← The Town with Matthew Belloni
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If you care about Hollywood, and I assume you do, if you're listening to the Town, you should really be getting the whole story about Hollywood. That's what you get with Puck. I'm a founding partner Puck and I write a newsletter called what I'm Hearing. It's got exclusive news for insiders and analysis of the biggest stories. Puck has a bunch of great journalists. We just hired Kim Masters who also covers Hollywood from the inside, plus media, sports, fashion, politics and finance. It's a must have for plugged in people. Fans of the Town get a discount on the description page of this episode or at Puck News thetown. Go further into Hollywood by becoming a Puck member.
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Today, Adolescence has been nominated for 13 Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Limited Series, Outstanding Lead Actor Stephen Graham.
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What have you done?
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Outstanding Supporting Actor Owen Cooper.
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I haven't done anything.
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And Outstanding Supporting Actress Erin Doherty.
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You need to sit down J. You don't tell me when to sit down.
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Forbes raves Adolescence is an all time technical masterpiece. Deadline declares it a world changing phenomenon. For your Emmy consideration, Outstanding Limited Series Adolescence Only on Netflix.
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This episode is brought to you by Lucasfilm. Presenting Andor Season 2 Andor has earned 14 Emmy nominations including writing, directing and outstanding Drama series. Vanity Fair raves that Andor is profoundly resonant. It's the best television of the year. All episodes of Andor are now streaming on Disney. It is Monday, August 18th. The history of the entertainment business has been technological disruption and change and reinvention. I remember back when I was at the Hollywood Reporter I used to look at the archives over 100 years and it was pretty remarkable to see how much the industry wide freakouts over color television or the VCR or TiVo. They mirrored the modern debates about YouTube and Netflix and the streaming video industry. The difference of course is that Hollywood was always able to adapt and merge and eventually subsume all the other technologies and maintain its grip on the worldwide content distribution industry. Now, though, with the Internet having disrupted that oligarchy of distribution, the past 15 years have been a slow march of disruptors refusing to be subsumed and in fact becoming the subsumers of a new version of Hollywood. One in which Internet enabled distribution has disrupted pretty much everything. But it didn't happen all at once. And there's been a bunch of incremental moves since 2010 that we can now look back on as key moments in this painful transition that is today's show. Lukas Shaw from Bloomberg is here. We're going to rank the 10 worst things to happen to Hollywood in The streaming era from the ringer and puck. I'm Matt Bellany and this is the town. All right. We are here with Lukas Shaw from Bloomberg once again. Welcome back, Lucas.
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C
The Dodgers are back.
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A
They are back. They are back. I was in distress last week and then they sweep the Padres and they're back.
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C
If the government was listening to my or looking at my chats, they would have been concerned about my mental health around Wednesday or Thursday of last week.
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A
Nice. They are. But now we're both in a great mood. It's Monday morning, and it's a perfect time to talk about the biggest disasters of the past 15 years in Hollywood.
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C
In honor of the Sydney Sweeney movie bombing.
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A
Yes, the Sydney Sweeney movie Americana did not do well this weekend despite her ubiquity for the past month. So sad for her. But that is not one of the most meaningful fails of the past 15 years. I want to define our terms here before we get into this, because this is not just disasters. This is not flops. This is not shows that bombed, celebrities who flamed out. This is not that. We are looking for the 10 most meaningful disasters of the past 15 years. We pick 15 because that's basically the streaming era. That's the 15 years in which Hollywood went from the apex of influence and financial power to where it is today.
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C
Yeah. The way it was framed was initially was worse things to happen to Hollywood in the last 15 years. So I will give my bias, which is that I think that most of the problems that we're talking about today trace back the decisions in, like, the first half of that period. I don't think anything that happened in the last five, seven years mattered that much.
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A
Oh, interesting. I have a couple. But yes. And we could all. I mean, everything goes back to the Internet. We could say, like, oh, the Internet ruined Hollywood.
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C
No. But there were some strategic mistakes that companies made.
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A
Yes, exactly. And that's. We are going to get into that and drill down on particular moments that have had meaningful and negative impacts on the entertainment industry. So should I let you go first or would you like me to go first?
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C
Whatever you want.
