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We're going to take a quick break for the next two weeks. We'll be back in January. That's the housekeeping. Back when this podcast was called Recode Media, I would frequently ask Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw, the killer media reporter,
to come on the show and help me put a bow on the air and look ahead to next year. And you know what? Some traditions are good. So we are bringing this one back. In this episode, I talk to Lucas about all the changes big media is or isn't going to see in the near future. what losing TikTok will or won't mean for media, and much more. And it's more fun to hear him talk with me instead of me monologuing, so let's get right to it. Here's me and Lucas Shaw.
I'm talking to Lucas Shaw. He is the star of All Things Media at Bloomberg. The last time I talked to him was a year ago when this show was called Recode Media. He was talking to me, I believe, from South Korea. And today you're talking to Los Angeles, but you were most recently in Saudi Arabia. Do I have that right?
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and UAE, yes. Boy, are your arms tired. Thank you for staying awake and helping us assess what happened in 2024, what's going to come in 2025. Let's start here because maybe this will give us a good sense of what's going on. going to happen next year why are you in the middle east what's the media story there the media story is that media companies uh and filmmakers and producers and sports leagues although that's not why
Didn't happen while I was there. All keen to kind of find new sources of money are spending an increasing amount of time. in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the UAE. So when I was there, I went to the Red Sea Film Festival, the fourth year of it, which is sort of this big film festival that the Saudis have ginned up as part of their outreach to the Hollywood community. i think it overlapped or was very close to formula one races in the gulf
Also events, there was a music event in Riyadh while it's happening. There's just a bunch of people going to that part of the world because they think that there's money that they're having a hard time getting in the US and Europe. And so you wrote this piece about your trip to the film festival, the Red Sea Film Festival, is it what we're calling it? Red Sea Film Festival. Which is not apparently yet going to challenge places like Venice and Toronto for debuts of high-end art.
What is the point of that festival? Is it because the Saudis want people to come make movies? in Saudi Arabia is because the Saudis want people comfortable taking their money for movies they make somewhere else. What's the end goal here for the Saudis? Partially to... convince people to come and make movies in Saudi Arabia. But more than anything, I think they're one of the things that they have tried to do and a couple of other organizations in the region have tried to do.
is create a forum to elevate filmmakers from the region. So a lot of the movies that are shown there are from the Middle East, are from Africa, are from South Asia. um movies that probably don't get the same love as can venice toronto sundance and so there's this sort of there's this dance happening where
These countries would like to build up their local film industries, whether that's for soft power, whether that's to diversify their economy, all of the above. But it's hard to do that without... some help from the people who have been doing it forever. So if you look at a country like China, like they put a bunch of money into Hollywood and
The end game was Hollywood came and shared a bunch of expertise with local filmmakers in China that has helped accelerate the development of the local industry there. And now China doesn't really need Hollywood movies the way that it used to.
In the China instance, it wasn't just that the Hollywood film companies were there on a fact-finding mission, right? No, there were billions of dollars in money going back and forth, and they shot a bunch of stuff there, and they changed the product. Right, shot a bunch of stuff there, changed the product. So it would appeal to Chinese film goers. And then that all stopped. Now we're not at that phase. No one is writing scripts so far. Maybe you tell me otherwise.
picture Saudis in important roles. No, and it may never happen because if you look at Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, two very wealthy countries in the region, there are not a lot of people who live in those countries. Because there are great places. There are sort of like hubs of commerce in the region. If you're a Western company and you want an office in the Middle East, you open up shop in Dubai. But you're not making product for the viewers there.
Saudi Arabia is bigger, but still not so big that it's like, it's actually a pretty important market for social media companies. It is not yet an important market and may never be for the Netflixes of the world. And to be clear, Emily Blunt, Cynthia Erivo, Will Smith, Vin Diesel, they are not at these film festivals because they're deeply interested in helping the Saudi economy create its own film hub, right? They're there because they want money from...
