Dec 18, 2025

Welcome back to What I’m Hearing. Now that we’ve all vomited and cried a little over those cringey photos of David Zaslav joyfully touring Netflix’s Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters around the Warners lot, hopefully this will be the last thing you read before you enable the holiday O.O.O. emails and begin drowning your despair in spiked hot cocoa and Tom Cruise cake.

💫💫 WIH will be on a limited schedule over the break, with my annual Hero and Villain of the Year issues dropping on the two Mondays, and then some ’26 predictions to scare the crap out of you for the new year.

Tonight, as the Warner Bros. board rejects the latest hostile bid from Paramount, I’ve got an exclusive interview with Gerry Cardinale, the RedBird Capital founder and Paramount backer, on the path forward, and what’s really up with Larry Ellison’s money. Gerry is feisty! Plus, what’s at stake with the Oscars’ move to YouTube…

Speaking of the Oscars, it seems obvious, but yes, I can confirm that the show in March will pay tribute to the late Rob Reiner, who was notoriously never nominated for a directing Oscar. (Shockingly, his only nod was as a producer of A Few Good Men.) The bigger question is how host Conan O’Brien might handle it. One of the awful details in this beyond-awful situation is that Nick Reiner allegedly killed his parents after they all attended O’Brien’s holiday party last weekend. Condolences to everyone impacted here.

Discussed in this issue: Gerry Cardinale, Bryan Lourd, David Zaslav, Bill Kramer, Bob Iger, Ana de Armas, Neal Mohan, Amy Girdwood, Cate Blanchett, Martin Scorsese, David Ellison, Gunnar Wiedenfels, Larry Ellison, Lynette Howell Taylor, JB Perrette, Tom Cruise, and… Who do these people think they’re talking about?

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.

Thursday Thoughts…

Paramount isn’t ready to let Netflix have Warners.: I just talked to Gerry Cardinale, the RedBird Capital founder and backer of David Ellison’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. He was understandably pissed, having been rebuffed by the WBD board in a lengthy S.E.C. filing that explained why it accepted Netflix’s $83 billion offer for the studio and HBO Max and made the Ellison bid for the whole company seem messy and Larry’s backing not totally real. “It’s all a false narrative” Cardinale told me of the WBD missive. “It’s all a bunch of red herrings.” You can listen to the full chat here, but since the elder Ellison’s commitment to the deal, and the involvement of his revocable trust, was openly questioned by Warners, I’m excerpting Gerry’s emotional answer to my question about whether the Oracle mogul is fully committed to backstopping the deal:
- “You know, we didn’t just show up. We’re not deal jockeys. We’ve been at this for 15 years [in Skydance]. … Frankly, it’s disrespectful to me. It’s disrespectful to the Ellisons. Who do these people think they’re talking about here? I spent 35 years doing everything the right way, and the Ellisons are no different. He’s one of the greatest entrepreneurs and business builders in history. When he says he’s going to do something, he does it. And by the way, don’t just believe me. Look at his track record. That trust has been a counterparty to tens of thousands of transactions and he’s never not delivered on any one of them, including the most relevant one, which was the Paramount deal. So, all of a sudden, there’s gonna be this aberration and he flakes out? It’s impossible. Not happening. False narrative.”

Of course I also asked Cardinale if the Ellisons will raise their bid beyond $30 per share, as many believe they must. He says he still wants the WBD shareholders—not the board or C.E.O David Zaslav, who he believes is biased toward Netflix—to respond to his current offer:
- “I’m saying the following: $30 in cash for 100 percent of the company, with our regulatory profile, is superior to Netflix. Okay, over to them. Respond to that offer. We’ve shown a track record of going through five bids where they responded, and somehow on the sixth—where we actually hit what they asked us to hit, both in price and structure and everything else—they decided not to respond to it. I’m waiting for that.”
(Disclosure: Through our recent acquisition of Air Mail, RedBird and Zaslav are small investors in Puck.)

