Ankler Agenda

Monoculture may not be dead after all — it just needed Taylor Swift in a wedding dress and Christopher Nolan in IMAX. Elaine Low, Sean McNulty and Natalie Jarvey break down an old-fashioned July of cultural spectacle, from the Swift-Travis Kelce nuptials to Nolan’s star-studded Odyssey, which arrives with sold-out premium-format...

Books run on word-of-mouth. So what are the people who shape what gets made, watched, read and bought reading? Elaine Low, Natalie Jarvey and Sean McNulty dig into The Ankler’s inaugural summer reading list, where 100 notables — including Sony Entertainment CEO Ravi Ahuja, Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sherry Lansing, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, Netflix film chief Dan Lin, Gil...

Another Monday, another huge deal in Hollywood. Two weeks ago, Fox Corp. announced its intentions to acquire Roku for $22 billion. Now, it’s Comcast’s turn — in reverse. Today, the company revealed it will exit Hollywood completely, spinning off another division, consisting of NBCUniversal and Sky Media, as a publicly traded company, and joining Versant outside the Comcast gates. Comcast hopes to...

Oprah flew in to close deals, FOX Entertainment CEO Rob Wade came to talk up his investment in creator-led programming and even the Teletubbies arrived, ready to party. Last week, a cross-section of dealmakers, executives and stars flooded the Croisette for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where the battle between YouTube and Netflix was hotter than France’s record-setting he...

Leave it to the U.S. sports-TV machine to turn three-minute hydration breaks at the FIFA World Cup — a new feature to prevent players from collapsing in the heat — into a multimillion-dollar ad opportunity for Fox. With 48 nations competing for global football domination on U.S. soil, the World Cup is a cultural and ratings bonanza, delivering NFL-sized audiences for marquee U.S. matches and provi...

At Cannes Lions, the exec tells Ankler CEO Janice Min how the hardware behemoth became a streaming empire — 'We really do have almost Super Bowl-size audiences every day' — and makes his first public comments on the Fox acquisition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Los Angeles mayoral candidate and Los Angeles City Council member Nithya Raman is acutely aware of what’s at stake as local Hollywood production craters — 42,000 jobs lost over two years between 2022 and 2024, shoot days down 50 percent below the five-year average. Many of her constituents in District 4, which stretches from the San Fernando Valley to the Santa Monica Mountains, work in the indust...

Would you rather spend $18 billion a year on content like Netflix does, or $22 billion once to buy the remote? That’s the bet Fox Corp. is making with its blockbuster acquisition of hardware and distribution behemoth Roku, a deal that suddenly turns the home of Fox News, Fox Sports, Tubi, cable channels and a broadcast network into one of the most unconventional combatants in the Streaming Wars. W...

Nothing like a $22 billion deal to start a week, as Fox was revealed as the mystery buyer for the Roku business — furthering Lachlan Murdoch’s company’s diversification from being heavily based in the linear TV ecosystem, to extending strong tentacles in the digital and streaming space. In this bonus episode of Ankler Agenda, Business Insider columnist and Channels podcast host Peter Kafka joins T...

It’s a deal that would have been unimaginable a decade ago — maybe even two years ago. But last month, motivational speaker and On Purpose host Jay Shetty signed a reported $100 million agreement to move his video podcast exclusively to Netflix and Spotify. In the era of Alex Cooper, Joe Rogan and the Kelce brothers, streamers are battling for podcast talent as the once audio-only medium morphs in...

“I would not be feeling good right now if I was sitting in my corner office over at Disney after this weekend,” one source tells Like & Subscribe’s Natalie Jarvey about the box office success of Backrooms and Obsession — two movies from popular YouTube creators-turned-filmmakers Kane Parsons and Curry Barker, respectively. Both low-budget breakouts leapfrogged over Star Wars’ The Mandalorian and G...

Angelenos are on the clock. The Los Angeles mayoral election is set for June 2, and even those who don’t live in SoCal should pay close attention to the outcome. Hollywood is taking center stage in a way it rarely has before as local production plummets, jobs shrink and frustration ripples through the city. Has Mayor Karen Bass done enough? Could City Councilmember Nithya Raman or former reality T...

The summer box office is already popping, with The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Michael raking in millions before Memorial Day — and with new movies coming from Christopher Nolan, Steven Spielberg, Marvel, Pixar and A24’s youngest director ever, it feels like the industry might have its best summer since 2019. (Even if The Mandalorian and Grogu fails to launch.) Elaine Low, Sean McNulty and Natalie Jar...

