The NFL brothers’ New Heights podcast—already a top 10 show, per Nielsen’s latest report—hit 13 million YouTube views and a 3,000 percent spike in Spotify listens in the first 24 hours for its latest episode, possibly thanks to an appearance by Travis’s girlfriend, Taylor Swift.

B.T.W.: Lots of noise online about Swift playing both a Sphere residency in Vegas (her forthcoming album has Showgirl in the title) and the Super Bowl (I won’t even mention the Easter eggs on that one). I could see one or both happening—after all, what is left for her to do? And the movie she wants to direct at Searchlight is still in development. Or it could be just noise. A Sphere publicist gave me this statement, take it however you’d like: “While we love and respect Taylor Swift, we are not in conversations with her team about a residency at Sphere.”

24 percent Year-over-year decrease in global commissions of original scripted series from the top six streamers (Apple, Amazon, Disney+, HBO Max, Netflix, Paramount+) in the first half of 2025. [Ampere Analysis]

28 percent Bump from same day to Live+3 audience for last week’s Tonight Show with Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld as a guest, the most watched (non-sports-delayed) episode for Jimmy Fallon since 2020, when his guest was Barack Obama. [Late Nighter/Nielsen]

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64 percent Radio’s share (yes, radio) of daily time spent with ad-supported audio in the U.S., still more than tripling podcasts, at 19 percent. [Nielsen/Edison]

450,000 Square footage of Taylor Sheridan’s new production campus in Fort Worth, the largest studio facility in Texas. (Paramount and billionaire Ross Perot Jr. are partners.) [LA Times]

When I chatted up David Ellison last week, I asked point blank how he and his studio chiefs, Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein, expected to replenish the Paramount film franchise reservoir, which has been sucked pretty dry over the past decade or so. He said he’s got a plan, and today we saw a building block is coming together: a distribution deal with Legendary Pictures, which has had success making I.P.-driven blockbusters like Dune, A Minecraft Movie, and the Monsterverse, all released by Warner Bros.

The Legendary deal won’t close for a few weeks, but I’m told the plan is for Street Fighter to be the first Legendary franchise to be released via New Paramount. The plan could always change, but that adaptation of the video game, directed by Kitao Sakurai and starring Jason Momoa, 50 Cent, and Noah Centineo, is currently in production. Legendary previously had a distribution deal with Sony Pictures, and if the Paramount arrangement closes, this project will now be released by Ellison & Co. in 2026. (Paramount and Legendary declined to comment.)

“I did a deep dive on [Zaslav] and I thought, ‘Well, he’s so boring.’” —Bryan Cranston, when asked at a TV Academy event whether his ruthless boss on The Studio is based on the Warner Discovery chief, adding: “There’s nothing funny about David. I’m sure he’s a great C.E.O.”

Runner-up: “Ironic, because I’m on a yacht off Croatia right now.” —Leo DiCaprio, asked by Paul Thomas Anderson for Esquire how he “recovers” emotionally from an intense movie role. Okay, here’s Kim with the ‘Weapons’ Q&A…

Zach Cregger was in Prague, already prepping his next project, a Resident Evil reboot, when we connected by Zoom. His latest horror movie, Weapons, had just closed out a $44 million opening weekend—it’s since crossed $150 million worldwide—marking his second box office hit following his 2022 film Barbarian, which raked in $45 million worldwide on a $4.5 million budget.

