Welcome back to What I’m Hearing, thanks for taking a short break from writing checks to the Harris 2024 Victory Fund, as everyone seems to be doing today. (More on that below…)

I’m sure you saw Warner Bros. Discovery exercised “matching rights” today for the NBA rights that the league sold for $1.8 billion a year to Amazon. My sporty partner John Ourand is all over the story, so check out his analysis here. This is likely headed to litigators, but it’s hard to evaluate the actual claims without knowing contract details. We do know the NBA thinks WBD can only use matching rights on the “B” package, since it includes linear TV games. Amazon’s “C” package is considered streaming-only. But according to John, “WBD believes it is entitled to bid on Amazon’s package since it includes some games that are currently on TNT. Plus, it believes that it can match Amazon’s streaming proposals with Max.”

What a mess. I still think this is ultimately resolved by NBA commissioner Adam Silver slipping David Zaslav some cash from his $76 billion overall haul to go away—and to politely pass next time Jim Dolan invites him to a Knicks game. Then Zaz can claim at least a small financial victory while pointing to the amazing tennis and Mountain West college football games still left on Turner nets. Litigation would be a horrible look here, and costly, and a signal to other leagues—like, say, the UFC, whose rights are up next—that Warner Discovery has entered its desperate “final throes” stage.

Programming note: This week on The Town, Lucas Shaw and I parsed Netflix earnings and its ad battle with YouTube, Luminate’s Jimmy Doyle explained why Star Wars is underperforming on Disney+, and BofA Securities’ Jessica Reif Ehrlich laid out some tough scenarios for Warner Bros. Discovery. Subscribe here and here.

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Discussed in this issue: Dana Walden, Damon Lindelof, Lee Isaac Chung, Reggie Hudlin, Ryan Murphy, Rupert Murdoch, Luke Combs, Tom Cruise, Ari Emanuel, Jen Salke, Mike DeLuca, Donna Langley, Rupert Murdoch, and… Wendi Murdoch’s Instagram.

But first…

Runner-up: Michael Moses, the marketing head at Universal Pictures, created an event out of Twisters (see below) and generated an $82 million domestic opening. The same film, released overseas by Warner Bros., has disappointed with $42.7 million from 76 markets so far. Whoever decided to have the cast shotgun beers onstage with Luke Combs deserves a promotion.

Honorable mention: The Max homepage programmer, for ensuring Veep was the first thing I saw in the dashboard slot on Sunday night.

Dishonorable mention: CNN, last of the cable news nets to go live on Sunday with Biden’s exit. (Fox News was first, followed by MSNBC, then the broadcast nets.) CNN, in full cost-cutting mode, was airing a rerun. 🤦‍♂️

Speaking of that exit…

Endeavor C.E.O. Ari Emanuel, brother of Rahm, actually abandoned Biden before that, but his comments at the Aspen Ideas Festival weren’t reported until later. George Clooney probably gets the most influential defector Demmy for plunging a dagger via his Times op-ed bailing on the president, for whom he had just collected $30 million at an L.A. fundraiser. To people outside Hollywood, a Very Famous Person going public like that really turned the tide of elites. Former Netflix C.E.O. Reed Hastings and Abigail Disney were out there early among big Dem donors, too.

Regardless, the energy and enthusiasm seems pretty high right now. “Amongst the donors and activists I’m talking to, with a high degree of bubble awareness, I can’t understate how excited they are… and how surprised they are at their own excitement,” Lindelof texted me today. “Everyone understands there’s work to be done, lots of work, but this is a faith-based enterprise and I am getting strong vibes of BELIEF.”

I’ll leave it to my plugged-in Puck colleagues to dissect the Kamala calculus (Peter Hamby just published an analysis tonight), but if there’s a Hollywood winner in her ascension it’s probably Dana Walden, the Disney TV chief. Walden and her husband, Matt, go back years with Harris. Along with producer Reggie Hudlin and his wife Chrisette, they’re maybe the closest to Harris and her L.A. entertainment lawyer husband, Doug Emhoff, according to a couple Dem insiders I polled. (Disclosure: I worked for Emhoff as a summer associate in law school and have remained friendly with him.)

