After plans for my evening were unexpectedly canceled on Saturday, I engaged in one of my favorite pastimes: lying on the couch and watching YouTube videos on my television screen.

As I was scrolling through my Recommended list, three things jumped out at me:

• Ina Garten was this weekend’s guest on The New York Times’ podcast The Interview.

• Mickey Rooney1 appeared on What’s My Line? on the very last day of 1961 in an episode of the game show I had somehow not yet seen.

• Every recommended video was over ten minutes long. Most were over twenty minutes long.

I grew up with the Internet, so I’m well aware that my list of recommended videos on YouTube is curated to my interests and my established viewing habits. These things were not surprises to me; I effectively curated this list myself, just through my passive collaboration with the almighty algorithm.

But there were a few things about these three observations that got me thinking about how they were all connected:

• The reason that Garten appeared on The Interview video podcast was to promote her new video podcast (and her new cookbook). And according to the Times, Vox scored producing rights after an intense bidding war for the chef’s new venture.

• In the rare wide shots of the illustrious What’s My Line? panel, I notice the words on the panel itself: “Allstate Insurance presents What’s My Line?”

• The videos were all ten minutes long because I primarily watch news, interviews, and video essays on YouTube. Within the last six months, I’ve dabbled in video podcasts, which combine all three of these categories I just mentioned. Good Hang with Amy Poehler and The Opinions from The New York Times are the ones I watch the most. (Jamelle Bouie hive, rise up.)

This isn’t a piece about YouTube, though maybe it should be. It’s about what all my pieces are about: disruption in the entertainment industry in the Internet age. My own appearance on my couch made me consider the similarities between where the podcast model is headed, with Garten as the latest contributor to the fastest-growing medium in the world, and how it’s probably headed in the same direction that television was headed in at the beginning of the 1960s, when Rooney made his appearance on What’s My Line?

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The Evolution of the Television Model During the Medium’s First Golden Age

When you think about the early days of television, you probably think about a cultural touchstone like I Love Lucy. It’s easy to look at the groundbreaking sitcom today and understand that it turned its stars, married couple Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, into major celebrities and American icons. But both of them were famous before they made their way to television—and I Love Lucy was a program before it made its way to television, too.2

In the late 1940s, when the Hollywood studio system was collapsing and independent production in motion pictures was booming, television sets were beginning to invade the living rooms of American homes. For the B-listers of the film colony, television was an opportunity to keep working in entertainment, even if the small screen was seen as less prestigious than its big screen counterpart.

It might seem backwards now, but it was radio broadcasters—The Big Three we know and love today, NBC, CBS, and eventually ABC—who were much better positioned to succeed in television than the film studios were, if only because of how television worked. Like radio, television was broadcast over radio airwaves, and in its earliest incarnation, it featured live broadcasts pretty exclusively. Television basically was radio, just with picture. (It developed the exact opposite way motion pictures did, which were first only seen, then heard.)

The Big Three participated in a bitter war for talent at the end of the 1940s, “raiding” each other’s rosters of radio actors and comedians and developing new radio shows for those stars that they stole from each other. Usually, stars’ contracts included a clause that said something to the effect of, “once we (the broadcaster) figure out how the hell television works, we’re moving your show to the small screen.”

This was the case for My Favorite Husband, Lucille Ball’s radio precursor to I Love Lucy. When My Favorite Husband became I Love Lucy, and Richard Dennings became Desi Arnaz, Ball and Arnaz formed their independent Desilu Productions to actually make the show. Networks needed more and more content each year, and doing business with indies like Desilu and Dick Powell’s Four Star was part of the game. And in just a few years, Desilu and Four Star began to produce full slates of shows beyond their flagship programs.

But there was a third party that was deeply involved with the making of these shows: the sponsors. We don’t have this in mainstream television anymore, but back in the day, Madison Avenue completely dominated the content shown on television (and broadcast over the radio before TV). This is why during the first Golden Age of Television, you had shows called Texaco Star Theater and GE Theater and The Alcoa Hour. “Sponsor forward” is how I would describe the power balance at the time.

If we were to map the television model onto the traditional, three-pronged film model: the indies were the producers; sponsors were the distributors; networks were the exhibitors. Indies could make package deals with networks, but shows would only get made if a sponsor committed their advertising budget to it. When Powell was president of Four Star in 1961, he summed up who controlled the purse strings and who kept the gates in television like this: “People still think this is an art…It’s not. It’s a business. We make shows for sponsors.”

At the beginning of the 1960s, though, that began to change. Networks realized that they could just start making shows themselves, cutting out the middleman (i.e., indies). It’s not all that different than when Netflix started making original content. The exhibitor becomes a producer. Tale as old as time.

In this new model, “Allstate Insurance presents What’s My Line?” also disappeared. What’s My Line? became a show with multiple ad breaks, which came with time slots for what we would call “commercials” that corporations could buy. This is how network television still works. If you’ve ever heard the term “the up fronts,” it refers to the once-yearly gathering of sponsors to learn about networks’ new shows to determine where they’ll purchase ad time. The goal is to advertise during the ad breaks of the show you think will get the most eyeballs. The first up fronts took place in 1962.

This evolution in the model consolidated power in television so that the networks had most of it, which lessened the prevalence of sponsor interference on programming.3 And it totally extinguished the power that independent producers of the 1950s had. There are still indies, but they are now at the whim of the networks.

Before we move on, it’s also worth mentioning that another byproduct of this shift was the mass development of pay-television, premium cable’s predecessor, which itself is streaming’s predecessor. If consumers paid for content, they wouldn’t have to deal with sponsors at all.

Eventually, it was this evolving model that allowed for the medium’s second Golden Age to arrive about fifty years after the first one—it’s what made television prestigious. Commercials, we all agreed, cheapened the programs. Commercial-free content turned television into art.

The Rapid Evolution of the Podcast Model

I actually remember the first podcast I listened to, and I imagine I’m not the only one. When Serial came out in 2014, it was a complete cultural phenomenon. “Appointment podcasting,” if there is such a thing in an age where everything is time-shifted. And completely antithetical to the philosophy of the podcast itself (as it was then), I listened to the whole thing in bed one weekend. Like it was a television show. Even though I couldn’t see it.4

Something you probably remember if you were listening to Serial during its original release was the closing advertisement from sponsor MailChimp. So omnipresent was Serial that the MailChimp ad became a meme—and totally transformed MailChimp’s fortunes as it became the email-marketing platform of choice.

A few years later, as a result of listening to My Favorite Murder, I purchased my first products from podcast advertising. I must confess to you, dear reader, that not only did I buy Glossier’s Boy Brow, but I also bought a Casper mattress.

My Favorite Murder, like many podcasts from those early days, was produced independently by its series’ creators. So was The Bill Simmons Podcast. So was The Joe Rogan Experience.

Following the Lucille Balls and Dick Powells of the past, Murder and Bill Simmons’ creators formed their own, independent podcast networks that produce a slate of shows in addition to their flagship show.5 For now, Rogan only produces himself. (Let’s hope, for the nation’s sake, it stays that way.)

All three have partnered with distributors and/or exhibitors in the past five years. Murder is aligned with Amazon’s Wondery; Bill Simmons and Joe Rogan are both aligned with Spotify, with Bill Simmons and other video podcasts in The Ringer Podcast Network with exclusive license to stream on Netflix.

Now that podcasts are essentially becoming television through the video podcast, this moment in the evolution of the podcast is particularly interesting! A few recent key statistics:

• A Pew Research report from 2023 found that 69% of top-rated podcasts are associated with a larger organization, suggesting that in order to actually crack the market and gain an audience, creators need the backing of a major news outlet or media company for distribution and financial support.

• According to a 2026 report from Podsqueeze, a whopping 73% of podcast listeners don’t mind listening to ads when they’re listening to podcasts, and 6 out of 10 listeners say they’ve purchased from podcast ads. (Guilty as charged.)

• Video podcasts present a challenge to advertisers. In 2024, YouTube overtook Spotify as the number-one platform where podcast listeners consume the content, but YouTube ads are 25% less effective at driving purchases than audio-only ads are.

If Lucille Ball or Dick Powell were alive today and they read up to this point, I imagine both of them might quote Euphoria’s iconic Maddy Perez:

I think where we are with podcasting is very similar to where we were when the Golden Age of Television ended—but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

The days of the independent podcast creator are dwindling. This shouldn’t be a huge surprise. Since Smartless premiered during the pandemic, it seems like more and more established voices are entering the podcasting space. Food Network icon Ina Garten entering the podcast space does feel like a turning point, though, since the established voices thus far tend to mirror the voices of the late 1940s film colony: television stars who lean toward comedy or nostalgia. See Jiminy Glick’s brutal roast of Sean Hayes for a more colorful summary:

In terms of sponsorship for podcasts, these deals, more and more, will be brokered by those established news organizations and media companies that have a portfolio of podcasts (or a “network”). And as laid out in his piece about the collapse in contemporary Hollywood, leveraging sponsors in a way more similar to how they used to be leveraged might be the answer to the elusive question: “How can this make money?” I don’t know if “Allstate Insurance presents The Joe Rogan Experience” is in our future, but I did watch a Fly On the Wall episode recently that had a “Five Hour Energy” logo in the corner the entire time.

Exhibitors—Spotify, YouTube, Netflix—have the most interesting task, here. There’s solid advice that they should invest in platform enhancements that would allow for transition between video and audio-only experiences. A taller order for YouTube and Netflix, not just because Spotify’s already done it, but because they’re primarily video platforms. Eyeballs have always been what they’re after; allowing for audio-only experiences may be antithetical to their core business, though I do know that if you have YouTube Premium, you can listen to YouTube videos while your device is locked.

Those are the things that I would be watching as 2026 turns into 2027. And I feel pretty good about my micro predictions. What I’m less certain about is if these transitions will beget the podcast’s Golden Age—or if they will end a Golden Age that we might already be in.

In terms of revenue generation for podcasts, the future may bring more prosperity. In terms of unknown creators’ abilities to hit it big on an RSS Feed, the future looks bleak.

As Amy Poehler, inaugural winner of the Golden Globe award for Best Podcast, said recently in one of her live shows:

If you follow any entertainment-related social media account, you’ve surely been reminded that this past weekend was “D23 — The Ultimate Disney Fan Event,” the biennial convention where fans of Disney properties gather to hear the latest from the House of Mouse. Upcoming movies, planned experiences, new Disney Legends, and more are revealed to Disney’s hopelessly devoted public under blue lights and showers of confetti in the Convention Center and Honda Center of Anaheim, California.

You might think from my illustration that I went to D23 this year, but you’d be mistaken. I’ve never been to D23, and I don’t plan to go anytime soon. Not because I wouldn’t enjoy it; I probably would. But I am a self-professed “adult who loves Disney,” something very different than a “Disney Adult” in my mind, and D23 is for Disney Adults.1

If you’ve read any of my pieces, you could guess that I don’t really like being a cog in the machine, which is what I would become if I ever attended this three-day extravaganza. What I do like being, perhaps more than anything, is a student of machines, a keen observer who takes machines apart just so she can understand how the things work. The Walt Disney Company, the most well-oiled machine in town, is the one I like tinkering with the most.

While this year’s D23 has come with its own exciting slate of announcements—I’ve been keeping an eye on the refurbishment plans for the Carousel of Progress like a teenage boy would follow the NFL Draft—the mere existence of the event got me thinking about how Disney gets away with such a garish display of their own bullshit year after year. (Compliment.)

The answer is remarkably simple: Disney has the most devoted fans of any media company in the country, probably the world. Understanding why that’s the case is a little less obvious, and it requires us to crack open the history books to understand how Disney built its Magic Kingdom of loyal subjects.

Merchandising the Mouse

There is a power in cartoons that most men who drew them in the early twentieth century didn’t fully understand, not because of the cartoons themselves, but because of the nascency of what we call “popular culture.”

It really wasn’t until the 1910s when American culture started to become more monolithic. And this was thanks to the Technological Revolution. Inventions like the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the radio ushered in the era of mass communication. If you want a refresher, hitchhike to EPCOT and get on Spaceship Earth.

Mass communication enabled the entertainer to become a celebrity. Don’t get me wrong. There were entertainers who were widely famous before this happened. (Actors like Sarah Bernhardt and Edwin Booth—brother of John Wilkes, unfortunately—come to mind.) But mass communication ensured that everyone you knew had seen or heard the thing that was being circulated. Live performance was ephemeral; recordings and photographs were forever.

This is how Old Hollywood ran on the star system. Actors could amass huge followings because they were seen by literally everyone. While it’s tempting to believe that fan culture has never been more rabid, full of plot theorists who bear resemblance to Charlie Day in my favorite meme of all time, that’s simply not true.

Back in the day, when celebrities were becoming an important part of the culture, there were publications called “fan magazines.” Modern Screen, Photoplay, Screenland. These were the places where Americans could read exclusive stories about their favorite stars. Jimmy Stewart went on a fishing trip. Greta Garbo tried on 12 dresses. Hedy Lamarr invented secret communications.

Buying a fan magazine and reading it was one thing, but fan magazines were not just for reading. They were for scrapbooking and hanging pictures of the Star of the Month all over your bedroom wall and circulating your star-related national newsletter from your regional fan headquarters. I know this because I’ve been lucky enough to see scrapbooks from this era, plastered with photographs of the same guy and stuffed with quarterly bulletins from newsletters like “The Dick Powell News.” (I couldn’t make this up if I tried.)

Stars of the Golden Age were larger than life. No one who wasn’t a political figure had ever been as famous as these people in the history of the world. But their fame wasn’t meant to last. They were all victims of the same disease: aging.

The problem with the star system of Old Hollywood was that the stars were always getting older. This could have serious effects on a studio’s bottom line if they didn’t plan accordingly. Take child star Mickey Rooney, for example. His teenage-focused Andy Hardy films were responsible for a third of MGM’s profits at the end of the 1930s. But after he turned 25, his star began to fade—and MGM stopped making Andy Hardy movies.

This is why the cartoon character is so powerful for a media company’s longevity. Cartoons never age. They are frozen in whatever time their artist creates for them.

Like I said, this wasn’t as obvious as it seems now. Cartoons weren’t the stars of feature-length films for the first fifty years of motion pictures; they were usually the stars of shorts that played before or in between the main attractions at the movie palace. Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs did a lot to change that, but even before Snow White, the Disney brothers made a critical decision that laid the foundation for D23.

As I’ve written about before, Walt was the brother who created and Roy was the brother who scrambled to find the money that allowed Walt to create. The first decade of what eventually became The Walt Disney Company was laden with financial scares. Walt always spent too much, usually in the name of quality.

Licensing Mickey Mouse began as a means to an end for the Disney brothers. Then, it became their core business. Unlike Mickey Rooney, Mickey Mouse could live in your bedroom if you really wanted him to.2 He could take the form of a doll or an embroidered napkin or a watch.

It’s hard to overstate how much of a phenomenon the Mickey Mouse watch was when it debuted in 1933. It kept Disney Studios afloat. We actually probably have the watch to thank for Snow White, and we’ve got a guy named Kay Kamen to thank for the watch.

Kamen was a mass marketing genius, maybe the first ever. No consumer product was too plain to slap a high-quality, Disney-approved Mickey Mouse on. It was because of Kamen’s efforts that Mickey Mouse became Mickey Mouse, a character so ubiquitous with American culture that it’s almost like he (the mouse himself) invented it. It wasn’t quite immersion in the sense we’d use that word today; it was more…omnipresence.

After Snow White premiered—which did for Dopey what the watch had done for Mickey—it was suddenly apparent to the Disney brothers that they were in a better position than any other studio in town to capitalize on their creations in perpetuity. Cartoons could never die; ergo, Disney would never die.

The Disney Adult

Immortality was a concept that Walt Disney was deeply enamored with, and cartoons were but one way he could guarantee the continued success of his entertainment company. Disneyland and its successors were deliberate attempts by Walt to leave a lasting physical legacy on this Earth. The audio-animatronic, invented by WED Enterprises to resurrect Abraham Lincoln, is probably the pinnacle of Walt’s obsession with eternal life. (I’m certain that this is why the conspiracy theory that Walt’s head is cryogenically frozen somewhere persists; the guy wanted to live forever.)

Long after Walt died—and was cremated, you freaks—and during the time when the studio wasn’t making pictures that were doing so well with the public, merchandising continued, and it became the most important cash cow for a reddening bottom line. When maximalist Michael Eisner took over in the 1980s, merchandising was the thread that strung everything together.

If you, like me, grew up in the 1990s, you can thank Disney’s long history of merchandising for many a memory at The Disney Store. These were the first stores of their kind, dedicated to the exclusive sale of merchandise from a single studio in Hollywood. It’s kind of weird to think about it that way since The Disney Store felt like a slice of Disneyland at your local mall. But that’s all The Disney Store was, a highly curated and overly sensory experience designed to get children to beg their parents to spend money on Mickey—who was over 60 years old when the first store opened—and all his pals. And it worked! Per Walt’s dream, it will certainly live in my heart forever.

The Disney Store, the creation of the Disney Vault (and really the mass circulation of VHS tapes), and the expansion of Disney theme parks under Eisner created fertile ground in which the seedlings of future Disney Adults were planted.

Then came Iger.

In a lot of ways, Bob Iger, former CEO of the Walt Disney Company and current owner of the Los Angeles Lakers, turned the entertainment division of the Walt Disney Company into a legitimate competitor with the other Big Five in Hollywood. Disney’s live action offerings were always second-class to their animated features, but Iger’s legacy, as I’ve mentioned several times before, is his deal-making ability. He famously acquired several companies during his twenty-year tenure as CEO. Two seem important to this conversation: Lucasfilm and Marvel Studios.

I don’t need to tell you what Disney did with Marvel or Star Wars. We’ve been living with the consequences of those deals for more than a decade, with Marvel having been acquired in 2009, Lucasfilm in 2012.

I’ve always thought that the primary reason that Iger acquired so many companies was because much of this century’s media game has been won by those who have exploitable intellectual property. And because of Disney’s stellar experiences division (i.e., theme parks), there’s really no better studio to exploit such assets to their fullest extents. Both properties take place in universes different enough from our own that to replicate them on Earth would require exceptional world-building skills. Disney has that in spades.

Upon further reflection for this piece, though, Disney’s additional secret sauce to successfully managing IP is the fans. Fans of the Disney brand have, for almost a century, been conditioned to accept Disney-owned IP as a part of the culture. Disney-owned IP is on your diapers as a baby, your lunchbox as a kid, your dorm room walls as a teenager. Disney is just a part of life, really, whether you’re a fan or not. With Marvel and Star Wars—and the rise of convention culture and cosplay, this century’s answers to the fan magazine—Disney fans don’t have to settle for having a character on their timepiece. They can actually be the character.

Cosplay is a critical component of a successful D23. (Here’s an Instagram post showing off fans in character from this year’s event.) Half the announcements are about new immersive lands in their theme parks across the world. I’m sure some people are interested in the animation or live action slates that get announced at this thing every year, but being Disney seems to be far more important than experiencing Disney. Watching Disney has long-been out of fashion.

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Tomorrow with D’Amaro

I wouldn’t necessarily say that Disney has been at a crossroads over the last several years. They’re still in the winners’ circle as far as major media companies go. But the perceived decline in quality of Marvel and Star Wars properties has raised some eyebrows in the last several years, and they, like every legacy studio, are constantly being questioned about the longterm viability of their streaming service.

D’Amaro seems to want Disney+ to become some kind of virtual hub full of Disney-made content and user-generated content, a sort of digital extension of D23. All of my concerns about the OpenAI deal aren’t really present in the latest TikTok deal, and any TikTok that winds up on the platform is going to go through so much vetting that I’m sure it will seem like it belongs.

I think I understand where D’Amaro’s head is at: Disney+ democratizes the fan experience, especially at a time when you have to pay an arm and a leg just to sniff the popcorn from the gates of Disneyland. It gives people more opportunities to engage with the brand while they maintain their grip on it, which is what they care about the most.

What D’Amaro may not be betting on is which content is going to continue to be popular and which isn’t. That’s really up to his entertainment divisions to sort out, but let me put it to you this way.

If we just look at Disney’s box office in 2026 alone, Toy Story 5 has been the biggest moneymaker, and it’s not even a contest. Is it any wonder why it performed so much better than Mandalorian & Grogu or Moana (2026)? Not to me! It’s a cartoon! Those things live forever. In fact, that’s basically the plot of Toy Story 5. Toys get passed from generation to generation, and you can still play with them, thirty years on. Woody may have a bald spot, but he’s still playable. (Plus, he’s always wearing a hat, so who cares?!)

Mickey himself, who hasn’t really been in any Disney content aimed at anybody over five years old for several decades, continues to be the company’s mascot. And the merchandise that gets sold, though it may bear shades of Star Wars or Captain America, usually has his trademarked ears somewhere on it—sometimes, the ears themselves are the merchandise.

The Disney machine runs on those who love it. I suppose every business runs on its customers, but because so much of Disney’s IP is immortal, Disney doesn’t have to constantly reinvent its own wheel to keep up with changing tastes and aging stars. Their omnipresence in American culture is what keeps fans dedicated, and amid a once-in-a-lifetime industry collapse (reshaping, I like to think), Disney is well positioned to endure.

Perhaps this is why Iger founded D23. In 2009. Right in the middle of his acquisition spree. (Yeah! He did it! A corporate genius if there ever was one.) Disney runs best when the fans do half the work for them. The event barely needs a marketing team; the fans will market it themselves.

It’s a 103-year-old racket that probably has at least another 103 years in it because none of us will ever be able to get out of it. For some, that may be a nightmare. But for others—especially those at the top of the Disney food chain—it just may be the wish their heart made.

To the moviegoing public of Los Angeles, it’s been a little bit of a “Christmas in July” situation this summer:

1. Obsession and Backrooms have been credited with bringing Gen Z into the movie theater.

2. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey smashed box office records, and every screen in town has been booked through August to see the epic epic. Spiderman: Brand New Day is right behind it.

3. American Cinematheque, the LA nonprofit dedicated to screening movies from around the world on screens across the city, added Westwood’s Fox Village Theater—now known as Directors Village—to its roster of historic theaters in summer preview season before its official opening in 2027. (This is where I saw The Odyssey, I’ll remind you!)

4. The Alex in Glendale has been screening The Odyssey in a bid to actually get back into film screenings after being a live entertainment venue for much of the last several decades.

5. Sony Pictures purchased the most-yearned-for theater in town, the Cinerama Dome, with plans to open it under their Alamo Drafthouse banner in 2028.

6. Sony also made a major investment in Cosm, which specializes in immersive entertainment via a number of technological offerings, including LED domes. (Think Sphere.)

