A huge jury trial win for the lawyer who took over the Live Nation/Ticketmaster antitrust case after the Department of Justice settled. C.E.O. Michael Rapino & Co. say they will appeal, but for now this is the most high-profile legal victory over music’s biggest monolith.

A little honorable mention… for Jason Reitman, whose Fox Village Theatre in Westwood has been closed since last summer but will host the premiere of Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft on May 6, I’m told. It’s a farewell, of sorts, as renovations on the Village begin for a planned reopening sometime in 2027.

“Get off the ad crack!”
—Tom Rothman, the Sony film chief, loudly admonishing 3,000 theater owners from the CinemaCon stage for running “endless commercials” before screenings

Runner-up: “Originality is not risky. Derivative sameness is.”
—Mike De Luca, the co-head of Warner Bros., lecturing the crowd right before he presented an upcoming slate with a Dune sequel, two DC Comics exploitations, another Cat in the Hat, more Lord of the Rings, still more Evil Dead, a Game of Thrones movie, a Weapons spinoff, Mortal Kombat II, and Practical Magic 2.

Second runner-up: “I didn’t write this.”
—Robert De Niro, heroically calling out the inane banter scripted for him and Ben Stiller onstage during Universal’s Fockers-in-Law segment

Speaking of CinemaCon…: Paramount’s presentation touted Top Gun 3 as “in the works.” But while the script by Ehren Kruger is said to be close to being turned in, producers are prepping for the likelihood that Top Gun: Maverick director Joe Kosinski will not return. Kosinski has said his next movie after his U.F.O. thriller for Apple will be Universal’s Miami Vice, the timing of which is dependent in part on when star Michael B. Jordan turns in the Thomas Crown Affair remake he is directing for Amazon. Cruise has not said what he’s doing now that he’s wrapped Alejandro G. Inarritu’s Digger, but Paramount would love Top Gun 3 to be next. So the studio and producer Jerry Bruckheimer have begun approaching talent agencies for directors, should Kosinski bow out as anticipated. Pitch away!

1 billion
Viewing hours for KPop Demon Hunters on Netflix, yet another milestone for the most successful film in the platform’s history. [Ampere]

$5 million
Sales of Justin Bieber merch (via his brand Skylrk) over weekend one of Coachella, crushing the festival’s previous two-weekend record. [Puck]

36 minutes
Average amount of film content between ad breaks on streaming services, far more than the 14 minutes of screentime between ads for TV series. On average, films feature 40 percent fewer ads per hour than TV series. [Ampere]

$1,643
Royalties received by NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani from his since-abandoned rap music career as “Mr. Cardamom,” per his 2025 tax return [NY1]

Now here’s Julia on the biggest rivalry in reality TV…

Have you been following the Summer House scandal? Bravo’s popular reality series about young New Yorkers sharing a Hamptons party pad, now in its 10th season, has been attracting record viewership amid the love triangle drama involving its three biggest stars (Google it if you dare). And Bravo has been fully leaning into all the offscreen mess: winking at the fallout on its social channels, interviewing castmembers on Andy Cohen’s Watch What Happens Live, and relentlessly teasing what is sure to be action-packed reunion episodes.

The Summer House press blitz and uptick in viewership over the past couple of weeks has also thrown into stark relief just how badly Peacock’s main U.S. rival Hulu (Netflix is far ahead of both, and HBO Max’s unscripted programming is more Dr. Pimple Popper than Summer House) has mismanaged its own reality TV ambitions. Last month, just before the Summer House kerfuffle began, a TMZ-worthy scandal of a much more depressing variety erupted around Taylor Frankie Paul, the breakout star of Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, when a recording leaked showing her hurling metal chairs at her ex, Dakota Mortensen, one of which appeared to hit her young daughter. Disney promptly canceled Taylor’s forthcoming season of The Bachelorette, which had already wrapped filming—and all this in Josh D’Amaro’s first week as C.E.O. of parent company Disney. (Hulu has yet to announce whether Mormon Wives will resume filming Season 5.)

Even though The Secret Lives of Mormon wives beats out Bravo shows on Nielsen’s top 10 chart (a benefit of dropping an entire season at once), not even a noteworthy scandal that dominated headlines and social media feeds could reignite interest in Hulu’s biggest reality TV show. As a result of the binge-style release, viewership for Season 4 peaked just one week after its March 12 premiere, according to Luminate, and then immediately cratered—cutting short what would have been a larger cultural moment. (Mormon Wives’s fourth season charted on Nielsen for the weeks ending March 15 and 22.)