Barbarian turned Cregger, a 44-year-old former actor and sketch comic, into an overnight sensation. (Disclosure: I am name-checked in Barbarian as the reporter who breaks a story that is pivotal to the plot, but somehow I didn’t get points on the movie. Go figure.) Afterward, a streamer made a $5 million preemptive bid for Weapons, based on Cregger’s concept alone. He passed. Instead, his team sent out his script at 8 a.m. on January 23, 2023—with the advice of a psychic, of course. It didn’t take long for the offers to start rolling in, including from Warner Bros.’ Mike De Luca. Cregger was happy to discuss all that and more in his first interview since Weapons smashed the box office. Also on the line was the prolific producer Roy Lee (It, The Lego Movie), who spoke about their partnership, the bidding strategy for Weapons, and the call that changed both of their lives. Lee had scouted Cregger as a star filmmaker early on, so I started with him…

Kim Masters: Roy, when did you come across Zach, and what started this relationship? Roy Lee: It was when I met with [the production company] Boulder Light, and they were talking about wanting to break into more studio projects—because they had been doing movies for $100,000 or less—and they just couldn’t break in. And I was like, “Just send what your favorite thing is, and we’ll see what we can do.” And they sent me the script for Barbarian. I remember reading it, probably starting at around 10 p.m., and by midnight I was like, “I love the script!” I mean, it was just so apparent on-page. I read scripts, and the ones that I myself would want to see, that’s what really gets me going. And so I was just waiting ’til morning to give Zach a call to tell him that I wanted to make the movie.

Zach Cregger: That phone call—it was a true turning point in my life. I had been trying for about two years to get Barbarian anywhere. My acting career had basically dried up and I was starting to think, What do I have to do to make this movie? Do I sell my house and go into massive credit card debt and try it that way? I was getting desperate, and [Lee’s call] was really… it was a miracle. It was, like, nine in the morning. I’m in bed. I was in my underwear. I was playing video games. I got a call from an L.A. number I didn’t recognize. I usually don’t answer those, but for whatever reason, I did. And he was just like, “Hey, Zach, it’s Roy Lee.” And I didn’t know [who he was]. He said, “I read your script. I think it’s great.” I thought he was going to be, like, a new agent at CAA that had been assigned to my team. And he was like, “How much do you think [making Barbarian] would cost?” And I was like, “$5 million maybe?” He’s like, “Yeah, I think we could do it.” And I was like, “I’m sorry I don’t know—who are you?” And he goes, “I have a production company called Vertigo. We made It and The Departed and The Lego Movie.” I immediately got a shot of adrenaline. I’m standing up, I’m pacing around. I hung up with him, and then I Googled him. I called my manager, and I was like, “Do you know who Roy Lee is?” and he just started laughing. And we were off to the races. Once Roy came on, people started returning phone calls and agents started taking it seriously. Moving on to Weapons. Now I’m even seeing some Oscar talk. I’m not sure if you went into it thinking that was going to happen. Cregger: That would be insane if I thought that, going into a movie like this, where someone’s head gets ripped in half. No.

Roy, were you the one who was so convinced that there would be an auction for Weapons? I mean, I know there was a lot of interest in you, Zach, because of Barbarian but… Lee: Zach, I don’t know if you remember, I was like, “I think you’re gonna get $10 million for this thing.” And I remember your reps calling me and saying, “You’ve got to stop saying that, because that’s not realistic.”

Cregger: It’s funny. Roy always has a habit of kind of calling it, and usually he’s pretty dead-on. And yeah, my reps are generally frustrated with him because he gets my hopes up, but it usually comes true, so it’s pretty wild. Note to self: Don’t make box office bets with Roy. Cregger: Yeah, I wouldn’t. I wasn’t anticipating a bidding war, necessarily. However, before I even sent the script out, we did get a pretty incredible offer from one studio that was, like, aggressive. Lee: I think I got the $10 million number because when you passed on the $5 million offer, I was like, “You’re gonna get double that.” That’s where I came up with the 10.

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So you did pitch it? Cregger: It wasn’t a pitch, necessarily, but I did the rounds after Barbarian, and I was pretty deep in the writing process of Weapons. So you sit down with all the studio heads and you introduce yourself, and everyone’s very nice, and everyone inevitably is going to say, “What are you working on?” And I am one of those guys where I really enjoy a little five-minute pitch of what I’m working on, so I would give them the five-minute Weapons pitch.