7. And the Vista screened not one, but two Dick Powell features in July, including the aptly titled Christmas in July!

That last one was really just for me, but the first six are all exciting signs that in the movie capital of the United States, moviegoing is alive. Whether it’s being revived or just getting stronger is up for debate.

There’s no debate about the Cinerama Dome, though. That is, in fact, being revived after lying dormant in the heart of Hollywood for over five years.

When Deadline broke the news that Sony was in the final stages of negotiation to purchase the legendary theater and the adjoined ArcLight multiplex, I thought: “Sony knows something we don’t.”

While that’s not entirely true—we know what they’re doing and the optimists among us have good guesses about why they’re doing it—it’s still notable that in the so-called “streaming era,” Sony’s exhibition strategy seems to concentrate exclusively on physical, brick-and-mortar, honest-to-god theaters.

So what’s going on? And when did this strategy even start? And most importantly, why Sony?

Height of the Streaming Wars & the Dissolution of the Paramount Decrees

During the 21st century, Sony has been among the “Big Six,” now “Big Five” since Twentieth Century-Fox sold itself to the Walt Disney Company, major motion picture firms in Hollywood. They’ve never been the biggest, but they’ve always been in the mix, capitalizing on their ownership over the Spiderman IP during the massively successful creation of the MCU in the 2010s and their distribution rights to the James Bond franchise when Daniel Craig was playing 007.

Sony, even before they were Sony, never really played by the big dog’s rules, though. And in retrospect, their status as the only major in Hollywood not to launch their own streaming service was probably the smartest non-move in modern entertainment history.

Why? Because the majority of streaming platforms just became profitable. Like…within the last nine months. See this newsletter from the from seven months ago below.

The Entertainment Strategy Guy

A Realistic Analysis of Streaming’s Profitability Era...Plus Micro-Dramas: Bubble, Goldrush, Fraud or Genuine Opportunity?

(Welcome to the “Most Important Story of the Week”, my bi-weekly strategy column analyzing the most important (but often not buzziest) news story of the last two weeks. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry…

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8 months ago · Entertainment Strategy Guy

Sony’s cohorts—Disney, Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal—spent much of the pandemic trying to catch up to the Big Kahuna of streaming, Netflix, with very slow gains as the industry collapsed under the weight of lockdown and dual guild strikes. Though most are now profitable, the margins are thin, especially compared to Netflix.

Even so, Netflix had a less-than-stellar Q2. It seems that when consumers are home, they opt for short-form content they can view on their phones. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram Reels. And for longer content, well…they may just be going to the movie theater.

While some of the majors have faltered under the shifting tides, Sony has held steady. They licensed their content to a number of streamers during this period, guaranteeing revenue without the overhead costs of developing and then running their own service. The exchange (maybe) for fiscal responsibility was a less-solidified brand than the other majors, that is, if Sony even had a unique brand identity to begin with.

After the pandemic and the strikes, when some of the dust was beginning to settle in 2024, Sony quietly bought Alamo Drafthouse, the small theater chain that specializes in the dine-in theatrical experience.

If you’re a regular reader of my pieces, you already know how such a thing was allowed to happen: the Paramount Decrees of 1948, the Supreme Court decision that literally changed the entertainment business by forcing motion picture firms to divest from their theater chains, were overturned in 2020. And so, studios were once again allowed to own theater chains.

Unsurprisingly, studios didn’t really jump at the chance to get back into the theater business, especially at such a precarious time for in-person events of any kind. Though I’ll maintain until my dying day that studio-owned streaming services engage in modern-day block-booking, one of the practices that was deemed illegal under the Decrees, streaming was seen as the reason that the Decrees had become obsolete. Modern exhibition, to those dissolving the ruling, didn’t seem to pose the same anti-trust issues that old-fashioned exhibition used to.

(Haha.)

But Sony, who didn’t have a streaming service they were trying to make profitable like the rest of the studios in town, took the bait and bought Alamo in June of 2024. Now, two summers later, they’ve purchased a minority stake in Cosm and have promised to resurrect the beloved Cinerama Dome. As of right now, Sony is the only studio trying to vertically integrate the old-fashioned way.

In defense of the other Four, theater chains are kind of a hassle to own. The overhead is enormous—as real estate always is—and for the last six years, people haven’t been going to movies nearly as much as they were pre-pandemic. Alamo isn’t a very big theater chain; the Cinerama Dome and ArcLight multiplex is literally one place; Cosm domes are only in a handful of locations. So if Sony had to own theaters, they’ve certainly picked the right ones to invest in.

But the strategy points to this belief in “experiential entertainment,” something we discussed before in our two-parter on the history of film exhibition. Cosm in particular has mostly been exhibiting sporting events, but I do suspect that immersive domes of all sizes will start to spring up, and slowly but surely, they’ll start to screen movies. (Think Wizard of Oz at Sphere.)

Just looking at the scale of their investments, betting on theatrical is not enormously risky, but it’s a bet nonetheless. The ground is still shaky here in LA. The Paramount-Warners merger, the break up of Comcast and NBCU, whatever Disney Experiences is doing to subsidize Disney Entertainment. We’re clearly experiencing one of the biggest turning points in Hollywood history. Sony, who has mostly stayed out of it, is well-positioned, then, to fight the battle against a decline in theatrical viewing while their cohorts fight off bigger foes like anti-trust laws and the president.

Is Sony Poised For a Grand Ascent?

One of the biggest critiques that I have of my own thinking when it comes to this stuff is that I maintain the old-school view that studios are competing against each other in some race for “best” or “most important” studio in town. This would typically be determined by a combination of revenue, profit, and the share of the box office. By these metrics, Sony is doing just fine.

(It’s worth noting that when it comes to box office share, Sony is in fourth place with just 7% of the North American market. This is relative to Disney’s 28%, Warners’ 21%, and Universal’s 20%.)

But in today’s reality, movie studios are actually competing against other forms of entertainment. In the “attention economy,” any two-hour movie is fighting an uphill battle with two hours’ worth of TikTok videos. (Allegedly.)

It’s in this overly simplified half-truth, that TikTok and YouTube will eventually render features obsolete, that I find Sony to be the only studio with their finger on the pulse.

Now, this opinion is mine and mine alone, though I imagine others share it, but I predict the day in which people will not be physically able to watch a movie in their home, simply because they won’t have the attention span to do it. They’ll watch short-form content at home, but long-form content? Well, they’ll need leave the house and enter a dark theater with very strict rules about cell phone usage in order to sit through a feature-length film.

And Sony will be further ahead in the theater chain game, in which movie theaters may resemble domes and spheres more than they resemble the four-walled theater today, than any other studio.

What I, a historian, find particularly interesting about Sony being ahead on this goes back to what I said about them never having played by the rules.

To do a bit of oversimplifying myself, Sony is the modern incarnation of Columbia Pictures,1 one of the three “mini majors” from the Golden Age. (Universal and United Artists were the other two during that period.) And like Universal, the reason that Columbia wasn’t a big major was because they never owned theater chains. So when the Decrees came down in 1948, they were largely unaffected. In fact, after RKO went out of business in 1955, Columbia took their spot among the other big dogs and became a true major.

It is fascinating to me that the studio that never had an exhibition arm of any kind, neither theatrical in the 20th century nor streaming in the 21st, is now the only studio with a growing and diverse portfolio of movie theaters.

Perhaps their entrance into the theater business—about a hundred years later than their peers, by the way—is a natural extension of their perpetual status as an “outsider” studio, one that never was the biggest or most prestigious. But one that always made a decent-enough slate of pictures in one year to fund the next year’s slate of decent-enough pictures.

Like I said, I don’t know how much good it does any studio to really try to compete against each other at this particular moment in time, with uncertain obstacles and downright intrusive forces around every corner.

But if in the future this “experience” entertainment thing really does become the saving grace for movies, then Sony is gonna have a good shot at winning the race for most relevant studio in town. Maybe even most innovative.

At the beginning of 1956, show business luminary Dick Powell signed a contract with Twentieth Century-Fox to be its newest producer-director. He signed the dotted line about eight weeks before his first epic picture, The Conqueror, hit theaters with a hollow thud.

The Conqueror—which attempts to illustrate the many conquests of Genghis Khan—hobbled through two years of obstacles before it made its big screen debut. From John Wayne’s legendarily bad performance to extreme weather during shooting to the total collapse of its studio, RKO, The Conqueror’s biggest battle was itself.1

The film would come to be known as one of the worst films ever made, and modern film enthusiasts will tell you that it was a box office bomb. But that’s not the whole picture.

The Conqueror, for all its legitimate trials and tribulations, was the eleventh highest-grossing movie of 1956. It was RKO’s highest-grossing movie of the entire decade. The movie’s box office problem wasn’t that people didn’t see it—it was that its enormous cost made profitability a particularly tall order. (Plus, it was critically panned, which certainly didn’t help.)

When Powell spoke to the press about what he hoped to accomplish throughout the duration of his seven-year contract at Twentieth Century-Fox, he made a characteristically astute remark:

“When you have an investment of $8,000,0002 as we had in ‘The Conqueror,’ your only salvation is to have a big, big subject, new backgrounds and a tremendous job of pre-selling. That’s the kind of property I’m looking for now.”3

By 1956, most movers and shakers in Tinseltown were under this impression. Topping the gross list that year was Cecil B. DeMille’s modern remounting of The Ten Commandments (1956), with global adventure Around the World in 80 Days, the aptly named Giant, and a Cinerama-released documentary called Seven Wonders of the World right behind it.

Production of “epic pictures,” multi-million dollar movies that took on “big, big” subjects that were often historical in nature, exploded in the 1950s, and they really were seen as the “only salvation,” as Powell put it, if you wanted to sell movie tickets.

Why? Because of television.

As previously discussed, 1950 was the first year in the history of American cinema that a decline at the box office was directly correlated with the introduction of a new medium into the mainstream. In reality, there were multiple factors that led to reduced moviegoing, but television was certainly the reason that had the studio elites in a total panic.

This is how we got the widescreen format, first through Cinerama, then through Twentieth’s CinemaScope (which The Conqueror and Powell’s subsequent pictures were shot in) and Paramount’s VistaVision. Television screens had the same aspect ratio as the movie screen (4:3), so the movie colony’s first attempt to save themselves from total ruin was to innovate technologically.

At the same time, studio writers began developing scripts that fit the widescreen bill. They needed the scale of the stories to match the scale of the presentation—and they needed them quickly. From the time that Twentieth’s biblical epic The Robe premiered in CinemaScope in 1953, studios raced to make bigger and better “epic pictures.”

If the highest grossers of 1956 are anything to go by, I’d say that Hollywood’s attempt to get people back into theaters via widescreen epics worked pretty well.

I’ve often drawn the comparison between this time in entertainment history with today’s. There are just too many parallels to ignore, most notably the introduction of a new medium. With so much historical context to learn from, I’m actually surprised it took us until 2026 to say, “Fuck it. Let’s give The Odyssey a shot and see what happens.”

This fake quote I’m making up is, of course, not reflective of the thought process that the illustrious Christopher Nolan went through before mounting his modern-day epic The Odyssey (2026). If Nolan is known for anything, it is his gift for crafting large-scale, space-and-time-bending movies. No one else’s films in this century quite live up to the term “major motion picture” like Nolan’s do.

As I’ve said before, I don’t really think of myself as a cultural critic, so my thoughts on the film are sort of irrelevant. Nonetheless, because I am boastful, I will tell you that I saw The Odyssey in glorious 70mm at the historic Fox theater in Westwood—of which Nolan is now a co-owner, by the way—on opening weekend. The experience was as amazing as you think it was, and if you must know, I loved the movie. (I think it’s his best.)

The Odyssey was always going to be a commercial success. It’s Nolan’s first movie since Oppenheimer, that three-hour biopic that won him the Oscar two years ago despite being pitted against the highest-grossing movie of the year, Barbie. It’s also his second with Universal, which, as I said a few weeks ago, is the best studio in town for a filmmaker who wants to be successful in these trying times. And it stars a zillion box office hotties, from power couple Zendaya and Tom Holland to Anne “five movies in one year” Hathaway to one of the last true movie stars (in the classical tradition) Matt Damon.

Probably the biggest predictor of The Odyssey’s success at the box office, though, was the very fact that it was The Odyssey. This is one of the world’s oldest stories; the so-called “hero’s journey,” which plenty of writers lift up as a key framework for successful storytelling, is literally based on Odysseus’ return home. (Alt title: Odysseus: No Way Home? Get it?)

The scale of the well-known, well-trod Odyssey also demands to be seen in a theater. A war between a thousand gladiators. The Trojan horse. THE CYCLOPS. Anybody who is really interested in seeing these images would not want to encounter them first on a television screen. Or worse, a phone. And for anyone familiar with Nolan’s track record on complex imagery, they knew he was going to succeed in bringing these mythical compositions to life.

For much of the last decade, action movies seemed to be the surest bet at big box office, especially in calculations that heavily factored in international moviegoing. One of the reasons that action plays is that it doesn’t rely on language to convey emotion or move a story along. As filmmaker Denis Villeneuve famously said two years ago, “I don’t remember movies because of a good line, I remember movies because of a strong image.”4

What distinguishes the epic from the run-of-the-mill action picture is its grounding in a historical subject; everything about an epic is universal. It’s tried-and-true; it’s familiar; it is, in today’s terms, the most-recognized IP. So, yeah. The Odyssey was gonna work.

So is this the beginning of some epic boom? In David Ellison’s kingdom, are we going to get a third remake of The Ten Commandments?

Probably not.

Something that is completely different between then and now is the number of pictures that a studio makes in a year. A diverse and voluminous slate was a requirement during the Golden Age because movies usually only stayed in any given theater for one week.5 Plus, the studios were really the only game in town (though independent production was on the rise by the end of the 1940s.) Hollywood exported hundreds of movies a year, which made failure less risky.

Today—like, literally, today—it’s much harder to justify a budget as big as The Odyssey’s. (A quarter of a billion dollars, if you’re wondering.) With a perceived dwindling of demand for movies, the big swings have had to become that much bigger and more precise.

But I don’t think The Odyssey is a fluke, either, a stew that is only successful because of its particular combination of ingredients. The Odyssey’s formula, when you really think about it, is really simple. Big director, big stars, big subject, big studio. In some ways, it’s the formula that’s always worked.

Some stories are best-suited to the cinematic experience. The Odyssey, the story that begot all stories, is, of course, one of them. We should be making more pictures like that if we wanna make it through this time of corporate upheaval and economic uncertainty.

I don’t think that the epic is Hollywood’s “only salvation,” but it’s certainly a tool that filmmakers and executives alike should remember is in the toolbox. It just might help them get back home.

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Universal will find a way to survive. It’s what Universal does.

In light of the recent news that Comcast is breaking itself up into a its component parts, I figured it was time we explore the peaks, valleys, and improbable resilience of Hollywood’s oldest studio.

The timing of the re-org is notable. Paramount seems to be poised to actually buy Warner Bros., anti-trust sentiment (if there’s any left) be damned. Fox—which just went through this only nine years ago when 20th Century Fox was spun-off and sold to the The Walt Disney Company back in 2017—just bought Roku. And now, NBCUniversal and all of its subsidiaries1 are on their own again.

When I was listening to The Town’s recent episode about the news, I was struck by something that Lucas Shaw asked: “When you think about…all the stuff that’s happening, it doesn’t feel like all of the media companies that ran the world for so long are slowly disappearing, or maybe rapidly disappearing?”

replied, “Yeah,” with his hallmark resignation.

We don’t know what’s going to happen to NBCUniversal, a name that so plainly explains the company’s long history in both film and television. (There are also, of course, the parks to think about!) It’s not even clear if NBCU will be acquired; some seem to believe the corporate leadership when they said that NBCU could be the buyer in a hypothetical, non-specific deal.

What I do know, though, is that Universal will endure. NBC might. Universal will.

Here’s why.

By now, you know the origin story: a turn-of-the-century immigrant buys a movie theater and turns it into a film distribution company before running to California to escape the Edison Trust.

Unlike the other Golden Age moguls, though, Carl Laemmle was on the front lines in the battle against Edison. In fact, they were direct rivals since Laemmle was the leader of a coalition of independent filmmakers. It was because of Laemmle’s efforts, some might argue, that the Edison Trust was eventually broken up by the Supreme Court in 1915.

Though Universal was founded in New York in April 1912,2 Laemmle moved the bulk of its operations to Hollywood just a few months later. Importantly, he got there a few years before everyone else—Zukor, Goldwyn, Mayer, the Warner Brothers. And so, Universal, Hollywood’s oldest motion picture firm, was also Hollywood’s first major motion picture firm.

It’s hard to imagine now, but the so-called “silent era” of global filmmaking lasted several decades, and even with the arrival of other moguls and other studios, Universal remained a “major,” that ranking system that people like me track with a fervency that rivals that of people who track baseball standings.

Before we officially move to the Golden Age, it’s worth mentioning that a few years after Laemmle got to Los Angeles, he founded a town. Universal City, which had a zoo and featured a tour of the studio for paying customers, became a popular attraction. This was by Laemmle’s own design, who treated the area like a state fair—or, through our 21st-century lens, a theme park.

By 1927, one of the other majors, First National, had built its giant lot directly across the street from Universal City in Burbank. And though both lots remain there to this very day, that was the year that threatened to end both of them.

As previously mentioned, the First National lot became the Warner Bros. lot after Harry, Abe, Jack, and their late brother Sam invented the talking picture and acquired First National in 1928. Universal retained Universal City, but they were in swift decline.

Two things really hamstrung Laemmle. The first was that he lost the visionary Irving G. Thalberg to Louis B. Mayer in 1922. Ask anyone even casually interested in Hollywood history, and they’ll tell you that Thalberg, probably more than any of the moguls, is the guy who built The Town. He was an extraordinarily gifted producer who died way too young. Another piece for another day…

Losing Thalberg meant that Universal began to churn out lesser pictures. More important to the bottom line, though, was that Universal didn’t own a theater chain. In increasingly vertically-integrated Hollywood, this should have been a death sentence.

In some ways, it was. Universal lost its “major” status before the 1920s were even over, being replaced by the traditional “Big Five” that historians have come to know and agree upon: Warner Bros., Paramount, RKO, MGM, and (eventually) Twentieth Century-Fox. In 1936, Laemmle and his son (Carl Laemmle, Jr.) were ousted by the Universal board. Junior left the film business for good; Senior died three years later.

But Universal, against the twentieth-century tide of mergers and acquisitions, endured. Before he’d been ousted, Junior had, perhaps unwittingly, established ownership over a niche: horror. Dracula, Frankenstein, the Invisible Man. They all became movie stars before the Laemmles were unceremoniously removed as heads of their own studio.

It was focusing on genre pictures that carried Universal through the Golden Age. Westerns, melodramas (early noir), and horror were where Universal excelled, and they were primarily known as a studio that made B-movies.3 Along with Columbia and United Artists, Universal became a “little major” and successfully exhibited its movies in theater chains owned by the Big Five through the next decade and a half.

As my avid readers know, the next turning point came in 1948, when it was deemed that the Big Five couldn’t own theater chains anymore. Chaos ensued, and that ruling would eventually end the reign of every mogul in town, doing lasting damage to RKO and MGM in particular.

Universal was actually the first to be acquired by an outside company, though. At the time, this was seen as a possible harbinger that it might actually be over for Universal.

Again, in some ways, it was. Decca Records acquired Universal in 1952, but it was through a desperate deal with MCA—who eventually merged with Decca in 1962, becoming Universal’s second parent company—that Universal sold part of Universal City to MCA’s Revue Productions.

Revue deserves its own book, let alone its own paragraph in this piece about Universal. But the following high-level explanation will have to do:

The dissemination of televisions into American homes deeply hurt the box office by 1950. If you were a Hollywood mogul, you did everything you could to resist television, including barring your stars from appearing on small screens. As a result, television studios like Revue, backed by the all-powerful talent agency MCA, became the leading “independent” producer of television during the medium’s first Golden Age.

Some might think that honor belongs to Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s Desilu; others (like me) might try to convince you that it was Dick Powell’s Four Star. But neither indie ever came close to having the slate that Revue did. Part of their success could be owed to their partnership with one of the three television networks: NBC.4

(Are you seeing where this is going?)

Universal, under the thumb of MCA, didn’t really have a choice to resist television production. Television sort of happened to Universal, and when MCA did finally take over the company, Revue merged with the film studio to become Universal Television.

Buoyed by the unrivaled output of Universal Television, Universal Pictures remained. In the 1970s, again, perhaps unwittingly, Universal distributed two movies that changed the course of Hollywood history: American Graffiti in 1973 and Jaws in 1975.

Between these two movies, Universal came into contact with the “Big Three” of New Hollywood: Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg. Only Spielberg would forge a lasting relationship with the studio. And I would argue with anyone that he’s the reason the thing is still standing today.

As I’ve mentioned before, Jaws is usually credited as the movie that invented the blockbuster, but it also was the seminal film that created the long-standing partnership between Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and Universal. Fruits of this partnership include E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and the entire Jurassic Park franchise; plus, Spielberg’s protégé, Robert Zemeckis, made his biggest movie at Universal. Ever hear of Back to the Future?5

By 2000, Universal had regained its “major” status culturally, but its C-Suite had an active revolving door at its threshold for the latter two decades of the 20th century. Its owner in 2004, French investment group Vivendi, panic sold a majority stake to General Electric—outright owner of NBC. Five years later, GE panic sold the newly formed NBCUniversal to Comcast.

This is how old friends became life partners. And how Universal reclaimed ownership over itself.

NBCUniversal was not the first time a television unit combined with a motion picture unit. Disney had acquired ABC about a decade before, and CBS and Paramount had been under Viacom’s control since 2000. But the beauty of NBCUniversal was that both entities were important in the media landscape, had known each other for quite a long time, and their parent organization, Comcast, was interested in providing the capital to grow their combined power.

More importantly, the Comcast deal gave Universal the two things that had prevented them from retaining their major status from the transition to sound.

Comcast, a connectivity business, was (at that time) thought to be the modern-day equivalent of owning a theater chain. It was a distributor of content; the exhibition took place in people’s homes (and maybe on their Blackberries). Vertical integration was back—and legislation moved too slowly to recognize the return.6

The other thing that enabled Universal’s success in particular was that it had (and still has) a dynamite leader in Donna Langley, the Irving G. Thalberg of our time. Langley came to Universal all the way back in the Vivendi days, which is when she launched the Fast & Furious and Bourne franchises.

But the strength of Comcast as a parent company gave Langley the juice she needed to make Universal the most important studio in Hollywood. The hard numbers may indicate that The Walt Disney Company has the honor of being the biggest of the modern “Big Five,” but especially in post-pandemic L.A., it’s Universal that continues to have the biggest presence in the zeitgeist.

