Welcome to Daily Variety, your daily dose of news and analysis for entertainment industry insiders. It's Wednesday, February eighteenth, twenty twenty six. I'm your host, Cynthia Littleton. I am co editor in chief of Variety alongside Ramin Situta. I'm in LA He's in New York, and Variety has reporters around
the world covering the business of entertainment. On today's episode, we'll hear from Ridy's Todd Spangler on the latest developments in the Three way Na Love triangle between Warner Brothers, Discovery, Netflix, and Paramount's Guidance. And then Owen Gliberman joins us to pay tribute to what he calls the symphonic talent of Robert Duval. But before we get to that, here are a few headlines just in this morning that you need
to know. Stephen Colbert's epic tussle with CBS over the Late show's interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talerico took another weird time when CBS released a statement late Monday denying that it had forbidden Colbert to run the segment. As Colbert told his audience on Monday night, which prompted him to put the segment on the show's YouTube page. CBS came back and said it was merely providing legal
guidance on equal time rules. Colbert came out in his monolog on Tuesday Night and said the network didn't bother to tell him that it would release that statement. This is getting as ugly and tense as it was during David Letterman's last days on NBC Late Night in nineteen ninety three before he jumped shipped to CBS. U two has released a new six song EP titled Days of Ash. It has a song that pays tribute to Renee Good. It feels like February when you see this headline On Variety.
Emily Deschanel is back in the Pilot Mix. She'll play a renowned criminal profiler on the untitled Universal TV drama pilot from Dean Gorgaris and John Fox. All of these stories and so much more can be found.
On right now.
And now it's time for conversations with Friday journalists about news and trends in show business. Todd Spangler, Variety's business editor, helps us unpack what is happening with Netflix and Warner Brothers Discovery and what is happening with Warner Brothers, Discovery and Paramount. The next seven days are sure to be an eventful period in this saga. Todd Spangler, thank you for joining me at the end of your day to sort out all that had transpired between Warner Brothers, Discovery
and Netflix and Paramount's guidance. This is a love triangle that has been playing out now for going on six months. So they have initiated, i think to a lot of people's surprised with Netflix's blessing. They have initiated a seven day period for negotiations to see what Paramount really has to offer. Paramount has been being a little bit coy, well, we might have a better offer in us, and now they really this is seven days and Ted Sarandos in an interview earlier today on CNBC that it is time
for Paramount to put their money where their mouth is. Todd, this was the first thing you dealt with this morning. Help us sort out what's going on here.
So Warner Brothers did a couple things right. They said, look, we will hear you out, David Ellison and company, come give us your best offer. By the way, one of your representatives told us, you'd be willing to go hire thirty one bucks a share or hire. It wasn't in writing. It was just mentioned on a phone call to an unidentified Warner Brothers board member. So they wanted, like, if you have something to really beat the Netflix deal, show it to us, put in writing, and we will definitely
consider it. I mean they have to write. They're obligated to do that.
That's probably the first order of business in fiduciary duty. Make as much money as you possibly can exactly.
But they're giving them a short leash seven calendar days. Note it's not seven business days. And they also said, oh, by the way, we are setting mark twentieth as this special shareholder vote to vote on the Netflix deal. And by the way, Paramount's guide ants or peace Guy has they refer to them, to their by their stock symbol. You know, we're still fully recommending Netflix, and we're telling our shareholders to vote against your offer as it stood
as of last week. So they're putting deadlines in place and saying, hey, Paramount, if you really want this, you got to have a clearly superior financial offer.
But let's remember that Netflix sealed a deal on December fifth, and so it has been a long walk to getting to the shareholder approval that will then really kickstart the regulatory review. But Netflix does have the bird in the hand, and of course, as listeners know, it gets complicated because Netflix isn't buying all of Warner Brothers Discovery. But this hurdle, this uncertainty has kind of hamstrong Warner Brothers Discovery from moving forward with its plan to spin off most of
its linear cable channels. You can feel the frustration coming out of Burbank.
It's always, you know, a bit of kabookie. Right to do this type of negotiation, which does need to be in public for significant parts of it, right, you do need to be transparent with shareholders, So there's a lot of posturing that goes on. And keep in mind, this is the first time that the Warner Brothers Discovery board is going to engage with Paralance Guidance in a discussion. Previously,
they've just waved them away. So when I see people saying, oh, this is then reopening talks with Perland now they have never had a serious negotiation with David Ellis.