But the differences between the two networks are obviously deeper than their respective scandals. Perhaps most obviously, Summer House airs on a traditional weekly schedule, which has allowed Bravo to convert every daily micro-development on Page Six into consistent ratings. Though the total number of minutes streamed doesn’t come close to Secret Lives, evidenced by its lack of appearance in Nielsen’s weekly rankings, the steadiness of its audience on top of the uptick driven by scandal creates momentum that Bravo can leverage into other series, like the recently released Real Housewives of Rhode Island, to further cultivate audience loyalty—all the more important when streaming subscribers are fickle and Peacock’s churn rate remains among the highest in the business.

Again, to be fair, the Secret Lives cultural conversation is one that Disney very much did not want viewers to have—hence the decision to cancel Bachelorette and suspend filming of Secret Lives. But the two divergent data sets also highlight how the weekly versus binge cadence factors into viewer behavior. On Hulu, in particular, unscripted viewers appear to be both highly valuable but also incredibly volatile: Nearly 95 percent of subscribers who sign up for Hulu to watch Secret Lives are still paying a month after the show’s premiere, according to Antenna, about five percentage points higher than the average Hulu sign-up. But following that 30-day period, the retention rate for Secret Lives viewers dropped four percentage points below the benchmark.

In other words, Secret Lives is one of Hulu’s most powerful shows—there’s just not enough of it. And since Secret Lives appears online all at once, those benefits are frustratingly fleeting. If Hulu’s head of unscripted programming, Jilly Pearce, takes any lesson away from Bravo’s nearly two-decade run of success in reality TV, it’s that a hit show isn’t enough; it has to become a world.

Since 2024, viewership for nearly every returning Bravo series is up season over season on Peacock, averaging more than 40 percent growth, per the network. Last quarter was also Bravo’s biggest ever on Peacock, the company added. And importantly, these series are relatively cheap to produce. It’s no wonder that Bravo was the only linear TV network that wasn’t spun off with Mark Lazarus in the NBCU/Versant divorce.

Critical to the network’s success has been the efforts of Cohen, the longtime mastermind behind the Housewives series, who’s created dozens of spinoffs to extend the Bravo universe. There’s Next Gen NYC, built around the children of Real Housewives stars and other influencer-ish young adults of a certain ilk, which notched about 5.5 million viewers in its first 35 days and became the network’s most-engaged-with title on TikTok (at least until the Summer House blowup). Lisa Vanderpump, an O.G. housewife, gave birth to multiple spinoffs via her own Vanderpump Rules, including The Valley and Vanderpump Villa on Hulu. More recently, Summer House’s Kyle Cooke and Lindsay Hubbard experimented with Winter House, a self-explanatory sister show, and the upcoming In the City, which will follow several of the cast’s daily lives in Manhattan. When Housewives star Heather Gay appeared in a crossover episode on Below Deck, the show garnered its best ratings in nearly three years.

Hulu’s two top unscripted titles—The Kardashians and Secret Lives—actually outperform Bravo’s shows on an individual basis. But without either the plan or the ability to translate one-off successes into overlapping universes, they haven’t been able to scale. There’s also no Andy Cohen, no spinoff engine, and no ecosystem flywheel. Four seasons in, for example, Hulu is just now reportedly getting around to plans for a Secret Lives spinoff focusing on Jennifer Affleck (no relation to Ben, alas), who has relocated to Los Angeles, per People. As of right now, Affleck will reportedly be the only main castmember featured in the spinoff, but some of her castmates have used the show’s success to pursue other opportunities. Whitney Leavitt, for example, moved to New York and starred in Chicago.

One potential issue facing any Secret Lives spinoff, ironically enough, is too much of the original cast in too short of a time, Luminate analyst Tyler Aquilina told me. Risk of overexposure, in other words. But whether or not Affleck has enough star power to entice the fan base is a big question.

The broader trends in the reality space aren’t helping, either. Reality TV premieres in the U.S. are down about 33 percent since 2022, per The New York Times. Reality TV’s share of streaming time has also slipped over the past three years, from just over 3.5 percent of minutes viewed to around 3 percent as of April, according to Luminate. There are still breakout hits—Love Island drove one of Peacock’s largest Gen Z audiences ever, according to NBCU sources, and Alan Cumming’s The Traitors is a bona fide breakout hit and the reigning Emmy winner. Love Is Blind has become a Netflix staple and spawned regional spinoffs around the world. But these are exceptions in an increasingly spare and risk-averse landscape.