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A
You go first. I feel like you have. You have a thoughtful approach here.
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C
So my number one is the Breaking Bad phenomenon on Netflix.
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A
Oh, interesting. All right, explain why that was. That was bad for Hollywood.
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C
The deal for that happened, like, just outside of our limits. It was like 0809 or something. But Breaking Bad popped off in 11 and 12. And it was this show that had been a critical darling but not a commercial success for amc. It was Almost canceled. And then it just starts to take off on Netflix and it becomes not just the show that wins all the awards, but one of the most watched shows on television, at least on cable for a couple of years there. And the success of that show, I think helped convince a lot of other studios and networks to keep licensing, and not only keep licensing, but license more to Netflix in pursuit of that type of hit. Because Netflix was seen as the primary reason that Breaking Bad took off. And so all these other places are like, well, there are different audiences because Netflix did drive viewers back to Breaking Bad on nc.
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It became a hit on Linear after.
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C
The Netflix, let's just copy that strategy. And the result of that, in fact, was Netflix just got all the popular shows, including contemporary popular shows, from everyone else and started to pull people away from the television business. And while that was great for Netflix, obviously, I think it was bad news for basically every other traditional company. Instead of investing in their own streaming services, instead of paying attention to what was happening, they just took the short term cash and they chased this sort of phantom of the Breaking Bad phenomenon or the Netflix effect.
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A
I agree with you. I had a slightly different approach here. My number three was Disney licensing Marvel movies to Netflix in 2013 or just.
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C
Their original movies in general that the pay one deal that they did.
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A
Exactly. And to me, that was just not only a tipping point, but a sign of the lack of vision about the future. And it took these companies five years to realize that the quick hits of licensing revenue were, were actually killing their businesses. And by the time they switched over in 2018, 2019, and said, oh yeah, let's not do that anymore, let's start our own services, it was too late.
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C
So I'm more okay with the Movie one. Not that I say it was the best decision, but these studios had been licensing their movies to sort of premium networks like HBO and Showtime and Starz forever. Right. Like there was actually, you know, Disney's movies had been on Starz before then, and it didn't hurt them as much. I don't think movies move the needle as much as like just all of the new television shows being on Netflix.
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A
But they were going to start competing with them for big movies. They didn't see that if you build a scaled streaming business, you can start to make $200 million movies that Disney once thought they were the only ones.
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C
That could make those 100%. I just don't think movies matter as much as television. Television is way more of the viewership and drove way more of the economic for these companies, for the most part.
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A
Pay tv, they're pretty important, having original movies on there. And I remember back then that it was huge that you could go to Netflix and see the Disney movies.
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C
Yeah, it was a very big moment. And when Bob Iger wanted to say, fuck Netflix, we're done with this. We're going for it. If you remember, he announced like, we are taking our movies off of Netflix. That was like at the earnings hall, he's like, we're taking our movies and we're starting Disney. I also think movies just matter more to Disney than any other company.
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All right, so my number one and I. This one is a date that people would recognize as being a disaster, but I think it's actually been under discussed as how big of a disaster. And it's gotta be ATT buying Time Warner in 2018. This was my number four, okay, $85 billion deal. It was very clear. I'm sure you got the same impression the first time you talked to John Stanke, the CEO of AT&T or now CEO. We all knew this wouldn't work. This idea of melding a telecom with premium content, disaster from the start. And not only was it a bad transaction for this company, I think the larger ecosystem of entertainment really suffered from this. Because imagine if HBO had just focused on being HBO and growing that digital business and transitioning over from the pay TV model to. To a digital model than licensing out its digital app or its digital content everywhere. Instead, 10 years later, they're subsidizing David Zaslav's renovation of Bob Evans house. They've been saddled with debt. They've got this ridiculous Scripps Discovery company attached to it. AT&T recognized it was a bad deal. They merged it with Discovery, tried to turn it into Netflix, didn't work. And they are back now to trying to grow HBO as its own digital service. Imagine if they had not wasted 10 years on that.
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C
Two thoughts. One, can I offer a counter moment? Because I did think about this. It's related. But instead of the Time Warner sale to att, it is Time Warner turning down Fox's bid.
