Barbie & Oppenheimer & Strikes, Oh My
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Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is the third act of the Barbenheimer phenomenon. Just kidding. This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. Naima is out this week, so we're going to dive right into the interview portion, or in this case, it's a panel about one of my favorite topics, the movie business.

For a long time, I've been saying that the theater business is getting smaller and smaller due to consumers going digital. And well, box office numbers and the pandemic push to streaming have borne me out on that. But this past weekend, Hollywood finally had some solid wins. Even as the strikes of writers and actors continued, two films had explosive openings at the box office.

And while we don't have the week's final numbers yet, they seem to be on track to push Barbie over the $200 million mark and Oppenheimer over the $100 million mark. So are the movies back in business? Or is Barbenheimer a cultural phenomenon that will be impossible to replicate?

I wanted to discuss this with three experts. Matt Bellany is an entertainment journalist at Puck News who pens the What I'm Hearing newsletter and was previously editorial director of The Hollywood Reporter. Franklin Leonard is a film and television producer who founded The Blacklist. That's the list of Hollywood's favorite never-produced screenplays. And Brooke Hammerling is a communications expert who writes the newsletter Pop Culture Mondays. Let's go. ♪

Welcome, Brooke, Matt, and Franklin. It's been a busy week for Hollywood, so let's dive right in, starting with the Barbenheimer weekend. That's the last time any of us can say that word, by the way. It is everywhere, and the media has lost its mind about it. But let me start with Matt. A

The weekend box office, Barbie made, I think, $150 million domestically, and Oppenheimer made $80 million. It's finally now a hot summer movie after a cool one. We're still, I think, 20% behind 2019, I read in your column. So talk about what's happened here and how important this is.

weekend has been for Hollywood. Well, listen, it's a clear win. And I think the reason that people in Hollywood are going so nuts over this is because this is not a superhero movie weekend. These are not sequels. One of them is an original auteur-driven biopic that's three hours long. The other, yes, it is exploitation of very well-known intellectual property. But the

It was an example of a company, Marvel, that let a talented A-level filmmaker in Greta Gerwig sort of have her way with this material. They took risks and they both turned into fantastic successes. I don't know that we can ever account for the...

Barbenheimer phenomenon and the fact that these two movies caught on online and became memed and turned into one of those zeitgeisty cultural phenomenons that the movies only seem to be able to deliver in this context. So,

you know great for hollywood but i don't know that you can then say in the executive suites okay now what's our barbenheimer of next summer right or we're back because they're 20 down from a couple years ago right they're still not at the same levels no and you know this is not going to bring hollywood back these movies are both going to be very profitable and good for both these filmmakers and greta gerwig will be able to make whatever she wants to make now great for her but

in terms of the movie business having found an answer and a way back, I don't think that the movie business is in a great place right now. So celebrate the weekend, but don't read too much into this. Too much into it. That it's not like superheroes are over. I'll get to that in a second. But Brooke, talk

about the cultural phenomenon. Is it as widespread as it seems? And is it as diverse as people are saying it is, them studios at least? Because someone tweeted and made me laugh, this is Black Panther for white girls, which I thought was kind of funny. Credit where due, that was Trayvon Free. Trayvon Free, that's exactly. And I mean, it's a good, it's certainly a good one. And I would have thought that. I mean,

I would have had a very different opinion if I hadn't gone to the movie myself last night in London. Yeah. But just the diversity in sort of, you know, in central London, but it was still very diverse in terms of male and female diversity.

diverse in terms of age, diverse in terms of race. It was a really interesting experience and it was so packed and everybody was sort of very emotional at the end. Nobody wanted to leave from my experience. They wanted to stay through the credits. I do think that's a little bit of the Marvel training. Everybody was waiting for something to be revealed during the credits. Yeah. I mean, it couldn't end on vagina, right? It couldn't just end on vagina. Yeah.

Gynecologist, please. Oh, come on. Say it. Yes, but she was celebrating her having a vagina. Yes, that's correct. Which is why you go to a gynecologist. But we're not going to explain that to you guys. Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. Fun fact about that scene. You know, they tested many different versions of a final scene.