From Illumination, which finally gave us a Super Mario franchise and, of course, the minions, to backing Jordan Peele’s groundbreaking projects to nabbing Christopher Nolan from Warner Bros., Langley’s Universal has become the leader in original storytelling in an IP-obsessed world of sequels.

And though it is a separate entity, it’s important to keep mentioning that Universal is the only other studio in town that has a global theme park business, a real boon as entertainment companies start pursuing “experiences” in earnest amidst the uncertainty of the ol’ humdrum theatrical release.

In a lot of ways, Universal has long been in the race for second place. For some, the silver will never be as meaningful as the gold, but for businesses in one of the most volatile and unpredictable industries in America, second might be the safest place on the podium.

Only time will tell us what the Comcast spin-off will bring to NBCU. Linear television is guaranteed to go extinct eventually, so I’m not really sure what the future of NBC looks like.

But Universal? Though the studio is no stranger to bad decisions, inherent in its DNA is a resilience that has allowed it to endure.

Laemmle’s premature arrival over one hundred years ago, perhaps, is why Universal has always marched to the beat of its own drum. They’ve never done anything by the book, even though they wrote the first few chapters.

They’re in the best possible position to withstand a corporate shake-up. I, for one, look forward to seeing what the next chapter might bring. And I don’t think it will be their last.

In 1943, Paramount Pictures nabbed the rights to produce the film adaptation of a novel called Double Indemnity.

Written as a hardboiled serial almost a decade earlier, Double Indemnity had been too risky to make for years. Unlike its spiritual predecessors—the gangster pictures of the 1930s—Double Indemnity was a story about murder that involved “regular people.”

Two idiots (my words, not theirs) decide that they can organize a crime all by themselves in Double Indemnity, and at the risk of spoiling the ending, lead character Walter Neff throws his life away because of his own hubris. The thought of putting such a story on the screen in the 1930s was unthinkable to Hollywood execs that were now under strict observation of the losers in the Hays Office—the headquarters for the suits that enforced the newly re-enforceable Motion Picture Production Code.

The Code would last well into the 1960s, but by the 1940s, Hollywood’s filmmakers were pretty sick of the limitations it put on their artistic expression. It didn’t help that Americans weren’t too keen on seeing pictures that ended in happiness. They, along with the rest of the world, were living through hell. “Escapism” was becoming unwelcome on the screen.

There were melodramas before it, and there were many many many after it, but Double Indemnity—with its combination of three powerhouse actors (Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and my boi Eddie G.), a whip-smart script by the incomparable Raymond Chandler, and legendary director Billy Wilder behind the camera—is largely considered to be the first “film noir” of American cinema.

The specifics of what make a movie a “film noir” is up for debate, one I’m not really interested in having. But there are some specific conditions that made film noir emerge in American moviemaking at the time that it did:

1. The mid-war and post-war angst of the 1940s, which eventually gave way to the Cold War paranoia of the 1950s, made these decades the perfect time to make a million movies about deception, moral decay, and murder!

2. Related, noirs were a safe genre to explore seedier desires than other genres in the fight against the restrictions of the Code. Noirs were, fundamentally, about taboo subjects; you were likelier to wrestle with very real social phenomena like infidelity and drug trafficking if you were watching a noir than some big MGM musical. (No shade to my beloved Gene Kelly.)

3. As we’ve discussed many times, the studio system started to crumble in the late 1940s, which severely impacted studios’ bottom lines. Noirs were relatively cheap to make, and some that critics would now label as among the finest entries of the genre were understood at the time to be “B” movies.

Film noir, unlike most other genres of moviemaking, is unique in that it is time bound. This isn’t to say that there aren’t neo-noirs, but like the screwball comedy, the films that we’d consider to be “noirs” were all made in about a fifteen-year span. And then, they became…something else.

This is slightly different than what I keep referencing when I bring up “picture cycles.” These were often studio-engineered timespans when a given studio would make a certain kind of picture over and over and over again. Why? Because that’s what sold. And while “picture cycles” were sort of strictly a Golden Age tool, I’d say that we’re just coming out of the “superhero cycle,” if that helps frame it for you.

I would argue that the classical period of film noir was a picture cycle, but it was an organic one. It was a span of time, with beginning and end dates, in which a certain type of picture was being made by every studio in town. Why? Because it met the moral demands of the public while matching the studios’ dire financial situation.

If you’ve listened to any movie podcast in the last eighteen months, you have, no doubt, heard critics and journalists alike squawk about how we’re in a horror boom, and part of the genre’s appeal to Hollywood execs is that it’s relatively cheap to make.

It wasn’t until I saw Obsession a few weeks ago when I started connecting these dots.

Now, I’m not gonna sit here and say that horror is an entirely new genre. It’s not! In fact, it’s been around longer than movies have been around. Human beings have always seemed to love scary stories, our fascination dating all the way back to our campfire days.

But horror has never been more popular as a movie genre than it is right now. And if Obsession’s filmmakers are any clue, I don’t think the cycle we’re in at the current moment will end anytime soon.

Obsession is not the first movie in this so-called horror boom. Far from it. Since Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Andy Muschietti’s It: Chapter One (2017) changed the trajectory of the box office, the horror genre has more than doubled its market share.1 Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019), two sides of the same horror coin, officially introduced us to “elevated” horror—and officially made A24 a creature in its own right.

Since then, a few more Eggers, Peele, and Aster movies, plus the addition of a few Osgood Perkins movies and a couple Zach Creggar movies, have led us to the apex we’re at now. Perhaps the average moviegoer would deem Sinners (2025) as the peak of this phenomenon, but that’s already proven to be untrue. And it’s important to note that Sinners was far more expensive to make than any movie I’ve already mentioned.

Though horror movies have been around for over 100 years, I think we can all agree that this batch of horror movies, those that have come out in the last decade or so, feel different. And like the collection of noirs from the past, it’s not always easy to identify what makes them similar to each other.

Eggers’ movies are macabre; Peele’s are funny;2 Aster’s are twisted; Perkins’ are atmospheric; Creggar’s are kinda sad! Some are fantastical; some of them directly challenge big societal problems; some deal with the human condition; some are deeply personal (Creggar wrote Weapons (2025) as a way to cope with the loss of his best friend Trevor Moore). Some dabble in the supernatural; others display the worst parts of us when we’re just trying to deal with each other.

They are all, of course, scary. This is their unifying factor, as a general sense of “doom” was for noirs. But there’s something else that binds the horror films of the genre’s Golden Age—which I think we’re in right now.

I think it’s exactly what made Double Indemnity so subversive in its time. It’s about a regular guy, and the vast majority of these movies are about the same indescribable category of person.

You, sitting in the crowded theater, don’t go, “I would never be dumb enough to go into that basement” like you might have when watching a Halloween installment. Instead, you go, “Holy fuck, if my boyfriend was this dismissive of me right after my sister killed my parents, I’d sacrifice his ass, too.”3

Horror is the genre that’s doing the best at depicting what it’s like to be alive right now. Obsession does this amply while introducing us to the next peak in the Horror Mountain we’re still climbing.

Obsession shares elements with all of its predecessors. It dabbles in the supernatural; it is funny; and it is very scary! It’s less a commentary on society at large and more a commentary on unhealthy interpersonal relationships.

I won’t be the first to make this observation, but I think what makes Obsession stand out in the crowd is that it, along with its weird partner in this box office ascension Backrooms, is that it was made by a member of Gen Z. And its popularity among a generation that’s been blamed for the death of cinema more than a time or two is notable. And I think it answers the question, “Why is horror so popular?”

When noir was in its Golden Age, it was speaking directly to its viewers’ innermost fears, about the world and about themselves. As noir leading man Dick Powell said just a few months after his career-redefining role as Detective Philip Marlowe debuted on the big screen in 1945, “I think after the war there’s bound to be an era of lawlessness and there have to be pictures about it….They may not be like the gangster pictures of the thirties…The mobs might not be hijacking liquor; they might be hijacking nations.”4

Obsession director Curry Barker is uniquely positioned to deeply affect audiences, especially because he’s never consciously experienced a world before the internet. (Scary in itself.) Obsession confronts the duality of Gen Z characterizations: they are simultaneously the “wokest” generation and more morally punitive than millennials or Gen X.

Curry’s answer to the paradox concludes in bloody and dreadful inevitability, scored by one of the greatest songs of yesteryear, 1960’s “Forever” by The Little Dippers. In the end, no one in the world of Obsession gets what they want, their greed and selfishness obscuring any suggestion that attempting to sit in the discomfort of vulnerability might actually yield what they’re after: human connection, a dwindling currency in the 21st century.

I also want to take a moment to draw some parallels between Obsession and quite a few of its noir ancestors. Main “villain” Nikki is a femme fatale, upside down and on steroids; the movie starts with a monologue from our antihero; Barker’s lighting choices are quintessential noir. And, miraculously, Obsession, which just passed the $300 million mark for global box office, was made for under one million dollars. Fritz Lang would be proud.

Gen Z has been dealt an unfair, largely digital hand. Obsession uses the visual language of their youth—horror—to say something about how hard it is to be young at this particularly dark moment in American and world history. It may not show gangsters hijacking nations; but it does show what impossible societal expectations do when they hijack the mind of a regular guy.

There will come a day when horror movies don’t live up to whatever standard they’re setting now. And when that day comes, the cycle will have its end date. Perhaps film theorists fifty years from now will look back on this batch of movies and label them something other than “horror,” as the term “film noir” was invented to retroactively group together mid-century melodramas.

Until then, I’ll keep tracking this genre’s Golden Age. The filmmakers who are making it happen are pushing moviemaking and moviegoing forward. Like the stories of noir and horror, I’m intrigued by the cycle’s mystery—even if some of the reasons for its existence are ones we’ve seen before.

I’m tired of thinking about this, aren’t you?

Anyway, since the DOJ approved the big merger with legendary verbosity, I figured it was time we return to The Town’s hottest subject. Next week will be better; I have things to say about Obsession and the popularity of horror movies. Until then, we’re all just mice in the Ellison wheel.

A lot has happened, mostly on the Paramount side, since I last wrote about these two Hollywood stalwarts. Colbert’s show went off the air; 60 Minutes blew up; and neither studio has really been able to claim victory at the box office since the year began.

We’re off to a great start, aren’t we, boys?1

Look, there’s so much to say. This merger will lead to more contraction in an already strained industry, and the motivations behind it are driven by greed, ego, and political power. And I think it’s very easy to focus on these obviously bad qualities of the situation.

But I try to put these things in historical context, because just like there are “cycles in pictures,”2 there are cycles in the pictures. And when I was thinking about the last time this happened, something became glaringly apparent to me: this merger is an old move in a new world. And by the time anything really happens, it may have all been for not.

Let me explain.

First of all, yes, we’ve been down this road before.

I could not retell this story with more justice than already did in his article for The Hollywood Reporter six months ago, but what you need to know is that this is not the first time that Paramount has tried to acquire Warner Bros. Adolph Zukor, Paramount’s first/most infamous czar, was on the tails of the brothers Warner for about half a decade before he finally gave up his pursuit.

Many factors were at play in his thwarted mission, the biggest probably being the Great Depression. (History really does rhyme, doesn’t it?) But Warner Bros. was also the most innovative studio in Hollywood at the time. If you’ll recall from my very first piece about Jack Warner and David Zaslav, Sam Warner, may he rest in peace, essentially invented the talkie.

In writing Dick Powell’s biography over the last two years, a media disruptor in his own right (and, weirdly, the biggest Warner Bros. star right after this first attempt at an acquisition occurred), I’ve become very familiar with the peaks and valleys of America’s entertainment industry. And we’ve talked a lot about the turning points on this very platform! The exodus from New York to Los Angeles; the talkie; the Depression; the war; television; the collapse of the studio system; the holding companies; home video; streaming.

I’ve spent a lot of time comparing these moments to each other, always concluding that because Hollywood is still standing, these threats never turned out to be the extinction events their headlines had promised. I have to believe that this moment, either because of the one hundred years of historical precedent or just because I’m too emotionally fragile to believe otherwise, is no different.

But these two mergers, a century apart, don’t really have much in common at their core. Yes, the companies are the same, and ultimately, leaders at the top of big businesses want to own more market share. But while they’re both happening during periods of seismic transition, Zukor had his finger on the pulse. The Davids do not.

Zukor and Ellison would both tell you that they wanted Warner Bros. because of the studio’s cutting-edge assets, but they wouldn’t be talking about the same thing.

Zukor wanted Warner Bros. because he wanted to expand. Given that we have him to thank for the vertically integrated studio system and all the practices that the Paramount Consent Decrees knocked down in 1948, we can safely assume that he was an anti-trust lawyer’s worst nightmare. It’s worth mentioning that Zukor’s relentless quest to conquer the entertainment industry did lead Paramount to file for bankruptcy eventually, but that didn’t happen until after he failed to nab Warner Bros.

At the time when Zukor started dangling carrots in front of the Warner brothers, their studio, through the purchase and development of sound technology Vitaphone, was about to disrupt the industry that Zukor (and others) effectively built. Zukor, one of the least creative moguls in the original bunch, understood that if he could own part of the disruption, he’d win the latest battle for power in Hollywood. This is shrewd and long-respected business practice. Facebook buys Instagram because Facebook recognizes that Instagram is rendering Facebook obsolete. Paramount weathers the storm of change if it owns a piece of the Warner Bros. pie.

This isn’t really the case for Ellison. The assets that he wants are all of the brands that Warner Bros. owns. (Brands and “content” are the currency of the industry these days, as you well know.) The discussion around why he wants them has been largely focused on CNN because of the Ellisons’ ties to the Trump administration, but we know that young David is also—genuinely!—a big fan of movies.

What he wants to do with Warner Bros.’ “iconic assets” isn’t entirely clear or specific. Theme parks? Video games? User-generated content? Who knows? And really, who cares? Disney and Universal are better than both of these studios at exploiting their own intellectual property, anyway. It’s a race for third place.

I’m getting wrapped around the axle. (Typical.) The point is this: Adolph Zukor heard about Vitaphone and wished he’d thought of it first. And he was right to think that. David Ellison heard about the “For Sale” sign on the gates of the Warner Bros. lot and wished he could buy it. Just because.3 And he’s making it everybody else’s problem.

Vitaphone pointed to a future that actually materialized; it was revolutionary technology that didn’t just change the entertainment industry. It changed the world. Sight and sound were synchronized. Communication was forever altered.

What future is the Warner Bros. brand library pointing to? More…sequel premieres? One streaming service instead of two? These are not things that are moving the needle; it’s business as usual, just more of it, and business hasn’t been great over the last six years. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Ellison would be better off investing in OpenAI than buying Warner Bros. if he actually wanted to become a leader in the industry. And I know the deal has since vaporized, but that’s why Disney almost did it.

(As I was editing this, Fox Corp. announced that they were buying Roku, proving my point in the above paragraph. Technological infrastructure is what will set entertainment conglomerates up for future success in these highly volatile, unpredictable times.)

Think of it like this: two dinosaurs mating does not produce the first homo sapien. It produces another dinosaur. A younger dinosaur, but a dinosaur nonetheless.

It’s a big, dumb move that will weaken an already-struggling industry for basically no other reason than to stroke Ellison’s ego and, to the real cynics, move toward a media system that is heavily influenced by a wanna-be dictator. The DOJ’s approval is definitive proof of the latter.

The technological disruptions in Hollywood—and our world broadly—are just as scary in the short-term, but they’re actually the ones that will, eventually, birth a new normal. Artists of all kinds will use these tools to make content like they always have, on screens large or small. And actually, storytellers and people who can think creatively are the very people who should be shaping the usage of such technology if society doesn’t want to be swallowed by it. (A big takeaway from the college reunion I just attended, but I digress.)

When I hear about all of the drama around 60 Minutes and CNN, I can’t help but think about the fact that I don’t watch either. I know that I’m not everybody and everybody is not me, but to think that millennials or Gen Z are tuning into legacy news series and networks on linear television is asinine.

And perhaps I am one of the cynics, but I think that the health of our media environment is not solely determined by the journalists of the Cable News Network. People spread plenty of misinformation on their own, all across the internet, which is where more and more of the population is getting their news. The lions are fighting over a carcass that’s been dead for years.

I’m nearly out of metaphors, so I’ll wrap it up. I guess all I’m trying to say is that the impending consolidation is a move out of time, a step out of rhythm. Money and power were motivators in the past, too, but they weren’t the only motivators. Making things that people wanted to see, where and how they wanted to see them, also seemed to be important. And I just don’t see that in this federally approved merger.

As Warner would be disappointed in Zaslav, Zukor would be disappointed in Ellison.

About a month ago, reports about Netflix’s potential purchase of the old Radford Studio Center were swirling. I was hoping to write about it after the deal closed, but it would seem that things have gone all quiet on the NoHo front.

On the Netflix front, however, there’s still plenty of noise.

I talk a lot about exhibition, mostly because it’s always been the most fraught part of the Hollywood supply chain, the node that has, over the decades, been impacted the most by entertainment’s most seismic shifts.

Within the last month, Netflix has made two important announcements regarding the exhibition of their product: David Fincher’s (by way of Quentin Tarantino’s) The Adventures of Cliff Booth and Great Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew are both getting theatrical releases.

What’s this have to do with the potential Radford purchase, which would really only affect Netflix’s production arm? Maybe nothing.

But also, maybe everything.

“Long” theatrical windows—something I’ve consistently said I will address, and I will very soon, I promise—have been under threat since the days of the VHS tape, even more so during the meteoric rise of streaming platforms last decade. No Hollywood studio has been more vocal about its disdain for theatrical release, let alone theatrical windows, than the one that started as a technology company.

And yet, here Netflix is, seemingly capitulating to the ol’ model. Make a picture and put it in theaters where the people can commune to see it.

The decisions around the potential Radford sale and two of the most-anticipated films of the next 12 months were, to be clear, likely unrelated.

But it did make me think: if Netflix is “going theatrical,” might they also be “going backlot?”1 And that made me wonder: is the soundstage ready for its big comeback?

The soundstage, as I’ve suggested before—perhaps, I hope, prematurely, based on these new developments!—has been dying a slower death than even your local AMC has. Since New Hollywood’s emergence in the late 1960s, many a filmmaker has preferred to shoot their biggest scenes on location. Feature film production relied less and less on the soundstage as its primary hub as the 20th century gave way to the 21st.

But soundstages were still being used—television production necessitated that. The explosion of television production in the 1950s, luckily, coincided with the decline of feature film production. So the soundstage was never really left vacant; it just got new tenants.

But since TV has entered its “prestige” era, showrunners have opted for more location-shooting, too. Commercials—and the few multi-camera sitcoms that still air on linear television—have accounted for a large portion of soundstage rentals ever since.

Perhaps no studio lot—large swaths of Los Angeles acreage that are home to these stages—encapsulates this history of the Hollywood soundstage better than the Radford Studio Center.

Since the very beginning, Radford has been in turmoil. Its builder, Mack Sennett, king of silent screen comedy, made the perilous decision to build a campus of stages in 1928. (For those who may need a refresher, talkies premiered at the end of 1927.) Sennett filed for bankruptcy after failing to evolve as rapidly as Hollywood required between 1927 and 1933, and he became a Norma Desmond-type figure until he died at the Motion Picture Country Home in 1960.

By the time he died, though, his old lot had been home to a number of companies. B-studio Republic, most famous for its Westerns, became the primary owner shortly after Sennett left packing. But even during the Republic days, much of the lot was leased to other entities.

In the early 1950s, Revue, MCA’s (i.e., Universal’s) television unit, occupied the majority of the Studio City campus. In the late 1950s, the independent Four Star Television, owned and operated by television mogul Dick Powell, rented 75% of the lot’s capacity for its television shows.2

Very shortly after Mr. Powell died and Four Star’s stock plummeted, CBS ate up most of the lot capacity, eventually buying the whole 70 acres from Republic in 1967. Mary Tyler Moore—coincidentally, a Four Star discovery—eventually moved in with her MTM Enterprises in the 1970s.

CBS, through its decades of metamorphosis, remained the owner of Radford until the Redstones, former owners of Paramount (of which CBS is a subsidiary), sold it to offload the expenses that inevitably come with owning dozens of acres in Los Angeles County—a particularly precarious asset in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent labor strikes of 2023.

CBS eventually sold Radford to Hackman Capital Partners, a real estate investment firm, in 2021. Goldman Sachs now owns the lot, leasing it out, as is the Radford way, to whomever in Los Angeles wants to make something in a soundstage these days. Such is the fate of a cultural institution in the age of private equity.

Now, as the tea leaves are opaquely communicating, ownership of Radford may be returning to a big studio. Netflix, with all its innovation and tech-infused, data-driven mandates, is suddenly keen to own the 100-year-old lot, which boasts 18 soundstages and a bunch of office space. In the AI-era, Netflix seems to be going dot com!

This move hasn’t been made entirely in isolation. Netflix is building a giant production campus in New Jersey as we speak. This move always reminded me of Warner Bros.’ strong presence in Atlanta (since its subsidiary, Turner, is headquartered there).

The reason for these basecamps on the eastern seaboard are myriad, but a big one is because of the tax credits that these East Coast states provide to production. The tax credits, many journalists posit, are a primary factor in Los Angeles’ decline in feature film production. Why make a movie in the most expensive state in the union when you could spend less money making it literally anywhere else?

But remember: most lots aren’t even used for film production anymore. If any soundstage has the red light on outside its door, it’s because they’re shooting television inside, and especially right now, it’s probably a commercial. So why is Netflix, content producer, investing in a studio lot of soundstages?

The simple, if cryptic, answer is that times are changing! And so is the soundstage. Making fewer headlines than the lack of work in LA, soundstages have been evolving pretty rapidly over the last twenty years. It started with green and blue screens, which have evolved into even more sophisticated visual effects equipment.

In a soundstage down in Manhattan Beach sits one of “the volumes,” arched video walls that have been used by Star Wars productions for years. And for any fellow New Yorker subscribers, you know that a movie-loving billionaire is occupying a soundstage in order to finish what Orson Welles started when he set out to make The Magnificent Ambersons; the AI being used in this very complicated project requires the laboratory-like conditions that a soundstage provides.

Additionally, and maybe most importantly, California politicians are running right now on an expansion of tax credits for the entertainment industry. Whether or not sluggish state policy will be quick enough to recapture the production that’s fleeing Southern California remains to be seen, but it does seem to be a focal point of many campaigns. (If you haven’t seen gubernatorial hopeful Katie Porter chastise other gubernatorial hopeful Antonio Villaraigosa for saying that Hollywood is his number one priority in that debate from a few weeks ago, you’re in for a good laugh.)

Netflix, longtime believers that Hollywood’s export is “content” and not “film” or “television,” may be realizing that to compete with the actual biggest streaming service in the world—YouTube, top purveyor of real down-and-dirty “content”—they might need to make higher quality fare, that which looks more elevated than the slop that any jabroni with a computer could make, that which could realistically compete in theaters.

