … So many A.I. movies on display, but is there one that anyone actually liked? … Let’s just give John Travolta’s berets their own honorary Palme.

Second runner-up: Rich Gelfond, the Imax C.E.O., whose stock shot up 15 percent on a Journal report that he’s courting a sale.

A little more on this: Those Imax sale feelers are real, though preliminary, and not a huge shock. I predicted Gelfond would sell in 2024, premium screens now account for 16 percent of U.S. ticket sales (up from 13 percent in 2021), and the Imax share price hit $42 in late February. Plus, with a market cap under $2 billion, it wouldn’t saddle most acquirers with a ton of debt.

But which one? Boring private equity, or an existing technology partner, or a deep-pocketed experiential entertainment company like Live Nation probably makes the most sense. Netflix hasn’t spoken to Imax, despite some false reports out there, and it’s hard to see co-C.E.O. Ted Sarandos acquiring a non-core business so dependent on product from rival studios, even if it might allow more Netflix stunts like Narnia and Cliff Booth, and help lure bigger filmmakers. (Remember, Imax is a technology company that mostly licenses to exhibitors and programs the screens; it doesn’t own or operate many theaters, so Netflix would still be hampered by windowing requirements of theater owners.)

Disney seems more logical, given that it releases the biggest movies with the longest theatrical windows. And Disney clearly loves the P.L.F. screens, as evidenced by its silly “Infinity Vision” marketing stunt for the large screens devoted to Avengers: Doomsday while Dune: Part Three hoards Imax in December. Would new C.E.O. Josh D’Amaro pull the trigger on an acquisition that largely bolsters the non-growth theatrical side of Disney? Especially when Disney wouldn’t actually own or control those Imax theaters?

Maybe not, but with the Paramount Decrees gone, a studio owning exhibition isn’t an issue, as Sony showed with its 2024 purchase of Alamo Drafthouse. I’m told a studio buyer wouldn’t face opposition from AMC, which houses most of the non-China Imax theaters. Plus, what’s another $2 billion to Paramount and its financial backers to guarantee Imax screens for the kind of large and loud movies that David Ellison wants to make?

Quote of the Week

“Paramount strongly believes in covering both sides of any black hole that is swallowing everything we know and love, and the coverage must also include the positive aspects of the insatiable emptiness.”
—Jon Stewart, Paramount’s Daily Show host, appearing on the Late Show With Stephen Colbert finale, in a segment where an “interdimensional wormhole” threatened to consume all of late-night TV.

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[READ] ALL HER FAULT STARS SARAH SNOOK AND DAKOTA FANNING ON THE UNDEREXPLORED ASPECTS OF MOTHERHOOD ON TV

[LISTEN] DAKOTA FANNING ON HER MOST COMPELLING TELEVISION ROLE YET

[READ] MEGAN GALLAGHER ON ADAPTING “ALL HER FAULT” WRITING THE SPIRAL OF INVISIBLE MATERNAL EXPECTATIONS

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Speaking of Paramount…: Tom Hardy, who I reported on Thursday was fired from his hit Paramount+ show MobLand, could still get a mea culpa meeting with producers. Hardy is said to have made peace with his forced exit, and Jez Butterworth, the veteran showrunner who gave Paramount a Hardy-or-me ultimatum over the actor’s behavior during Season 2, has not yet agreed to a sit-down. But even though the Season 3 writers room is open and writing without Hardy in mind, Paramount is hoping to orchestrate some kind of get-together to resolve the differences, and producer David Glasser is said to be open to it. Seems doubtful, and producers have already put feelers out for a name actor in Hardy’s age range to join the show, but stranger reconciliations have happened before.