Saudis some of them are there because they're being paid a lot of money to be there some of them are there because they would like to get money for future projects and then there are a couple of people there who i spoke with who were legitimately interested in they were like doing workshops with local filmmakers and really had that as a passion but i think that
The vast majority of the people who went, whether they were the famous people you mentioned or the executives that I met with, were there to try to figure out if there's a way to get financing for projects. So to be blunt about it, six years ago, the Saudis, according to the CIA and many others, killed Jamal Khashoggi. There was an immediate revulsion about that act. And for a couple of years or at least a year.
Americans went through great pains to say they weren't going to do business in Saudi. They weren't going to take Saudi money. Ari Emanuel gives the money that he had gotten back. And it seems like we have reset. expectations now. The Saudi's been putting money into video games. No one's made a peep about that. They put money into golf with Live Golf. There were some peeps about that. It seems like that's resolved. Do people have qualms about being associated with Saudi money in 2024?
yes but not nearly to the extent that they did five years ago i think it's easy for Relatively easy for a CEO, an executive, a producer, a financier to take Saudi money. Not to say that there won't be some blowback, but they can do it. The category that people think is still tricky is talent. Like it's one thing for Emily Blunt to go to this film festival.
and like accept this award that probably most people in the public are not aware that she accepts and she gives a speech where she really doesn't say anything it sounded like her pr person just sort of wrote her two minutes of nothing it would be another for her to like go and film a movie and promote it there and all these things. And I think some talent will do it, right? Like Will Smith, they had a bad boys premiere in Saudi Arabia, but most talent.
or maybe not most, but a lot of talent, I think would still be a little worried about. The image would be worried about the kind of lack of rights for queer people and for women in that country. And so that's certainly one of the biggest impediments to there being more. business relationships when it comes to entertainment specifically. As you point out in your coverage, one of the reasons people are flocking there is that other sources of money have dried up.
Hollywood always needs new people putting money into it because old ones get disappointed and move on. The China moment has moved on. It's now much more expensive to borrow money than it used to be. That is a funding issue. How much of it is... just that how much of this move to saudi and middle eastern money in general is just that that's where the dollars are they're not somewhere else yeah if you're looking to finance uh an independent film or television production
It's just been brutal for the last few years. And so any place that's willing to step forward and help you with that, you have to seriously consider. I think that really... explains it it's not that there's the the big entertainment companies the disney's warner brothers discoveries paramount's buying less but then also it's it's almost even worse if you're an independent trying to get something made because you
To your point, it's more expensive to borrow money. And you have all these folks looking at an industry that's contracting and saying, why do I want to put money into it? And so they've had to... It's already... an unpleasant experience to try to raise money for an independent feature film. But I think right now, the last couple of years, it's been as difficult as it's been in a long time, probably since the recession in 07-08.
Did you see a good movie when you were at the Red Sea Film Festival? I did. You want to tell people about it? I'm going to admit that I didn't finish it because I had to leave for a meeting. So not the best movie. No, no, no. I wanted to finish it. I had to leave for a meeting. But there's an Indian movie.
called The Superboys of Malagon that's actually being released, I think, by Amazon. But this company, Excel Entertainment, that's one of India's bigger production companies, made it. I really enjoyed it. It's very charming. So you'll probably be able to watch it here. I pick that as opposed... To some other ones that you might not be able to. I can see your name on the poster now. It's charming. Lucas Shaw.
This bridges us to sort of where I wanted to have an overall discussion with you, which is what happened last year, what's going to happen next year. And in both cases, it seems like contraction. We had bigger companies swallowing others, announcing plans to swallow others. There is a lot of expectation.
Expectation that we'll see more consolidation in media next year. You had David Zaslav the morning after Trump was elected saying, bring it on. I can't wait for more consolidation. This is going to be great. But Lucas, you have argued that you don't expect the media merger that maybe some moguls are expecting. Lucas, you have argued that you... Don't expect the media consolidation frenzy that some people are expecting slash hoping for to manifest in 2025.