After actualizing its goal to be one of the biggest studios in Hollywood, it would seem that Netflix is realizing, as Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw suggested on a recent episode of “The Town,” that sometimes doing things the Old Hollywood way is what actually plays—commercially.

Netflix’s presence in the history of Hollywood deems it as bizarre as the previous owners and renters of the Radford lot, making it, in a backwards kind of way, a perfect new owner.

Because of its reputation as the enemy of Hollywood’s status quo, Netflix is much more similar to B-picture studio Republic and MCA subsidiary Revue and indies Four Star and MTM than it is to its legacy media counterparts. Whatever whacky, new-age plan they have cooked up for the Radford lot is bound to work, if only because Radford seems to be the only place to sustain such lamented risk-taking.

Radford fascinates me as a site, mostly because I’m in disbelief that the thing is still standing. Despite a century’s worth of hot-potato-style ownership and consistent revenue bleeding, it remains! So who better to take it over than the biggest disruptor of the 21st century?

If Radford is the embodiment of the ouroboros of Hollywood production, then Netflix is the next worthy consumer of its old ways.

For the full scoop, read Part I that covers exhibition from the invention of the Kinetoscope to the box office collapse of 1950. Or don’t! Whatever!

Last week, after having an existential crisis brought on by viewing The Devil Wears Prada 2 in ScreenX, I started retelling a very brief history of film exhibition in the United States.

This week, we pick up where we left off: moviegoing is declining; everyone is buying a television set; and every studio’s camera department is in an arms race to see who can come up with a siren call that will get people back into movie theaters.

Pretend it’s 1950 in 3…2…1…

Cinerama, CinemaScope, and VistaVision

Part of the fun of going to the movies had always been seeing your favorite screen stars projected as giants. But when television sets stormed into the living rooms of American homes around the turn of the decade, going out to see those stars became a little obsolete. Jimmy and Sally could sit as close to the television set as they wanted to, and they could see John Wayne—or a new cowboy who looked enough like John Wayne to kids who wouldn’t know the difference—as intimately as they wanted to.

There was evolution in the storytelling at around this time, which coincided with an influx of method actors, like James Dean and Marlon Brando, to Southern California. Those things were happening, but it would take a few years to see if the shift in movies’ tones were doing anything for the box office. A quicker solution to the problem might come from evolving the actual moviegoing experience.

If theaters could make going to the movies feel novel again, they might attract more customers.1

How do you make moviegoing a novelty again? Change the format. Specifically, change the aspect ratio.

If you, like me, grew up in the early aughts, you are probably familiar with the terms “fullscreen” and “widescreen.” Every DVD I popped into the player when I was eight came with the option to watch the feature in either format. In 1950, though, these terms did not exist. Everything was in what we now know as “fullscreen,” but it didn’t have a counterpart that would necessitate a defined word to describe what it was. The arms race changed that.

Studios and independent manufacturers and producers alike all seemed to agree that making films wider was the answer to their dwindling box office prospects. And none more than Cinerama, which was actually the first of these processes to become a well-known format, embraced the mission to remake moviegoing into a real novel experience.

Cinerama, not unlike ScreenX, used three synchronized projectors to screen a film on a giant, curved screen that sort of enveloped the first row of a theater. The goal of Cinerama was to immerse people in a film as much as the 146-degree arc would allow. It might have worked if anyone was brave and stupid enough to take the financial risk and shoot their feature film with three synchronized cameras to test the thing out. But for the few who did get to see documentaries and travelogues projected in Cinerama in the early 1950s, it was allegedly a real treat.

The follow ups to Cinerama came from Twentieth Century-Fox in the form of CinemaScope and Paramount in the form of VistaVision. The two approaches were different from each other. CinemaScope relied on a change of the camera lens to widen the picture; VistaVision shot on regular 35mm film but sideways so that it made the frame wider and the grain finer (proto-70mm). Both were employed by the film industry pretty immediately after their debuts in 1953 and 1954, respectively.

The widescreen boom was the reason that studios also started making “epic pictures,” either in scale or subject matter. Rebel Without A Cause, The Robe, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea were all shot in CinemaScope; The Searchers, The Ten Commandments, and a handful of musicals like The Court Jester, High Society, and White Christmas2 were shot in VistaVision.

All of these processes with fun names were really complicated, either on the production side or the exhibition side or both, and they were soon out-paced by the development of Panavision and the rise of 70mm film becoming more readily available. But for a time, they, along with the growing prevalence of color films (another edge that movies had over television), seemed to keep the wolf away from Hollywood’s door.

But that’s about all. The box office never bounced back to its “pre-1948”3 levels. Why? Because people who moved to the suburbs didn’t have a sudden change of heart to move back to the city, and they kept buying television sets. And television programming was getting pretty good, depending on who you ask. If going to the movies was about being entertained together, the solidification of the “nuclear American family” guaranteed that you could be entertained together at home—for free. (Remember, television, like the radio, was free. Sure, you had to buy a bunch of equipment to access it, but once you made that one-time purchase, you watched TV for no money at all.)

Television production moved from New York to Los Angeles in the early 1950s under the leadership of television pioneers like Desi Arnaz and Dick Powell. The studio system, the successful Hollywood business model that treated filmmaking like glove-making at an Industrial-era factory, collapsed in the mid-1960s. Widescreen and color pictures were here to stay; the moguls that ushered them in were not. Many of them, in fact, had adopted an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” attitude and incorporated their own television divisions.

The future of Hollywood would now rely on two exports: movies and television.

Pay-TV, The Blockbuster, and The Multiplex

Television, I’ll remind you, did not stop movies from being made and exhibited in theaters. And as obvious as that may seem now in 2026, I think it’s important to underscore. People really thought that might happen, that television would replace movie theaters. If this oft-repeated refrain sounds familiar, you’re clearly paying attention to what’s happening today.

Anyway, back in the 1960s, everything was in flux. Eventually, Dad replaced the black-and-white television set with a new color television set. Dramatic anthology series, which were so popular in the 1950s, eventually morphed into the “made-for-television” movie. And in the 1970s, cables were laid down across the world to make way for what early television tycoon Dick Powell always referred to as “pay-TV.” This encapsulates structures like pay-per-view, subscription networks like HBO, and, of course, basic cable.

Exhibitors knew that the movie palace was no longer sustainable. There was just no way to get 3,000 people to see a movie in a theater at the same time. What could be done, though, perhaps, was getting two different groups of 1,500 people in two different movie theaters to see two different movies. Maybe even four groups of 750 people in four different movie theaters. Groups of 375 in eight. 190 in sixteen.

This is how the “multiplex” came to be. Diversifying the slate of features being shown at a theater at any given time was better business than banking on one movie to draw a fraction of the crowd. Additionally, multiplexes required a lot of space to hold so many theaters, and the suburbs had plenty of undeveloped commercial real estate. It was through the multiplex that movie theaters finally moved to the outer ring of a city’s center.

Multiplexes’ proximity to suburban families certainly helped to stabilize the domestic box office, but there was something else afoot that was about to blow up Hollywood’s earnings. In the late 1960s into the 1970s, there were plenty of “New Hollywood” filmmakers who made different and interesting films that people wanted to see, but there were three who really changed what the moviegoing experience was: Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas.

These three filmmakers—who were also real-life friends and business partners—made five movies in the 1970s that transformed moviemaking and re-established the movie theater as the place to be if anyone in America wanted to stay current in the cultural conversation. Those five movies, in release order, were:

• Coppola’s The Godfather in 1972, which became the highest-grossing movie of all time shortly into its initial run.

• Lucas’ American Graffiti in 1973, which became one of the most profitable films ever made (maybe as a result of Coppola’s compliance in having his name slapped on it as “Executive Producer.”)

• Coppola’s The Godfather Part II in 1974, which established that sequels could be just as good, perhaps even better, than their predecessors.

• Spielberg’s Jaws in 1975, which is widely identified as the first film that eventized the moviegoing experience, the film that created the “summer Blockbuster” and kicked off “the Blockbuster era.”

• Lucas’ Star Wars in 1977, which built on the box-office precedent set by Spielberg’s Jaws by demonstrating that a big film could turn into a multimedia franchise.

By 1980, the Blockbuster era was in full swing, and moviegoing seemed to be an American past time again. Spielberg and Lucas pioneered the blockbuster format with new entries like the Indiana Jones franchise and Spielberg’s E.T. the Extraterrestrial. Soon, a slightly younger generation followed the blueprint. Robert Zemeckis created the Back to the Future franchise and labored over (with mentor Spielberg) the greatest live action-animated feature of all time, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

The blockbusters and their sequels made moviegoing a required activity. If you wanted to be able to speak to your friends and colleagues, you had to go see these movies in theaters when they came out. And perhaps most critically, because the majority of blockbusters were often about fantastical things—Alien was about aliens; Ghostbusters was about ghosts; Terminator was about the concept of “Arnold Schwarzenegger: movie star”—movies became the place to stretch your imagination. They became the modern incarnation of the “epic picture.”

While movies were being eventized, television was transforming in a similar way, creating the concept of the “water cooler moment.”4 The difference between the mediums was the content. The Cosby Show welcomed you into the Huxtable house like you were another family member; The Golden Girls got you excited about retiring with your BFFs somewhere in Florida; Cheers was the place where everybody knew your name. As the 21st century approached, the balance of content seemed to save movie theaters. Television displayed your everyday life; Movie theaters displayed that which was conceptually larger than life.

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Home video, Smart TVs, and Streaming

The 1980s certainly marked the beginning of a renaissance period for moviegoing in America, but it was also the decade that gave birth to the forces that would threaten to destroy it again.

As was the case in the 1950s, the main culprit responsible for a slow decline in the domestic box office was new technology. The VHS tape and later the DVD made going to the movies less enticing, but “physical media” (which is, among cinephiles, having a bit of a moment right now) wasn’t so much to blame as the Internet was.

Revenue earned from the sale of physical media technically counted toward a film’s bottom line, and the world of the 1990s was analog enough that people still visited the movie theater, if only to scope out their future investment in a film’s DVD. But in the 2000s, as wireless connection replaced dial-up and televisions became “smart,” going to the movies became a whole thing again. Why drive to the megaplex to see something new when you could pirate it for free and screencast it to your big, new widescreen television?

Eventually, Netflix, which used to mail DVDs to people’s houses, splintered into two new companies: Netflix, the streamer, and Roku, the hardware that made streaming possible on your television. It feels almost pointless to tell you what happened next because we’re living it, but very succinctly, streaming became the “infinite scroll” equivalent for what was now firmly being referred to as “content.” Television shows started to look more and more like movies, and the blockbuster strategy that had worked for 25 years fell off a cliff after Avengers: Endgame premiered in 2019.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, the digital connection that the Internet provided somehow replaced face-to-face, “IRL” connection that humans have thrived on for thousands of years. The pandemic only intensified this phenomenon. I’m not sure that I feel far enough away from lockdown to speak with any certainty of its longterm impact on the film industry, but what I do know for sure is that it’s not good!

I’ve spent a lot of time on this Substack talking about the death of Hollywood. We’re in the spiral right now. I don’t know how it’s gonna turn out. Nobody does.

But it’s clear that a combination of technology, a traditional disruptor, and the anthropological shifts taking place in our society, more of a “once-in-a-lifetime” kind of disruptor, are wreaking a level of havoc on the film industry, and moviegoing in particular, that is genuinely unprecedented.

So what’s gonna happen?

In 1958, when Dick Powell was the loudest voice in Hollywood championing pay-TV, he made a rather bold prediction: “Free TV will still exist,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “People still go to a show, still go to band concerts, even with TV…If Pay-TV doesn’t come, TV will remain a high-class mediocrity.”5

Sitting here in 2026, I think we can all agree that he was right. When pay-TV came, free TV did not go away. People still see stage shows; they still go to concerts; they still go to the movie theater. (And pay-TV did usher in more prestigious television, but that’s sort of a different thing than what we’re talking about.) The point is, he said that almost 70 years ago. And all those things that The Hollywood Reporter was asking him about are still around.

There’s a lot stacked against American movie theaters right now. Studio consolidation and the shrinking “theatrical window;” hyper individualism; the screen in your pocket. But in the first five months of 2026 alone, there have been movies that have performed so well at the box office that they blew by their tracking numbers. Amazon’s Project Hail Mary, Universal’s Michael, Universal’s The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, and, YES, Disney’s The Devil Wears Prada 2 are just four of them.

It would seem, based on the data, that people still want to see movies in theaters. And we have some data about what kind of theater is resonating with the masses.

IMAX, which promises its viewers the biggest screen of all time, is here to stay. 4DX and ScreenX also appear to be popular, especially for high-octane action pictures. And then, of course, Sphere is going to continue screening movies, and the psychos behind Sphere are only going to get better at doing it.6

The formats will evolve, and some (more than others) will attract movie enthusiasts to purchase tickets to the theater. This I am sure of. What I’m less sure of is the philosophy of the moviegoing public.

Why do people go to the movies in 2026? Unlike moviegoing’s golden age during the 1930s and 1940s, moviegoing today is prohibitively expensive, which eliminates the possibility that the movie theater is an accessible “third space” in a modern world where third spaces seem to be non-existent. And any cultural conversations about movies that are happening are happening online, in Reddit threads and in TikTok comment sections.

But.

Like moviegoing’s golden age during the 1930s and 1940s, the American public is living through extraordinary times, on the brink of global financial collapse and inching closer to another world war. (Or maybe, it’s already started…) The social conditions that gave way to the movie palace, temples of cinema where people could forget their troubles and laugh at Mickey Rooney with 2,999 strangers, mirror those of today.

Escapism, perhaps, is what is driving the current box office surge. That, for my money, is the best explanation as to why people are flocking in droves to see a movie about an astronaut and his rock best friend or a bad biopic about a bad man who made incredible music or a movie about our favorite Italian-American cartoon or a movie about Stanley Tucci’s fine ass. (Plus, so much television real estate has been gobbled up by reality programming. Movies’ latest edge comes from their commitment to narrative storytelling.)

Honestly, I hope that is the reason. Because there will always be hard times. And people will always need places to go to forget about the hard times. And maybe, just maybe, the movie theater will always be one of those places.

So is being in the movie the future of moviegoing? In terms of the format, it’s very possible. In terms of the audience’s ability to sit back, relax, and be entertained? Absolutely.

One of the many perks about living in Los Angeles when you’re a person who loves movies is the Thursday Night Preview. If you really can’t wait to see something that’s coming out on Friday, it’s almost a guarantee that you’ll be able to go to any one of the AMCs in Burbank—the 6, the 8, and the crown jewel the 16—on Thursday and be treated to the newest major motion picture before anyone else in America is. And in a variety of formats, no less. Let the “coastal elite” accusations roll in!

The tricky thing about the Thursday Night Preview, though, is that you must decide to attend one of these precious screenings well before Thursday night rolls around if you wanna get a good seat. It was this past Wednesday at maybe 10pm when a thought struck me: “I wonder if there are still tickets left for The Devil Wears Prada 2 at 7pm at the 16 tomorrow.”

I raced to my AMC app—I’m A-List, please—and saw that out of all of the screenings with ideal start times, there was just one that had a single seat in a reasonable spot in the theater. “I will see you tomorrow night, Mr. Tucci,” I whispered on the toilet as I snagged J13 before anyone else could.

I won’t bury any ledes. When I actually go to the movies, I rarely care about the format in which I see the picture. I’m sort of old school in that way. I watch movies like I’m a person living in the 1930s, one whose mouth is agape in wonder at the marvel of seeing Leonardo DiCaprio’s face thirty feet tall, an occasional bag of buttered popcorn in my lap. “Wow, that’s really him,” I think. (I’ve seen Total Eclipse (1995), for the record. So, YEAH. I’m a FAN!)

This Thursday’s viewing experience of The Devil Wears Prada 2 included a bucket of buttered popcorn and a bag of plain M&Ms and plenty of drooling over an Italian-American Scorpio actor. (Tucci and DiCaprio have the same birthday. Look it up.) But right before the movie started, as would happen in an IMAX theater or a Dolby Cinema theater, there was an ad for the format we were about to see the movie in: ScreenX.

I’ve never seen something in ScreenX, and, I’ll admit, I’d never even heard of a ScreenX screening until I was in one. Literally. ScreenX, for the uninitiated, is a 270-degree viewing experience in which the majority of a film is projected on the screen in front of you, but the margins of the film are projected on the walls on either side of the typical screen. So when you see a movie in ScreenX, the goal is to have you be immersed in the film.

Whether or not I liked my ScreenX experience for The Devil Wears Prada 2 doesn’t really matter. But because I went into the screening without knowing that I was going to be in such a situation, during the first ten minutes of the movie, I kept thinking, “who invented this and why did they think it was necessary?”

And because I’m something of a historian myself,1 I answered my own question pretty immediately.

One could make a cogent argument that how we view movies has been just as important as the movies themselves throughout the history of Hollywood, the history of film, really. After all, moving pictures were an invention of mechanics before they were anything with artistic merit.

As I mentioned in my piece about how Hollywood has always been anti-trust, many of The Town’s earliest movers and shakers were exhibitors. But I didn’t explain why that was the case.

In the early twentieth century, there weren’t really “movie theaters.” That term didn’t even exist. What did exist, though, were nickelodeons. And compared to theaters that required real, live human beings who required real things in exchange for their services like money and food, nickelodeons were relatively cheap to run. Moviegoing was also a burgeoning leisure activity, one that attracted the average Joe rather than the theater-going elite. And the Joes spent their nickels like it was their last day on Earth.

For a handful of Jewish Eastern European immigrants, who found discrimination and antisemitism when they showed up to their factory jobs in other industries like textiles and scrap metal, film exhibition promised a new enterprise with very little WASPy overhead. For Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn and Adolph Zukor and Carl Laemmle and the Warner brothers, the flicker of the films they showed in their first nickelodeons lit their paths to realizing the American Dream.

What movies mean to Americans, and really to people across the world, has changed considerably over the last 120 years. And the formats through which we view moving images have evolved over that same period of time.

No matter what anyone says, movies aren’t dying. We see more video than we ever have. It’s not the movies that are poised for extinction. It’s movie theaters that are under threat.

And this is despite ScreenX’s best efforts!

Hollywood has seen many a seismic shift, and at the epicenter of each seems to be the exhibitors. This current era of collapse and consolidation is no different. People will say that the problem is the content, but that isn’t the primary factor. (And I’m not so sure that’s even really true.) It’s how people are viewing movies, and how rapidly those modes of exhibition are changing, that is the problem.

As my readers know, this, the chaos of today’s movie industry, is something that I think about a lot. And after sitting through The Devil Wears Prada 2 in ScreenX on Thursday, I wanted to dive into the history of commercial film exhibition in the United States.

I am a firm believer that you find your present in your past. Perhaps if we assess the groundbreaking leaps in exhibition alongside the external forces that have threatened the longevity of the movie theater, we can find a way out of the mess we’re in now.

So this will be part one, which will cover the rise of moviegoing in the first half of the twentieth century through to the collapse of the box office in the early 1950s, the first real “death of cinema” in the United States. Part two will cover the answers to that death, the Blockbuster era, 3-D, IMAX, and streaming.

And along the way, I hope to raise and provide answers to the most critical question: why do people even go to the movies? I think that the answer has changed as much as the technology has.

So let’s dive in. Our story starts with none other than the man, the myth, the legend: Thomas Edison.

(We’re doing it!!!)

The Nickelodeon

Before the first nickelodeon opened on Smithfield Street in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1905, motion pictures had been around for a little over fifteen years. In late nineteenth-century America, people who were lucky enough to see the modern miracle of a moving image viewed films through Kinetoscopes, machines that allowed a single eyeball a bird’s-eye view of film that was shot with a Kinetograph motion picture camera.

The Kineto-mechanisms were invented by—and, crucially, patented by—the Edison Company. Dial up the speed on your Kinetoscope a few notches and fast forward to 1908 to witness the establishment of the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), affectionately known as the Edison Trust.

The Edison Trust had one goal: squash all competition in film production, distribution, and exhibition. How did Edison accomplish his mission? He owned all of the patents to all of the equipment that he invented, which was basically all of the equipment you needed to make or screen a movie.

If you were a struggling independent filmmaker and you used Edison-invented equipment—which you did because it was your only option—then you had to pay Edison a licensing fee to use it. Cameras, projectors, everything except the actual film. That you could buy from the Eastman Kodak company, who was also part of the Edison Trust. Cool!

Meanwhile, the nickelodeon was revolutionizing not only the viewing experience, but Americans’ relationship to films. When the nickelodeon arrived, people could watch movies together, not one at a time like they had to with the Kinetoscope. Vaudeville theaters then started showing film shorts at the end of their shows. Edison was too busy trying to vanquish his enemies through an endless stream of lawsuits to see the forest for the trees. The movies were no longer a novelty; they were becoming a form of mass media.

The independent exhibitors I previously mentioned—Mayer, Goldwyn, Zukor, Laemmle, Warner(s)—fled the East Coast and went to Hollywood. Besides the promise of great shooting weather all-year round, California, especially in the early 1910s, was so far from Menlo Park, New Jersey, where Edison resided, that it would take a multi-day train ride for Edison to do anything about their delinquency in abiding by the laws of the MPPC.

By the time the Sherman Act busted the Edison Trust in 1915, everyone who had moved to California was already steps ahead of filmmakers who lived on the Eastern Seaboard. They had been doing whatever they wanted to for a couple of years. And several, like Zukor and Laemmle and another guy named Marcus Loew, owned chains of nickelodeons, which were quickly transforming into proper theaters. Movie theaters.

The Movie Palace

You know that pivotal scene in Midnight In Paris (2011) where Marion Cotillard takes Owen Wilson to the turn-of-the-century Moulin Rogue? How she feels about the Belle Époque of Paris is how I feel about film exhibition from 1915 through 1945. Not only because I think that the movie palace is one of the most gorgeous, if grandiose, inventions of American architecture, but also because this was the peak of moviegoing for the country. And I think that the audience philosophy during this 30-year period most resembles my own.

A bunch of important misfits moved to Southern California during the 1910s, and as each studio grew its production slate to accommodate the misfits’ massive creative and commercial output, they also grew their theater chains. The Loews, the Foxes, the Paramounts. Movie theaters popped up all over the country, and each newly constructed theater was bigger than the last one that had been built.

There was a reason for the growing size of movie houses beyond Hollywood’s output, and that was Americans’ appetite for motion pictures. Nickelodeons went extinct because they were too small to contain the hundreds of people who wanted to see movies. For the people who had an endless supply of nickels, they soon grew tired of the shorts that nickelodeons played. Runtime grew alongside the people’s burning desire to see films on bigger screens. The number of seats in the exhibition space had to match the wants of the people that would fill them.