In this environment, off-platform notoriety of the Summer House or Scandoval variety only matters if it reinforces existing on-platform momentum. As top NBCU unscripted exec Frances Berwick recently put it, the real power comes from “fans evangelizing for you.” Bravo understands this, treating social media as an extension of the show itself—“an additional castmember,” in Berwick’s words. That explains why Bravo reportedly booted The Valley’s Jax Taylor ahead of the third season: Fans soured on him following allegations that he had domestically abused his ex-wife and former fellow Vanderpump-er Brittany Cartwright. Despite losing its star, The Valley endured, and its ratings are even up slightly season over season.

The big question for Hulu is whether its franchises can survive similar shocks. If Secret Lives loses key talent, will the audience disappear along with them? Churn, after all, is as much of a branding problem as a content liability. Bravo’s solution has been to deepen the parasocial loop. Shows feed podcasts, podcasts feed social media, controversial storylines on social media feed live programming like Watch What Happens Live—keeping the Bravoverse top of mind for fans and intriguing those on the edge.

Bravo and Peacock’s strategy is relatively straightforward, but it’s been effective at turning attention into obsession as storylines cross back and forth between TV screens and social feeds. The more castmembers Bravo has across a variety of popular franchises with interweaving series, the more opportunity there is for onscreen narratives to continue playing out in the castmembers’ “real” lives. If drama becomes inescapable, those obsessive tendencies translate into subscriber loyalty and viewership week in, week out.

The read of the year so far: Showrunner Noah Hawley went to Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat and learned that “everything is free and nothing matters.” [Atlantic]

Speaking of executive retreats…: Jeffrey Katzenberg’s annual Montecito sojourn is set for the first week of May. Bob Iger will be there, though I’m told Jeffrey is still lining up speakers.

Lucas Shaw has a detailed explainer on what Bill Ackman (and Michael Ovitz!) really want with Universal Music. [Bloomberg]

You knew Jim Dolan was surveilling Madison Square Garden visitors via facial recognition. You didn’t know how incredibly elaborate and petty the whole operation is. [Wired]

The A24 merch machine is turning every movie into a lifestyle brand. [Highsnobiety]

Alex Cooper’s husband is a screamer, and maybe putting him in charge of her podcast empire was a bad idea. [Bloomberg]

This year’s Time 100 reads even sillier than usual: no actual movie stars who matter, Ben Stiller and Zoe Saldaña deemed “Titans,” and Nikki Glaser an “Innovator,” but congrats to publicists for David Ellison, Josh D’Amaro, and Neal Mohan, the only content execs on the list. [Time]

The A.I. Val Kilmer movie trailer is bad, but not because of A.I. Val Kilmer. [YouTube]

TV execs like NBCU’s Mark Marshall are finally pushing back on Nielsen’s Gauge reports, which have definitely fueled the narrative that streaming is dominating linear. [WSJ]

You can have lunch with Luann de Lesseps or other Bravo-lebrities for about $5,000. [The Cut]

My Thursday report on the infighting among movie theater executives over the WarnerMount deal prompted one of them to leave me a thoughtful voicemail, which I’ve transcribed and edited here…

“It might be hard for you to understand what we have gone through over the past six years. We’ve furloughed and fired countless people. We’ve declared bankruptcy. We’ve watched as the studios turned their backs on us and destroyed their theatrical windows in the name of streaming, all because the stock market told them they should be Netflix. I come here [to CinemaCon] every year and hear about how the light at the end of the tunnel is coming, we just need to wait for the studios to deliver. It’s every damned year, and this year it seems like it might finally be true. People are excited for once in a long time, even though we know the combination of Warner Bros. and Paramount will cut that celebration short. We know it. David Ellison said we have his word that he will release 30 movies a year. But for how long? Consolidation never results in more, only more “efficiencies.” Trust me, we have seen it in exhibition over the past 30 years. That’s why we are mad Adam [Aron, C.E.O. of AMC Theatres) turned his back on us to support this consolidation. He’s defying the other leaders in our industry and common sense. What’s his angle? Is there some side deal, either explicit or implicit, with David Ellison? What is he getting out of this that is worth throwing all of us under the bus?” —A theater executive

Have a great week,
Matt

Maya Tribbitt contributed research for this issue.

Got a question, comment, complaint, or smoothie suggestions for the Erewhon at LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

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