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A
Oh, interesting.
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C
Because that was sort of what put Time Warner in play. Had Time Warner instead done the Fox deal, I would imagine that that Rupert Murdoch and the team he had around him at Fox would have done a much better job with integrating that company. And it would have created this, like, much larger media business that could have been a real competitor to Netflix and to some of these other streaming services. Because I think now it is clear I don't think the problem was trying to expand HBO per se, or making it a little more of a competitor to Netflix. The problem was the way that they went about it and the lack of consideration for brand.
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A
Hmm, yeah. Well, you think that in 2019 that starting from where they were, they could have created a Netflix competitor for real?
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C
Well, part of the problem with that was that they got waylaid by the doj.
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True. But that was a year long delay.
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C
Two years pretty much.
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Okay.
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A year of closing, a year of that, I think, look, Fox made the bid in 2014. I think that obviously would have been subject to regulatory scrutiny and all that stuff. But if they had gotten that through, let's say in 2016 and really went after it, I think that was not too late.
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And you think that Rupert Murdoch would have done a better job than John Stankey?
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C
That feels safe to say.
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I think that's safe to say as well. Time Warner had been paring itself down for a sale for seven years before this. So it was not a shock that they were in play after the Rupert offer. I just think that the deal they did was great for Time Warner shareholders. They got paid on an $85 billion transaction. Congrats to Jeff Bukeus for that. But the impact of that we are still feeling. And HBO is probably going to have a new owner in a year or two and we'll go through this all over again.
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C
Yeah, a cursed company. It is sad, especially when you think back on the AOL Time Warner. Right. If we were to, instead of doing the last 15 years we did the last 25, we'd probably put AOL Time Warner somewhere on the list.
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Sure. I know they're the magnet for horrible corporate deals. It's kind of amazing that they produce the shows that they still do, given all the chaos there. All right, let's go to number two.
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C
My number two is also a deal, much smaller deal, but I think a symbolic deal, which is Disney's acquisition of Maker Studios.
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Oh, okay. I didn't have that. So go ahead.
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If you go back in time, kind of 10 to 15 years, you had a lot of the traditional media companies saying, hey, YouTube's a big deal. We should figure out how to handle, do something with YouTube. And they started investing in these businesses that were called multi channel networks. Maker ended up being the largest. This was the biggest deal. And these companies basically rolled together a bunch of YouTube channels and helped them with maximizing their audience, sometimes helped them with selling ads. All sorts of little sort of like, like.
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But they didn't own them.
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C
They, they, yes, import, they enhanced them, but importantly, they did not own them and they did not own the ip. And so the soaring valuations for these businesses reflected just really bad thinking and strategy by venture capitalists and media companies that both invested and then many of them bought them. Right? Warner Brothers had Machinima, at least that had a brand new AT&T. Time Warner kind of bought one.
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Paramount bought the Brian Robbins one. Awesomeness.
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C
Paramount bought Awesomeness as part of Comcast NBCU's deal for DreamWorks Animation, which had owned it. But the Disney maker deal was the biggest of them all. It was initially advertised as a $900 million deal because it was such a disaster and this was contingent on performance. I think it ended up being between 500 and 600 million. But this was supposed to be the moment where all these media companies were going all in on YouTube and, and they just made the worst possible decisions. Instead of investing in IP ownership, instead of investing in brands, they went after these networks that didn't have anything. And not only was that a problem because they wasted a bunch of money and they, you know, they didn't really develop a strategy, but because those didn't work, they chose to go back to basically ignoring YouTube for the next five years other than using it for promotion. And what they should have been doing was using YouTube as an incubator, using it to develop new properties or go out and buy some popular channels on there that you think you can develop into something. And instead now they're looking and they, they're all sort of afterthoughts on the most important video platform in the world.
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A
Okay, I like that. I have a related number two and mine is the failure of Quibi, the Jeffrey Katzenberg website app that burned through $1.4 billion in short form. Professionally produced studio quality content shut down in 2020. And I think not only was this a laughing stock and everybody made fun of Quibi and it's now a joke around town, but I think it spooked people. I think it spooked the industry from trying this kind of short form app based, made for mobile youth, skewing content companies to the point where five years later, now there's a new startup, this Lloyd Braun thing that doesn't have a name. And talking to people last week people were like, oh, good luck, you know, seems cute, they're doing micro dramas. But like this should have been a thing a long time ago. It's just people were scared because they didn't want to go down the Road of Quibi.