And speaking of Colbert…: The onslaught of media coverage on Friday notably did not include CBS Mornings, which totally ignored the big finale of Late Show. No highlights, no anchor discussion, not a single mention of a pretty major event on its own network. And that wasn’t an oversight. I’m told the ghosting was a specific directive from CBS News president Tom Cibrowski, who hated Colbert’s recent bit mocking their failure to secure a China visa for anchor Tony Dokoupil. Colbert “kicked colleagues when they were down,” one source at CBS News told me today. “It was unprofessional and unprovoked.” In the leadership’s eyes, the news unit had been supportive of Colbert and Late Show amid its cancellation by CBS and the swan song season, covering its F.C.C. dustup over James Talarico and inviting him on CBS Mornings. It wasn’t a complete gag order, though: Anchor Gayle King posted a gushing farewell to Colbert on Instagram and hit the finale afterparty on Thursday night.

Data of the Week

58 percent
Share of Saturday box office for Mandalorian and Grogu that took place before 5 p.m., showing how much younger the film is playing than usual Star Wars pics on its way to $100 million domestic this weekend. [EntTelligence]

$9.2 billion
Estimated global revenue generated by the podcast industry in 2025, up 23 percent year over year, thanks to 73 percent growth for video ads. [Owl & Co.]

$10.7 million
Nightly gross for the Korean boy band BTS on its current global tour. [Pollstar]

Now here’s more on teens and the movies…

Hollywood’s Gen Z Gap Is Real… and It’s Growing

In a complementary study to my annual survey of L.A. teens, it turns out that young people across America have pretty specific—and not all that shocking or unfair—gripes with the movie business.

Matthew Belloni

I think Kevin Goetz is a little annoyed with me. The founder and C.E.O. of Screen Engine, the research firm that conducts scientific studies and test screenings for movie studios, probably doesn’t love the decidedly unscientific focus group interviews about moviegoing habits that I’ve been conducting annually with high-school kids for a few years now. After all, Goetz collects detailed survey data from nationwide samplings of demographically representative respondents. I call up a buddy, who gets his daughter to let me chat with her and five friends from the same high school on the Westside of L.A. Not the same.

I’m transparent about my method, of course, and my exercise is designed not as a statistically significant study but rather for insights into the minds of particularly savvy teens and how they interact with the moviegoing landscape. But after seeing my most recent “report card,” Goetz decided to do his own study of teen moviegoing habits, asking 200 kids nationwide aged 17 and 18 (split evenly by gender, and with a more representative ethnic and racial breakdown) many of the same questions I asked my group. The results were interesting, so he slipped me the study.

Goetz’s larger group wasn’t that different from the more privileged and Hollywood-adjacent subset I interviewed. While both groups feel heavily saturated with personal digital screens, they overwhelmingly like going to movies and view the old-school theater as a “critical physical environment for social gathering, community bonding, and collective emotional expression.” Both crews love established I.P. and high-concept horror, and they learn about new movies almost exclusively via social media and digital video. “Nobody watches commercials anymore,” one noted.

But from Goetz’s study, a more nuanced portrait of the teen moviegoer emerges. Here are four other takeaways:TK

Franchise Fatigue Is Real: Amid total content saturation, established I.P. remains the primary draw to theaters, with the highest anticipation this summer for Toy Story 5 and Minions & Monsters. But… Goetz’s kids expressed strong reservations about burnout. For instance, they viewed the reduced Marvel output as a big positive for quality control. “Marvel was making too many, so it’s good to slow down,” one said. Marvel still tops DC in their eyes—same with my group—though many of these kids liked the creative reset at DC under James Gunn.

Elsewhere, Masters of the Universe was perceived as not relevant. (“I like the idea of it but it’s for Boomers,” one said.) And they’re highly skeptical toward live-action remakes of animated hits, like June’s Moana. “Hollywood is hurting if that’s the best that they can do!” one griped.
They Don’t Love “Hollywood”: Further, there was a clear, vocal resistance to being force-fed cynical remakes and spinoffs by the traditional movie studios. According to the study, these kids specifically rejected “perceived studio corporate greed, oversaturation, and ‘woke’ algorithmic content modifications.” Not totally sure what that last one means in the context of movies; it’s more likely a response to the studio content they see on TikTok. But the idea that “Hollywood” movies carry some kind of glamorous connotation doesn’t ring true to today’s kids.