Is that just a timing issue that it takes longer to put these deals together? I don't think that's fair. My issue is this perception that they're... i guess that there hasn't been deals not that there i do believe that there will be continued consolidation but i also think that the a lot of these legacy media businesses have been consolidating for a decade and there has never really been a slowdown if you go back to you know at t buying time warner and cbs and viacom combining and uh discovery
buying scripts and then buying what was Time Warner, renamed Warner Media and Disney and Fox. And on the music side, there's just been a ton of deal-making. And I get that... uh there are certain industries of the economy where things have really slowed down during periods and maybe a small like there are certain sectors in entertainment but
If you sort of level it out, it's been pretty consistent, even during the Biden administration, which a lot of people saw as hostile to deals. Like 2021 was one of the most, if not the most active deal years.
in the 20th century, or excuse me, in the 21st century, it then slumped progressively. But if you do sort of like the average number over those years, it's pretty steady. I think that there's been a lot of deals and there will continue to be a lot of deals because you've got a bunch of these cable networks that are...
that are declining assets and right for consolidation. Do you think there are going to be people looking at deals next year that they wouldn't have considered in 2024 because Donald Trump will be in office and presumably will, and they think that he will be... Give them a green light to merge when the Joe Biden, Lena Kahn, John Cantor era wouldn't make that possible. Yeah, probably. But some of those companies...
Like if we're talking about the really big companies that have to worry about antitrust, especially the tech companies, I don't know that if they wouldn't choose to do it just because of a new administration. Like if we saw Apple decide to buy an entertainment company. They're not changing their mind because there's suddenly Donald Trump is in office. They're changing their mind because what Apple does, as you know about this better than I do, Apple doesn't really do big deals and they haven't.
entertainment is a sideshow for them if they choose to go and spend $40 billion to buy HBO or something like that. That is a major strategic pivot that I think is independent from the administration. That's Apple making a big swing that they weren't planning before.
And here we should note, and this is really interesting to me, that all of Trump's appointees continue to say, one, we think people should consolidate, and two, we're going to be very critical and hard on big tech. So it may be harder for certain companies to get deals done.
And I'm also wondering if that notion still applies to some media mergers. I mean, on the one hand, you have Brendan Carr, who's going to be the head of the FCC under Trump, saying that there should be more consolidation, but then also that he thinks that maybe some... some broadcast licenses could be on the table that he might want to push to revoke them and or at least bring it up when, say, Sherry Redstone tries to get her deal to sell Paramount finalized to the Ellison family.
Do you see media people trying to sort of pick their way through the specifics of what Donald Trump likes and doesn't like as they try to get their deals done? I mean, I'm sure they will. The Redstone Ellison folks.
I think, feel pretty confident in where they're at. They're both Donald Trump friendly as well. Yes. Larry Ellison is... for a long time was sort of a rare republican in silicon valley it's certainly at that level sherry the redstone family and in some ways a you know rare conservative in in hollywood so yeah i don't um i don't i don't think they're too worried
Other companies that want to do deals, sure. I mean, you look at what happened when Time Warner initially sold to AT&T, CNN's coverage meant that, you know, that... the justice department or i shouldn't say that it led to. But there were a lot of people who felt that the Department of Justice tried to block that deal. Yes, the Department of Justice insisted there was no politics involved and most people don't believe them. But for record, it was not a not a legally motivated case.
motivated case. If David Zaslav tries to do another deal and CNN is once again a part of some transaction, you could certainly see Donald Trump or people trying to position things so that Donald Trump didn't block it. Same deal with, you know, there's been some speculation. I don't think I don't really buy it that.
One of the reasons that Comcast has spun out a bunch of its cable networks into, or is spinning out a bunch of its cable networks into a separate entity is because it wants to remove itself from MSNBC because Trump obviously hates MSNBC. Now that ignores the fact that the... shareholders of comcast are also shareholders in the new entity so it doesn't really change all that much um but every company every i mean every major business not just in media is
trying to figure out how to adapt to a very unpredictable new president. Let's talk about that Comcast spin out and what it says about TV in general.
um if you're listening to this podcast you know that comcast has said they're not going to ditch they're going to carefully place almost all their cable networks into a new company and they say it's not because they hate them and they're trying to get rid of them it's because they want them to grow on their own and they're floating the idea that that company can then go acquire other cable networks and become one giant cable network.