Supply and demand.

Eventually, the largest links in the theater chains became the movie palaces. These were ornate and elaborate structures, 3,000-seaters with one big screen and a big stage. Some, like Grauman’s Chinese and Egyptian Theaters in Los Angeles, were erected with exotic themes, making them all the more alluring to the average moviegoer.

The movie palace was the hub of a town’s entertainment, and not just because of the movies that it screened. Most of them also offered live acts between silents, or vice versa, depending on the balance of the bill. Over their first decade in existence, when you bought a ticket to a show at a movie palace, you were really getting a show.

Five or six times a day, movie palaces entertained people in droves with dancers, bands, and movies, acts that were shuffled along by the movie palace master of ceremonies, a job that existed for a very short amount of time. The movie palace emcee was your guide through the experience, and if you were packed into a room with 2,999 other eager beavers waiting to see the latest Francis X. Bushman picture, you were grateful that the emcee was there to keep order.

When movie palaces were the places to see movies, the audience was there to be entertained. Those crowds had the same energy that a Broadway theater crowd has. They were unmistakably alive, their collective leisure creating a spark of energy so dynamic that, sometimes, they’d come back for the next show, even if it was identical to the one they’d just seen. Being entertained is one thing. Being entertained while thousands of other people are being entertained alongside you? A totally electric experience.

In 1927, after The Jazz Singer premiered at Warner Bros.’ biggest theater in New York City, many movie palaces underwent the giant transformation of being wired for sound.

This, for obvious reasons, was a pivotal moment in Hollywood history. Films had been silent for their first thirty years. Suddenly, they weren’t. They couldn’t be inventive feats of only visual art; they had to be inventive feats of auditory art, too.

Sound films—“talkies” as they really were known—shifted every studio’s production slate so severely that many silent-era actors were suddenly out of a job because they didn’t sound good enough to be in a movie. But with talkies came two other major shifts in American entertainment.

The first was the death of vaudeville, which wasn’t immediate, but it didn’t take long, either. Luckily, in the same year that The Jazz Singer premiered on screen, Show Boat premiered on the stage, making way for the rise of the American “book” musical. That’s a story for another day and, honestly, for another writer. I don’t know enough about Broadway history to speak on it coherently. The point is, live theater didn’t die. It just evolved, and it left vaudeville behind.

A lesser discussed but perhaps more important consequence of theaters being wired for sound was the short but critical evolution of the movie palace master of ceremonies. Before, he was probably some trumpet player who led the house band. Now, juggling sound films, live acts, and visiting movie stars on “personal appearance tours,” the movie palace emcee needed to be someone with a real personality. And one with real talent. He may not have been seen by more than 3,000 people at a time, but sometimes he was heard by hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions depending on the metropolitan area, because sometimes he broadcast his show over the radio.

Movie palace emcees became celebrities to those in their immediate vicinities, and a lucky few, like Dick Powell in Pittsburgh, eventually moved West to become nationally known movie stars themselves. As movie palaces dropped their emcees and their live acts, sound films kicked off the Golden Age of Cinema in the United States. The people still came in droves, but they were just there to see—and hear—the movie.

For the movie palace to work, especially after the advent of the talkie, it needed most of its seats full. They can be cavernous spaces, those movie palaces, and without a lot of bodies in warm clothing to absorb some of the crackling from the synchronized sound technology, a movie would probably be unintelligible even to someone with perfect hearing. And through the 1930s, not even the Great Depression could stop people from congregating within the four giant walls of these structures.

The movie palace was the ultimate escape from a harsh reality for millions of Americans, and it was the first place that human beings could see and hear other human beings who were literally larger than life. The aspect ratios were all the same—4:3—and no one was thinking that they’d be anything other than that. The screen was huge. It didn’t matter what shape it was.

You would think that World War II would have hit movie palaces particularly hard. It kind of did, but what really hurt the box office was everything that came after the war.

The “Box Office Slump”

I will be the first to tell you that there is no one reason that is solely responsible for the decline in moviegoing at the end of the 1940s. Anyone who thinks one thing is to blame is not thinking critically.

The confluence of factors, in a semi-particular order, are as follows:

1. When soldiers came home, they took their brides and moved them out of urban environments, creating what we now know as “the suburbs.” For the movie palaces of America, which were often planted in the centers of cities, this meant that a large portion of their audience left town.

2. The Red Scare had an effect on more than just Hollywood itself. In addition to the round up and expulsion of supposed “communists” from Tinseltown, the light fare that moguls were hell-bent on pumping out was no longer interesting to a nation scarred. When the Iron Curtain was being lowered upon the decimated cities of Europe and Asia, it was hard for Americans to give a shit about Mickey Rooney’s foibles as lovable liar Andy Hardy. Like…who cares if Andy finds love or not? Stalin is building a nuclear program!

3. As I’ve talked about at length, the moguls lost their legal right to own theater chains after the Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. in 1948. This marked the loss of a major revenue stream for theaters, and they were forced to alter their business model. This meant that they couldn’t make as many pictures per year as they had for their first couple of decades in business.

4. If one reason gets all the glory in this game of blame, it’s television. The rise of television, which really started in 1947, was apparently the biggest factor in the decline of the cinema box office. “Video killed the radio star,” as it were.

All of these things happening at the same time were the core reasons that the box office collapsed in 1950. Television, though, I will admit, is the only one that had a meaningful effect on film exhibition, the actual format by which moviegoers saw motion pictures.

For its first five decades, film formats evolved, but not by much. Film was film; pretty quickly, it was produced in a few standard sizes. It was up to the projectors to make them dazzle, any “wow” factor coming from how big a theater’s screen was. But everything was in the 4:3 aspect ratio.

Including television.

Filmmakers needed to compete. For the general public, if they could be entertained with the same kind of thing at home as they could in a theater, why on Earth would they ever leave their homes to go to the theater?

This was the motivating question behind many studios’ R&D departments as they scrambled to invent new film formats to lure people out of their suburban homes and back into the movie theater.

We’ll start with those formats—Cinerama, CinemaScope, and my beloved VistaVision—next time.

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WARNING: If you plan to see “The Drama” but have not seen it yet, do NOT read this piece. Come back to it after you’ve seen it!

First of all…do we think that Josh D’Amaro read my piece about how Walt Disney would not invest in OpenAI, and that’s what led to the closure of Sora literally one day later? My dream (that is my wish that my heart made)…

Typically, I try to write about the business of the entertainment industry, stories that connect the dots between the Ted Sarandoses and the Louis B. Mayers of Hollywood, tales that illustrate the domino effect of technological evolutions, yarns that expose “show business” as a model that lives up to the paradox inherent in its name. Big picture kinda stuff, you know?

But I wouldn’t be so interested in the entertainment industry if I didn’t love its product. After seeing screen darling A24’s latest offering, The Drama, I started thinking about the movie’s lineage, its film ancestors who paved the way for the absurdly hysterical effort from Kristoffer Borgli. Nothing happens in a vacuum, and I was curious about how far back I could go with possible influences.

Turns out, pretty far back. Like…90 years back.

Now, I’m not a “cinephile” in the classic sense, one who considers the Criterion Closet to be the ultimate temple of the screen. I’ve never seen a John Cassavetes movie, though Husbands (1970) has been on my list for forever. I’ve never seen a Paul Newman movie, either, though I’ve seen him many times on hundreds of bottles of salad dressing throughout my life. I’ve never even seen Jurassic Park (1993). (I don’t wanna hear it.)

What I have seen, though, are seven Mervyn LeRoy movies. I’ve seen every movie that Fred & Ginger ever made together, and I’ve seen most every that Fred & Carole made together.1 My most-watched director of 2025 was Michael Curtiz; my top actor, to no one’s surprise I’m sure, was Dick Powell. And while I’ve just started to dip my toe into the New Hollywood pool—I saw Hal Ashby’s Harold & Maude (1971) a few weeks ago and was moved to tears, and I’ve seen every Godfather movie, I’ll have you know—I think it’s safe to say that any deep knowledge I have of the history of American cinema is reserved for the “classic” period, or as it’s better know, the “Golden Age.”

My initiation into Old Hollywood was rather unceremonious, and completely driven by my own curiosity. But what started out as a practical quest2 to program my moviegoing experiences like TCM programs its content blocks has turned into an intense reverence for the art of Golden Age cinema. The adage is old, perhaps even worn, but it really is true that after finishing a crisp Howard Hawks picture, you can’t help but say: “God! They just don’t make ‘em like they used to.”

There is a literal dimension to this cliché. Most films aren’t shot in black-and-white anymore, for instance. The science of filmmaking has evolved leaps and bounds over the century that sound films have existed—and that’s just sound films! But there are also qualities of storytelling that have radically changed; in fact, some movie genres don’t even exist anymore.

The screwball comedy is one such genre.

Before you lambaste my declaration, I’ll admit that movies that have shades of the screwball have been made since the genre’s classic period ended sometime in the mid-1940s. But I hope that you would admit that when you hear the words “screwball comedy,” the first few people who pop into your head are Cary Grant or Jean Arthur or Edward Everett Horton.3

Over the last two years, I’ve watched probably 20 or more screwball comedies, from classics like It Happened One Night (1934) and The Awful Truth (1938) to more obscure fare like Easy Living (1937) and Christmas In July (1940) (the latter two both written by the wonderful satirist Preston Sturges, by the way). Even among these four examples, plots vary widely, but there are key characteristics that make a screwball a screwball:

1. At the center of the story are a man and a woman who, despite every ludicrous obstacle thrown their way, you know will end up together.

2. Per the previous characteristic, the obstacles that our heroes face are often so ridiculous that they’re farcical.

3. Screwballs smartly and surreptitiously deal with big societal issues, which usually include class and always include gender relations.

4. Snappy dialogue is not a must, but it seems to be omnipresent in this genre. I personally believe that screwballs of the 1930s got faster and faster until they culminated in 1940 with my favorite screwball of all time, His Girl Friday, which must be watched at least three times before a viewer can comprehend even half the lines that are spewed by the film’s characters.

The screwball comedy emerged alongside a few other genres that we don’t see in their classical forms as much anymore, gangster pictures and the big-budget musical comedy being the other two I’m most familiar with. While these three genres have mutated over time—the screwball has become the romantic comedy; the gangster picture has become the anti-hero drama; the big-budget musical has become whatever Damien Chazelle was trying to do with La La Land (2016)—they were born from the Great Depression. And Depression-era audiences needed what many would call “escapist stuff,” to borrow a phrase from 1954’s screwball-adjacent sex comedy Susan Slept Here.4

Plenty of films from the Golden Age were labeled “escapist.” It might feel obvious what the American public felt they needed to escape from during that period of time, but I’ll spell it out anyway. The combination of the Great Depression and World War II made for a pretty bleak outlook for about fifteen years. The movie palace itself—with its silver screen and red velvet seats—was an escape from a gray, industrialized world unwilling to give its inhabitants a chance to prosper, unwilling to give some a chance to live.

This is where most of the magic in Golden Age movies comes from—and where most of the magic from that era of Hollywood comes from, too. Films really used to show ideal scenarios, fantasy lives where people who were down and out triumph spectacularly, almost impossibly, at the conclusion of a picture. Believe it or not, people used to like happy endings.

All of that started to change after World War II. American audiences suddenly wanted a level of realism in their movies, the opposite of “escapist stuff.” And that desire for realism was turbocharged by the makers of movies themselves, either through method acting or the decline of the soundstage5 or, eventually, all those New Hollywood directors I’m largely unfamiliar with.

In today’s world, in which nuance is practically dead and movies like One Battle After Another are winning Best Picture at the Oscars, light fare at the AMC seems hard to imagine. The screwball comedy? Unfathomable.

Enter The Drama.

Now, I’m not gonna sit here and tell you that The Drama is a screwball comedy in the classic sense. Those movies really won’t ever be made like that again. But as I attempted to put together a mental list of its predecessors, the first comp I thought of was 1938’s Bringing Up Baby, arguably the most quintessential effort in the screwball tradition.

(SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT! DON’T SAY I DIDN’T WARN YOU!)

The Drama sees engaged couple Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) thrust into an impossible series of events after Emma confesses that she planned—but did not carry out—a school shooting at her high school when she was fifteen years old. The confession comes days before their wedding. Hijinks ensue, as they say.

Before I go on, I’ll tell you that I have no desire to be a cultural critic. I have no doubt that the specifics of Emma’s confession will rub more than a few moviegoers the wrong way, especially if they watch the film in any theater in America, the actual site of a handful of mass shootings over the last two decades. And as an American myself, I totally accept and respect that reaction.

So I’m not here to critique The Drama; I’m not here to tell you if including that specific plot point is morally right or culturally sensitive or if it’s neither of those things.

I’m here to tell you why, upon seeing the film, I instantly thought, “are screwball comedies back?”

After Emma’s big confession, we watch Charlie—a man—devolve into an insecure, easily influenced doubter. He is not disturbed by her confession as much as he is disturbed about what it says about his fiancée, and more importantly, what it says about him. He seeks impartiality from his coworker Misha, but when she doesn’t give him the answer he’s looking for, he, in a moment of sheer panic, tries to have sex with her. He quickly aborts the plan when he realizes (perhaps) that grasping at ways to exert his manhood won’t take the confusion of his fiancée’s troubled teenage past away.

The whole thing falls apart at Charlie and Emma’s wedding, when a classic pile of misunderstandings erupts in slapstick-style violence. Emma is ridiculed by her evil maid of honor Rachel—you scare me, Alana Haim—and Charlie gets a head butt to the face from his would-be affair partner’s boyfriend.

If you’re thinking, “How is this anything like Bringing Up Baby?” I hear you.

It was in The Drama’s ending where I found the familiar final beat of a classic screwball.

Charlie wanders into a diner called Andy’s after the wedding reception takes its disastrous turn. The audience will recognize Andy’s as a common spot for the couple after Emma suggested they end their wedding night there early on in the film. Sad and on the brink of a nervous breakdown, Charlie is relieved to see Emma walk in five minutes after him. They sit tensely in a booth until Emma implies that she wants to just forget the whole thing. Charlie implies that he agrees. The two smile and hold each other’s hands across the table. “The End.”

In order to entertain my argument, you must believe that Charlie and Emma winding up together is the happy ending I believe it to be. Today’s audience, so desperate for a level of realism I don’t quite understand given how often they are inundated with live footage of crimes against humanity, may not see it that way. Emma should be punished for her thought crime; Charlie should be punished for his three-second lapse in judgment. Marital love—societal convention that it should be unconditional be damned—should not exist between these two reprehensible characters.

I say this with love: It’s a movie. These people are not real. You won’t hurt anybody if you merely try to see the ending as the cherry on top I believe it to be. (Maybe I’m a culture critic after all…)

In addition to the promise of a lifetime of love for its central couple, The Drama contains those other key elements of a screwball that I mentioned previously:

1. The dominoes that fall after Emma’s instigating confession are so outlandish that the hullabaloo surrounding her admission of murderous thoughts becomes the driving force behind the satire, not the confession itself.

2. Beyond the obvious relevance of school shootings, The Drama comments on male-female romantic relationships in the year 2026 with blistering accuracy, making a fool of the man at its helm and making a villain of the woman (unjustly, in my opinion). If this story isn’t a byproduct of the wedding-industrial complex and the panopticon that we live in because of the phones in our pockets, then I don’t know what is.

3. While I wouldn’t say that this movie has particularly snappy dialogue, it has especially snappy editing, the visual equivalent of dialogue, if you ask me.

Most crucially, The Drama is premiering at a time in America when, and forgive me for being so blunt, everything has gone to hell in a hand basket. As the country plunges into fascism and a handful of insecure and petulant men control all of the wealth, The Drama provides a timely escape. It’s dark, to be sure, much darker than any pure screwball of the 1930s ever was—though I think that My Man Godfrey (1936) has its fair share of questionable ethics.

But I found The Drama to be comforting. The familiarity of its core is painful, but when its details get thrown at you in a dark theater, you can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it all. The absurdity of this time. The absurdity of our very lives.

So why did it remind me of Bringing Up Baby, specifically?

Well, beyond the fact that Robert Pattinson’s Charlie bears a striking resemblance to Cary Grant’s David Huxley—they’re both bespectacled Nervous Nellies in charge of museum curation—and beyond the fact that Katharine Hepburn’s Susan Vance makes her partner’s life a living hell, not unlike Zendaya’s Emma, Bringing Up Baby has the same ending that The Drama does.

After David spends time in jail with his perpetual annoyance (read: his kidnapper) Susan, he finally resigns himself to being in love with her. David reluctantly admits to Susan that he can’t live without her while she’s on top of a ladder. The ladder wobbles perilously under the explosion of Susan’s joy at her Stockholm Syndrome success story. To prevent herself from falling, she climbs atop a giant dinosaur skeleton, and David rescues her from certain death just before the bones fall to pieces beneath her. David is beside himself at the destruction of his life’s work; Susan doesn’t care. They embrace. “The End.”

Since I don’t think I’m the calibre of cinephile I need to be to make a definitive judgment, it feels foolish to declare that The Drama is the best example of a 21st century screwball. But for me and my money and my essay? I think it is.

Whether screwballs are poised to make a comeback or not is up to Hollywood executives, and last I heard, comedy itself was on its way out. But do I think that these hard times will bring about more absurdist storytelling, a new kind of escapism that is as dystopian as it is laugh-out-loud funny? You betcha. I know I chuckled during Bugonia last November!

A modern screwball will never look like a classic screwball, but in these uncertain times, the bones of the classic screwball are bound to hold up a few evolutions of the genre. And The Drama, at a minimum, is the latest evolution whose X-ray will reveal that its skeleton was inherited from the films of Preston Sturges or Frank Capra or, of course, Howard Hawks.

They don’t make ‘em like they used to. But they make ‘em like this. And hey! When it comes down to it? I’m just glad they’re makin’ ‘em.

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Hear ye, hear ye! Our new Disney king has been crowned, and the long reign of benevolent and savvy leader Robert Iger has come to an official end. “So long, partner,” I whisper, à la Woody at the end of Toy Story 3 (2010), through the window of my Burbank apartment, my body angled to face the Disney lot down the hill.

We’ve only lived in Josh D’Amaro’s America for six days, but his feet have already been thrust into the fire in the form of The Bachelorette scandal. Puck founder and my personal idol Matt Belloni summed up how Disney’s former head honcho is probably feeling right now in this glorious tweet:

(Shout out to my best friend Alison, who sent the tweet to me immediately. You’re my day one.)

On Wednesday, March 18, his first official day as CEO of The Walt Disney Company, Josh D’Amaro spoke to the company’s shareholders in a beautifully edited, all-encompassing video. Here’s what I would describe as the thesis statement of his message:

“Simply put, while others in our industry are consolidating just to compete or struggling to be relevant in a fragmented and disrupted world, Disney’s in a category of one.”

As much a dig as it is a declaration. Okay, Josh’s speech writer! I see you!

Toward the end of the fifteen-minute spiel, D’Amaro says that, “underpinning all of [our efforts] is technology…because we know that technology acts as an amplifier for our stories, our experiences, and the emotional connection audiences have with our brand.”

Following this explanation, I was fully prepared for an update on the billion-dollar investment that Disney made in OpenAI at the end of 2025. But alas, even for the shareholders, AI seems to be a taboo subject.

After bringing up Disney’s investment in Epic Games, D’Amaro transitions into the beginnings of his closing statement:

“We’ll continue to develop and embrace new technologies to empower our storytellers, but never at the expense of our characters and worlds, our creative partners, or the trust people place in us. Because Disney, at its core, is a company that celebrates human creativity.”

It would seem that D’Amaro recognizes that Disney’s partnership with OpenAI may be at odds with the ethos of the company’s legendary founder. His best way to combat the naysayers is to avoid mentioning AI itself, shoving all of his eggs into the basket of Disney’s long-held belief that their core business is storytelling.

While I think that’s probably true, that the company’s expertise lies in maximizing a story for every possible corner of human entertainment, it’s notable to me that D’Amaro is unwilling to publicly stand by one of his immediate predecessor’s final acts.

So it begs the question: Would Walt have invested in OpenAI?

The Rabbit, The Mouse, and The Businessman

In 1927, four years after founding a new animation studio with his older brother Roy, Walt Disney had his first big success in Hollywood. He and his creative partner, animator Ub Iwerks, had created one of the first cartoon characters that had a distinct personality. The character was spunky and mischievous, and his elastic physicality was emphasized by his oversized ears. He was a cheeky little varmint, clad in nothing but a pair of shorts.

He was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and he built the Walt Disney Studios on Hyperion Avenue in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Silver Lake. (It’s where the Gelson’s is now, my dear friends who live in the greatest city in America: Los Angeles, California.)

If you thought I was describing Mickey Mouse, you’re proving part of my point. If you’ve ever seen early renderings of these two side-by-side, it’s easy to see that Mickey—the most iconic cartoon character ever—stole his whole vibe from Oswald. They were created only a year apart, Oswald having been first drawn in 1927, Mickey in 1928. But the relationship between these Irish twins is more interconnected than a first glance may convey.

In fact, Oswald is the only reason Mickey Mouse even exists. More specifically, the ownership over the rights of the Oswald character is the reason that Mickey Mouse exists. The story of Oswald as intellectual property (IP) is, in some ways, the Genesis event in the history of what is now known as The Walt Disney Company.

Long story short, Walt and Iwerks were commissioned to create Oswald by Charles Mintz, a tyrant whom Walt had produced several projects for by the mid-1920s. Disney animated Oswald cartoons; Mintz financed the cartoons; Universal Pictures distributed the cartoons. Oswald was an instant hit, and he afforded the Disney brothers with enough cash to hire an actual animation staff.

Because of Oswald’s meteoric rise to becoming one of America’s most-loved animated characters, Walt asked Mintz for a bigger budget. Not only did Mintz refuse Walt’s request, but he systematically destroyed the Walt Disney Studios by persuading each of the new animators to come work for him. As if stealing Walt’s whole staff wasn’t unscrupulous enough, Mintz’s final blow to the Disney brothers was claiming his rightful ownership over Oswald as IP. Mintz did not renew the Disney contract, and he produced Oswald without the rabbit’s creators for the next several years.

Don’t feel too bad for Walt, though. On the train ride home from New York, where he tried to negotiate with Mintz one last time, he drew Mickey Mouse.

And the rest, as they say, is history!!!

Walt’s loss of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit is one of the most brutal business stories from early Hollywood, and it’s one that has been kept alive by The Walt Disney Company ever since it happened. In the early aughts—when, I’ve since realized, Disney was itching to buy back the rights to the rabbit from Universal—the company started peddling the story again, attributing the Oswald fumble to Walt’s inability to read the fine print.

It’s a disingenuous retelling of the tale, one Walt himself would probably resent. In truth, their failure to retain the rights to Oswald turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to the Disney brothers. And it wasn’t just because it gave them Mickey.