People still want to be scared out of their minds together, and Atomic Monster president Michael Clear, M3GAN writer Akela Cooper and YouTuber-turned-filmmaker Mark Fischbach (aka Markiplier) are all in the business of giving audiences those thrills. Their conversation, which was moderated by Like & Subscribe’s Natalie Jarvey on the Ankler’s Business of Media and Entertainment Stage at NAB Show in...

It’s the end of Upfronts week, better known as Hollywood’s annual pilgrimage to woo Madison Ave. Formerly about broadcast TV schedules, Upfronts has become a showcase for a much stranger, fragmented TV future: creators, podcasts, live sports, live events, movies, dog shows and, yes, lots of AI, the cringe buzzword of the week (and jeez, sorry, scripted). Elaine Low, Sean McNulty and Natalie Jarvey...

Quarterly earnings season isn’t just MBA word salad. Earnings calls are where Hollywood’s biggest companies tell Wall Street what matters most — and where employees often learn what’s really happening inside their own studios. This week, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount reported earnings, and Elaine Low, Sean McNulty and Natalie Jarvey break down what the companies are signaling about...

The agency formerly known as Wasserman — made infamous in recent months by founder Casey Wasserman’s flirtatious emails with Jeffrey Epstein accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell — is up for sale. So who wants it? Elaine Low, Sean McNulty and Ashley Cullins break down the bidders, the stakes for the representation business and what the multibillion-dollar price tag reveals about the industry — and who has...

The entertainment industry’s economic and existential tailspin is playing out on the political stage, as Los Angeles’ mayoral candidates curry favor with the Hollywood set before the June 2 primary. Incumbent Karen Bass, city council member Nithya Raman and former The Hills star Spencer Pratt aren’t wooing the A-list, but the rank-and-file of an industry being squeezed by runaway production. Elain...

Everyone talks about taking big swings again, but few Hollywood execs feel like they’re actually in a position to do it — without fearing for their jobs. But former Showtime head Jana Winograde and ex-Warner Bros. Television pres Susan Rovner are greenlighting shows from the backseats of cars and searching for new talent right out of film school, after making the leap from legacy TV to microdramas...

During Warner Bros.’ supersized CinemaCon presentation in Las Vegas, the studio’s sale to Paramount went unmentioned — even as it touted a theatrical slate stretching into 2028. But the contentious merger was impossible to ignore, dominating chatter across the convention floor and even inadvertently pulling The Ankler into the mix thanks to what’s now being dubbed “pin-gate.” Elaine Low, Sean McNu...

The tentative deal between the Writers Guild and Hollywood’s major studios has quelled fears of another strike — all while shaking up the major guilds’ contract cycle. Elaine Low, Sean McNulty and Natalie Jarvey break down the key terms, including a $321 million infusion into the WGA health plan (alongside higher deductibles and premiums) and a shift to a four-year bargaining agreement rather than...

Sean Penn, puffing away inside the Beverly Hilton at the Golden Globes. Kylie Jenner, with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth, on the cover of Vanity Fair. Nurse Dana, taking a drag on The Pitt. Smoking is back — both IRL and on screen — just as Hollywood’s shrinking career ladder leaves many millennials feeling stuck and a stressed-out Gen Z, inheriting the collapse, searches for connection an...

Silicon Valley was supposed to be satire. In 2026, it plays more like a warning. In a look back on the iconic 2010s HBO comedy, co-creator Mike Judge and exec producer Alec Berg reflect on how “incredibly intentional” they were in making tech startup life feel plausible. But what’s wilder is how close to reality some of their storylines actually got, from AI to the ruthless capitalism of the real-...

Casting Taylor Frankie Paul on The Bachelorette was supposed to revive the wilting franchise. Instead, a 2023 video of Paul attacking her ex-boyfriend triggered the meltdown of not one, but two of Disney’s biggest reality shows. Paul’s season of The Bachelorette is now sitting on a shelf, and production on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives — where Paul is a central character — is paused indefinitel...

Here’s the irony: Even in the age of streaming, about 85 percent of profits from a merged Paramount Skydance–Warner Bros. Discovery still would come from linear TV, as Sean McNulty points out. So what do you do with more than two dozen aging cable networks? Spin them off, reinvent them as digital brands or send them to TV’s great dead-brand graveyard in the sky — all while Wall Street watches with...