I want you to play the good cop here because I look at that deal and I go, if they wanted any of these assets, they would have kept them. The fact that they don't want them means that no one else is going to want them, and the idea of bundling a bunch of cable assets that no one wants is just going to make a big thing that no one wants. But tell me why I'm wrong about that logic.
Because Comcast thinks I'm right. I'm not sure that you are, but I will definitely... The Comcast argument is we have these assets, these cable networks that make a bunch of money. They're not growing. And so they're... a bit of a drag on our stock our investors don't want us to invest more in cable networks in traditional media we think that there are assets out there that will that are available or will become available that are reasonably priced because
wall street has basically turned on this business and we have the the financial resources to go and snap them up but if we snap them up through comcast our shareholders are going to hate it if we snap them up through this other thing we'll be fine
That would be sort of the positive, that this new entity, Spinco, that they're calling it, can go to David Zaslav at Warner Brothers Discovery and say, hey, do you want to sell us the Food Network? Or they can go to Jim Dolan and say, hey, do you want to sell us AMC Networks? So let's say they pull that off, though. Let's say that this theory works off and people sell or dump their cable networks into Comcast's collection of cable networks. What is a big collection of cable? What is the upside?
of owning all that in one company? Absolutely no idea. I mean, in theory, it's that they can get better carriage rates, right? Well, there's the version of it where they have more clout. in the advertising marketplace and in negotiating with pay tv distributors there's also the long-term play where if they get it big enough they can then package it and sell it to someone else for more money maybe because
Yeah, I mean, AMC networks. I don't know why I'm picking that one, but some of the discovery networks, there are assets out there that would profit more.
being part of a larger entity because you can cut costs you basically have you you have like one sales team one distribution team one programming team and you you eliminate a bunch of you create a bunch of efficiencies i should say so 10 years ago, it was sort of obvious to you, to me, to a lot of people that cable was starting to decline and streaming and...
Other things were replacing it. Is there something crazy to you that 10 years later we're basically still having the same conversation? No. Not because, one, 10 years ago... So 2014. I got something in 2015, but yeah. Right. But yeah, 10 years ago, you could still have a debate about whether cable was going to fall apart because the cable guys could say, our numbers are as good as they've ever been. There is no...
decline. And they were technically correct. It was just sort of obvious if you looked around how people were actually consuming media that that was going to change. And then Bob Iger freaked everybody out in 2015 by saying, yeah, actually we are losing ESPN subs and it's been falling off a cliff since then. But more broadly, just that it's very hard for the story of covering media in the Internet age, right? Is that all of these big companies.
It takes them a long time to see the threat. And then once they see the threat, they spend a bunch of time trying to argue that the threat is not going to affect them as much. They're better positioned than the other industry that got hammered by this. But they all still fundamentally have the same problem, which they still have to.
day, which is the internet thing that is disrupting their business might be the future, but in the meantime, they need to make money and profits from the thing they are still holding on to. And that's what we're talking about today. Everyone is stuck with that challenge. So we spread this out a bit. We know what Comcast is doing for the next year. You have written convincingly about, sorry, you have written.
With authority about what Paramount's plans are for next year once this deal gets approved. Remind people what the new Paramount will look like and how it will be different than the old Paramount. Well, the new Paramount will... Have the same general collection of assets, you know, the film and it's film and TV studio, the Paramount Plus and Pluto streaming services, cable networks like MTV and Comedy Central. It will combine with. David Ellison's company Skydance, which is...
financier and producer that sort of tucks in with the studio, but will still do things that are not part of Paramount. And then there's a sports joint venture with the NFL. There's a gaming thing, some animation, but it's kind of the same company. The big change is going to be the people in charge and the strategy, right? So Paramount currently has three co-CEOs. Most people expect two of the three of them to leave. David Ellison will step in as the CEO.
Jeff Schell, who used to run NBC Universal, will be his number two. And then there'll be one person who runs all of the TV networks. That's probably going to be George Cheeks. There'll be one person who runs the streaming service that may or may not be former Netflix executive Cindy Holland. And there'll be one person who runs the studio.