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Stars Matter Less, Directors Don’t Register: These kids reject celebrity “idolization” and consistently cited “content and concept” over star power in deciding whether to see a movie. Among specific actors, oversaturation was a problem. (“Chris Hemsworth and Pedro Pascal are in too many movies and I avoid movies with them,” one kid said.) So was typecasting (“Zendaya, Dwayne Johnson, and Kevin Hart. They all play the exact same role every time and we’re sick of seeing them,” said another). Sydney Sweeney remains particularly polarizing. (“She seems to never say no to anything.”)

That said, comedic actors like Hart and Adam Sandler prompted the highest willingness to watch in theaters, which is funny because both those guys make a ton of streaming movies. And unlike the L.A. kids, who seemed pretty familiar with big filmmakers, the Goetz sample did not track or even recognize director credits (Nolan and Tarantino excepted). Interestingly, they viewed Steven Spielberg, whose big new movie Disclosure Day is opening in a few weeks, as “universally respected as a foundational industry pioneer,” but they were “highly skeptical of his contemporary output” and associated him with their parents.
They’re Really Hard to Reach: Unlike the L.A. kids, most of Goetz’s respondents were unaware of the upcoming summer lineup, despite the survey taking place in early May. When prompted about specific movies they planned to see, they clustered around high-budget I.P. (Mandalorian and Grogu, Spiderman: Brand New Day), horror (Scary Movie), and nostalgia-driven titles (Toy Story 5, Street Fighter).

Today’s kids find out about movies via videos and mashups on social media—similar to my L.A. cohort, minus the billboards—and rely on friends and digital influencers to validate their choices. Aggregators also play an outsize role, with RottenTomatoes and Letterboxd seen as particularly influential, and in-theater trailers are highly valued.

So overall, the Goetz kids nationally aren’t all that different from the L.A. sect: they just seem a bit more jaded and fed up with what Hollywood is offering. Aren’t we all.

My Reading List…

Countdown until James Murdoch gently suggests a New York magazine hit piece on his father or Fox News… [Puck]

The Chosen is a way bigger phenomenon than you realize. [New Yorker]

A straight-faced deep dive on L.A.’s clown shows, which doesn’t only refer to studio development teams. [Vulture]

Fox is paying just $485 million to air the World Cup this summer—about a billion less than market value—thanks to a shady 2015 deal that let FIFA move the 2022 tournament in scorching-hot Qatar to November. [N.Y. Times]

Drew Goins reveals how to become a Jeopardy! champion. [Atlantic]

Blake Lively’s haircare line still hasn’t recovered from Baldonigate. [Puck]

Paul Schrader has broken up with his A.I. girlfriend. [Facebook]

And for no reason at all, here’s that 2015 Esquire profile of Miles Teller that attempts to figure out if he’s a dick. [Esquire]

The Feedback…

I had to cut a bunch from Thursday’s list of ways Hollywood has changed in the five years of What I’m Hearing, so here are a few more (including reader feedback on stuff we missed)…

“Being global now matters more than ever, and Hollywood fails to see it.” —A banker

“The biggest change in the past five years is the Writers Guild thinking they could help the business with a protracted agency fight and a strike that has largely yielded no material gains.” —A manager

“With no more ICM and the consolidation of the agencies, it’s harder to get a good agent.” —An actor

“The cost of everything has drifted up. Both materials (supply shocks from Covid) and labor (Netflix drunken sailor era thanks to Wall Street treating it like a tech stock).” —A producer

“There is no way to ‘hit the lottery’ with a project, only the tech bros can. In the old days, content was always king—now owning the rails is king.” —A producer

“‘The business reinvents itself every five years’ is no longer true. The business reinvents itself every five months, if not quicker.” —An executive

Finally…

Universal’s The Odyssey (July 17) has the awareness that Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer enjoyed at this point, but not yet the interest, according to the latest tracking chart from The Quorum…

Have a great (short) week,
Matt

Maya Tribbitt contributed research for this issue.

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

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