For nearly eight decades, Oswald represented something much more core to the evolution of The Walt Disney Company. The lucky rabbit is responsible for the tight grip that Disney has maintained on its IP—a move that has contributed significantly to the Disney brand becoming one of the best known worldwide.

Oswald is the reason there are Mickey Mouse watches and exclusive locations across the globe where you can meet him. (A place called “Disneyland” was Mickey’s first home in our three-dimensional world.) Oswald is the reason that former CEO Michael Eisner sought to bring outside IP into the parks in the 1980s and 1990s. Oswald is the reason that former CEO Bob Iger acquired half a dozen creative companies in the 2000s and 2010s. As the years have rolled on, Disney has seemed only to squeeze their grasp harder on their own brand—until a few months ago.

At the end of 2025, Disney and OpenAI, the company responsible for large language model ChatGPT and video generator Sora, announced a three-year partnership. In the tech company bargain of the century, Disney invested $1 billion in OpenAI in exchange for OpenAI’s exclusive access to Disney’s library of iconic characters. The promise (at the moment) is that Disney fans will be able to create their own stories (read: short-form videos) using these licensed characters, from Captain America to Obi-Wan Kenobi to—YES!!!!!!!!—Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. (Iger traded ESPN sportscaster Al Michaels to NBCUniversal in exchange for Oswald back in 2006.)

When this deal happened, I instantly thought of Oswald. “After all that…” I said to myself. “Just give Sam Altman the keys to the kingdom?!” Letting someone even briefly handle the Disney library was not only an insult to Walt’s legacy as a brand builder, I thought, but it’s just completely antithetical to the way this 100-year-old machine runs. “Walt would never,” I reacted, “do this deal.”

But.

By only focusing on Walt’s career as a filmmaker when assessing this deal in the context of his legacy, I’d be denying his career as a real innovator. Simply put, Walt was a nut for new technology. And what is AI if not the newest technology on the 21st century block?

This dichotomy, Walt’s identities as both an artist and an innovator, is critical to exploring if one hopes to even begin to answer the question: Would Walt Disney Invest in OpenAI?

The Animator, The Innovator, and The City Planner

There’s actually plenty of evidence that would suggest that Walt would jump at the chance to integrate new technology into his company’s practices. And those first few clues can be traced back to his days as a filmmaker. All the way back to when he first met Charles Mintz.

Walt and Mintz first collaborated on something called the “Alice Comedies” which Walt and Iwerks created when Walt Disney Studios was “Laugh-O-Gram” studios. The Alice Comedies were pretty cutting edge for their time, plopping a live-action Alice into a world full of animated creatures. Almost 40 years after the Alice Comedies, Walt would perfect this very particular art form when he made Mary Poppins in 1964. And then, 20 years after Walt’s death, his company would bring live-action animation to its peak with 1988’s groundbreaking Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Animation nerds will attest that Mr. Disney’s biggest filmmaking innovation was the multiplane camera, which allows animated films to have a level of depth that has become standard in the genre. Walt did not invent the first iteration of such a camera, but he patented the definitive version of it in 1940 after developing the technology through the making of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

It will come as no surprise to my readers that Walt’s biggest technological innovations, though, began to take shape shortly after founding WED Enterprises, which is now known as Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI). This R&D branch of The Walt Disney Company was incorporated to design Disneyland, but it has since become, in my humble opinion, the lifeblood of the organization.

WDI’s shiniest innovation is the Audio-Animatronic, which not only crashed through the boundaries of theme park entertainment, but also sparked an entirely new field in an expanding robotics industry. These machines have evolved quickly since Walt first debuted his most-prized project to that point—the original Audio-Animatronic that was built to revive Abraham Lincoln—at the 1964 World’s Fair, and two of the most prestigious robotics departments in the world have experimented with this technology on behalf of the company.

These examples are all legitimate proof that Walt was deeply invested in developing new technology to better entertain his vast and increasingly devoted audience. But there’s one trail of bread crumbs that leads us to EPCOT, which is the most compelling piece of evidence for Walt’s potential interest in AI. And I’m not talking about the theme park.

If you, like me, are a Disney freak, then you already know what the acronym “EPCOT” stands for: “Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow.” The Florida park that poorly stitches together promises of the future with cultures of the past was not originally conceived in such a way. In fact, as the acronym hopefully suggests, it wasn’t even conceived as a theme park.

The project was Walt’s last before he died, and he was so fixated on making it a reality that visitors to his death bed at St. Joseph’s in Burbank remember watching him use the grid of the drop ceiling tiles in his hospital room to plot out the blueprint for his sprawling planned city.

Walt conceived EPCOT as a real town. Plain and simple. He wanted it to be a place where real people actually lived and went to work and raised their families. And every so often, men who worked for EPCOT would come to residents’ homes and replace their appliances with the latest models. EPCOT was supposed to be exactly what it was named: an experimental prototype of a community that was living in the future (i.e., tomorrow).

It is within the original EPCOT hub-and-spoke layout where we meet Walt and his potential investment in OpenAI. If Walt lived long enough to realize his dream of EPCOT—and, crucially, if there were people still living within the confines of his highly controversial social experiment—there is not a doubt in my mind that he would encourage, perhaps even require, the citizens of EPCOT to use generative AI.

To Walt, investing in OpenAI would be akin to being sponsored by General Electric or Pepsi-Cola; it would be a move that would spark innovation and forge collaboration to improve the lives of the average American. Testing this technology in EPCOT homes would provide both Walt and the tech company with valuable insights into the viability of the product. If today’s investment in OpenAI were an investment in the EPCOT of yesteryear, then the answer to the original question is: Yes. Absolutely. Without a doubt.

But.

That’s not what the investment is for. The scope of this deal fits squarely into Disney Entertainment—not the Disney Experiences vertical. And more crucially, a core difference between this deal and all of Walt’s entertainment innovations is that Disney didn’t invent or create the AI that will host its character library. They don’t even own the technology.

With all of that being said and explained, I have to believe that Walt would not only have not made this deal, but he would be so against it he would probably try to patent his own large language model, maybe one that promised to bring rapid developments to the English language itself. (I’m spitballing.)

This is, of course, why D’Amaro made it a point to end his inaugural address emphasizing the importance of the human touch in Disney’s output. The dissonance between this deal and Walt’s legacy hums so constantly that D’Amaro refuses to invoke the term “AI” at all.

To answer the subheadline—And what are Josh D’Amaro’s plans for Disney’s AI usage?—there’s, unbelievably, nothing new to add. Maybe I’m being too hard on D’Amaro. Like I said, it’s only day six.

But whatever he says about it in the future—and he has to talk about it eventually—he’d be wise to extend his general statement on the value of human beings to the deal itself. If only to ensure that some future Sora user’s fan edit of Black Panther and Peter Pan doesn’t come at “the expense of [Disney’s] characters and worlds, [Disney’s] creative partners, or the trust people place in [Disney.]”

With each moment that passes where the deal goes unaddressed, my trust will waver. Your move, Mr. D’Amaro.

Hooooooraaaaaay foooooor HOLLYWOOD!

Wow! What a show!

I’ll level with you: I’m writing this about three hours before the ceremony, but I already know that last night’s Academy Awards did not disappoint. How? Because for the first time in several years, I genuinely had no idea which movie would walk away with Best Picture. I had zero inkling about any of the acting awards. Even cinematography had me guessing.1

(Inserting here that I have been in love with Leonardo DiCaprio since I was three years old, and I hope he won. But if Michael B. Jordan won, that is the correct outcome!)2

This year’s awards cycle has been particularly exciting because of the aforementioned unpredictability. And the tale of the two films in a deadlock for first place make for a story so classically epic that Hollywood could make a movie about it.

If you’re reading this, I probably don’t need to tell you who was on which sides of the rope in this deliciously entertaining tug of war. But I’ll do it anyway.

On Side A, representing an original story that leans on one of the most successful genres of the 21st century (horror) that was created by a relatively young top-rate director of his maturing generation, stands Ryan Coogler’s Sinners.

On Side B, representing an amalgamation of adapted material that seems to be the culminating magnum opus of a well-seasoned director who is widely considered to be among the greatest of his peaking (perhaps cresting) generation, stands Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another.

I’m not here to litigate which movie is better. They’re both great, made by great auteurs, starring great actors, featuring great visuals. Either reasonably could have won Best Picture, and if we were all being honest with ourselves, we would all say, “yeah, that makes sense,” in either case.3

But let’s zoom out.

These two movies have more in common than first meets the eye. They’re both epics that demand to be shown on the big screens that you and I both know are struggling to survive. In fact, Coogler and Anderson are both passionate advocates for the moviegoing experience. (One Battle After Another was the first film in over 60 years to be projected in VistaVision, if you’ll recall.) And fascinatingly, both films were distributed by Warner Bros.—that legacy studio that’s for sale at this very moment.4

If you believe that Hollywood is in its dying days, then Sinners and One Battle After Another are two of the loudest death rattles you’ve ever heard.

The motion picture industry, as it is traditionally known, has been in crisis pretty much since it planted roots in the Los Angeles basin. If it wasn’t Edison who was after disrupting the status quo, it was talking pictures. And if it wasn’t talking pictures, it was The Great Depression. And if it wasn’t The Great Depression, it was the war, and then the Red Scare, and then television, and then home video, and then streaming, and now AI.

The forces of capitalism—the ferocity of competition, the speed of innovation, greed—have crashed down on this business time and time again, waves that have threatened to wipe out the whole town, figuratively and—as production continues to favor locations that are not in California—literally.

But through most of those storms, we’ve had The Oscars, the most prestigious awards for filmmakers, and I would define that word in its most literal sense. For the people who make films, from the actor to the director to the production designer, winning an Oscar means that you are best-in-class at what you do. And for all of the bullshit that you as a maker of movies put up with—the low pay, the long hours, the creeps—getting to hold that golden statuette somehow makes it all worth it.

At least that’s what I imagine winning an Oscar feels like today.

But it wasn’t always like that. In fact, the Academy wasn’t even founded to give out awards.

The Oscars are, in my estimation, a very happy accident born from a pretty ugly business move. As always, I’m here to tell you the story. And like all great movies, I’ll start in the middle of the action.

In the spring of 1926, movie mogul Louis B. Mayer, chief of the recently formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, wanted to build a beach house so quickly that it would be ready by the summer. To win his race against time, he wanted to hire studio labor to make it happen, but the craftsmen had just signed a new labor contract. Seeing the writing on the wall for potential unionization in the town he helped build, Mayer created what eventually became the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (the Academy). His primary goal for the Academy was for it to act like a “company union,” a kind of dominating brain trust of movie people that could circumvent unions by promising fair mediation of labor disputes between the moguls and the people who made the products they sold.

The additional context, here, is that most of the entertainment guilds we know today—the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild of America, the Directors Guild of America—did not exist in the 1920s. But there was one guild that did, and that was the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, better known by its enunciable acronym, IATSE.

IATSE had been around since the 1860s, but it was in the mid-1920s when movie studio laborers, who we would now characterize as “below-the-line craftspeople,” were brought into the union’s fold. Mayer recognized that if he didn’t stop the below-the-line hoards from organizing now, it would be a futile effort to try to discourage the above-the-line creatives from doing the same.

If he created a company union, Mayer thought, he could get ahead of independent unionization. His vision for his organization included five membership branches for the five kinds of makers of movies—technicians, writers, actors, directors, and producers. The goal of what became the Academy was sort of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” in reverse: if you can’t beat ‘em, trick ‘em into joining you.

Mayer’s scheme transformed rapidly. The time it took for this side hustle to go from a union-busting power grab to an honorary organization was only a few small years (wink wink), and there were plenty of good, even noble, ideas that Mayer’s gang came up with to make the Academy a legitimately important institution.

First of all, in the mid-1920s, motion pictures were not really seen as an art form. Mayer hoped that the Academy would change that. (It’s worth noting that those tides were shifting anyway, but still.) His first idea to elevate the prestige of moviemaking itself was to tack on “Arts & Sciences” to the end of the organization’s name.

Another seemingly earnest idea was to set up a true academy, one that would teach people the art of filmmaking. In collaboration with the University of Southern California, founding members of the Academy like D. W. Griffith and William DeMille (brother of Cecil B.) gave academic lectures on things like the technical aspects of filmmaking and storytelling. These lectures marked the creation of USC’s world-renowned film school.

The Academy was so thrilled with the results of these talks that they developed an entire textbook devoted to teaching its readers everything there was to know about the movies. The book had the working title, An Outline of the Motion Picture.

(The textbook was never published, but I am in possession of a draft of the 239-page document, and I can say that it seems to be a genuine effort from Hollywood’s finest. Irving Thalberg, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and granddaddy of the dreaded Production Code himself William H. Hays are among the contributors to the tome.)

If you’re following the thread, it’s not hard to see where the honorary component of the Academy came from. Mayer wanted his facade for the Academy to serve a real genuine purpose: to lift the reputation of movies out of the depths of cheap entertainment and into the light of high art. An “Award of Merit,” as the bestowing committee was originally called, was the perfect ending to Hollywood’s own stories.

At the same time, chasing awards kept artists in competition with each other, distracting them from their true enemies: the elite of the Academy, the moguls! Mayer explained his motivations best: “I found that the best way to handle [moviemakers] was to hang medals all over them. If I got them cups and awards, they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted. That’s why the Academy Award was created.”

Given the volume of noise surrounding the Sinners/One Battle After Another race, a race between two films distributed by the same near-extinct Big Five studio, I’d say that Mr. Mayer, 98 years after the fact, is getting the last laugh.

It would be too sad, and a little disingenuous, for me to sit here and say, “we fell for it, and we’re still falling for it.” Since those first Oscars were presented in May 1929, the Academy Awards have rewarded those on the forefront of film innovation. Categories unfathomable then—like visual effects and casting—and categories unfathomable now—like two separate cinematography categories, one for films shot in black-and-white and one for films shot in color—demonstrate the evolution of the finest film award in the world.

I’m not saying that the Oscars have always gotten it right, but when taken together, these 98 years have done more than a decent job of celebrating the industry’s most groundbreaking and historical milestones.

And yet, people really think that Timothée Chalamet blew his chance at Best Actor because of comments he made about opera and ballet. (Comments he made after the voting period had ended, by the way). They really don’t see that the real controversy lies in what today’s Hollywood elite are doing to the industry. As Fortune’s Geoff Colvin just wrote, Hollywood is in a death spiral.

It’s interesting to juxtapose the origin story of the Oscar with the origin story of the mess we’re in now. As you may remember, a combination of the global COVID-19 pandemic and the labor strikes of 2023 led to the sharp contraction of the industry. Those two things in tandem, many say, are to blame for just how quickly America’s entertainment capital fell into disarray.

Those strikes—which really do feel like they were happening just yesterday, don’t they?—marked Hollywood’s biggest labor dispute since 1960. SAG and the WGA (and every other supporting guild) marched for better conditions, better pay, and protections from disruptive technologies. They were negotiating with the “Alliance for Motion Picture and Television Producers,” better known by its villainous initialism, the AMPTP.

The Venn Diagram between the AMPTP and the original Academy is not two overlapping circles, but it’s not lost on me that Netflix was singled out by the actors and the writers in 2023 as enemy number one on the AMPTP.

Netflix, until Ted Sarandos’ recent song-and-dance in the wake of his potential purchase of Warner Bros., has quietly worked toward rendering movie theaters obsolete. Worse, Netflix is a technology company; their core business is data, making them the most likely studio to start experimenting with these feared technologies.

And yet, Netflix, as we all know, has been after a Best Picture Oscar for a good decade. Famously, they release their movies in theaters just long enough to meet the theatrical window criteria that makes movies eligible to be nominated. (Actor-producer Dick Powell actually did something similar when he convinced Academy Executive Director Margaret Herrick to let two episodes of his television show compete at the 34th Academy Awards in 1962, but let’s save that incredible saga for a future post.)

Since 2019, the streamer has racked up one or more nominations in the Best Picture category every single year. They’ve won 30 Oscars across a slew of other categories. Even the modern day mogul himself, it would seem, is not immune to charms of Mr. Mayer’s ingenious enterprise.

I suppose, in a way, the Oscars are what they’ve always been: a way for the elite to keep tabs on their struggling underlings and a genuine effort to reward great work by great artists. Simultaneously. As with most things in this town, they are bred from and they themselves breed controversy—but at the same time, the people who get to go home with one are (often rightfully) permanently inscribed in the history books as the greatest of their craft, tearful acceptance speeches and all.

And if that ain’t what the entertainment industry’s all about, I don’t know what is.

Well.

First of all: I’d like to formally apologize to Michael Eisner, who I cast as a blunderer because he recently told Graham Bensinger that Paramount would buy Warner Bros. Egg on my face, Mr. Eisner! Turns out, you were just being prophetic. And in hindsight, I don’t know why I ever doubted you. You are a multimillionaire, genius film executive. I am a writer who browses the Variety archives for fun. We are not the same; you are my superior; and I am sorry.

In my last piece about Josh D’Amaro’s rise to the top job at Disney, I promised I would write about Walt Disney and OpenAI this week. But then, on Thursday, February 26, Netflix backed down from their bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, clearing the way for Paramount Skydance Corporation to buy it instead. Walt: I’ll see you and Sam Altman at a later date.

There have been a lot of appropriate reactions to this news across not just the entertainment industry, but the country at large. In fact, in between the time that the president of the United States was flirting with the idea of bombing Iran and actually doing it, this story shot to the top of The New York Times homepage. I’ll be the first to admit that I was refreshing my phone for The Town with Matthew Belloni’s emergency pod.

I share the opinion of The Town’s “Monday Guy,” Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw, when it comes to what a Paramount-WBD merger will mean for Hollywood. On the DEFCON scale, Shaw rated the merger a 1—fatal. People with more expertise than I could illuminate the reasons why that’s probably true, and importantly, why a Paramount takeover is worse than a Netflix one. Just know that in light of the news, I’m revising my answer to the first question I ever asked my readers:

Would Jack Warner Hate David Zaslav? Yes. Unequivocally.

But I’m not here to futurecast. I’m here to mine the past for an array of answers to the eternal question: How did we get here?

In thinking about how to write about this news for this particular platform, a few questions came to mind:

1. What’s the mutual history between competitors Warner Bros. and Paramount? How did their founders get along throughout the Golden Age?

2. How is this merger in particular, which would create what The Hollywood Reporter’s Rick Porter called a “TV Colossus,” just the latest left turn in the evolution of America’s most fascinating and influential medium: television?

3. Have the news and narrative media always been interchangeable when you really look at the history?

4. What’s this mean for the soundstage? (And I should note: this is an idea I’ve thought about for several weeks as a standalone piece tentatively titled, “Does Anyone Even Use Soundstages Anymore?”)

To me, these are all interesting angles. And I’ve got plenty of time to explore them since this merger will be under review from state and federal regulators for months. Even that—all of the legitimately devastating political ramifications this merger would have—is a worthy topic of discussion.

But at the end of the day, the cogs in the entertainment machine that are most hypnotizing to me are the people. And so, it’s time to turn our attention to the commander-in-chief behind the hostile takeover: Paramount’s Chairman & CEO, David Ellison.

The younger Ellison—if you somehow don’t know, David is the son of Larry, Oracle founder and second-richest man on planet Earth—has worked in and around Hollywood for the last twenty years. After founding his Skydance Productions twenty years ago, he formed a partnership with Paramount to co-finance films, which led to such successes as True Grit (2010) and the revitalization of the Mission Impossible franchise.

But David Ellison really came to the fore when he, with the backing of the Ellison family fortune, merged Skydance with Paramount literally six months ago.

He has a bit of a mixed reputation, which is getting more negative by the day with these latest developments. A Paramount Skydance Corporation-Warner Bros. Discovery merger—already plagued by the presence of four companies in its title—would probably shrink the industry so much that it would finally collapse in on itself. The entertainment job market in Los Angeles would become as desolate as the landscape that the city’s outskirts occupy. But Ellison is also allegedly a champion for certain aspects of old-school moviemaking, and most notably, he has been steadfast in his desire to keep movie theaters alive.

As much as he would like to characterize himself as some kind of next-gen savior of a struggling industry, we’ve seen his kind before.

His historical comps are aplenty, and because of the news media pieces of this potential merger, I thought about exploring the Venn diagrams between Ellison and controversial media tycoons William Randolph Hearst or Rupert Murdoch. But there’s another guy with whom Ellison shares a lot of personal characteristics. It’s someone I’ve already written about.

It’s Howard Hughes.

Immortalized in the most underrated Scorsese-DiCaprio collaboration, 2004’s The Aviator, Hughes’ history in Hollywood is worth revisiting in light of Ellison’s swift rise to power in La La Land.

So let’s do it.

There are a lot of details about Hughes’ childhood that continue to elude his most studious biographers, but the first link that the eccentric entrepreneur has to Ellison is that they were both boys who were raised by their mothers. Their relationships with their fathers during their respective adolescence were forged in the fruits of paternal bank accounts.

Howard Hughes Sr. amassed his fortune through the Hughes Tool Company, which was as inventive in its engineering as it was in its business model. Larry Ellison made his money through technology company Oracle, whose enterprise software functions like a digital tool more than a standalone product. Their wares are not a one-to-one, but both Hughes Sr. and the elder Ellison share an aptitude for developing proprietary efficiencies for complex machinery.

As the title of the aforementioned Hughes biopic suggests, young Howard had a fascination with airplanes from an early age. When he was a child, Hughes Sr. asked Howard what he wanted for his birthday one year, and Howard asked to fly in a seaplane. When he was 19, after both of his parents died prematurely, he inherited the whole Hughes fortune.

When David Ellison turned thirteen, his largely absent father bought him an airplane. “I got sick my first flight,” Ellison would later say of his start in the aerobatic aviation world. This particular genre of flying, in fact, is where Ellison’s “Skydance” gets its name.

The point is: before either turned 18, David and Howard, separated by decades but spiritually linked through their mutual access to massive wealth, became avid enthusiasts for human flight.

Out of this shared interest emerges the pair’s most remarkably uncanny similarity. Their first self-financed films were about pilots during WWI.

Hughes’ Hell’s Angels (1930) is legendary in its own right, widely regarded as one of the most influential early sound epics and rightfully credited as the film that launched Jean Harlow’s career in motion pictures. But the more notorious aspects of the film lie in its production, which took three years and resulted in Hughes’ accidental directorial debut. Though not the first film that Hughes technically produced, it is the first one he produced by himself, and it started the “Howard Hughes presents” billing precedent. Hughes’ films would be known, first and foremost, for their association with their producer for the rest of the mogul’s days in Hollywood.