A lot of people think it's going to be Dana Goldberg who works at Skydance. None of this is officially confirmed or sanctioned or announced, but that's sort of what it looks like. And when all that gets done, and you said it's kind of the same Paramount it was before, just has different owners and different managers.
does the company become something else fundamentally different do they sell off lots of pieces and focus on one thing do they try to just keep what they have and make it all better look all these folks come in when they buy one of these legacy declining tv companies they come in thinking that they have the strategy to make it better right they have to why else would you do the deal but they run into the same problem that you just outlined which is true across all these companies whether it's
paramount warner brothers discovery even disney you know bob iber comes back to a company that he ran and it proves way more difficult at least at first than he thought it was going to be you know the paramount folks have hopes and ambitions. They think they can cut costs even more at the TV networks. It's crazy to think that a company that's been firing people for five years has a lot more to cut, but everyone says they do. They believe that they can make the streaming service better.
um you know david ellison has made some noise around the technology you and i have both had a little bit of fun with that i don't think technology is the the fundamental problem with the streaming business you could make your app 200 better it will still have the same problems it has but
They believe that, you know, by cutting costs where they need to cut costs, improving the streaming, and then, you know, having access if needed to the Ellison family pocketbook puts them in a fundamentally different position. We'll be right back with Lucas Shaw, but first, a word from a sponsor. Support for the show comes from Mint Mobile. What could 15 bucks buy you? Take it to the movies, maybe? A couple gallons of gas, sure.
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$45 upfront payment required equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on the first three-month plan only speeds lower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. So see Mint Mobile for details. And we're back. Disney, we know, will still have Bob Iger running it because he has, once again, extended his employment contract. He'll be there through the end of 2026.
Disney feels pretty confident about where they're headed. They made a big show of announcing multiple year plans to Wall Street. That's a departure for them. Do we think that Bob Iger has turned Disney around from the mess that he helped create and then had to inherit again? I guess I would put it a different way, which is that of the... legacy media companies or legacy Hollywood studios. Disney is the one that I'm most confident in looking into the future.
Kind of them and Comcast, but I'd probably put Disney number one.
um you know their their movie studio had a had a really killer year after a couple of down cycles that may not repeat next year at slate doesn't look as good but a lot of the a lot of the thoughts around that company even though the movie business is pretty small like that's the one giant company where the movie business really matters it sort of drives the rest of the business they're streaming business is the biggest of the legacy players it's also now break even and will be profitable
The thing that really worried, and their theme parks, they make a ton of money. So the best case for Disney is that they're more diversified than these other players. The thing that would worry me is that their streaming service is losing share of TV time. If you add up Disney Plus and Hulu and ESPN Plus, people are spending less or less of the time that people spend watching TV goes to those services than it did.
you know, a year ago. And they're trying to fix this by making Disney Plus the like super app that has Hulu and ESPN Plus. And maybe that'll work. But I just, I don't know that their streaming business is where it needs to be. But I have certainly higher hopes for them than for their peers. Disney owns ESPN next fall.
Disney is finally going to allow people to buy an ESPN only subscription service. They've been going back and forth about this idea for years. Now they've been saying they're going to do it for years. What do you think?
Disney is going to charge for an ESPN streaming service? This joint venture venue, which has yet to launch because of a lawsuit, was supposed to cost $43 a month. What do you think Disney will charge for just... espn and do you think it will be successful i gotta admit i haven't spent a ton of time trying to figure out the answer to that because it feels like there's a range that we all know it's going to be in and so it doesn't
It's like going to be, you know, 25, 30 bucks. Maybe it'll be north of that. I think they'd be crazy to go north of that, at least out of the gate. And so I guess I'll say 25. And do you think Disney really thinks there are a meaningful number of people who want to buy that? Or do you think this is a thing they can say they offer and they hope that everyone buys ESPN through a bundle like they normally sell? They don't know.