The Waldens hosted a fundraiser with Harris in 2022 at their Brentwood house, one of several boosts they’ve given Kamala, going all the way back to her first race for San Francisco district attorney in 2003. According to the pool report, Harris said, “Dana and Matt introduced on a blind date Chrisette Hudlin and Reggie Hudlin, who then introduced on a blind date me and Doug. So, in many ways, Dana and Matt are responsible for my marriage. But [they] have always been extraordinary friends.”

Harris and Emhoff, based mostly in Brentwood when they’re not in D.C., have pretty strong ties to the entertainment community, especially compared to Biden. Talent lawyer Matt Johnson has been a backer since her first run for California attorney general back in 2010. Katie Abrams, the activist wife of J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot co-C.E.O., has been a vocal supporter, as have Nicole Avant, Obama’s ambassador to the Bahamas and Mrs. Ted Sarandos; Universal’s Donna Langley; Amazon’s Jen Salke; and Laura Shell, wife of incoming Paramount president Jeff Shell. The list goes on (don’t email me if I didn’t mention you!).

Yet few, if any, go as far back with Harris as Walden does, nor do they enjoy the perch and purview Walden does at Disney. If Kamala ends up becoming president, might that “extraordinary” friendship even give Walden a boost in the Disney C.E.O. succession race? Probably not, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Now for Scott Mendelson’s take on the Twisters success and the rise of “regular people” blockbusters…

After nearly two decades of big-budget tentpoles dominated by Marvel and DC superheroes, “chosen one” protagonists like Harry Potter, and one-man-army action figures like Ethan Hunt, Twisters kept its spectacle firmly on Planet Earth, with a plot centered on ordinary people coping with extraordinary circumstances. Of course, the film was aided by a youngish cast of semi-recognizable names, including Glen Powell, Daisy Edgar-Jones, and Anthony Ramos.

Universal deserves credit for pitching the $155 million disaster epic as an all-quadrants PG-13 franchise flick in a summer otherwise dominated by R-rated action movies and younger-skewing animated films. For better or worse, the filmmakers also avoided material that might offend conservative audiences (no references to climate change; a painfully G-rated romance, thanks in part to executive producer Steven Spielberg), and promotional materials that positioned Edgar-Jones’s buttoned-up scientist as the protagonist but Powell’s small-town cowboy as the star. (There’s an extended rodeo sequence, much to the annoyance of PETA, which disrupted the premiere before a protester was escorted out amid boos while chanting “There’s no excuse for animal abuse!”). Universal even recruited Luke Combs to contribute a title tune, “Ain’t No Love in Oklahoma,” which led an original soundtrack with new music from Miranda Lambert, Shania Twain, and Jelly Roll. When was the last time—outside of Disney’s animated releases and Barbie—that a soundtrack was almost as big a deal as the movie?

Universal’s effort to cater to rural America clearly paid off. Compared to the 52-weekend market share average, theaters in Dallas (the second-biggest market of the weekend behind Los Angeles) jumped 33 percent, Kansas City was up 83 percent, and Oklahoma City skyrocketed 229 percent. And while AMC, Regal, and Cinemark were again the top earners for the weekend (with 53 percent of the gross), the Kansas-based B&B Theatres shot up 142 percent, and the San Antonio-based Santikos jumped 70 percent. And just because Midwest theaters overindexed, that doesn’t mean moviegoers in NYC and L.A. stayed home: Two of the top five theaters were AMCs in Manhattan and Burbank.

Sure, there were plenty of fantastical Hero’s Journey tentpoles between Star Wars in 1977 and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in 2001. But the pursuit of global box office glory (teased by the 1990s successes of Jurassic Park, Independence Day, Titanic, and The Phantom Menace) led filmmakers and studios to focus on superpowered fantasy heroes. To wit: By the mid-2010s, even the Fast & Furious franchise, which began with a counterprogramming release about young toughs who hijacked trucks and stole DVD players, had morphed into an aspirational globe-trotting spy-action saga. This left Jurassic World—filled with scientists and soldiers and activists coping with dinosaurs—as the closest thing to a blue-collar franchise centered on regular human beings. And, of course, the dinosaurs were the real stars.