Ellison’s Flyboys (2006) was less successful than its cosmic predecessor. And while originally viewed by Ellison as the appropriate vehicle in which he could make his screen acting debut, the production characteristic that matters is that he was responsible for a good chunk of the film’s financing; it was produced, in fact, without the backing of a major motion picture studio.

Hughes followed up Hell’s Angels with 1931’s The Front Page and 1932’s Scarface, both of which occupy much-deserved spots in the annals of Great American Cinema. (The Front Page (1931) was the first screen adaptation of the play of the same name; the second adaptation, 1940’s His Girl Friday, is probably the best known.)

After a ten-year hiatus from filmmaking to focus on his career as an aviation pioneer and his growing business portfolio, Hughes returned to a soundstage to produce and direct another infamous picture. So salacious was 1943’s The Outlaw that Hughes was on the hook for distributing the picture, too, and it didn’t see wide release until three years later in 1946. Getting The Outlaw to flicker on screens nationwide was a real pursuit of Hughes’, but it was not as rabid as his obsession with grabbing more power in Hollywood.

One of The Town’s most or least successful schemers depending on how you look at it, Hughes significantly increased his market share in the motion picture landscape when he effectively bought RKO Radio Pictures in 1948. In addition to his immediate capitulation to the Supreme Court in its ruling in “United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.” one of the first things Hughes did when he took control of the flagging studio was fire most of its staff. He did this out of Red Scare paranoia, and it had a catastrophic effect not only on his own studio, but in entertainment at large.

If this is sounding familiar to you, it’s because David Ellison is currently in his “I just bought RKO with my dad’s money” era. After purchasing a failing Paramount in August 2025, one of Ellison’s first acts as the studio’s new czar was cutting 1,000 people from his payroll. Though not explicitly motivated by the previously employed’s political leanings, it’s not a secret that Ellison and his father are deeply entrenched in right-wing politics at the moment, having just attended Trump’s State of the Union address last week. The prospective merger is only strengthening the political undertones of Ellison’s trajectory in America’s crumbling entertainment capital.

Because Ellison is currently in the middle of Hughes’ path, we have no other choice but to follow Howard’s footsteps to see where David’s may lead.

RKO’s slate plummeted under Hughes’ reign, which RKO historian Betty Lasky characterized as a “systematic seven-year rape” in her book RKO: The Biggest Little Major of Them All. The exorbitant spender’s twenty-five-year career in Tinseltown culminated in the film that is regarded as his most notorious: 1956’s The Conqueror.

Another movie that took years to release because of several Hughes-related post-production delays, The Conqueror is widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. In the light of a 21st-century day, it’s patently racist, contains John Wayne’s worst performance, and though it was one of the highest-grossing films of 1956, it never recouped its enormous cost. (It’s also unforgivably boring, but that’s a criticism that only seems to come up among people who, like me, have seen the film.)

But its most infamous detail, which has only bolstered the film’s lore over the decades since it made its debut in CinemaScope, is that it was shot in St. George, Utah, at a time when St. George, Utah, was covered in nuclear fallout. Half of its cast and crew would eventually be diagnosed with cancer, some claim because of their exposure to radioactive sand.

The decision to shoot in that particular swath of Utah desert is usually attributed to Hughes, and the association with the deaths of his high-profile cast and crew allegedly haunted him until he died in self-exile in 1976. But as the biographer of Conqueror director and producer Dick Powell, I feel obligated to tell you that there’s plenty of evidence1 suggesting that Powell, who was the first of the cast and crew to die after a cancer diagnosis, is actually the one who pulled the trigger on St. George. Nonetheless, “Howard Hughes presents” was above the film’s title throughout its multimillion-dollar promotional campaign. So based on the billing, Hughes seems to be the guy to blame.

Before The Conqueror had a chance to fight its way out of Hughes’ editing bay (a stressful situation for Powell), Hughes sold RKO to General Tire & Rubber Company in 1955. (Hughes bought The Conqueror back from General Tire, which is the only reason the film briefly saw the light of day in 1956 before Hughes pulled it from wide circulation for decades, obsessively screening it for himself for the rest of his days.)

General Tire wasn’t particularly interested in RKO’s producing resources when they made the winning bid for the company. All they really wanted was RKO’s film library so that they could broadcast movies on their television stations.

This last chapter of Hughes’ time in Hollywood, which is also a significant milestone in the history of both film and television in America, is also weirdly relevant to today’s media climate, where “content is king,” as they say. The night before Ellison’s first failed attempt to woo WBD CEO David Zaslav into accepting Paramount’s bid—three long months ago—he reportedly sent the following text:

“Daivd [sic], I appreciate you’re underwater today so I wanted to send you a quick text…It would be the honor of a lifetime to be your partner and to be the owner of these iconic assets.”

I include the direct quote for two reasons. First, I find the fact that Ellison misspelled Zaslav’s first name, which is also his own first name, deliciously juicy. More importantly, though, it lays bare what the Ellisons deem as the valuable meat on the WBD bone. They don’t want to buy WBD because of its producing powers or its deep bench of creatives. They want to own Harry Potter and CNN and—that’s right, can you believe this?—the distribution rights to the RKO film library. (It’s worth noting here that the current Paramount lot encompasses the former RKO lot as well, so they already own Hughes’ old stomping grounds.)

Up close, Ellison wants assets he can use to…make more content? That’s the hope, at least. But in the wide shot, Ellison wants power. Seems an obvious thing to say, but sometimes, those things are worth saying out loud. At the risk of oversimplifying the persona of a modern media mogul, David Ellison, like Howard Hughes before him, is just a kid with a growing portfolio, an obsession with defying gravity, and access to his father’s bottomless money pit.

So to answer the headline, “How Did Paramount CEO David Ellison Become So Powerful So Quickly?” He bought his way here. Nothing else to it.

The only good news is that Ellison’s track record for quality in the content he produces seems to be going in reverse of Hughes’. Though we have yet to see a major movie open under any of Ellison’s new banners, let’s hope none of them use The Conqueror as their historic blueprint.

If Ellison is as serious about cinema as he says he is, then perhaps we have nothing to worry about. But if he, at his core, is just another silver-spooned entrepreneur who thinks he can fly and sometimes makes movies, then I fear we’re in for a vomit-inducing dance through dark skies.

It happened sometime in the early 1940s. A Los Angeles dad took his two daughters to Griffith Park to ride the merry-go-round. The spot was just one of a handful around L.A. where he would take his girls during “Dad’s Day,” a regular appointment that the 40-something kept with his two young children. Something of a child at heart himself, the man watched his daughters, perched on painted ponies, spin around the carousel. While he sat on an old park bench, he wondered: “Could there one day exist a place around here where I, too, could ride the merry-go-round with my girls?”

The girls were Diane and Sharon. Their dad was Walt Disney. And he answered that question in 1955 when he and the guys at the newly christened “WED Enterprises” hastily constructed a theme park. “Yes!” Walt eventually declared. “And we’ll call it Disneyland!”

It took Mr. Disney over a decade to realize Disneyland, and initially, he wanted to combine his dream of a family-friendly amusement park with his overflowing mailbox of requests to tour the Walt Disney Studios by building a place called Mickey Mouse Park behind his studio lot in Burbank. But space proved to be a problem, so he settled on Orange County.

The level of critical skepticism around Walt’s big project in Anaheim was nearly equal to that which he had received when he told Hollywood he was going to make a feature-length animated film twenty years before. It nearly bankrupted him, but that film—Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs—is still the highest-grossing animated film of all time (adjusted for inflation, of course).

Walt Disney built his empire on ideas that people didn’t believe in. He is the exemplar of an “innovator.” His visions revolutionized moviemaking, mass marketing, robotics, and the very nature of entertainment in countless ways, including with his distinctive invention of the American theme park.

No one can deny the behemoth that his legacy—The Walt Disney Company—has become. Snow White built the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, which built Disneyland in Anaheim, which built Walt Disney World in Florida, which led to Disney’s acquisition of ABC, which led to the Disney Cruise Line, which led to eight more Disney theme parks around the world, which led to Disney’s acquisitions of Pixar, Lucasfilm, Marvel, and so on and so forth.

When listed in succession, the above milestones really do give the impression that The Walt Disney Company is remarkably cutting-edge, one of the slickest conglomerates in America, a machine that’s seemed only to have run smoother as it has aged beyond 100 years.

But is “innovative” the first word you think of to describe it? Maybe it is, especially if you (like me) are the type to stay up late on a Friday night to watch a four-hour documentary called Disney’s Living Characters: A Broken Promise. But if you’re a normal person, even a person who’s really interested in the entertainment industry, my guess is your answer is probably “no.”

I will boldly assert that when the average American thinks about “Disney,” they think about the past. Movies they grew up with; television shows that raised them; parks they made memories in. By its very nature, The Walt Disney Company is in the business of creating entertainment the whole family can enjoy, and with that comes a certain amount of quaintness.

The upside to this angle is that the Disney brand is one of the very first, if not the first, that many an American child can recognize. The downside is that the business has to constantly reconcile its legacy of innovation with the nostalgia that permeates through many of its products. How can you bring a company that’s built on making memories into a rapidly evolving future?

This is quite the pickle! Such a conundrum, in fact, that only a handful of men have tried to steer the Disney ship in its century on the entertainment seas. Even fewer have done so to objective success. And now, a new captain has been elected to steer it into—dare I extend this tired metaphor just one more time?—uncharted waters.

In a shock announcement I still can’t quite figure out the timing on, two-time Disney CEO Bob Iger told the press that he would be leaving his (second) contract early, and that he had appointed the head of Disney Experiences Josh D’Amaro as his (second) successor.

If you couldn’t tell by all the parentheses, the changing of the guard at Walt’s old castle hasn’t always gone according to plan. With such a delicate brand identity, a crumbling Hollywood foundation, and an organizational chart that would make a tech bro’s head spin, Mr. D’Amaro certainly has his work cut out for him.

But I want to answer my headline’s question early, partially so I can spend time explaining whose shoes D’Amaro has to fill besides Mickey’s to be successful and partially so that I can tell you why I think: Yes, D’Amaro is well-positioned to be the next great CEO of The Walt Disney Company.

Before I wax poetic about why I believe that D’Amaro is the right guy to lead Disney into its next chapter, I have to disclose to you that I am what some might call a “Disney adult.” Now, I prefer the phrase “an adult who loves Disney,” and I often bring up the fact that I do not and have never owned a pair of ears as my evidence that I don’t fit the typical “Disney adult” archetype. As previously insinuated, I’m more of a Defunctland Disney freak than a Figment-popcorn-bucket devotee. Nonetheless, I’m personally invested in the future of this monster of an organization, and I would feel dishonest if I didn’t mention it. So it’s with a sigh and a shrug that I confess this to you. Let’s move on.

As complicated as The Walt Disney Company has always been, hidden within each executive triumph is actually a blueprint for success. It only takes looking at three previous CEOs to figure out what it is.

You might be thinking that the first person that D’Amaro has to best is Walt himself, but already, you’d be wrong! Technically, Walt Disney was never the CEO of his own company, but his absence from D’Amaro’s list of worthy predecessors is attributed to far more than a technicality.

As Walt once said, “it takes a lot of money to make these dreams come true.” And so, if Disney has to have a Founding CEO Father, it’s got to be the man who controlled the purse strings for close to fifty years—and the best partner a little brother could ask for: Roy O. Disney.

Wherever Walt was when he got some crazy, new (expensive) idea, there Roy stood, spreadsheet in hand, blood pressure elevating. Walt, at his core, was a huge risk taker, and on dozens of occasions he spoke of the value of failure. And the Disney brothers had many in their early years. But Roy stuck it out, not only because he believed in his younger brother’s visionary instincts, but also because he was good at acting on them.

Roy and Walt personify the secret sauce to running their namesake organization: balance. I suppose this is a key to running any business, or pursuing any endeavor, really, but the sides of the Disney scale are so different that the skill required to balance it becomes that much more important. Essentially, the leader(s) of The Walt Disney Company must possess the wonder of a child and the financial savvy of a Wall Street banker. Faith, trust, and pixie dust, as they say…

Many will contest that when Walt died in 1966, the company fell into swift decline. And that’s kind of true. But amid all of the “What would Walt do?” uncertainty that hovered over the lot in the late 60s, Roy—73 and undoubtedly crushed that he outlived his baby brother—made a move that literally saved the company from certain ruin. I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that he did not see it that way.

Roy only lived for another five years after Walt’s demise, dying in the last days of 1971, but not before realizing his brother’s final dream: The Florida Project. It may seem like hyperbole to say that the opening of Walt Disney World (WDW) in Orlando on October 1, 1971 is the most consequential milestone of the company’s history, but it’s not. It’s just the truth.

When WDW opened, the vast majority of the American population lived east of the Rocky Mountains, which meant that for the majority of the nation’s children who watched the Disneyland television show through their black-and-white sets with great envy, Fantasyland was now a brick-and-mortar reality.

Additionally, and even Walt got a chance to say this part before he died, WDW gave the company more of the most-coveted possession in American life: land. If you’ve been to both parks, you understand firsthand the difference in scale between the two. If you haven’t, I’ll put it this way: Disneyland is a park; WDW is a town. (That aspect of WDW was Disney’s most valuable playing card in their ridiculous game of “Go Fish” with Ron DeSantis a few years ago.)

Roy was hell-bent on making The Florida Project a reality for only one reason, and that was to finish what his brother started there. It was a deeply personal decision to open two hotels, a whole new theme park, and a more robust monorail system in the wake of Walt’s death, which brought on a period of dwindling prospects for the company. (The monorail was another of Walt’s dreams, and it has its own fascinating place in the history of Los Angeles’ reliance on car transportation. I digress.)

But despite Roy’s feelings about bringing his brother’s dying wish to fruition, the biggest reason that opening WDW is the most important decision in Disney history is because it laid the groundwork for transforming the company’s core business. With the opening of a second theme park, what’s now known as “Disney Experiences” became a genuine second vertical of the company. (The first is what’s currently known as “Disney Entertainment.”) And because WDW had so much land—over 40 square miles—it offered an unprecedented amount of room for those who would eventually be known as “Imagineers” to invent, create, and play.

As pivotal as Roy’s great achievement was for his company, the balance in the front office was severely out of whack by 1971. In fact, Roy wasn’t technically CEO anymore when he built WDW. It was not until 1984, when Disney poached two top bananas from other major movie studios, that balance was restored and what is commonly known as the “Disney Renaissance”* began.

The first banana was Warner Bros.’s Frank Wells, a whip-smart lawyer-turned-film executive who became Disney’s president. The second banana was Paramount president Michael Eisner. He became The Walt Disney Company’s fifth CEO, and he is the second leader that D’Amaro must emulate if he wants to be successful.

Together, Eisner and Wells became second-generation versions of the Disney brothers before them. Some of their best-known works came in the forms of betting on home videos, their incredibly wise investments in their merchandising department, the establishment of Disney’s long relationships with George Lucas and Jim Henson, the invention of the mythical Disney vault (seriously), and, of course, the revitalization of the studio’s Animation division. (Eisner’s friend-turned-enemy Jeffrey Katzenberg led this last effort, in all fairness.)

But the parks are Eisner’s real legacy. He opened nine of them and dozens more resorts during his tenure as CEO. At WDW alone, Disney-MGM Studios (since renamed Disney’s Hollywood Studios), Disney’s Animal Kingdom, Typhoon Lagoon, and Blizzard Beach were erected, not to mention 15 uniquely themed resorts and hotels and an ever-evolving shopping district currently known as Disney Springs. Five more parks opened during Eisner’s twenty-year reign, four of which were built on foreign soils.

Even more Disney vacation resorts that weren’t attached to an adjacent park popped up around the world, and Disney entered another new era when two ships launched the Disney Cruise Line at the end of the 1990s. The culmination of Eisner’s legacy as the executive of a company that seems to insist that hospitality is not at its core is the Disney Vacation Club, the ingenious time-share program that allows its members early or exclusive access to any of these destinations through a points-system. (Again, I am necessarily disclosing that I am a member of the Disney Vacation Club and have been since birth.)

The above list doesn’t do justice to the depth of Eisner’s accomplishments as Disney’s CEO, but the success of the enterprises themselves are a bit of a mixed bag. And remarkably, the start of Eisner’s “fall” at Disney coincided with a monumental event: Frank Wells’ tragic death in 1994. There was plenty that board chair and Roy O. Disney descendant Roy E. Disney and a disgruntled Katzenberg hated about Eisner, but the biggest critique levied against him at the time was his exorbitant spending, particularly on parks like Euro Disney (since renamed Disneyland Paris), Disney’s California Adventure, and Hong Kong Disneyland that weren’t immediate moneymakers.

But Eisner would be the first to admit that neither he nor his company was the same after Wells died; at the heart of Eisner’s descent into being the most-hated person on the Burbank lot was the loss of the other half of his balancing act. Eisner’s 21 years at the company were split almost perfectly in half, too: ten years with Wells, eleven without, and that last year without him was hardly a full year at all.

Eisner appointed an ABC executive as Disney’s new president in 2000. Three weeks after Eisner and his second-in-command opened Hong Kong Disneyland, the CEO resigned, though it’s important to note that he was essentially ousted by Roy E. and his “Save Disney” campaign. Eisner’s lieutenant Bog Iger became president and CEO, and here we meet our third inspiration for Mr. D’Amaro.

Iger’s reputation as Disney CEO is nearly pristine, and he is widely regarded as the company’s most successful leader since the Disney brothers themselves. What’s especially impressive about Iger is that the balance seems to come from within. Without a well-known buddy at the top with him, Iger apparently embodies equal respect for both creativity and moneymaking—a rare breed that conquers the oxymoronic challenges that “show business” lobs at its bravest soldiers.

At first glance, it may seem that Iger’s great legacy as CEO is all those acquisitions, half of which I’ve already mentioned. Pixar, Lucasfilm, Marvel, National Geographic, Twentieth Century-Fox. These deals made Disney the biggest movie studio in Hollywood; they made Bob Iger one of the greatest business executives of the 21st century; and they made the Disney brand inescapable.

That feeling, that you as a consumer cannot escape from media that is owned by The Walt Disney Company, is actually Iger’s great legacy, and it shows up in the parks in a much rosier light. It goes by the name of “immersion.”

Though he only built one park during his tenure, Iger built lands within parks. Toy Story Land, Avenger’s Campus, and two locations of Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge in the U.S. parks make you feel like you’re in Andy’s backyard, working for Stark Industries, and visiting a planet the Millennium Falcon crash landed on, respectively. Immersion, he has actually insisted through his “business of storytelling” remarks, is Iger’s true legacy.

If I haven’t done a good job at dismantling the assumption that the intellectual property (IP) is what makes the world building possible, it’s because that on its face, that’s true. But looking at the motivations behind the acquisitions reveals something. Immersion, Iger believes, is the future of entertainment broadly. See his recent investments in Epic Games and OpenAI as the latest evidence. The final destination of the acquisition long game wasn’t the movies and television shows; it was the parks.

This is something that Iger actually learned from Eisner, even if he wouldn’t admit that explicitly. Attractions like The Tower of Terror, Star Tours, and Muppet Vision 3D (RIP) were all designed by Eisner’s Disney to be innovative ways of getting park guests to interface with well-known media—and notably, not one used Disney IP for its source material. But no attraction better exemplifies Eisner’s proto-immersion method better than the now-defunct and oft-yearned-for Great Movie Ride (RIP).

The tagline for the ride, “A Spectacular Journey Into the Movies,” summed up what this thing did: it moved over 60 park guests at a time through famous scenes in cinema, all brought to life by the most sophisticated Audio-Animatronics Disney had placed in any park to that point. It was the beating heart of Disney-MGM Studios when it opened in 1989, and it resurrected a score of dead screen stars—Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne—and brought them to a budding generation of film lovers’ attentions. It was an experience, and in some ways, it reverse-engineered Walt’s first blueprints for his Mickey Mouse Park by bringing people into the world of moviemaking.

But it had a fatal flaw: its existence was built on a complex series of licensing agreements. So were the other three attractions I mentioned. (Lucasfilm and The Muppets are now, of course, owned by The Walt Disney Company, but at the time, they were not.) Eisner was a master of these deals. Watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit? if you remain unconvinced.

Iger, following and in some ways anticipating the evolution of American enterprise, realized that it might be less of a headache for parks to keep attractions that used outside IP open if the IP for those attractions came from inside the House of Mouse.

And we’re back to the initial pickle. The Disney brand pre-Iger, even pre-Eisner, was worn out. Eisner obviously knew this, so he expanded the Disney universe through licensing. Iger solidified the expansion by acquiring stables of creatives and what we would now call libraries of content. And Roy O. created the infrastructure that gave these two those options. This is Disney’s legacy of innovation on full display. And it’s up to Mr. D’Amaro to carry it on.

So why do I feel sure he can do it? Three reasons:

1. D’Amaro is currently the head of Disney Experiences, and in his 27 years with The Walt Disney Company, he’s worked in nearly every corner of the division. He’s overseen consumer products, Adventures by Disney, Disney’s Animal Kingdom. The list goes on. His expertise lies in the most innovative vertical of entertainment’s most unique company.

2. His appointment seems to indicate that The Walt Disney Company is finally admitting that Experiences is more important to the bottom line than Entertainment. I know this assertion has its naysayers, but D’Amaro’s ascent is just the latest move in the long history I’ve just explained. Plus, Experiences was responsible for 70% of the company’s operating income as recently as 2023. Argue with a purple-colored wall.

3. He seems to possess the secret sauce: the wonder of a child and the financial savvy of a Wall Street banker. He’s successfully run his divisions of the business for close to thirty years, and yet, he regularly strolls down Main Street U.S.A. Harvard Business Review recently coined D’Amaro’s superpower as having “experience intelligence.” He very well could be, like his predecessor Bob Iger, a unicorn who could run the company on his own. But just for good measure, and surely to prevent a nightmare from recurring, Iger has appointed a president for the first time since he himself vacated that spot in 2012. Former Fox television executive and current co-chairman of Disney Entertainment Dana Walden will be D’Amaro’s second. What’s interesting, and further validates Disney’s quiet confession that its parks come first, is that Walden is occupying the traditional “creative risk taker” position in this duo, while D’Amaro brings much more traditional management experience to his role. Still, even if the ingredients in the secret sauce have swapped quantities, a renewed sense of balance will hopefully be instilled when these two take over.

We have less than a month to go before Josh D’Amaro officially becomes CEO of The Walt Disney Company, but he’s already pounding the pavement about the future of the business, with plans to update Smuggler’s Run and light musing about his partnership with OpenAI. (We’ll get into Disney and OpenAI next week, so stay tuned.)

Will he be the company’s next great CEO? I don’t know. But I hope he is. Until his tenure starts, I guess I’ll just have to think of a wonderful thought, have faith and trust, and…oh, I know I’m forgetting something…

*This term is officially used to describe the resuscitation of the Animation department, but let’s face it: it broadly applies to the company during that whole period.

