Business Features
Shane Smith and the Final Collapse of Vice News
Just weeks after the company he founded entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy last May, Shane Smith jetted to the French Riviera. But this wasn’t a vacation for the 54-year-old flamboyant former Vice CEO to drown his sorrows. Smith landed in Cannes on a mission to save the media company that he had started as a scrappy […]
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A Streaming TV Prizefight: Walmart Tries Muscling in on Amazon
The first-ever television commercial ran on July 1, 1941, during a Brooklyn Dodgers-Philadelphia Phillies baseball game airing on the local New York TV station WNBT. The 10-second spot, for Bulova Watches, featured a graphic of a Bulova watch face over a map of the U.S. A voiceover declared that “America runs on Bulova time.” As […]
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AI’s New Job? All-Purpose Hollywood Crewmember
Picture this: In a future not too far away, HBO is mulling whether to greenlight a new Game of Thrones spinoff but is on the fence about the project. So instead of dumping tens of millions of dollars to shoot a pilot it might wind up passing on, it uses a generative artificial intelligence system […]
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Inside Disney’s Shadow Succession Game
In the bowels of the Washington Hilton in April, just hours before the White House Correspondents’ dinner, several ABC News staffers were seen hastily carrying furniture, including couches and high-top tables, out of a room on the terrace level of the hotel that was about to host executives and talent at the network’s pre-dinner reception. […]
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How Marvel Is Quietly Retooling Amid Superhero Fatigue
Just over a year ago, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was set to take Marvel Studios to the next level. A new villain was going to be introduced, setting the stage for several years’ worth of storytelling. And the movie itself was a giant-sizing of a franchise that was previously modest in scope. Instead, the […]
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Take the Cash or Fight? Media Moguls Split on AI Deals
A highly amusing, albeit scathing New York Times restaurant review of Guy Fieri’s American Kitchen & Bar that went viral in 2012 is being used by attorneys acting for the Times in their lawsuit against OpenAI to illustrate just how destructive the new technology could be to the future of journalism. When prompted about the […]
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Disney’s Epic Deal Reignites Hollywood Love Affair With Video Games
Not long after he returned as Disney’s CEO in late 2022, Bob Iger sat down with Josh D’Amaro, Disney’s head of parks and experiences, and Sean Shoptaw, the company’s head of games, to be briefed about the media habits of young consumers. “The first thing they showed me were the demographic trends,” Iger recalled, speaking […]
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How Vince McMahon Got TKO’d
When Vince McMahon stepped into the New York Stock Exchange on Jan. 23, he was on hand to celebrate what was supposed to be a triumph for TKO Group Holdings, the company for which he was executive chairman, and the owner of the WWE, the wrestling promotion that McMahon turned into a multibillion-dollar business. Earlier that […]
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How to Burn Cash and Alienate People: Behind The Messenger’s Implosion
In the basement of a car dealership in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District last spring, The Messenger chairman and CEO Jimmy Finkelstein addressed a throng of New York’s media elite. Finkelstein was there to unveil his grand plans for a new website that he claimed would revolutionize the news, talking a big game in the process. “When […]
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How Comfort Shows Conquered Streaming TV
The runaway success of Suits on Netflix in 2023 gave the show the biggest year ever in the short history of streaming viewing measurement. It also headlined a banner year for library series (aka shows that ended their run years ago) across a number of platforms: The top 10 overall titles in Nielsen’s year-end rankings […]
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Netflix Is the King of Streaming. Is It a Benevolent Dictator?
In Netflix’s global smash hit Squid Game, the penultimate challenge sees the last few surviving competitors make their way across a glass bridge. One wrong move, and the player falls to their demise. But as the players progressed, they hit upon a revelation: Yes, there will only be one winner of the final game, but […]
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Behind Netflix Film Chief’s Exit — And What It Means for Streaming Movies
The end of Scott Stuber’s seven-year tenure as head of film at Netflix did not come as a shock. But it had seemed to be coming for so long that one producer who’s done business with the streamer says when he heard that it had finally happened, he didn’t know whether to believe it. “I […]
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