It will be interesting to see if Ellison's really have been playing poker and they pump it up by two bucks, and then that really would take it off the tables. And then if we know that Netflix has a matching right, what is your read from Netflix on their willingness to go up significantly from where they are?
I don't have that kind of crystal ball, but I think they you know, they have their ceiling, and I don't know what that is. I assume that they've reached that ceiling now and if it goes any higher, they they're prepared to walk away and take the two point eight billion breakup fee. Why not? You know, that's a little pocket change for them. I go back to this notion that for Netflix, Warner Brothers Discovery is a nice
to have. It's a creative to earnings. You know, it gives them a production footprint, It gives them a prestigious streaming service and cable network, you know, the gold standard of premium content HBO. So this is all nice to have. David Allison is in a different spot. He really needs to get synergies, not just in the studio business, which would be a good thing for them, but on the TV side as well. That's why he wants to buy the whole thing. So you know, there's a lot of
debt at Warner Brothers. That's why they're in this spot in the first place right now. And by the way, David Zaslav and the rest of their investors at Warners Discovery, they are the real winners out of all of this, because they're going to walk away with a nice little bump from whatever they put into this project from where it was a year ago, you know what I mean?
Right, And David Ellison, by his own admission telling everybody last summer and fall who would listen, that he absolutely had to get Warner Brothers. It was part of the plan from the get go, and so he certainly if he does wind up with this at the end, he will certainly have dug himself out of a hole in
a huge way. Well, we have two big dates on the calendar now to watch the end of this seven day calendar day period, so they'll probably be working over the weekend and also March twentieth if that date still holds. So again, this will not be our last conversation about this. Thank you as always for helping us interpret all that
is going on here. All right, good to talk, and now we turn to Owen Gleiberman, Variety's chief film critic, brings us incredible perspective and a fountain of adjectives to pay tribute to the greatness of Robert Duval. Owen Glyberman, thanks for joining me.
Good to be here, Cynthia.
As happens too often these days, you were summoned on Monday, on a holiday, to pay tribute and really just help us interpret the career of truly one of the greats, one of the true originals, an idiosyncratic character who was a very unlikely movie star according to people that worked with him and knew him best. Robert Duval left us over the long weekend at the age of ninety five.
When you saw the headline, what did you think of when you thought, what were some of those first immediate impressions that came to mind as you thought about Robert Duval.
It's funny about Daval. People will say about a movie star when they're trying to pay him a compliment. He's a character actor in a leading man's body, And I think that Robert Duval was a leading man in the character actor's body. I mean, he could do anything. He was this extraordinary chameleon, just like Daniel day Lewis and Meryl Street. But he had a certain look to him,
of this very ordinary quality. He was not glamorous, and when we first saw him playing characters like Bu Radley or the role that made him famous, Tom Hagen and The Godfather, he had this very quiet, recessive quality. And I think a lot of us watching his performance in The Godfather thought this is what Robert Duvall is like.
We thought he's this brilliant, understated actor. But I think all of that really started to change around the time of Networth, where he's playing the corrupt prophet, hungry TV executive, and Duval just gave this wild performance, kind of unhinged. And that was the other side of Robert Deval, the one who was drawn to showing you men at their most extreme. And as that side of him came out more and more, what I think you saw is that there was this incredible duality to Robert Duvald. He knew
how to play the perfect Southern gentleman. He could be the soul of decency, but he also showed you the dark side, not because he was drawn to playing villains, but because he wanted to understand and show you every dimension of humanity and he did that.
Oh, and I want to read your words and the incredible tribute that you wrote to him. This is a roadmap for the movies to go find and this is kind of a fun, cryptic puzzle way to do it.
In assessing Robert Duval's talent, you say quote he was a sly dog virtuoso whose roster of indelible whose roster of indelible characters included a broken down country singer, a mafia consiglieri, a charismatic pentecostal preacher, a psychotic army commander, a corrupt TV news executive, and a creepy neighbor who lives in the shadows, not to mention a whole lot of cowboys and also Dwight D. Eisenhower and Joseph Stalin. That a is truly a roadmap to Robert Duval and
captures all of his multitudes. That I spoke Monday morning to Walter Hill, who directed Duval twice in two projects, the movie Geronimo and the AMC mini series Broken Trail, which really kind of boosted him back and won him Emmys. Hill told me that Duval had mentioned to him that he was very proud of having played Joseph Stalin.