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C
I'm going to zag a little bit here. I think the failure of Quibi was a good thing.
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A
Oh, you do?
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C
Apologies to your friend Jeffrey Katzenberg. My best friend Quibi, from the inception was a bad idea. It was a misguided strategy by people who didn't understand. And look, Jeffrey Katzenberg's smarter than me. He has had way more business success and he had, he even was. He bought awesomeness, which was not a bad deal of all the YouTube MCN deals. But this notion that YouTube is poor quality and people wanted to come for short form video on Hollywood style budgets was wrong. The great innovation of YouTube is not short form video. The great innovation of YouTube is user generated programming. And people gravitated towards that and the platform, which is why now the biggest YouTube stars are actually making TV length videos.
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A
Often they are, but they're not making it those at those prices. The problem with Quibi was the price of the content. They were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per show.
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C
It was trying to compete with YouTube and every company that has tried to compete with YouTube, slash Google has totally failed. And so I think it was good for Hollywood to, to get a little bit of a reality check about what was happening in the media business and recognizing that they weren't going to compete head to head with YouTube, that they had to lean into YouTube a little bit more or figure out a way to coexist with it. But that trying to create like some Hollywood version of YouTube was a fantasy.
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A
You don't think this Lloyd Braun thing is going to work?
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C
These are the micro dramas that are really popular in China that costs like.
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Peanuts to make and some people would.
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C
Say are kind of softcore porn for women. If you look at the titles of some of the popular ones, I'm just.
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Like, I left my husband for my gardener.
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C
I think Jeffrey got right was that Hollywood companies needed to engage in mobile first short term programming. What he got wrong was that they should build a platform. What they should have been doing was making shows for YouTube or making shows in short form fun for their own platforms, however they want to go about it. And so I think if this Lloyd Brod thing is trying to produce shows for platforms that already exist, it could work if they're trying to compete as a platform. I think given the respective background of the people involved, I would bet against it.
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A
Yeah, it seems like employment opportunities for former Hollywood people that want to reinvent themselves as a digital first company. And typically that has not worked. There's, you know, Susan rovener worked at NBC. Janet Winograde worked at Showtime. There's Chris McGurk who has a movie distribution company. These people are Hollywood people and it seems to me like what they're going to create is a Hollywood style app or production company that can make this kind of content and maybe make it better than the Chinese softcorn porn that's successful there. But will it be successful on at scale? I don't know. Or does it just become a production company for this kind of content to be on YouTube? That doesn't seem like their ambition here. They've got financial backers. It seems like they want to create a platform.
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C
Right, I agree.
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Good luck to them. Okay, let's go to number three. My three was the Netflix thing. So what's your three?
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C
John Carter from Mars.
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A
Good one. I forgot about that one.
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C
So I was trying to think about the movie business and like the moment and this was at the beginning of my career and you had in I think 2011 and then again in 2012, a parade of blockbusters that just completely failed. And John Carter was a big original swing from Disney. It was in a summer where I think that and the Lone Ranger both tanked. The head of the studio, Rich Ross, gets fired. And I just feel like Hollywood had been trending towards only going with sort of IP and bankable stuff for a while. But if I had to pick a moment where they just basically gave up on originality altogether, it was that moment especially because Disney was became sort of the emblem and the architect of this strategy of like a few movies only IP zero risk. And we're just going to like mine the archives. Basically.
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A
Yeah. Bob Iger is basically admitted. He's just like play the hits. Like what are we doing here, John Carter?
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C
They started to reboot their old animated movies as live action. Like why are we trying to do anything new?
