What I’m Hearing: Offshoring Blame Game, Gorman’s Disney & ‘Anora’ Intrigue

Welcome back to What I’m Hearing, finally enjoying the hot fall weather in L.A.

This weekend, in addition to seeing Gladiator II and Piece by Piece (both fun), I managed to finish two complementary new books: They Went Another Way (October 22), writer-producer-cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan’s brisk memoir that highlights, in absurd diary form, the excruciating start-and-stop process of working (or, mostly, not working) in today’s TV industry; and Driving Marilyn (October 29), a biography of the late William Morris C.E.O. Norman Brokaw, written by his son Joel. While you won’t learn much about Brokaw’s biggest client, Bill Cosby, the book paints an interesting picture of the fast-and-loose dawn of TV in the ’50s and ’60s, and a business ruled by personal relationships—something very different from Kaplan’s current, soul-deadening reality. “The world is a lot crueler than when he was in action,” Joel told me today of his father.

Programming note: On The Town, Lucas Shaw and I dissected the Netflix earnings and potential pain points, James Andrew Miller predicted who’ll be No. 1 on the call sheet at the SNL 50th reunion, and Terrifier 3 distributor Chris McGurk walked me through his indie horror playbook. Subscribe here and here.

Got a news tip or an idea for me? Just reply to this email or message me anonymously on Signal at 310-804-3198.

Discussed in this issue: Bob Iger, Sue Kroll, Tony Vinciquerra, Dwayne Johnson, Dana Walden, Ted Sarandos, Mark Burnett, Al Pacino, Roger Goodell, Josh D’Amaro, Sean Baker, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, Ari Emanuel, and… the Chick-fil-A streamer.

But first…

Runner-up: Roger Goodell. Only the NFL commissioner could simultaneously enrage three broadcast partners by allowing ESPN to simulcast six extra Monday Night Football games on ABC, adding primetime competition and depressing ad inventory for rivals. “Now the rules changed, and only one company is benefiting,” one executive griped to John Ourand.

A little more on the Disney news…

Gorman, the former Morgan Stanley C.E.O., is, by all accounts, a very serious person. So after chatting with a couple Disney insiders, here’s my read on his elevation to board chair and the delay of a decision on Iger’s replacement until “early 2026”:

1. Unlike last time around with Bob Chapek, Iger won’t be as influential in the choice of his successor. This is Gorman’s plane to land.
2. Perhaps most important, the delay suggests the internal candidates aren’t currently cutting it—or at least that neither parks chief Josh D’Amaro nor TV head Dana Walden (or, if we’re being generous, Jimmy Pitaro at ESPN and Alan Bergman in film) have convinced the board there is currently an internal person worthy of the golden mouse ears to elevate and anoint now. Which we all kinda knew—none of the four candidates is a perfect package of experience and skill set—but it wasn’t a given that the board actually recognized this. Now we know they do.
3. A more robust search outside the company is likely.
4. Gorman likely would not ascend to board chair in ’25 only to abdicate it to Iger at the end of ’26. So the speculation that Iger will stay on to run the Disney board and thus loom large over the new C.E.O. as essentially his or her boss may be misplaced. More likely, Iger will simply join the board as a director, or even leave the company completely (though I doubt he can do that… See: last time around).
5. Today’s announcement also signals to the media to lay off a bit, since nothing’s happening for at least a year. It won’t quell the speculation over the most important job in entertainment, of course, but it may temper the sense that a move is imminent.

“The door was wide open, and people who I didn’t know were living off me. It was ‘Come one, come all! Al’s got it and he doesn’t care!’”

“There’s almost nothing worse for a famous person—there’s being dead, and then there’s being broke.”

“Even though I only had two cars, I was somehow paying for 16, along with 23 cellphones I didn’t know about. The landscaper was getting $400,000 a year and, mind you, that was for landscaping at a house I didn’t even live in.”

On 2011’s infamous Jack and Jill: “It came at a time in my life that I needed it because it was after I found out I had no more money.”

Not surprisingly, when I asked SAG-AFTRA what its leadership thought of this comment, I got a fiery response. “It’s somewhat surprising that Tony Vinciquerra didn’t learn last year’s lesson about how wrong it is for multimillionaire C.E.O.s on lavish trips to criticize industry workers who want salaries that keep up with inflation,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the union’s executive director, told me today in a statement. “Let’s be clear: This is a highly compensated C.E.O. at a major studio saying that workers have too many contract protections and their wages are too high, and that he and others intend to exploit lower wages and lesser contract terms wherever in the world they can find them.”

Ouch, Vinciquerra walked into that one. (I asked his rep if he’d like to clarify those comments, but I didn’t hear back.) And yet… from my conversations lately, his statement does reflect a pervasive sentiment on the executive side of Hollywood. Costs are going up everywhere at the same rate as financial pressure to keep those costs down. Over the summer, the 2024 wage rates kicked in for writers, directors, and actors, and the increases, when compounded by the new pension and health contributions, can add millions to a budget of a film or TV project. IATSE and other below-the-line guilds have negotiated their own big increases.

So let’s say you’re a WGA screenwriter making scale for an original feature script with a treatment. The minimum goes up from $160,084 in spring of this year to $171,485 in summer of next year, a 7.1 percent increase. Then add in the 11.25 percent pension contribution increase, the 11.5 percent healthcare bump (increasing to 12.5 percent next year), and the 0.5 percent paid parental leave contribution. Using the union math, the cost to Vinciquerra of that same script actually rises to more than $213,000 in the fall of next year. And that’s just the floor, of course. Writers with credits and leverage negotiate more based on those floors.