The funniest Warner Discovery grift: I know, we all love to read about how much richer David Zaslav will get from the sale of Warner Bros. Discovery, a company from which he aggressively drained value during his three years as C.E.O. (and which he should never have created in the first place). But let’s at least acknowledge his other C-suite collaborators, who aren’t far behind in the outrageous golden parachute pecking order. Thanks to Paramount’s S.E.C. filing this week, we can now see the total payouts in cash, equity, and benefits if the company were to sell:

David Zaslav, C.E.O.: $567.7 million

Gunnar Wiedenfels, C.F.O.: $144.9 million

Bruce Campbell, chief revenue and strategy officer, $138.5 million

JB Perrette, C.E.O. and president, global streaming and games: $167.4 million

Gerhard Zeiler, president, international: $95.2 million

That’s more than a billion bucks to five executives, ghoulish money for all of them. But the funniest grifter of all might be Amy Girdwood, the chief people and culture officer, who stands to make $28.9 million in vested stock awards. A pittance compared to the others, but that’s nearly $30 million to the H.R. person! Who has no involvement in the strategy and direction of the company! And that’s before any further bidding!
Why did Ana fire CAA?: Remember this summer, when Oscar nominee Ana de Armas shifted from longtime CAA agents Tracy Brennan and Josh Lieberman to agency C.E.O. Bryan Lourd and his day-to-day guy, Chris Andrews? She was coming off the miss Ballerina and likely wanted to mix things up, and a common tactic with disgruntled clients is to promise them the full attention of the boss. But two sources told me the shift was also due to a request for higher priority by de Armas’s then-hand-holding friend, Tom Cruise, one of CAA’s most treasured clients. Now, sadly, de Armas and Cruise are seeing less of each other, so I can’t imagine she would be a top concern for Lourd—and boom, she just bailed for WME’s Brent Morley and Elan Ruspoli. (Both WME and CAA declined to comment. Usual disclosure: WME reps Puck but not me personally.)
Box office over/under: Nail-biting time at Disney: Avatar: Fire and Ash is tracking notably below 2022’s The Way of Water, which opened to $134 million domestic on its way to $2.3 billion worldwide. Estimates for this one are at about $105 million, and I’ll take the over.

The Oscars-YouTube Brand Problem

The streamer’s bold bid to host the Academy Awards offers maximum reach for a show that was becoming minimally niche, but mixing prestige and base populism has its potentially problematic downsides.

Matthew Belloni

If we’re being honest, the value of the Oscars has never been about the show. It’s about the brand. Exclusive. Glamorous. Prestigious. That’s what grew a silly awards dinner, and by association the silly nonprofit club that staged it, into a cultural institution whose annual popularity contest commands about $100 million a year for broadcast rights. There are many awards shows. But you see that bald, gold Oscar statuette anywhere in Hollywood… or Honolulu… or Hong Kong… and you immediately think exclusive, glamorous, prestigious.

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

Has anyone ever used those three words to describe YouTube? No, which is why the new five-year broadcast deal, set to begin with the 101st Oscars in 2029, is a bit of a brand risk. I know, for most people under, say, 50, YouTube is TV now. The platform generates about 13 percent of all viewership on connected televisions in the U.S., per Nielsen, more than any other streamer or linear network. And by moving the Oscars off ABC/Hulu and onto a global digital platform with more than 2 billion users worldwide, the Academy sees a chance to finally defibrillate its flatlining ratings. A show that commanded 57 million viewers in 1998 is down to fewer than 20 million in today’s fractured media landscape. By the 2030s, “television” will likely be a global oligopoly run by YouTube owner Google, Amazon, Netflix, and maybe Disney—and of those three, YouTube is the only service that’s free and accessible to anyone anywhere. Maximum reach for a show that was becoming minimally niche.

This is probably why I heard so much ambivalence when I polled some Academy members about the move. I thought more would be upset at the prospect of Cate Blanchett or Martin Scorsese triumphantly hoisting that symbol of exclusivity, glamor, and prestige… and most of us watching on our phones and iPads like they’re the Dude Perfect guys doing trick shots. It feels kinda icky. And indeed, in discussions about the various offers, I’m told Academy dealmakers grappled with that very ick factor.