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A
Yeah, and I think others followed. I mean we saw that there were some others that were big flops for Universal had 47 Ronin. I remember there was a Battleship that Universal tried to make off a board game. There were some very high profile flops that led to a retrenchment and back to the safe confines of IP that was proven and that they knew would be hits. And then now seems like we're pivoting a little bit to more filmmaker focused movie blockbusters. Hopefully that'll be a trend, but for the most part it's just play the hits. This episode is brought to you by FX's alien Earth from creator Noah Hawley and executive producer Ridley Scott comes the first television series inspired by the legendary Alien film franchise. A spaceship crash lands on Earth, bringing five unique and deadly species more terrifying than anyone could have ever imagined. And a technological advancement marks a new dawn in the race for immortality. FX is Alien Earth. All new Tuesdays on FX and Hulu. This episode is brought to you by Wayfair. Your home is more than a space. It's where you express yourself. Like, we've all got our movie night set up. I definitely do. I've got my chair, I've got my popcorn. I've got my nice drink area. Everything's set up perfectly. Whatever your vibe, Wayfair has every style for every home. They've got all your home essentials, storage solutions, decor and more all in one place. I recently got some great stuff from Wayfair. Ordered some nice outdoor furniture. We got a rug that looks nice with the fire pit. We've got some flower stuff goes all around the outdoor barbecue. Very cool. Lots of entertaining this summer. Wayfair big part of it. Get inspired with room ideas and easy to shop collections. All with everyday ways to save. Shop everything home@wayfair.com with free and easy delivery straight to your door. That's W A Y F a I r com wayfair every style, every home. My number four is the 2021 NFL deals with its broadcast partners.
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C
Ooh, why?
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A
Which represented massive gains. The deals run from 2023 to 2033, collectively worth 110 billion over 11 years. And it's a reflection, obviously, of the fact that sports content is the only thing that works in linear still. But I think these deals have been massively bad for Hollywood because they're so expensive. They are so expensive that these linear businesses really can't become profitable with these sports rights. And it's impossible to make the math work when you're trying to transition your business over to streaming. And the content itself is so expensive. Not to mention the fact that it doesn't leave very much money left over to do the actual Hollywood content that this industry runs on. So while the NFL is the juggernaut and the engine of viewership and value for these companies, I think ultimately for the greater Hollywood ecosystem, the rise of sports rights and the onerous nature of these deals has overall been pretty bad.
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C
This is not a circumstance, I guess you can say where, like is your contention that the network should have just said we don't want it, or that the league should have recognized that it was asking for so much that its partners were actually going to suffer Or.
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A
I think the latter. I mean, I don't have an answer here. Like, this is not a situation where I'm like, they should have done xyz. Everybody is acting in their self interest here. The leagues want more money. The networks need this content. Everyone's doing what they arguably should have been doing. But the outcome here has been pretty bad for the entertainment business because the albatross nature of these contracts because they put so much pressure on all the other things that go along with having a functioning TV or digital business.
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C
And you think that NFL deals are singularly bad relative to college football or NBA or just symbolic?
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A
I'm saying that this was the beginning. The 2021 deal with the NFL reset the market. And all the deals that have come after that have been outsized. I mean, we saw what the NBA got last year in their deals, which most people believe or just outrageously priced given the falling viewership. And we'll see. But how long can this go on? How long can the rights fees keep going up, up, up when the linear business is going down, down, down and the digital business has not proven itself to be sustainable? How long can that happen?
- [24:29]
C
Great question. Until the tech companies come in and take all the rights.
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A
Yeah, I mean, this was obviously, the 2021 deal was also the first time that the NFL did a digital exclusive with a partner. They did the Amazon Thursday Night Football deal. That opened the door to what we have now, where they're trying to carve out various packages for the different streamers to get in business with these players that they know are the future of television without totally abandoning their existing partners. So that's also another way that this was bad for Hollywood because it brought the tech companies into the NFL.
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C
Well, that was going to happen anyways.
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A
But yes, it was going to happen, but that was the, that was the turning point.
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C
Yeah.
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A
You don't have the answer here. You don't have.
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C
No, no. I honestly hadn't thought. I didn't really touch on sports. I didn't think about it that way. I'm not like it's a tricky one because on the one hand, I think the point you're making is a really interesting one, which is that if they hadn't spent so much on sports, the rest of their business might be a little bit healthier. On the other. Yeah, I just, I don't see how you, you avoid it when the NFL is so popular and the market is what the market is.
