The Option

The U.S. Film & TV Production Coalition launched today, uniting virtually every major guild, union, studio group, and industry organization behind a proposed 20% federal transferable tax credit for film and television production. Alongside the launch, the MPA released an Olsberg SPI study projecting $249.1 billion in gross economic value added to the U.S. economy between 2027 and 2035 — the mo...

Paramount and Netflix are ending their animated film pact — a deal originally struck in 2023 between Netflix and Skydance Animation before the Skydance-Paramount merger. The unwind is orderly: two films already in production (Brad Bird's Ray Gunn and Rich Moore's untitled Jack and the Beanstalk project) remain committed to Netflix, while the broader content licensing relationship between the two c...

A Page Six item about Jimmy Kimmel's future at ABC exploded online Tuesday, leading Drudge and landing on the day of Kimmel's post-summer return. The story as written is overblown — Kimmel isn't fired, the show isn't canceled — but the underlying economic signal it's pointing at is real. Broadcast late night is facing a structural cost crisis, and every major network deal is running the same math....

NBCUniversal Media Group Chairman Matt Strauss took the stage at a Bank of America investor conference to make the public case for the company's coming split from Comcast — but the subtext running underneath the optimism is more consequential: deal conversations with potential partners are already underway, and the spinoff is being structured in a way that creates clean M&A optionality. This e...

Fox Corp. COO John Nallen went on record at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference to say the company's $22 billion acquisition of Roku remains on track despite a DOJ second request for information — but the real story isn't regulatory procedure. It's the unmapped political risk sitting on top of an otherwise manageable antitrust process, driven by Trump's public displeasure over Fox News' abru...

AMC Global Media has settled the Walking Dead profit participation lawsuit brought by creator Robert Kirkman and fellow producers Gale Anne Hurd, Glen Mazzara, David Alpert, and Charles Eglee for $120 million — $85 million paid this month, $35 million next year as an advance against future participation rights. The settlement, reached September 4, closes a lawsuit filed in 2022 over how AMC calcul...

Netflix quietly raised UK subscription prices on September 3rd, with the ad-supported Standard with Ads tier jumping 33.4% — from £5.99 to £7.99 per month. The move, confirmed to Deadline with no advance announcement, affects both new and existing customers across Netflix's 18M+ UK subscriber base. For the business side of entertainment, this isn't just a consumer story: it's a signal about how Ne...

France and Korea unveiled the Lumière Partnership — a combined €1 billion ($1.16B) screen industry financing initiative — at the Lumière Summit in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. The fund targets companies with the scale and ambition to compete internationally, with first instruments deploying from 2027 through 2031 and the partnership remaining open to additional country signatories. For producers, agents,...

Sydney Sweeney has signed with CAA — but the bigger story is how the deal got done. Months after her longtime agent Jennifer Millar departed Paradigm to move into management at Brillstein, Sweeney was in play, and per five separate sources, Scooter Braun — her boyfriend and music industry power broker — inserted himself into the agency selection process. For agents, managers, and executives tracki...

Tom Cruise appeared on the Pat McAfee Show Tuesday to discuss his Days of Thunder sequel — and ended up delivering an unsolicited public endorsement of Paramount's pending merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. Paramount CEO David Ellison has promised 30 theatrical releases per year from the combined studio. Cruise said he's confident the number gets hit, and predicted it eventually grows to 40. For...

Range Studios, the production arm of Range Media Partners, is in final talks to close a two-year first-look deal with Paramount Pictures focused on commercially elevated theatrical releases. The deal formalizes a relationship that's already operational — with projects including an R-rated workplace comedy and the Osgood Perkins/Nicolas Cage follow-up to Longlegs already in development under its te...

Letterboxd's sale process just got significantly more interesting. Bankers who opened buyer conversations at a $250 million valuation are now floating a $1 billion figure — a four-times step-up — with a buyer pool that includes Netflix, Sony Pictures, Paramount, TPG, and RedBird. For agents, producers, and executives who care about where audience data and platform leverage are moving, this is a de...

The All3Media acquisition has officially closed, and Banijay Entertainment has named Patrick Holland CEO and Executive Chairman of the combined Banijay U.K. — now one of the largest independent production groups in the world. With ~40 creative labels and 2,000+ hours of annual content, the merged entity has meaningful leverage with every major buyer in the market. For agents, showrunners, and prod...