And that's one of the things that I find most interesting is going into the launch of Disney Plus, I think they had a reasonable estimation as to how big that service could be, and they've come pretty close to it. this one the folks i know at disney and espn aren't really sure they know they have to do it but they don't know if it's going to work i have heard the same
which is part of the argument for Venue, which was this joint venture, which is, well, maybe people won't buy the standalone Disney, but maybe they'll buy Venue, which has Disney bundled with other companies. And either way, we get paid, so we don't care. Right.
they're just trying to find you know espn at the peak of cable was just such a great business and they're trying to find as many ways as possible to cobble together subscribers that can mimic that right whether that's people who continue to pay for a cable package whether that's people who access espn
flagship whether it's people who get venue people who get a disney bundle they just need to cobble together as many subscribers as they can you know espn flagship which i hope they they change they get rid of the flagship and maybe they just call it espn i don't know has the same issue that venue would have which is am i gonna pay for just part of some of the sports or do i need if i'm a sports fan i kind of want all the sports and so then i need
YouTube TV or Comcast or Charter or whatever it is, right? I'm a big sports fan, so I pay for YouTube TV because that means that on any given night, I can watch basketball or football or tennis and I don't have to worry, oh, well, they have Monday night football, but they don't have... Saturday, or excuse me, Sunday night football, right? So who is the ESPN diehard? I don't know. I think it'll... Who is the ESPN diehard who's not getting some other cable? Package. Right.
Because that's the thing with venue. If you're going to go for that, then you're still missing other stuff. So what are you actually saving? Shouldn't you just stick with YouTube TV or Hulu Live or even Comcast? And none of the other things that you could bring in. Disney Plus, yes, you had the whole Disney library, but then you sprinkle in the Mandalorian and that becomes a reason for millions of people to sign up and watch this thing. With ESPN, they can't invent another sport.
side things like a really great documentary or if they like tried to you know if they're doing a live version of sports center for like these are nice but they're not a reason that someone's going to pay 25 30 bucks a month for the service people people who are going to pay for that are paying for live sports and there's nothing extra that they can add other than okay yeah we're gonna get a playoff game or we're gonna get uh whatever and then people sign up for a little bit and then turn off
Yeah, we can have a whole separate podcast about churn. You mentioned movies and you said, serve it aside, it's not really a big business. Commands a lot of mind share among people that you and I have talked to and pay attention to. I mean, look, I love the movies.
I love the movies, too. But there's a group of people, some of them work in movies, some of them work around it, and they go, movies must be seen in movie theaters, and every time a movie does well in the movie theaters, they get excited. Every time it does badly, they rend their garments. and there's always the hope that the movies are going to reassert themselves and people will once again flock to movies the way they used to. We don't know how this year is going to turn out, but it seems...
Most likely that fewer people will have bought tickets this year than they had.
in the pre-pandemic days so we're years and years well that's definite yeah yeah so years and years of hollywood of people not going to the movies with the same frequency that they used to long-winded way of saying do you think that now the new hope is that's all going to change in 2025 do you think that will change in 2025 or any other year or just the is this the new normal i think it's the new new normal um you know ticket sales will be or at least revenue
It's probably going to be down from last year, but only slightly. Folks will recognize that the strike is a factor. It influenced the release schedule a little bit this year. And so that's why they believe that next year will be better. 25 could be better than 24. It could be better than 23. It's unlikely to be better than 19, which was sort of this record movie going year right before the pandemic.
Most folks I talk to think that we've just sort of settled in a world where ticket sales are going to be down, you know, like 15 to 20 percent from what they will be. But the industry is not collapsing. And actually, most of the theater owners are in pretty good shape.