And obviously, Greta Gerwig wanted the one that ended up in the movie. Others I won't name did not want the movie to end on that joke. And she won out and people seem to love it. Yeah, they seem to love it. But Franklin, did you have something to say? Well, I think that there is a clear message that comes from Barbenheimer weekend, which is that the studios need to back talented filmmakers with wildly ambitious goals.

films and stories regardless of what intellectual property is behind them. And if you look at the most successful movies in Hollywood history, by and large, they have been directors with a vision, you know, usually involving some sort of IP, whether it's Titanic or Barbie or Black Panther, and frankly, to recognize the value that those filmmakers bring.

and not try to round out the edges with this sort of middle of the road, "Oh, if we can sand off the edges and make something that's more consumable to quote unquote, 'Middle America,'" you end up with something that is not only consumable, but highly desirable to Middle America. I'm actually looking at a New Yorker cartoon that I saw today, and it's a studio executive talking to writers saying, "Your screenplay is amazing. It's fresh, original, like nothing we've ever seen before, but we can fix that."

And I think, unfortunately, that is the overwhelming thinking from most people in this business on the business side. And that's bad business, it turns out. And the sooner we can learn that lesson, the better off we'll all be. Although there's always another lesson. But let me finish. But the cultural phenomena, does it continue? Because these things burn out, right? Well, I mean, it's hard to say. I certainly have seen. It's taking on new avenues, right? So first of all, I think everybody was expecting a different kind of movie. And so a lot of the reactions on TikTok were,

were like, that's not what I anticipated. Like people thought it was going to be a bubble gum and lip gloss and so forth. And it was, there's real meaning behind it. There's real emotion. There's mother-daughter stories. Just so you know, Brooke had Barbie tears last night. I didn't know. I had Barbie tears. I was absolutely moved, but so was everybody in that audience and everybody sort of stuck around and talked about it. It was, I mean, a thousand people, but then-

You're also seeing reactions now on TikTok where you have the reactions of the Ben Shapiros and the Piers Morgans. Yeah. And they get so upset. So then you see another layer of TikToks now creators are going after them. And then another interesting thing is, and this is certainly something I heard, even the people I was with last night all said, my God, Ryan Gosling deserves an Oscar. Yeah.

And so you kept hearing about Ryan Gosling's performance. And so now it's a whole nother layer on TikTok saying we are still programmed because like think about all the people in that movie. And yet everyone's talking about Ryan Gosling's performance and how it stands out when, you know, so that you see these different avenues keep opening up on the social media.

worlds. All right, Franklin, you did mention the people sick of superheroes as they want something fresh. I'm going to read a quote from IndieWire. Audiences don't crave IP. They want originality. The secret lies in investing in risky projects based on compelling ideas that challenge filmmakers and their audiences. So Indiana Jones was not doing well. And Matt, I want to get you on this. Mission Impossible did well, but not as well as expected. Fast 10 didn't do as well. The Flash didn't do as well. They like Megan. They like The Sound of Freedom. They like Cocaine Bear. What

What do you think about that? Well, I think they love Spider-Verse. So I don't think they're tired of superheroes. I think they're tired of things they've seen before. And if you want a successful film, you have to exceed audience expectations or subvert audience expectations in a way that delivers when you have the actual experience. And I think unless you nail that, you fail. You know, my argument around the most recent Fast and Furious movie and

to full disclosure, I worked on Fast and Furious 5 and it's one of my proudest sort of professional achievements is that they didn't go ambitious and silly enough. If you go to a Fast and Furious movie at this stage, you're going to be able to say that was the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. They set a bar very high, so they have to go bigger. I've said for a long time, the last Fast and Furious movie should be an alien invasion. And I promise you that if it is one- They were in space.

Well, they were in space, but there were no aliens. I've said that the tagline of the last one should be, this time family is all of humanity. And I promise you, if that was the tagline, people would show up out of morbid curiosity, if nothing else. But again, that's what audiences want. They want to be a part of a moment. They want to have an experience that over delivers. And when they do, they will go tell other people, you got to go see this movie.

Okay. So, Matt, where does theatrical go from here? Because I haven't been to the movie theater in a while. My sons went to Barbie and my second son, Alex, went to Oppenheimer with me. But there's so many bankruptcies. You had written this week, I think, that AMC is headed that way. These movies need to make an enormous amount of money. I think they will, as you said. Oppenheimer needs, I think, to make $200 million to break even. Probably more, but yeah. More, yeah. Will people go to theater or is this a one-off?