But reach is reach, and money talks, and I’m told YouTube C.E.O. Neal Mohan was at least willing to get close to the Academy’s current number. Still, it’s nowhere near the big increase that Academy C.E.O. Bill Kramer hoped to achieve, even with the group retaining some lucrative sponsorship rights currently held by Disney, and YouTube agreeing to broadcast the Governors Awards and other small Academy events nobody else really wanted (not even NBCUniversal, which bid aggressively to secure the Oscars for NBC and Peacock). Plus, YouTube will let the Academy produce the show how it chooses, while Disney was asking for general concessions, like balancing the craft awards with more populist segments. Kramer called Disney C.E.O. Bob Iger before the announcement to let him know that the show would be leaving ABC after an incredible 53-year run.

There’s a kind of resignation in the air around town, right? In a year in which an Oracle heir bought Paramount, Netflix is in the process of acquiring Warner Bros., Amazon convinced the Broccolis to walk away from James Bond, Disney served its characters on a platter to OpenAI, and headline after headline signals the demise—sorry, evolution—of traditional Hollywood as it becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Tech, YouTube nabbing the Oscars feels… if not right, then appropriate. Tech’s dominance over entertainment is now undeniable, why shouldn’t the biggest digital hub carry entertainment’s biggest celebration of itself?

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

The Brand Halo

Still, it’s worth Kramer and Academy president Lynette Howell Taylor remembering that the populist ubiquity of YouTube runs dangerously counter to the Oscars brand. ABC, for the past 50 years, has been a broadcaster in the broadest sense of the word, but its programming has always been curated. Many types of content are not on ABC, and it paid $1 million to lure the Oscars away from NBC in 1976 precisely because it wanted something classy that everyone cared about. Iger kept the show even when the cost increased and ratings declined because he valued the brand halo. (He and Willow also look great in formalwear.)

By contrast, everything is on YouTube. Its brand is everything and therefore nothing. The Oscars will live just one click away from skateboarding videos and drywall tutorials and fake movie trailers made using A.I. Twenty years ago today, YouTube first became famous due to rampant copyright infringement of the SNL “Lazy Sunday” video. For most of its existence, the platform has not been a friend to the professionally produced content business. YouTube wants the Oscars for the audience, and as something its sales team can use to bring in premium ad buyers. But the Oscars elevate the YouTube brand, probably more than YouTube drags on the Oscars. And I’m guessing, Mohan will continue building out big-audience events such as NFL games—just like Netflix is doing. Netflix, which didn’t bid seriously for the Oscars (it already carries the SAG Awards, renamed The Actor Awards), must now fear YouTube more than any rival, though its leaders probably love the fresh evidence that its competition is not just the subscription streamers it has already vanquished. To that end, this Oscars deal could be very useful in defining its market in the likely antitrust trial over the acquisition of Warner Bros.

Will more people watch the Oscars on YouTube? Unclear, at least in the short term, as many will struggle to find the show. Such was the case with Thursday Night Football, which dropped from 15 million viewers to under 10 million in 2022-23, its first year on Prime Video. But TNF has crept back to about 15 million viewers this season, and in the long term, the Academy is betting that the audience is more likely to grow on YouTube than anywhere else. That’s probably true, but the opportunity comes with a cost, and if the brand suffers too much, there may be far less for the Academy to sell the next time their broadcast rights come up for auction.

See you Monday,
Matt

Got a question, comment, complaint, or a better use of A.I. than the ‘Melania’ trailer but with Miss Piggy? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

Join Puck’s chief political columnist, John Heilemann, as he roams the corridors of power and influence in America on this twice-weekly interview show, taking you beyond the headlines with the people who shape our culture: icons and up-and-comers, incumbents and insurgents, moguls and machers in the overlapping worlds of politics, entertainment, tech, business, sports, media, and beyond. The conversations are rich and revealing, unrehearsed and unexpected… and reliably impolitic. A Puck-Audacy joint, new episodes drop every Wednesday and Friday.

Ace media reporter Dylan Byers brings readers into the C-suite as he chronicles the biggest stories in the industry: the future of cable news in the streaming era, the transformation of legacy publishers, the tech giants remaking the market, and all the egos involved.

Need help? Review our FAQ page or contact us for assistance. For brand partnerships, email ads@puck.news.

You received this email because you signed up to receive emails from Puck, or as part of your Puck account associated with {{customer.email}}. To stop receiving this newsletter and/or manage all your email preferences, click here.

Puck is published by Heat Media LLC. 107 Greenwich St., New York, NY 10006

SEE THE ARCHIVES