The first thing that struck me as soon as I heard that Duval had passed on was this incredible duality that he had playing kind of the light and dark sides of people at the same time. I mean, that, I think, is what is so great about his performance and tender mercies and why he won the Oscar for that. He's playing this broken down country singer Max Sledge who's hit bottom. The character is a recovering alcoholic, and we
see him throughout the movie really working to recover. That's kind of before this became such a movie cliche, and we see that he's basically a good man because Duval could really just play this bone deep sense of decency, and I think watching that performance, just so many people could relate to what a flawed soul this man was, because that's what Duval did. He always touched the truth
and even the dark truth. He really did start to do that in movies like The Great Santini, where he plays just this overwhelmingly bad father in ways, and yet the character's not a villain because he's trying to show you that everyone has his reasons and he wants to understand that character, and that, of course, is also what's there in his extraordinary performance in Apocalypse Now when he
plays Colonel Kilgore. It's such a mythic performance because he's coloring in in a way, this whole dark side of America, our desire to conquer and our desire to surf. It's totally psychotic, but he's showing you the appeal of that. It's a satirical performance, but it's also totally real. I mean, Leon screen in Apocalypse Now for ten minutes, and yet
nobody could ever forget that performance. But there's also this quality that Dvall brought to playing Kilgore that I think almost no other actor could have done, which is that it is such a dark character. It is so much a character that embodies the sins of America that I think almost any other actor would have You would have felt that he was on the side of saying that that this was a performance that is in a way a critique of America. But the way Duval plays it,
his identification with this character is so strong. You can tell that Duvall likes this character he's played. He's very charismatic, He's almost on his side during the performance that I think is the risk Duval took him playing that. He just goes all the way with me saying, yeah, you know, this kind of rogue cowboy, this is who America is.
What are some more recent Duval performances that stand out to you.
I just think the performance that I would like to draw people's attention to from Duval's canon is The Apostle eighteen ninety seven movie that he starred in and directed. I think it is his greatest performance, and I think it's absolutely one of the masterpieces that ever came out of the independent film era. I mean, I would just put it up there with Boogie Knight's pulpic fiction you
name it. Duval plays this charismatic Pentecostal preacher named Sonny who is totally It's like the ultimate of all performance. He's playing this guy who's totally a man of God, but he's also a narcissist devoted to his own gratification. I think Duvall probably drew on a lot of himself to play this character. He's both at once, and that's the duality that Daval could play like no one else.
Duval shows you how this man he's playing could be totally religious and at the same time may be homicidal, and as a preacher, he is like nothing you have ever seen. The word that I used for his performance when I wrote about it yesterday is symphonic. It is just one of the greatest pieces of screen acting you will ever see.
Definitely high praise. A lot of people have said he was one of those actors that just raised the performance of everyone because of his stature, because of his commanding presence.
Completely. I think Duval's legacy is really a lesson for us in terms of what movies and television are or should be, and that's that no matter how small the role, no matter how formulaic the movie, Duval always hit the true note. And he did it over and over again. You just felt that when you were watching a Robert Duvall performance, you were seeing just a total human being in front of you. He touched the depths, he touched our hidden sides, and that's what made him one of the greats.
Owen, thank you so much for writing so beautifully and taking the time to pay tribute to absolutely one of the greats.
Thanks.
As we close out today's episode, here's a few things we're watching for on February tw third, Variety will produce the first of three digital dailies out of the London TV screenings. It's going to be a busy event based on the volume of releases that are hitting my inbox.
It's almost time for Zach Braff, Sarah Chalk, and Donald Faison to scrub Back in Scrubbs, the hospital comedy that aired on NBC and ABC is back for more starting February twenty fifth on ABC and Hulu, and in scenes we never thought we'd see, there were picket signs out in front of the Writers Guild of America West building on Fairfax Avenue on Tuesday, Will Wonders Never cease. Variety's labor reporter, Gene Mattis will be closely watching this strike
by employees of the Writers Guild of America West. We love to hear from our listeners, so please send thoughts, scripes and other feedback about Daily Variety to podcasts at Variety dot com before we go. Congrats to Peter Trogett. He's been named head of Television for fifth season, reporting to CEO Graham Taylor. Trogett has been an executive with Cashette Studios as well as with NBC Universal fifth season, is a neighbor of Variety here in West LA. Thanks
for listening. This episode was written and reported by me Cynthia Littleton, with contributions from Todd Spangler and Owen Gleiberman stick Snick's hick Picks. Please leave us a review at the podcast platform of your choice, and please tune in tomorrow for another episode of Daily Variety.