- [25:36]
A
Yeah. It would have taken the NFL recognizing where this is all going and saying.
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C
Okay, there's no way they're going to fucking do that.
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A
Never. NFL take less money. No. And the others, like, it's just not going to happen. They're going to get as much as they can. Right. When they can get it. And these rights deals don't come up very often. So, you know, this is how the commissioners stay in their jobs. So I'm again, I'm not suggesting some kind of solution. I'm just saying that the way the value proposition of sponsors sports has evolved, it has hurt the rest of the Hollywood ecosystem.
- [26:06]
C
Right. I guess I could have gone. If we wanted to keep it parochial, I could have gone with the Dodgers Time Warner cable deal as the beginning of the end of the regional sports network business.
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A
That's a good one. Yeah. And now they're gonna have to try to figure out how to get the Dodgers to unwind that deal and be part of some national MLB digital thing that they're not gonna wanna be a part of.
- [26:26]
C
Yeah.
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A
So, all right, what's your next one?
- [26:28]
C
Well, my fourth one was Time Warner deal, which we covered. And then after that, I've got a couple where I sort of, like, know the topic, but I don't have the right moment.
- [26:36]
A
Okay.
- [26:37]
C
One of which that I was fiddling around with was sort of the companies learning the wrong lesson for how to go about streaming. And so I was almost gonna say Disney's investor. The Disney investor roadshow, which ended up working out well for Disney, but then like, inspired every other company to copy Disney instead of doing their own thing.
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A
Which roadshow are you referring to?
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C
Before Disney introduced Disney, it did like, this whole investor. It had their presentation and the roadshow, and they got everyone so excited and Disney was benefiting. And so then everyone else just copied Disney with the same exact strategy instead of being an original thinker. The other thing I was thinking about was, was there a moment with tax incentives and production leaving? So if you look back at the moments that California passed incentives, should they have done more?
- [27:23]
A
Well, you could look at maybe Marvel leaving for Georgia. Yeah, that was a big moment. And now it's hilarious. The Journal had a good story this weekend about how Marvel has left Georgia for the uk and what happened to LA via Georgia is now happening to Georgia via the uk. It's a downward spiral, but that's a good one.
- [27:43]
C
Yeah. Those are the two that I'd add in.
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A
I think those are decent. My number five. And you may groan because it seems so obvious, but I actually think there are many repercussions from this with the.
- [27:56]
C
Strike or the pandemic?
- [27:57]
A
The pandemic.
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C
I thought about it, but I felt like we had to just caveat. Like, obviously the pandemic was a shit show.
- [28:03]
A
And I know, but you know what? At the time, people were like, yeah, the movie business is screwed. But the streaming business went crazy, and it, you know, it fundamentally changed moviegoer habits. That's pretty clear at this point. It accelerated trends that were already there, but it supercharged them. And the movie business is still struggling to get those people back. And it created a false bubble in streaming, where the number of shows and the number of movies direct to streaming went through the roof. Everybody had jobs. It was a great time, but it was a false bubble. It was the peak TV that John Landgraf has been talking about for 10 years actually happened. And that led to the 2022 market correction, the Netflix crash, and everybody realizing that they needed to get profitable. And we are still living through that today.
- [28:58]
C
Yeah, I mean, this is not just a Hollywood story, but a business story and a societal story where a lot of industries hired more people during the pandemic or sort of inflated themselves in one way or another, at least in media, and then had to digest that. Right. Where we've had the video game business has been in a funk. The music business isn't in a funk, but they've been doing restructuring and firing people, and the podcasting had retrenchment, all of these businesses. And Hollywood has taken it on the chin the most because it had, like, already been in this boom, boom inflationary period, and then it added another 30% onto that. And if you hadn't had that, I don't know that people would be feeling so much despair about the state of the entertainment business right now because there wouldn't have been the same degree of pullback.
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A
Yeah. All right, so we agree. And you're not going to go there on the strikes.
- [29:48]
C
I thought about it.
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A
The strikes are very sad. Yeah. I mean, we. I don't want to place blame on anyone for who's responsible for the strike, but clearly the 2023 strike was pretty devastating. And we don't know how much it accelerated stuff that was already happening or if it created an incentive for these studios to just get out of certain businesses and make less, but, yeah, that. That, I think ultimately was not a net positive for the industry.