UTA CEO David Kramer fired off a companywide memo attacking Variety reporter Matt Donnelly following a story about high-profile client departures — including Alex Cooper and Nikki Glaser. Kramer accused Donnelly of bias, threatening behavior, and deliberately trying to damage UTA's business. Variety stood by its reporting and said the cited messages were taken out of context. For agents, clients,...

RedBird Capital is nearing a deal to acquire Puck — the subscription journalism platform behind Matthew Belloni's Hollywood coverage — at a reported $250 million valuation. For agents, showrunners, and studio executives who rely on Puck as a primary source of entertainment business intelligence, the ownership change raises immediate questions about editorial independence, writer retention, and wha...

Mark Ruffalo's Instagram criticism of Oracle's ties to the Israeli military — framed around Larry Ellison's role as Paramount's controlling shareholder and financial backer of the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger — has triggered a coordinated industry response. A group calling itself The Brigade, nearly 1,000 members strong and including producers Haim Saban, Lawrence Bender, and Teddy Schw...

Mike Schur — showrunner of Parks and Recreation , The Good Place , and Brooklyn Nine-Nine , currently on an overall deal at Universal Television — has gone public with a detailed case against the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger. Writing in The Hollywood Reporter , Schur argues the deal is existential for writers and the broader Hollywood workforce, drawing a direct line to the Disney–Fox m...

Less than a year after Comcast spun out its non-Bravo cable assets into the newly public entity Versant, CEO Mark Lazarus is making his first real moves to define a post-bundle identity — and the early signals include a tee-time golf platform and what appear to be additional consumer-services acquisitions. For agents, showrunners, and content sellers with exposure to Versant's linear networks, the...

The Paramount–Warner Bros Discovery merger is in the most dangerous stretch of its long regulatory fight. California AG Rob Bonta is refusing to settle, a March 2, 2027 trial date is locked in, and CEO David Ellison has threatened to begin relocating Paramount out of California on October 1 — a date tied directly to a $7 million-per-day ticking fee that's costing Paramount roughly $650 million per...

All three of the largest U.S. theater chains — AMC, Regal, and Cinemark — are now publicly aligned behind a settlement of California Attorney General Rob Bonta's lawsuit against the proposed $111 billion Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery merger. Cinemark's statement, released this week, followed CEO-level endorsements from AMC's Adam Aron and Regal's Eduardo Acuna, and arrived the same day indu...

BlackRock and Oaktree Capital have jointly taken control of a major production supplier to Hollywood studios, according to the Financial Times. The move puts two of the world's most sophisticated institutional capital allocators inside Hollywood's supply chain — and changes the negotiating posture between studios and the vendors they depend on to make content. Key Takeaways: BlackRock manages over...

Netflix has quietly built a federal lobbying operation that outspends every major Hollywood studio — and the quarterly disclosure filings prove it. Puck pulled the full dataset going back to 1999, and the picture is stark: Netflix now dominates Washington on the issues that will define how content gets made, protected, and monetized for the next decade. For agents, showrunners, talent lawyers, and...

Patrick Whitesell's Silver Lake-backed firm WTSL has made its first strategic investment in Alex Cooper's Unwell media company at a $500 million valuation — the company's first outside funding since launching in 2023. The deal signals Unwell's shift from creator-economy upstart to capitalized acquirer, with explicit plans to grow through acquisitions. For agents, managers, showrunners, and indepen...

Endeavor — Ari Emanuel's company — has agreed to acquire ATG Entertainment, the Ambassador Theatre Group, which operates 7 Broadway theaters and 10 venues in London's West End, along with dozens of additional properties worldwide. The deal, which requires regulatory approval in both the US and UK, is the latest move in Emanuel's long-running strategy to own the infrastructure that talent flows thr...

Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch publicly declared that the network will not renegotiate its NFL rights deal early — a pointed rebuke of the league's effort to bring broadcast partners back to the table ahead of opt-out windows. The move reframes Fox's negotiating posture and has implications for every broadcaster with NFL rights exposure, for the ad market, and for what Fox's programming slate looks like...