Tell me about your strategy for auctioning the script. Cregger: Embershot is a software that basically provides total security when you’re sharing files, so you’re ensuring that it cannot be screengrabbed, it cannot be forwarded, it cannot really be replicated at all. And you can see where someone is in the process of reading the script, which is a little gross, and I don’t think we really used that, but it’s there if we wanted to. And you’re able to send the script simultaneously to everybody, and then you can track who’s read it and who hasn’t read it, and you know that it’s not going to get leaked. The problem with Embershot is you have to read [the script] on the app, and so people have to download an app, and then they have to create an account. It’s obnoxious, admittedly so, but I think it’s worth it, because even with all of our precautions, eventually these scripts still leaked out, and people are passing it around online and doing spoilers, and it’s really frustrating. So I think I’m going to be even more regimented in the future with sensitive plots. Lee: As an aside, now that a lot of studios and assistants are using A.I. to cover the scripts, Embershot makes it impossible to use A.I. to cover it unless they retype the whole thing. So you just told people, “This script is going out at 8 a.m. on January 23, 2023”? Lee: It was weird, why we picked the date. Cregger: Dude, yes. Oh my God, this is crazy. I went to Sedona, Arizona, that New Year’s with some friends and stayed at this really hippy-dippy wellness retreat. We got comped to stay there, and there was a psychic who, on New Year’s Eve, was giving her prognostications for the coming year. And she was just so full of shit. She said that Vladimir Putin will be assassinated, and Donald Trump will be in prison. And she made all of these completely outlandish predictions. But she looked at me and said, “Don’t do any business anything until after January 17th or 16th.” And I was like, “You know what? I’m not messing around with this!” And then you say to everybody, “Be at your computer at 8 a.m. to read this thing if you might want it.” And then Mike De Luca called you, Zach. Lee: Yeah, the script went out at eight, and I’d say he called at about 9:30—which means he reads fast. Cregger: But I could tell that he read it. He said, “I love it. I have to make it,” and what was great about that phone call was that everything he loved about it were the things that I was the most nervous that I was going to get challenged on. And I said, “Mike, the only thing I have to say right now at the top of this process is, I don’t want to lean into the Pennywise-ification of Gladys. I want to hide Gladys [in the marketing].” And he said, “Absolutely. No problem.”

I did notice there’s apparently no deal for a potential prequel, which they now want. I suspect they regret not doing that. Zach, I read that you said that your agents don’t send you scripts because you’re self-generating, you have a million ideas that you want to make. Cregger: I don’t pretend to have a million ideas, but I have enough ideas where I’ve got a line of what I’d like to make. So I don’t really think it’s advantageous for me to be reading scripts that I know I’m not going to want to do.

As a filmmaker, did you care whether Weapons went to a streamer only, or did you want theatrical? Cregger: I really believe in the theatrical experience. It’s such an amazing part of the process, to go and have a communal experience. The energy in the room elevates the whole thing. It’s more fun to be scared in a crowd, it’s less fun to be scared alone. It’s fun to laugh in a crowd, it’s less fun to laugh alone. And it does break my heart to think that these movies could be sort of watched on a couch while you’re looking at your phone and people are walking around. I like the idea of forfeiting your time and attention to something together. Roy, we know horror as a genre has gone through some things recently. Do you have any thoughts about why some films are foundering, and then Zach comes in with this? Lee: Obviously quality, and the movies that are good are the ones that will succeed. Sometimes there are rough patches of movies that aren’t [good], that maybe shouldn’t have gotten made. That goes for any genre. Zach, you’re doing Resident Evil, but I read that it’s nothing to do with the previous movie franchise. So why are we calling it that? Cregger: So there’s the movie franchise of Resident Evil, which this has nothing in common with, although I’m kind of taking a leap of faith by even saying that, because I’ve never seen a Resident Evil movie. But there’s the games, I think there’s eight of them now, and the ninth one is going to come out next year. It’s a very malleable kind of canon—some of the games take place in, like, Spain, in the past, and some take place in Louisiana bayous, and some take place in the fictional town of Raccoon City. So you can get away with some creative license. I just have an original story that is very similar to the feeling that I get when I play the games. And I’ve played the games exhaustively, and I feel like the movies that I’ve seen, the trailers for the movies that I’ve seen, the other Resident Evils don’t seem interested in honoring the tone of the games. I think the tone of these games is inherently cinematic, and it’s something that I am really turned on by. And so I have an original story that really excites me, and it fits in the world in a way that I think is great, and I think is going to please the fans of the game.

