Welcome back to What I’m Hearing. Half of Hollywood seems to be in Paris for the Olympics (more below)—which, even with all that poop in the Seine, still seems a lot less stinky than Hall H at Comic-Con. Thoughts and prayers to those enduring the seventh ring of marketing hell in San Diego.

Caption contest winner!: Thanks to all who submitted captions for Monday’s silly pic of an exuberant Wendi Murdoch with Lauren Sánchez. Many made me smile, only one made me LOL, and it was…

“You’re gonna make it after all!”

Yeah, a 50-year-old reference to the theme song from Mary Tyler Moore, a show I’ve never watched, is our winner. Tom O’Neill is getting some Puck merch, congrats!

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Let’s begin…

• Silver dunks on Zaslav: No, I don’t know how the Warner Bros. Discovery lawsuit against the NBA will play out—they haven’t even sued or initiated arbitration yet. This “appropriate action” (Warners’ words), if it’s ever filed and not just a threat for a go-away payment, could be decided privately, depending on the contract. It’s not a great fact for David Zaslav that Warners invited Amazon into the bidding process, then watched as NBC Universal took the “B” package for $2.45 billion a year (after Warners balked at $2.1 billion) and Amazon got the new, streaming-only “C” package for $1.8 billion. My colleague John Ourand is out with an excellent behind-the-scenes piece on all the negotiating snafus that explain how this got so ugly.
• But Zaslav will always have Paris…: Like I said, happy Olympics Eve, especially to the seemingly endless list of Comcast and Comcast-adjacent people in Paris for the 17-day boondoggle—sorry, celebration of exceptionalism and global unity. So much for the Covid-era culling of the NBCUniversal “hospitality” list; if you’ve got a decent executive title at 30 Rock or in the Universal City tower—or you’re a producer or talent with ties to the studio—and you weren’t thrown a 5-star hotel and some gymnastics tickets, you’re basically nobody and should leave.

  At least Comcast can justify the shenanigans with its massive Olympics business in the U.S. (see below). Warner Bros. Discovery carries the Olympics overseas on its Eurosport channels and Discovery+, and the Paris Games will help launch Max in several territories, but its business is decidedly smaller than Comcast’s. Still, C.E.O. David Zaslav is going all-out for his first Olympics experience atop the combined Warner Discovery. Zaz is scheduled to stay for two weeks, I’m told; he invited all his direct reports (everyone from penny-pinching C.F.O. Gunnar Wiedenfels to film co-head Pam Abdy is there); and he’s flying in multiple waves of talent for V.I.P. experiences, including Tom Cruise, Margot Robbie, and Greta Gerwig. Many of them are booked at the Hotel de Crillon, one of the most luxurious palaces in town, home to Ben and J.Lo’s most recent honeymoon as well as a gold-plated pool. (It also famously overlooks the square where Marie Antoinette was beheaded… perhaps Zaslav will address his WBD subjects from his suite balcony: “Let them eat craft services!”) Oh, and Zaz is throwing after-hours parties for talent, executives, and clients at the Louvre.

  Yes, the Louvre, and yes, the same Zaslav who just laid off another 1,000 employees; and who, only this week, was outmaneuvered by NBCUniversal and Amazon for NBA rights; and whose stock just dipped back below $8 thanks to said NBA debacle.

  I’m half kidding. Obviously, Warner Discovery should leverage the Olympics to juice ad clients and push Max. Entertainment is nothing without promotion and talent relationships. (That’s why Brian Roberts and Comcast go similarly nuts.) “These Olympics and our launch of Max in Europe are an important opportunity to show clients and creative partners the breadth of what we can do, as the size and scope of our coverage across sports and news are immense over the next few weeks there,” Zaslav’s spokesman Robert Gibbs told me today.

  Yes, but… like I said, Comcast’s business and presence on the Olympics stage are much bigger, and Comcast isn’t such a troubled company. As with the infamous Cannes party, Zaz seems to be tone-deaf to the optics of such largesse during a time of painful cuts and scary financials at his company. Instead, he’s doing what he thinks big-time Hollywood moguls like himself should do. Credit to CNN C.E.O. Mark Thompson, who politely declined the Paris invite, citing the bad optics, I’m told, as well as the election news fire hose.