There’s a case to be made, given the breakout successes of A Quiet Place in 2018 and Bad Boys for Life in early 2020—to say nothing of the saturation of superhero flicks—that this decade was always going to see a partial shift back to regular folks fighting their own battles. In Twisters, Powell, notably, got to play a flesh-and-blood human as an old-school movie star, and PostTrak claims 22 percent of audiences showed up at least partially to see his scene-stealing performance. At the very least, it’s a reminder that Cruise became a movie star not just from Top Gun and Mission: Impossible but also from Risky Business and Rain Man and Jerry Maguire. Outside of Interview With the Vampire and arguably Legend, he’s never played a character with overtly superhuman powers.

Twisters checked all five critical boxes for a non-franchise, adult-skewing theatrical breakout: decent reviews, a recognizable ensemble cast, an easy elevator pitch, a known director, and the promise of gee-whiz cinematic escapism. (Other films that check these boxes: Baby Driver, Knives Out, House of Gucci, Oppenheimer, and Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood.) That Amblin and friends took a page out of the Dune playbook in applying these elements to a PG-13 all-quadrant franchise film meant the movie appealed to its endemic audiences and the initially indifferent, alike. Add that aggressive pitch to a rural demographic and you have a movie that, at least for this weekend, everyone chased.

The Apple come-to-Jesus over content costs continues. It’s costs… and at least on the film side, it’s also project choices. Fun task: Try to explain to someone under 40 why Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum made a $100 million movie about the marketing of the moon landing. [Bloomberg]

The Igers are reportedly putting more than $100 million of their own money into the Angel City women’s soccer team. [LA Times]

Michael Schulman scathingly reviews the Academy Museum’s exhibit on the first Jewish moguls, which, after vocal complaints, “retrofits history into a feel-good tale that the truth simply can’t sustain.” [New Yorker]

My buddy Adam Aron won a round in his seemingly endless battle to keep AMC Entertainment and its Ape investors out of bankruptcy. Now he just needs a Twisters every weekend in 2025. [Bloomberg]

Disney is hoping its user interface can soon match Netflix’s… circa 2018. [WSJ]

Joe Reid cuts through the Netflix “mirage” and argues that its platform-leading 107 Emmy nominations are actually a disappointment. [Vulture]

Jason Reitman and friends bought Westwood’s Village theater, but the adjacent, lesser Bruin, last seen hosting Margot Robbie’s bare feet in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, faces closure. Come on, Tarantino, just buy the thing and keep it as a shrine to toes in cinema. [LA Times]

“You’re really missing the point of WBD, which is odd because [Warner Bros. film studio heads Mike] DeLuca and [Pam] Abdy are telegraphing it like they did at MGM: They’re again prepping their studio for sale. WBD will merge with another studio, most likely Comcast. So among other things, this NBA rights issue will be moot in the not too distant future.” —An agent

“The big question for legacy media is: Who has the strategy and the balls to exit the cash-generating-but-laughably-declining linear arena whole hog and reorient the business around a few key growth pillars? As much as I hate the guy, I give credit to Rupert [Murdoch] for making an honest assessment of his company’s assets and long-term future, deciding to voluntarily opt out of everything except news and sports, and getting top fucking dollar for it.” —An analyst

“Do you think a board of directors could get comfortable [saying] a linear TV spin-off was viable since they have personal liability if they know it is not viable?” —Another analyst

“Thank you for saying the things we want to say in the meeting but can’t because these guys (they’re all men) don’t want to hear about reality.” —A Warner Discovery employee

Have a great week,
Matt

Got a question, comment, complaint, or Olympic sports you’d like to see called by A.I. Al Michaels? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.