Lloyd Braun finally went public with his unnamed shortform content app that we’re definitely not comparing to Quibi. [NY Times]

The world’s smallest violin is playing for Georgia, whose tax incentives lured Marvel productions from L.A., only to see the U.K. steal them with even more-aggressive subsidies. [WSJ] No, YouTube isn’t getting the Oscars, but it’s still fun that they’re bidding. [Bloomberg] If you’re gonna squeeze the Paramount stock, now would apparently be the time. [Bloomberg]

Lauren Sherman parsed the September magazine covers, featuring mostly the same stars that graced magazine covers back when magazine covers mattered. [Puck]

Spike Lee’s Colin Kaepernick documentary—the one I reported in September was not coming out due in part to squabbles between Lee and Kaepernick—is now officially dead at ESPN and can be shopped. [Reuters] Trish Duggan, Scientology’s wealthiest donor, is on Trump’s board of the Kennedy Center, which Tom Cruise just publicly shunned. Hmmm. [Underground Bunker]

Thursday’s reports on Sony’s ‘Kpop Demon Hunters’ miss and the Ellison media event at Paramount generated a few interesting comments…

“Sony risked missing out on a huge hit by ‘playing it safe’… If Sony knew which ones would be hits, they wouldn’t be making movies for others at all.” —An executive “Paramount’s sole goal is to defeat Netflix. They stole the UFC deal from them. They stole the Duffer brothers from them. They came out publicly and said, ‘The debate has been settled about whether movies should be released theatrically or not… they should.’ That’s a direct shot at [co-C.E.O. Ted] Sarandos. They are rebuilding their streaming tech stack from scratch to make the interface and the algorithm better and more responsive to the customer. Better than Netflix. Much of the town is cheering for Paramount and against Netflix, which is perceived to have wrecked the business. Paramount will get first dibs on the best material as a result.” —A producer

“Funny everyone is forwarding me your [Demon Hunters] article the same week the Paramount people say it’s ‘settled’ that making direct-to-streaming movies is a bad idea.” —Another producer

“David Ellison: King of the Canceled. Or, a nice way to put it, the King of Second Chances. If you look at who Ellison has done deals with, he leans into people needing second chances. I think he finds ‘value’ in their semi-canceled situations. At Skydance, he grabbed John Lasseter off the scrap heap to make him head of animation. He’s tied himself to Jeff Shell, who had his own harassment issue at NBCUniversal. One of his first deals at Paramount is with Will Smith, who has been bouncing around the desert of irrelevancy since The Slap at the Oscars. Even though Tom Cruise wasn’t canceled, Ellison backed Cruise as he rose back from relative downturn to the peak of Top Gun: Maverick and the M:I movies. I think we’re going to see more deals that Paramount makes with talent who’ve been relegated/canceled or are more on the outside looking in—i.e., Bari Weiss and The Free Press.” —An executive

Six weeks out, Leo DiCaprio’s One Battle After Another is facing lower numbers than his Killers of the Flower Moon in 2023, according to The Quorum’s early film tracking chart…

Have a great week, Matt

Julia Alexander and Maya Tribbitt contributed research for today’s issue. Got a question, comment, complaint, or birthday advice for DiCaprio now that he says he’s “emotionally thirty-five”? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

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