In last week’s piece, “Would Jack Warner Hate David Zaslav?” it was impossible to avoid discussing an ongoing annoyance that has plagued America’s entertainment capital for over a century: government regulation, specifically antitrust regulation that aims to keep the reality of “monopoly” from becoming more than a board game we all hate playing. In light of Netflix’s bid to acquire Warner Bros., The Onion reposted one of its old headlines, so tried-and-true that it was originally published in 1998: “Just Six Corporations Remain.”

As I confessed in my previous piece, I know little about the entire history of business regulation in the United States—but I have long been fascinated by Hollywood’s relationship to it. In anticipation of next week’s piece about Josh D’Amaro’s ascent to the top job at the Walt Disney Company, I was watching Graham Bensinger’s new video series with the House of Mouse’s former CEO Michael Eisner.

In the depressingly titled segment “Michael Eisner’s terminal prognosis for movie theaters,” Bensinger’s final question is: “What’s the conclusion to the streaming wars and future consolidation that still needs to take place in your mind?”

Eisner, who possesses the skill of a contortionist when it comes to his ability to put his own foot in his mouth, replies, “You mean like Paramount buying Warner Bros.? That kinda thing?” After Bensinger shrugs and agrees at his subject’s assessment of the inquiry, Eisner sighs. “You know what it is?,” he asks back. “It’s a merry-go-round…it’s been a merry-go-round since 1948.”

Ah, 1948. The year everything changed! If you’ve read so much as a single piece about the impending Netflix/Warner Bros. deal, there is no doubt that you’ve skimmed lines that have contained mention of the legendary year. There’s good reason for the reminder. As Eisner (who was six in 1948) put it, ownership over Hollywood’s major studios really has functioned like a merry-go-round for almost 80 years. So what the heck happened in 1948?

Eisner and all those musings about the latest Hollywood deal are referencing one thing in particular—the Paramount Decrees—but before we dive into one of the most consequential Supreme Court cases in the nation’s history, it’s worth mentioning that a few other things happened around the same time. The list includes: the Baby Boom, growing suburbanization, the House Un-American Activities Committee’s unconscionable investigations into some of The Town’s biggest players, and the start of a consumer buying trend that still haunts the industry—the exponential spike in purchases of television sets.

These, too, happened in the last few years of the decade, and they all made their own contributions to what The New York Times’ Thomas M. Pryor called the “box office blues.” By the end of the 1940s, film box office was in steep decline, the worst economic downturn for the industry since the Great Depression. People weren’t going to the movies anymore, and most of the previously listed events sum up the reasons why. But the biggest reason that major motion picture studios couldn’t bounce back from the plummet—even bigger than the advent of television, I’ll argue with anyone—was because they had lost a critical source of revenue as a result of that Supreme Court decision.

In the olden days, the only way a movie studio could become a “major” was if it was “vertically integrated.” Companies had to own the production vertical, which is the arm most associate with what a motion picture studio actually does. Cameras whir. Lights flash. Actors emote. And someone in jodhpurs tells everybody when to stop and start through a megaphone.

Studios also had to own the distribution vertical, which sold the result of the production vertical. This branch was full of salespeople who were scattered across the globe, a dispersed but powerful group that took the product (a movie), devised a marketing campaign, and made it available to viewing audiences by selling it to theaters around the world.

Believe it or not, there used to be a third vertical that these companies owned, and it was exhibition. Yes, if you can imagine it, movie studios used to own movie theaters. In fact, the seeds of most movie studios were planted in theater chains, and many of its eventual moguls started as exhibitors.

Marcus Loew, who owned the Loew’s theater chain, merged Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, and Louis B. Mayer Pictures in 1926 to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the goal being to produce MGM films that were guaranteed to run in his theaters. Adolph Zukor, Paramount chief, started as an exhibitor in Chicago, as did Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal. Even the Warner brothers’ first ventures in the film business were the purchases of theaters in the Ohio River Valley in the early twentieth century.

(It’s worth noting, as I did last week, that these East Coast exhibitors moved to California because of Thomas Edison’s belligerent wielding of his own monopolistic power over film technology. Hollywood, in fact, has antitrust law to thank for its very founding. Another piece for another day...)

In today’s landscape, in which theater chains are allegedly gasping their last breaths, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to be an exhibitor. But think about the business model. Nobody makes money filming a movie; distributors sell movies, but only after sinking money into the production and the marketing. The only way to make money off of a movie is by getting people to pay to see it. And for the first fifty years of motion pictures, the only way to see movies was to buy a ticket at a box office, walk through a theater’s threshold, and sit in a room full of strangers who were marveling at the same flickered images you were.

The evolution of the major motion picture studio benefitted from its first stage being exhibition. It’s not hard to understand why Paramount, MGM, and Warner Bros. were able to secure places in the “Big Five” list of the past, or why RKO (the “K” and the “O” are the exhibition part here) and Twentieth Century-Fox (“Fox” is the exhibition part here) were the others in the cohort. If your studio owned a theater chain, your films were guaranteed to play on screens around the country; and because you owned them, you could program them at favorable times and market them however you wanted. Pretty easy living, right?

Right! This model is what was legally challenged in the landmark “United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.” Independent exhibitors were the leading wagers of the war. The defendants were the eight biggest studios in Hollywood—the six I’ve already mentioned, plus Columbia and (probably unfairly) United Artists.

Philosophically (and legally), the primary argument was that because major motion picture studios owned sizable stakes in every node of their own supply chain, they unfairly eliminated competition from smaller players in each node. This is the backbone of understanding the reason that antitrust laws exist; the more one company is allowed to own its industry’s supply chain, the more that industry starts to bear an uncanny resemblance to that one company.

There were a handful of discrete practices, like “block booking” and “circuit dealing,” that independent exhibitors also challenged in the case. These practices could all be boiled down to studios passing on financial burdens to small exhibitors in order to secure their own favorable profit margins. But the very fact that major studios owned almost one fifth of theaters in America threatened independent productions and theaters alike. To make a long story very short, this legal case dragged on for a decade. Until it ended in 1948.

The Supreme Court, in a genuinely groundbreaking decision, sided with the exhibitors and encouraged a lower court to recommend that the studios divest from their theater chains. Before that court could even draft the recommendation, RKO head and eccentric drill bit tycoon Howard Hughes signed a consent decree and announced that he would split RKO’s production-distribution arm and its exhibition arm into two different companies. The other moguls were furious. Hughes’ capitulation meant the end of the ten-year battle. A few mounted some last-ditch legal efforts to avoid the inevitable, but to no avail. Thus, the “Paramount Decrees” became binding.

(As it turned out, Hughes’ decision was, characteristically, part of some larger scheme, and he would be the last studio head to actually comply with the Decrees. This landed him in such hot legal water that it scalded RKO with fatal burns by 1955. Of Hughes’ damaging leadership, RKO director Dick Powell allegedly quipped, “RKO’s contract list is down to three actors and 127 lawyers.”)*

The studios never recovered. They could not sustain themselves without their most lucrative vertical, and the “studio system” fully collapsed by the end of the 1960s. Critical to that collapse, though, was a series of acquisitions and mergers that marked the start of the carousel ride we’re on today.

Gulf + Western, a manufacturing conglomerate, bought Paramount. Kinney National, a facilities conglomerate, bought Warner Bros. Sony, the Japanese electronics conglomerate, eventually bought Columbia (from Coca-Cola!!). Private investors bought Twentieth Century-Fox, and it wound up in Rupert Murdoch’s hands in 1985. We all watched that story’s latest chapter unfold just a few years ago when Murdoch sold it to another one of next week’s subjects, Bob Iger. It’s now owned by the Walt Disney Company.

Even more recently, MGM, which had effectively been defunct as a brand for decades, was purchased by Amazon, which I’ll spare describing since you’ve probably heard of that conglomerate. This is what Eisner was talking about when he invoked his merry-go-round metaphor. Hollywood studios have been at the whim of other corporate interests since the ruling in 1948, which, in a twist of cruel irony, was trying to prevent Hollywood from becoming a more consolidated town than it already was.

The Decrees were successful in that they stopped the very specific thing they were trying to put an end to. But as time has worn on, hamstringing Hollywood studios has only led to bigger and greedier corporations—many of which had no previous presence in the entertainment industry—to acquire the remnants left behind by America’s first motion picture storytellers. The end of studios’ “vertical integration” seems only to have made way for more consolidation, more monopolistic behavior, and more revenue for exceedingly complex corporations. In other words, the great antitrust case of 1948 may have unintentionally paved the way for today’s tech billionaires to take over much of the Golden State.

When the news hit the internet that Netflix was trying to buy Warner Bros., I witnessed many a beat reporter flirt with the idea that the move might be monopolistic. I tend to agree with them. But a few misinformed pundits claimed that the move was in direct violation of the 1948 ruling.

Now, I’ll agree to the extent that streamers have effectively been vertically integrated since Netflix founded its own content division in 2012. Tell me the core difference between these two scenarios:

• Paramount theaters exclusively programming Paramount features in time slots when theatergoers were most likely to plant themselves in front of the big screen, resulting in a situation where something like a Samuel Goldwyn picture only played during weekday matinees.

• Netflix placing the tiles that represent their own television shows and films in the top row of their app’s homepage, with secretive algorithms claiming that half of them are in the service’s “Top Ten” list of most-viewed entertainment.

I’ll give you a hint: You can’t discern the core difference, because there isn’t one.

But I can’t agree that this latest revolution of the merry-go-round is at odds with the Paramount Decrees for one simple reason: they were terminated in 2020. They’re not relevant to this case because, well…they don’t exist anymore. And their disappearance went so unnoticed that some commentators are incorrectly invoking them in the current doom spiral. So now, I’ll answer my second question, “And do the Paramount Decrees even matter anymore?” The answer, from a legal perspective, is no.

The reason given for the decision by a U.S. court was that, “[the] conspiracy and practices that existed decades ago no longer exist.” This, of course, is technically true. The media landscape has changed drastically in the 78 ensuing years since this ruling was brought down. As I mentioned, theaters, some think, are experiencing their last days on Earth. But on full display are the limits of law.

If law was something that was able to evolve quickly, if it were able to adapt at the same speed at which the Information Age moves, it would be able to identify that today’s tech giants—Amazon, Apple, and yes, Netflix—are up to the same “no good” that the moguls of the past were up to. If the Decrees were updated to regulate streaming’s blatant antitrust practices, the companies of seven years ago would have absolutely been in violation of the rules.

But that’s not how laws or lawmaking function, and for very good reason. Besides, I’m not so sure the Decrees wouldn’t have been terminated anyway.

Americans are living in a modern Gilded Age, and I don’t see a Roosevelt—either a trust-busting Teddy or a union-building Franklin—on the political horizon. Independent cinema is far from dead, and the Decrees certainly helped it grow throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. But the overall trend toward corporate consolidation in America—and the power that Netflix’s Ted Sarandos in particular has over Hollywood specifically—is evidence enough for me to be sure that the entertainment supply chain is starting to look a lot like a company Reed Hastings founded decades ago...

Has Hollywood always been anti-antitrust? Yes. This answer may be so obvious that I should reframe the initial question: “Hasn’t Hollywood always been anti-antitrust?” Same answer.

But who was on which side of the battle line has shifted dramatically over the last 120 years. And Hollywood isn’t special in its disdain for regulation. For much of the nation’s history, businessmen of all industries have believed that antitrust laws keep them from maximizing their profits. And the ones that are so lazy that they have to scheme against consumers to line their pockets are right about that.

Unfortunately, making more money is all those men really care about. Lucky are the few who are alive at this moment in time, for they’ve got an ally in the White House. A surge of antitrust sentiment within the U.S. government seems unlikely to happen anytime soon. (And the DOJ just ousted the Antitrust Chief who was overseeing the government’s review of the Netflix/Warner Bros. merger, so, as has become custom in these times, things are changing by the day.)

What actually happens to Warner Bros. will be a harbinger of something. Perhaps many things. Of which things I don’t know, since the details are in the government’s decision to block the deal or not. Until then, I only hope that those six corporations that The Onion claims remain don’t turn into five, then four, then three…so spins the merry-go-round.

*Most of the Howard Hughes stuff is actually sourced from Betty Lasky’s fantastic RKO: The Biggest Little Major of Them All from 1984, a must-read if you’re interested in Hughes, RKO, the Kennedys, Orson Welles, or Hollywood in general. That book taught me so much about how business actually works; if you pick it up, get ready for a crash course in the stock market (no pun intended).

It was October 6, 1927. One third of the giant billboard above the Warners’ Theatre in Midtown Manhattan featured a photograph of a kneeling man, white gloves on his hands, black greasepaint smeared into every crevice of his usually pasty face. “Al Jolson in THE JAZZ SINGER” declared the billboard, the words “with Vitaphone” in much smaller font printed beneath. The premiere of The Jazz Singer—that ground-breaking picture that would go on to garner a checkered reputation because of its heavy use of blackface—changed the reality of three different entities:

1. Al Jolson, who often billed himself as “the world’s greatest entertainer,” was given the chance to broadcast his stage act, which had previously been hamstrung because of the ephemeral nature of the theater, to millions of Americans in movie theaters for years via The Jazz Singer.

2. Hollywood itself, which, despite many loud voices of its most powerful silent pioneers, would give into the revolution of sound films (“talkies,” as you may know them) pretty quickly, a new era of motion pictures that The Jazz Singer ushered in.

3. The Warner brothers, who, with the profits from The Jazz Singer, left so-called “Poverty Row” on Sunset Boulevard, purchased the First National Pictures lot in Burbank, acquired Vitaphone, and turned their company into one of the “Big Five” major motion picture firms, a status it has retained ever since.

It wouldn’t be insane to say that The Jazz Singer changed Hollywood forever—one might even reasonably claim that it made Hollywood, that before its presence on big screens around the world, Hollywood was a sleepy California town full of orange groves and novice filmmakers and exhibitors who were trying to escape the wrath of Thomas Edison on the East Coast.

One might assume, then, that October 6, 1927 was one of the happiest days of those Warner brothers’ lives. But it wasn’t. Sam Warner, the brother who had brought sound technology (that’s the “Vitaphone” part of the billboard) to the family firm, died the day before. Brothers Harry, Abe, and Jack were stuck on a train, lost in the shuffle between New York for the life-changing premiere and Hollywood to say goodbye to Sam. The three of them didn’t make it to either monumental event.

Harry and Abe would run Warner Bros. from New York for the next several decades, while littlest brother Jack—hard-nosed but kinda fun—stayed in Los Angeles, doing his best to turn the family’s fledgling studio into a major Hollywood player. He did it. Not without his detractors and enemies, but, by god, he did it.

98 years and 15 days later, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), the latest incarnation of the family’s legacy media company, effectively put a “FOR SALE” sign on the gates of its old Burbank lot. Those who have their ear glued to The Town’s streets were not surprised. WBD had (somehow!) survived a dismal five or ten years, a period marked by hubris-fueled mergers and acquisitions that only widened cash-bleeding wounds. On December 5, 2025, a company called Netflix offered the ultimate bandage—$82.7 billion to buy most of Jack Warner’s old stomping grounds.

Current Head of the House of Warner David Zaslav is the one who hung the sign, entertained a handful of bids, and ultimately chose Netflix as the lucky winner. If you’re reading this, you probably don’t need a run down of the assets huddled under the WBD banner that make Netflix drool. (Just in case you need a refresher, HBO and Warner Bros. Studios are the big two.) But one of WBD’s least valuable assets is the “D” part of its acronym. Netflix is so uninterested in Discovery (AKA “cable channels” or “linear TV”) that none of those 82.7 billion dollars are earmarked for the division.

“So?” you might be wondering. And hey, I hear ya. I’m not even a so-called “cord cutter.” I’m part of a most-feared group: “cord nevers.” It would be hypocritical of me to plead for the continuation of linear television; I’ve never paid for cable in my entire adult life. But I can’t help but notice that the guy who agreed to give this deal a shot, the guy at the top of the Warner Bros. food chain, is David Zaslav, who only became the WBD CEO because he used to be the head of the most decrepit and vapid arm of the company—Discovery.

Zaslav has been The Town’s punching bag pretty much since he got the big job at WBD in 2022, his choices causing many a Hollywood beat reporter to shake their head and cry, “David! Why?” The chief critique of the millionaire mogul is that he never knew how to handle WBD’s motion picture division, Warner Bros. Pictures, the engine of the company for over 100 years.

Zaslav worked exclusively in cable television his entire career, launching multiple NBCUniversal cable news channels before taking Discovery public in 2008. The aughts were the peak for non-narrative television, and Zaslav deserves at least some credit for capitalizing on the explosion of reality programming to the benefit of Discovery. But he was totally inexperienced when it came to leading a motion picture studio, let alone one of Hollywood’s most important creative entities.

His shortcomings in leading the kind of media company that WBD is—if its even had enough time to become its own thing—are obvious. What’s more infuriating, though, and at the core of the disdain for Zaslav, is that he doesn’t really seem to care about the legacy of the company. The creativity that has oozed out of the old First National lot and the newer HBO offices has been a critical ingredient not just in the Hollywood stew, but in American pop culture for a century.

The latest press will tout intellectual property like Harry Potter and DC Comics as the most important WBD assets, but WBD also boasts the rights to classics of the Golden Age of Hollywood like Casablanca and Rebel Without A Cause and syndicated television favorites like ER, Full House, and Friends. But Zaslav, in some ways the exemplar of the twenty-first century media tycoon, seems only to have dollar signs in his eyes—and worst of all, he seems most concerned with his own bank account. One hundred years of first-rate storytelling be damned.

It’s hard to believe in 2026 just how innovative a studio Warner Bros. was for decades. Often overshadowed by the glamor of MGM or the grandiosity of Twentieth Century-Fox—both of which are now defunct, by the way—Warner Bros. churned out important pictures and even more important television shows for much of the twentieth century. “Educate, Entertain, Enlighten” was the credo at Warner Bros. since its inception, a motto coined by oldest brother Harry and carried out primarily by youngest brother Jack. It’s noteworthy that Harry placed “educate” before “entertain” in the list of principles that guided what became his entertainment empire. It implied that Warner Bros. had a moral center: being in conversation with the American public was of the utmost importance.

Warner Bros. took creative and financial risks throughout the duration of the “Golden Age” of American cinema, which the studio itself kicked off on October 6, 1927. Arguably more impressive but less known is Warner Bros. rise to power in the world of television. When movie moguls were turning their nose at the medium they felt was beneath them in the mid-1950s, Jack realized that either Warner Bros. could die with the Louis B. Mayers and Adolph Zukors or he could evolve his company into something that could maintain relevancy in a changing media landscape.

When the Warners were running the company, they were notorious for their lean productions, preferring to keep their operating costs to a minimum. It had a detrimental effect on the happiness of many of its most famous contract players; James Cagney, Bette Davis, and Dick Powell were often lined up outside of Jack’s office to complain about how little he was paying them compared to their peers at other studios. So frugal were the Warner brothers that their head of production in 1933 left in a huff and started his own studio. That guy was Darryl Zanuck. That studio became Twentieth Century-Fox.

Perhaps it’s unfair to compare the business practices of the old studio system to the practices of today’s “AMPTP.” America actually used to pooh-pooh monopolies and heavily regulate businesses. For some additional context, the business tides really began to turn when Ronald Reagan became president and he destroyed every regulation he could get his hands on. Sometimes I wonder if Ronald Reagan would have even become president if Jack Warner hadn’t given him his first film contract in 1936…

There’s no doubt that American enterprise has evolved over the hundred years that Warner Bros. has been one of its most important businesses. But a call to action that has echoed in the ears of every entrepreneur since this nation’s capitalistic founding has been this: “innovate or die.” And Hollywood was no more immune to major technological revolutions that threatened to end its status quo in the 1950s than it is now. If I may be so bold as to oversimplify a genuinely complex issue, “streaming” is just the latest revolution. And if I can really press my luck, I’d bet money—nothing close to the $82.7 billion that Netflix’s Ted Sarandos is throwing on the WBD table—that there will be something in the future that kills streaming.

But I asked you a question at the beginning of this that I have yet to address: Would Jack Warner hate David Zaslav? I won’t bury the lead any longer: yes—and no.

Jack would hate that WBD bears almost no resemblance to the Warner Bros. he led. The current free fall that the company is in would probably sting that much more because Jack’s own name is associated with words like “crumbling” and “struggling” and “mismanaged.” Jack especially would hate to know that Zaslav has not been afraid to take on massive amounts of debt to keep the company afloat. The only time the brothers Warner did anything so risky was right after The Jazz Singer premiered—when they bought the First National lot and acquired Vitaphone.

Jack would be able to recognize that those risks that Harry, Abe, and he took at the end of the 1920s into the early 1930s were wise investments: inherent in both moves was a look toward the future of entertainment. The Warner brothers invented talkies; they had to keep making them if they wanted to keep making motion pictures at all. The crowning of Zaslav, a cable dealmaker, in 2022, after practically every studio in town had launched its own streaming service, would make Jack shake his head and shout a slightly different exasperation than the one of pundits: “David?” he would ask. “Why?”

Jack would probably hate every decision Zaslav has made in his short but consequential tenure as CEO. And I think a resounding “no” is in order to answer my second question: “Is the Warner Bros. Discovery CEO doing right by the youngest Warner brother?” And yet, after a legendary tantrum, Jack would probably know in his heart of hearts that streaming is the future of entertainment. And as excruciating as it would be to admit, he would probably understand that in order to move forward, aligning his company with the definitive victor of the so-called “streaming wars” would probably be a smart move.

Jack was a lifelong Republican, but he was also a huge supporter of FDR, so the jury is out on what he might think of the current regulation landscape. And candidly, I don’t know enough about the history of deregulation to give an informed opinion on it myself, let alone comment on how Jack Warner might feel about it.

Would Jack Warner have made the same decisions that Zaslav has made? No. Would he have led his family’s company to its effective demise? Of course not. But would he maybe, just maybe, understand that handing over his history to the people who are probably best poised to bring it further into the future is the best shot at preserving his dwindling legacy? Yes.

The Netflix acquisition of Warner Bros. remains to be seen; it’s blatantly monopolistic, and if the American government were functional right now, they’d block the move. Unfortunately, anything goes in today’s Washington. But that’s another essay for another writer who has the patience and energy to examine American politics.

Jack Warner would probably breathe a sigh of relief at the thought that Warner Bros. might live to see another day—maybe even another industry-altering movie premiere—because of Zaslav’s latest decision to have someone else take care of all that is genuinely valuable inside WBD. And for that reason, and that reason alone, Jack would probably grit his teeth and shake Zaslav’s hand for finally releasing his death grip on the house that Harry, Abe, Sam, and he built 100 years ago.