• Stuber sweepstakes nears end: Recently departed Netflix film chief Scott Stuber is about to announce his next act, per three sources. It’s down to a deal with Amazon, which would fully finance his film production pod (TV kept separate) and offer him a few guaranteed release slots per year, or Warner Bros. or Sony, which would entail him bringing in outside money. My bet is he will resolve the few final issues this week and close at Amazon. Rumblings are that Stuber could end up relaunching MGM’s dormant United Artists label, which would hopefully lead us to revisit the discourse around Tom Cruise’s eye patch in Valkyrie. (Reps for Stuber and Amazon declined to comment.)
• The Amazon ad depression: Speaking of Amazon, more evidence that Prime Video’s recent push into advertising has flooded the market with inventory and dragged down others: Even YouTube, the digital video ad leader, slowed its revenue growth from 21 percent in the first quarter to only 13 percent in the second, per its earnings report. (I know, David Zaslav would give up Bob Evans’ house if it meant 13 percent ad growth at Warner Discovery.) If YouTube is having trouble meeting its ad goals, what chance do any of these smaller streaming platforms have trying to maintain their volume and pricing?
• Jeffrey’s back (of course): Jeffrey Katzenberg buried the lede in his slightly cringey Times op-ed farewell to Joe Biden, which I read while live-texting with an industry friend. (Sample exchange: “Oh no… Oh no… He’s not gonna quote Hamilton… Oh no he quoted Hamilton!”) But the bio line of the piece is the news: Jeffrey Katzenberg is an entrepreneur, tech investor and former media executive and is a co-chair of the Harris campaign. The bolding is mine, and it’s exactly as I predicted: Jeffrey’s back! As much as Hollywood is pissed at him for glossing over Biden’s mental decline as he generated campaign cash, he fundraises like nobody else in the industry, and Harris needs that. Maybe some won’t return his calls, but given the current enthusiasm for the candidate, I’m betting almost everyone will.
• Lachlan is the eldest boy!: Congrats to Rupert Murdoch, who amazingly managed to keep secret his very Succession-y legal fight against three of his own children in Nevada probate court until the Times finally unearthed the story this week. How did nobody flag this way earlier? Especially since Murdoch is trying to ensure control of Fox News passes to current Fox C.E.O. Lachlan and not to the siblings who might gang up to change or even sell it. I guess this is really a congrats to Rupert’s lawyer Adam Streisand, late of the Britney Spears circus, and Gary Bornstein, the Cravath litigator representing Prudence, James, and Liz.
• Box office over/under: Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems to have been produced in an internet meme blender, is tracking anywhere from $155 million to $170 million. Let’s set the line at $165 million. It’s been more than a year since the last Marvel movie anyone cared about, so I’ll take the over, despite the R rating.

NBCU needs the Olympics to juice Peacock, which actually lost subscribers last month, and, more importantly, for those new subs to stick around after the Games, since Peacock suffers from an 8 percent churn rate, per Antenna. Lazarus was on The Town this week from Paris, and there were a bunch of questions we didn’t have time to include—the new $2.45 billion-a-year NBA deal, WWE rights, and his division of duties with the newly promoted executive Donna Langley—so I’m presenting a transcript below. It’s been edited for length and clarity…

Mark Lazarus: If you go back to 2012, which was my first Games with NBC, we made $9 million as a company. We make many, many times that now. So the Games are quite profitable for us. That’s the money side, but that’s not really the reason we do it. It’s a way for our entire company to rally around something. [We] push people to the Olympics, and then the Olympics are built to push people to our other properties. If you remember back in 2014, we launched the Jimmy Fallon Tonight Show in the second week of the Sochi Olympics.

Do I have to go to Peacock to hear A.I. Al Michaels, or is he going to be everywhere?

We might give you a taste in other places, but if you want to get Al whispering sweet nothings into your ear each and every morning, you’re going to have to go to Peacock and sign up.

It’s sort of amazing that he allowed his voice to be used. I’m sure that check was not small.

This is a great example of talent and network working together to utilize A.I.

How else are these games going to be different in presentation? You’re really pushing viewers to Peacock, with 5,000 of the 7,000 hours of programming there. That makes sense, given the stakes of that platform.

Peacock’s not on the clock, right? We can do anything we want any time of the day. It’ll stream every event live. It’ll have a lot of unique shows. We’re going to innovate with MultiView. We’re going to innovate with the A.I. Al, with what we’re doing with content, say, with Kevin Hart and Kenan Thompson [as hosts]. We’re going to do the Gold Zone with Scott Hanson. We have the ability now to really surround the customer with what they’re looking for.

You did an interview with Bloomberg where you said about the 2021 Olympics on Peacock: “We didn’t deliver to the consumer what we promised. We said we’d be the home of the Olympics, and we were not.”

That is true. And that was something we needed to be direct about. We went a long way toward rectifying that in Beijing with the Winter Games. But I think we now have a product that anyone who comes to Peacock looking for the Olympic Games will be satisfied that they are getting what we promised.

Also, the adoption of sports on streaming is just much greater now. You had success with the NFL wild card game driving fans to Peacock.