- [30:16]
C
Yeah, definitely a contender.
- [30:18]
D
I'm surprised the pandemic wasn't higher on this list. If you guys could go back and basically prevent one of these 10 things you listed from happening, would the pandemic not be number one.
- [30:28]
A
Sure.
- [30:28]
C
But in terms. Just in terms of the entertainment business.
- [30:32]
D
Yes.
- [30:33]
C
No, it wouldn't be number one for me.
- [30:34]
A
Yeah. The pandemic didn't create the Internet and how everybody responded to the Internet.
- [30:38]
C
It poured fuel on the fire, accelerated things. But the things that the pandemic led to happen were sort of already in process. So I think the biggest problems, just as an industry mostly happened between, like, 2010 and 2015. 16 range.
- [30:55]
A
Yes. The Albanian army period of Hollywood.
- [30:59]
D
What are people going to be mad that you didn't say.
- [31:02]
A
I think people might say that we should have mentioned the rise and sustained power of Marvel as the biggest franchise force in Hollywood as being bad for the overall business.
- [31:16]
C
I sort of got at that with the John Carter thing, though. I mean, we didn't address it directly. There could also be people who feel like. I'm sure that there will be some people who feel like we should have gone in more on. On Netflix for something, but I don't.
- [31:29]
A
Know, you know, maybe Hulu, maybe the failure of the studios to work together on Hulu and, you know, create a real competitor to Netflix, because they had it. They had it sitting right there. Hulu launched even before streaming on Netflix. And coming out of the strike in 2008, like, they could have just supercharged Hulu and created the Hollywood version and owned everything, and they didn't. Craig, do you have one? Do you have one from your perspective?
- [31:57]
D
Other than Happy Gilmore 2? I don't think so.
- [32:01]
A
The biggest fail. Oh, God. All right, Lucas, thank you very much.
- [32:06]
C
Thanks, Matt.
- [32:09]
A
All right, we are back with the call sheet. Craig, I made Lucas stay to discuss this very important topic because he is much more credible in the music industry than I am. Uh, we are talking about Taylor Swift and where she may or may not perform in the next six months. And there is rampant Internet speculation that she is both performing a residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas, which would be pretty amazing. I was there this past weekend and also performing at the Super Bowl. So let's go one by one. And I want to. I want to add in my 2 cents here because I was at the Sphere this weekend for the Backstreet Boys.
- [32:46]
C
Long story.
- [32:47]
A
Wife's plans.
- [32:48]
C
You loved it.
- [32:49]
A
I did enjoy it. I did enjoy it. I'm not going to trash them.
- [32:52]
D
Yeah, don't make excuses. You had a great time. Backstreet season.
- [32:55]
C
You'll go back for the NSync in five years.
- [32:58]
A
Exactly. They floated on a spaceship. Like, what more could you ask? So I was There and the buzz there. And I talked to one person in particular who was pretty confident that this was happening. And it was a person who was in the know and would have reason to know. Just to be clear, these fear people have given me a statement saying this is not happening. And there have been no talks. Maybe it will in the future. But they wanted to be clear that it is not happening. I kind of feel like it is going to happen.
- [33:27]
D
Well, it's. It's certainly the final frontier for her. Right. It's something she hasn't done yet. Same with the super bowl, which you would think, you know, these things are. Feel smaller than Taylor Swift, but at this point, there's nothing else she can do that she can conquer. Her taking over the sphere in Vegas for her new album, Life of a Showgirl. All that makes perfect sense to me. It's a much. It's easier for her. She can do the sphere for a month. She doesn't have to travel anywhere.
- [33:49]
A
Yeah. She can fly back to LA every night like Adele did. It would make sense. It is a smaller venue. 18,000 is not a stadium.
- [33:57]
D
It allows her to play with visuals in a way that she's never been able to do before, which is a big part of her. Of her brand and her art.
- [34:03]
A
Totally get it. It does feel like the ticket situation would quickly grow, go out of control.
- [34:09]
D
It'd be a disaster. Oh, my God.