And a couple of the studios are doing really well. The thing that I have my eye on, I mean, to your point about people get, anytime there's a big movie, they're like, see, people want to go to the theater. And it's like, yeah, people will go to the theater for the right movie. But the habit of movie going is gone for most people. And people are really only going to the theater for sequels. I think I looked at it, I think nine of the 10.
biggest movies of this year are sequels or prequels or something like that and the the tent the 10th is wicked which is you know based on both a book and a musical so there has not been some there's no glory for original work and next year all the biggest projects are also going to be like one of my predictions i'll probably do for a future newsletter is that
All 10 of the biggest movies next year are sequels or prequels. And the world for non-superhero, non-sequel movies that used to say, oh, well, that's now streaming. All that stuff is getting made either as actual movies or as television shows for the streamers. You could argue whether that was true, but the streamers are now...
pulling back from production in general, right? They're still going to have stuff. Yeah, they're still making movies and they for the most part can't be sequels and prequels because they don't have the library to do that. But they're not me. Well, so Netflix is making fewer movies, still making a lot of movies, you know, 30 plus a year. But it's half of what they were doing prior. Correct.
Probably for the best because the other 30 to get to 60, nobody watched. But Amazon is actually making more movies in part because they bought MGM. Amazon's a little bit of an outlier here where they're making... I forget the numbers, but I want to say 10 to 15 movies just for streaming and 10 to 15 movies for theaters. And so they are now as big as from a movie production standpoint as any other places now.
We'll see how those movies do in theaters. They may change their mind if some of this stuff doesn't work. Apple is a big question mark. Nobody can really figure out what they want to do in the movie business. But yes, if you want to make an original movie... the streaming services are still a better place to play. And I think of the three streaming services, most of the producers and agents and folks I talked to would...
Most want to work at Amazon because they can still get a theatrical release. And then the benefit of a big streaming service. So I know better than to extrapolate what my life is like in New York City, consuming media to the rest of the world. But I went to the Angelica Theater this weekend to go see The Order. Yes. Straight ahead B-movie. I definitely recommend it.
Place was full. People were pouring in to see that and Enora and a whole bunch of other stuff, stuff that I don't believe is made by streamers. In New York City, there's an audience for that. Are we just going to be in a world where... Right, where if you want to...
want to see those kind of movies in a theater you have to be in Los Angeles and New York and a handful of other cities and that's just where it happens I'm not sure because I don't know that that's a big enough market to subsidize all of those projects i mean maybe
You know, Anora did like a nice little piece of business, right? It's not a massive hit, but I think it grossed like $20 million at the box office. Neon, which is the company that put it out, at least in the US, has an output deal with Hulu, so they'll get paid. uh for that to get released so that's you know they'll make money on it but the just the slots for those movies will be there'll be fewer of them right so like i remember i was at
A Real Pain, which is another, Searchlight, which is a division of Disney, released it. Jesse Eisenberg movie, Sundance Darling, they bought it there. And it's opening weekend in, even in LA. They wanted to put it in two screens. And one of them was like, they were both at big malls. They were both big because there just aren't a lot of theaters showing those types of movies and screens where they could put them on, right? Like, yes, you have the Angelica in New York, but...
the number of those art house movie theaters dwindles by the day and so i think you can still put them out but there just aren't as many spaces which means not as many of them will get made or at least will get released in theaters you'll have a few successes but there won't be the same breath that there used to be. Like, I remember just being, I don't know why this number really struck with me.
But when I saw that number about the weekend that Moana 2 came out and Moana 2, Wicked and Gladiator 2 made up like 75% of all movie show times in the US. So that means that if you go to a theater. Three out of the four choices are just those movies. You only have one, like, let's say you go to a movie theater with four screens. You only have one other choice. And I think that's sort of where we're headed, where there'll be a few titles that really dominate at any given time.
And so if you're a coastal elite like us, you might still be able to see a charming indie movie about two brothers going to tour Holocaust sites, but that'll kind of be restricted to us. Yeah. If you want to see it in a theater. Yeah. There'll only be so many places that you can go to do that. You like to talk about music. You cover music. I don't cover it so much anymore. So let me make it. I mean, this will count as a music question. Okay. There is a decent chance that.
a month or so from now tick tock goes away in the us or it doesn't go away but it's impossible to download new apps and it starts the process of going away what does that mean for the media business if tick tock really does go away Okay, I'm going to answer that in a second, but I want to ask you, since you brought this up, what are your current odds on whether it actually goes away?