My reaction to that is… great. That’s what unions are for, and, as Crabtree-Ireland notes, these increases aren’t even keeping up with general inflation. Vinciquerra and the other top Hollywood executives certainly have raises written into their deals. But… the cumulative cost increases, coming during a market correction in entertainment and as the price of everything else goes up, are adding pressure on the studios to make fewer shows and movies, and to spend less on the stuff they do make.

Regardless of who’s to blame, the results are pretty obvious. Film and TV shoots are declining overall, and jurisdictions with the fattest incentive schemes are attracting the remaining productions. The U.K., in particular, regularly offers a 40 percent rebate on qualified spend, and they make it easy, returning money faster and with less hassle than some other jurisdictions. Germany and other parts of Europe are getting aggressive, as well. Ireland and Australia are courting unscripted shows. Meanwhile, California and Los Angeles leaders aren’t even talking about increasing their own incentives as one of the region’s defining industries withers.

Hence, FilmLA’s recent report, which revealed fewer shooting days during the three-month summer period than last year during the strikes, mostly due to the collapse of unscripted TV production. And many production veterans think this is just the beginning. It’s not only California and New York; places like New Mexico, Georgia, and other hubs will likely see major declines over the next few years—unless the overall volume returns to Peak TV levels, which few believe it will. That’s not great news for all those soundstages that were built during the boom. Also not great for everyone looking for jobs, and those expecting to see their families once they get one.

That’s not Vinciquerra’s problem, of course. His only job is to return profits to his Sony bosses in Tokyo. “Los Angeles doesn’t give any incentives for productions to remain here, and I think that’s a huge issue,” Gretchen Kinder, an unscripted producer, told the L.A. Times. “The networks are looking at the bottom line and can see the benefit of filming anywhere but here.”

Exactly. Everyone’s scrambling as the companies that built Hollywood struggle to survive in the new Hollywood. “While the unions were all yelling about corporate greed, somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000 non-union jobs disappeared in our industry over the last two or three years…that had nothing to do with the strikes,” Vinciquerra said in his speech. Maybe these powerful local employers should be more aggressively lobbying the state and city for more-generous incentives. Maybe they have a responsibility to at least try to boost the local below-the-line talent pool. At the very least, much like Disney’s Bob Iger shouldn’t have wagged his finger at “unrealistic” actors from his scenic perch in Sun Valley, Vinciquerra probably shouldn’t be blaming his creative partners for their role in cost increases. “Threatening the offshoring of American jobs is a cynical attempt to manipulate workers while masking the industry’s own business failures,” Crabtree-Ireland told me. “It is a false narrative that American workers have to choose between fair wages and contracts and losing their jobs. Our members won’t be fooled.”

The long-rumored Chick-fil-A entertainment app is officially launching November 18 with shows aimed at families with young kids. We can assume Taco Bell will soon follow with a lineup of 1980s Cheech & Chong comedies. [CNBC]

The latest mea culpa by NBC’s The Apprentice marketer John Miller only highlights how much Mark Burnett has disappeared from public since he created Trump’s image. [NBC]

Ari Emanuel is quietly projecting five-year revenue for Endeavor and TKO far in excess of what Wall Street estimates. [Sportico]

Harvey has cancer. [NBC News]

You’re not crazy, the use of “thrilled” and “cutting-edge” is skyrocketing in press releases. [Axios]

And now Scott Mendelson on the ‘Anora’ momentum…

The good news is that Anora played in the same ballpark as a Focus Features comedy featuring Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, and several other S.E.O.-friendly stars. The bad news is that a strong per-theater start more likely signals a one-weekend wonder like Steve Jobs, in 2015, than it does a mainstream success like Sicario, also in 2015. Asteroid City earned $28 million in North America, halfway decent for a modern Anderson flick released in summer, but not a blowout success.

While Anora is a low-budget indie, its positioning as a mainstream crowd-pleaser will be critical to its awards strategy. The film has already leveraged a limited release to generate buzz. Now, as it prepares to expand semi-wide beginning November 8, Neon will hope to avoid the fate—especially common in recent years—of other massive platform releases that became one-and-done flashes once they expanded to multiplexes.

Other recent films followed that platform model toward the end of 2022 but with even less success. The Whale rode a $55,000-per-theater average to a $17 million domestic total. The Banshees of Inisherin leveraged a $46,000-per-theater outcome in four cinemas to a modest $10 million domestic finish (while earning $50 million globally). Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans debuted with just $40,000 per theater in four cinemas, partially because it opened concurrently with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. The Universal release went semi-wide (638 theaters) on Thanksgiving weekend against Netflix’s limited one-week release of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. Never expanding beyond 1,149 theaters, the eventual best picture nominee ended with just $17.3 million in North America and $45.6 million worldwide.

Every studio hopes their little movie that could can spin strong reviews and solid word-of-mouth into gold upon expansion. However, the slow-roll approach more often results in one or two weekends of positive box office buzz before the film stalls in wide release and disappears. Just in the past few months, high-profile titles like Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness and Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night launched to impressive per-theater debuts, only to flatline beyond the big-city film nerd demos. Amid a nonexistent monoculture, Anora has…

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“Ted [Sarandos] masterfully convinced Hollywood that Netflix is somehow not a television station, and he is somehow not making television movies. This goes back to the Academy’s decision to allow Netflix to compete for Oscars while at the same time trying to undermine the business that the Oscars were invented to promote: theatrical moviegoing. When will the industry get wise and start treating Netflix like CBS or the Hallmark channel?” —An executive

“Daniel [Craig] speaks for all of us: The Netflix model is fucked!” —A writer

Got a question, comment, complaint, or a World Series ratings prediction? Email me at [email protected] or call/text me at 310-804-3198.