- [34:10]
A
People would be spending thousands and thousands of dollars. And those headlines would not necessarily be positive for her. Lucas, do you think this will happen?
- [34:18]
C
I'll preface it by saying I haven't done any reporting on it, but I think the super bowl is more likely than the sphere in the short term. She's dating a football player. She's making a big fuss about how. How into football she is now.
- [34:32]
A
Yeah. She pays attention to the draft now, apparently.
- [34:34]
D
Lucas, can you please drop The San Francisco 60th Super Bowl Easter egg that you heard on her podcast?
- [34:41]
C
It was that she said that she is thinking about bread. She's gotten into sourdough and she's thinking about bread 60% of the time. And all of the crazy Swifties out there have noted two things. One, that the Niners mascot is Sourdough Sam.
- [34:55]
D
Sure.
- [34:56]
C
And two, that this is the 60th Super Bowl.
- [34:58]
D
Yep.
- [34:58]
A
And it's in San Francisco.
- [34:59]
C
Or it's in and it's in San Francisco. Sorry. So I just feel like if you're her and you're coming off the biggest tour ever, the only way to top that is do the super bowl, which is the biggest stage in the world. The sphere would make a little bit of sense, because, again, if you're coming off this big tour, like, it's hard to top it. So do you do something? You want to do something different, and so you could go to Vegas. You don't have to travel the world as much, all of those things. I just feel like the super bowl is a little more in line with where her life is at the moment than the sphere.
- [35:29]
D
Do you think she'll pick one or the others, or is there a chance she'll do both?
- [35:32]
C
She could do both. She could do the super bowl and use that to announce she's doing the sphere.
- [35:38]
A
Exactly.
- [35:39]
C
But the tricky part, I'd be curious, because the sphere will bring people back. Taylor Swift could sell out the sphere for, like, five years. So how long would the run be? How's that going to work? How do you make sure that people feel like they can get tickets, that they're not, like, murdering each other to get the ticket?
- [35:53]
A
I know that's that. And if I'm her, that's the biggest reason to not do the sphere is because the accessibility will be ridiculous. It will be only the wealthiest fans and people that are in her fan club, and maybe she gives access to them. You know, the floor is for the fans, and then the rest of the tickets go elsewhere. And it doesn't matter what kind of dynamic pricing she does. The scalpers are going to make most of the money on this.
- [36:17]
D
The super bowl element makes sense because of Travis, this being his last year. If the Chiefs are going to be.
- [36:21]
A
But what if he's not there?
- [36:22]
D
They will be.
- [36:24]
A
No, they. Oh, really? You're prepared to make that prediction?
- [36:26]
D
I mean, me saying the Chiefs are going to make the super bowl is not the craziest prediction.
- [36:29]
A
And it's like, that's a lot to bet on. You got to decide these things early on. And if they have a crushing loss in the ASC championship, what does she cancel?
- [36:40]
D
So, Matt, are you predicting sphere and super bowl or just one of the two?
- [36:43]
A
I'm predicting both. Okay. And maybe I'll be right on one of them.
- [36:47]
C
I think they could both happen and one would feed into the other. But if I had to pick one, I feel like the odds of the super bowl are a little greater than the odds of this sphere.
- [36:55]
A
Yeah, I would agree with you on that. Just because of the downsides. I said, craig, what are the odds that Taylor will do a fantasy team this year?
- [37:03]
C
Wow.
- [37:04]
D
Honestly, with how much she's into football. She was excited about the Chiefs drafting Xavier Worthy. I feel like it's likely that she is in a new heights fantasy league with, like, Theo Vaughn and the guys from Busin with the boys.
- [37:18]
C
But she's not listening to your show to prepare for her draft.
- [37:21]
A
No, forget listening. I want her to appear on the Ringer fantasy football show. What are the odds of that happening?
- [37:28]
D
We need to get Spotify to acquire new heights, and then we'll be.
- [37:32]
A
I think her podcast appearances will be limited to those that that directly impact her boyfriend. All right, We've already talked about this way too long. That's the show for today. I want to thank my guest, Lucas Shaw, producer Craig Horleback, our editor, Jesse Lopez. And I want to thank you. We'll see you a couple more times this week.