We’re habituating consumers to know first, how to find it; second, how to use it; and then third, to be comfortable that it’s a good experience. It works in conjunction with our broadcast and cable sports portfolio. They are complements to each other, and it builds a community of people who move among the various platforms, as long as we tell them where it’s going be and treat them with the right amount of respect.

Our cable networks are important. We have a lot of exclusive sports content on USA. A lot of exclusive Premier League games, a lot of exclusive NASCAR.

But is any Olympics content exclusive to the cable networks?

Well, no, because we stream everything live [on Peacock], but we stream it differently. Our Big Ten [college football] deal and our NBA deal, both of those are broadcast- and streaming-centric.

Do you see that NBA deal as a defensive play or an offensive play? I see it as a defensive play. Obviously, you get a lot of content. But it takes Warner Discovery out of the NBA business, unless it sues and claws back the package awarded to Amazon, and prevents WBD from charging Comcast more for its channels.

We look at it purely from the programming point of view, not any sort of defensive point of view. And for us to be able to have those high ratings, that diversified audience—both in terms of age, gender, the different types of folks watching the games—it’s an offensive play for us.

And you get the John Tesh song back.

We are getting the John Tesh song back. You’ll see some marketing and promotion with the song during the Olympics.

First, we learned that it’s got to work. It worked to great success, right? The most streamed event to date in U.S. history. We learned how to market and make sure people knew what to expect when they got there. We also learned: Once that game is over, how do we make sure we retain those customers? Nine out of ten hours that the football fan watched over the next month were entertainment programs, things not related to football.

Speaking of Peacock, your WWE deal is up in 2026. With Monday Night Raw going to Netflix, are you planning to try to renew your deal?

It’s been a very strong property for us. I think we do a good job serving them. What will happen over the next two years in the marketplace, I won’t predict, but I would never say to you, “We don’t need or want something.” We do.

Yeah, David Zaslav made that mistake with the NBA. Peacock is a domestic play. Do you ultimately plan to compete on a global scale with these major streamers?

We are focused on domestic. We have a few partnerships in other territories. Comcast owns Sky, a big player in the U.K., Germany, and Italy. But not every [sports] property wants to sell their rights globally. The Premier League does deals in individual markets. The NFL does deals in individual markets. The Olympics do deals in many markets, not every individual market. I’m not put off by the need to have a global streamer. It doesn’t mean in the future we won’t aspire to that. But today, when the predominance of funding for sports properties in the U.S. still comes from the U.S., we’re not intimidated by needing to compete at that level.

By the way, how’s it working out with Donna Langley at the film studio now being promoted on the TV side? What’s the division of duties?

She’s in charge of the content. I’m her partner on the business side. We work very well together. We talk constantly. We share ideas. She weighs in on the business side, and I’m not shy about saying, “I think this” about a show. Hopefully, the creative community sees it as seamless.

She spends the money. You make sure that the money comes in.

We work together on that. But yeah.

I think it is a different game. There are some nights we can get to those numbers. On the whole, we can still get to over 20 million on average. We can achieve numbers that will rival the highest-rated and most consumed content for 2024.

What does your data show about who the biggest stars are? Ratings for the gymnastics trials were way up, and I’m presuming that is because of Simone Biles.

Certainly Simone Biles, but gymnastics overall. Suni Lee also won a gold medal in Tokyo, Sha’Carri Richardson and Noah Lyles in track, and Rai Benjamin and other athletes in track. Katie Ledecky, Caeleb Dressel, Simone Manuel, other swimmers who have been in previous Games, and there’ll be stories none of us can anticipate.

Who does Colin Jost have naked photos of? That guy gets to go to Tahiti to cover surfing?

Well, he happens to be a surfer. We took volunteers, he volunteered.

Oh, what a patriot! Do you have a specific goal for these Olympics? Do you set out two years in advance and say, “We will achieve this level of profitability, this level of penetration of Peacock, these ratings?”

The most important thing is the right amount of advertising, right? And we’re there or thereabouts right now.

Who’s the holdout?

We’re waiting to hear from the R.N.C. and the D.N.C.

I don’t know if you heard, but the D.N.C. had a little change recently in its product.

Then the most important thing for us is to deliver to those advertisers what we promised. On the distribution side, we want to deliver strong ratings for our broadcast affiliates, for our cable operator partners, and a lot of eyeballs on Peacock. I’m not going to give you our internal goals, but…

Oh, come on, we’re friends.

[Siren outside.]

That siren goes off in Brian Roberts’ office when anyone is about to say something remotely interesting.

That’s right. Brian is sending the Paris police over here to stop me.

Got a question, comment, complaint, or a nice designer neckerchief boutique in Paris? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.