Way, way higher than I would have said a year ago. I said, there's no US politician that wants to be responsible for taking away something that lots of people like. I was shocked, as apparently was TikTok, that it got through Congress. And even then, I was still assuming, well, that... no one's going to sign it into law. There's going to be some escape hatch.
I'm not a constitutional law expert, but it seems like it's quite hard to overturn a law, even if even if Donald Trump wanted to invest energy in that. And it's unclear whether he does. So yeah, seems like it's going. I'm sort of still clinging to the belief that someone will find a way to prevent it. But if it does get banned, it's really good news for YouTube and Instagram, which would...
Because they have TikTok clones. Correct. Well, and just, yeah, they're the other apps that young people use to watch video. Like there was that Pew Research study that was recent. And for all the fuss about TikTok. Americans between 13 and 17, YouTube is number one by a mile. And then it's TikTok, and then it's some of the others. For, you know, Hollywood studios, for record labels.
it just it removes an important marketing channel and so i think a lot of those folks are struggling to figure out how to reach young people and they would have to to recalibrate their marketing strategy right like a lot of the big successes over the last few years Can... owe some of their success to TikTok, whether it's a movie like Encanto or the Minions movie, or basically every hit song goes viral on TikTok at this point. So that's another area where probably
YouTube and others would benefit because if they're like, Oh, if we have to reach young people, where do we do it? Maybe podcasts will benefit. Not the, just in terms of. more marketing money coming in. I'm waiting for that TikTok bump here at Channels. Yeah. And is there any reason to think that people who are using TikTok to promote their songs and movies won't be able to have the same success at Instagram and YouTube?
No, I mean, in theory, they should be able to have more success because they're more familiar with the platform. Is there a culture on TikTok that you'll miss that you think is distinct from the other platforms? Me personally? Yeah. No, but I'm the wrong person to ask.
Middle-aged white guy is not the premier. I just ask you because you're younger than I am, so you count as a young person. Yeah. I say I'm the wrong person to ask because I'm not a super user. I have friends who are, and so people who rely on it. For like when they travel, they use TikTok to like. or even in their home city to like find a new cool restaurant or find a skincare routine or whatever it is, right? I'm not using it for that. A lot of people are.
Obviously, there are people who use it for entertainment. We haven't really seen a TikTok native star blow up. That's just not how the platform works. So there will be millions and millions of people who spend a lot of time watching TikTok and getting entertainment out of it, and they will miss that. And there's culture around that. I'm not one of those people, so I will not feel its absence.
It really is going to upend the restaurant business. Using TikTok to help you find restaurants is 100% the wrong thing to do, by the way, because it just means you're going to be in a long, long line full of a bunch of clueless people. You should not do that. Um,
All right, Lucas Shaw, it's the end of the interview, which means you have to give us either a song or a movie or a book that you love that you want us to share, to consume over the holidays early next year. I did not prepare for this. I should. First thought, last thought. First thought, best thought. Movie, I'm going to say, because I feel like not a lot of people are paying attention to it, this kneecap. which is uh an irish movie about a real life it's a real life story of this this rap
trio that got in a bunch of trouble, but also got part of sort of the movement to make Irish a national language in Ireland. It's very charming. It's very sweet. The music is fun. it's short i watched that on uh my plane flight to new york for thanksgiving and loved it um and highly recommend it boom that's all i wanted just boy you did it you nailed it lucas shaw also coming back oh yeah
Also, watch the Stacks documentary, the documentary about the Stacks record label on HBO, and then listen to all the Stacks music because I just love that Otis Redding is my dream. I need to watch both of those things. Lucas, thank you for coming back. We will not make you wait another year before coming back on channels. Thanks, Peter. Thanks yet again to Lucas Shaw. We will have him on more often next year.
Thanks to all the guests who've come on this year. I am grateful to all of them, and I've got some cool stuff lined up for next year. You'll come back for that, right? Thanks again to Jelani Carter, who's been working with me for a very long time, for years and years. Apparently is still not sick of me. Amazing. Thank you, Jelani. Thanks to our advertisers. Ads rock. We love ads. Go, go ads. And thanks to all of you. I always say it and it's always true.
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