Yeah, I mean, this weekend shows that there is still a desire amongst the general public to see a movie in theaters and be part of something larger than just plopping down on your couch and watching whatever the algorithm serves you on Netflix. So I do think that theaters are not going away. The problem is, is that, yeah, this is a great weekend, but these theaters require product.

They require a steady stream of these hit movies. And the studio's lesson from this summer, perhaps, is maybe lining up these movies one after another every weekend, which is the strategy that worked pre-COVID. Perhaps that's not going to work post-COVID. Maybe audience tastes...

have changed where they're not just going to automatically see whatever blockbuster is out that weekend. They're going to be a little bit more discerning. They need to see the 12 TikToks that tell people that, oh, this is something that people are talking about before they make that commitment. That's maybe a lesson for this summer, or it just could be that...

It's a process. People are gradually going to start coming back. Movie going, begats movie going. And everybody who had a great time this weekend at Barbenheimer is going to show up for whatever becomes the next Barbenheimer or maybe just a random Friday night movie. See, I don't know about that because my son's book, you know, my son's, um,

They didn't really. They saw the marketing campaign. It was all over TikTok. People are raving over it. And sometimes this backfires as snakes on a plane comes to mind. One of the things, I think Barbie made Oppenheimer seem cool, the combination. And Oppenheimer made Barbie seem more substantive. They certainly benefited from each other. Yeah, they benefited in a lot of ways. But one interesting thing, 6% of people who saw Oppenheimer this weekend, I think it was Korn,

did so because Barbie was sold out. And what was interesting, and they pointed out, is now Chris Nolan, who's the director of Oppenheimer, has his career-best non-Batman opening, thanks in part to the creative and marketing prowess that his old studio executed on that rival film, Barbie. This is you writing, Matt. Or this weekend, it might be a fluke, a creation of social media marketing that caught the zeitgeist as movies used to with so much more regularity, and films happen to both deliver their intended audiences. It's

of backfiring of these things because sometimes they do. People don't like, my sons watch Reddit and YouTube, period. That's it. Yeah. It was very surprising that I went to see Barbie and loved it the way I did because I was just like, I'm seeing progressive ads with Barbie. Zara, Windows are Barbie clothes. Every single store, every single brand has some Barbie connection. And I, again, I don't know, I'm not a Hollywood person, so I don't know if that's a Warner or

marketing win or loss, or if that's Mattel, I don't know. But it seemed like there was exhaustion, like it's enough fucking marketing. And my gut was, if I went to see the film, no matter how good it was, I was going to be let down because of the overhype. But in this particular case, and I think it's due to the making of the film, there's no CGI in this film.

I mean, this is what's so... Oh, there is. There is? There is. There's CGI in every film. Okay, sorry. There's CGI, but not in the way that we've been accustomed to. It's done in very different ways. And, you know, they make a big story around it. But, you know, I think that it delivered. And then the emotional connection, and it is emotional. It's not just this sort of razzle-dazzle. There is an emotional story. And people then tell that. And it's the spreading of that, as you say, on TikTok and in Instagrams and so forth, that people are sharing their personal...

personal connection to the story. Mother who, you know, and a daughter, a daughter who wishes she could share that with her mom. People who really have this experience that feels emotional, they share it on social and then that sort of fed into it. So it didn't backfire the way that I anticipated it. I really did. I thought people were going to be so sick of it.

I think it comes down to-- and again, I hate to keep hitting this drum-- is the movies are good. And if those movies had come out and the critics' responses had been mediocre, if the studios hadn't screened them for critics before they were released, the marketing campaign, I'm near certain, would have backfired.

Success is born of great work. And I think the reality is that even before the pandemic, audiences were becoming increasingly discerning about the movies they would choose to spend their money on because they had other ways to spend their leisure time that dollar for dollar cost them less. And so for them, the cost of leaving their home,

paying for parking, buying the ticket that is more expensive, paying for popcorn and a Coca-Cola, you need to offer them a better value proposition. And if you deliver on that value proposition, there is money to be made. And if you fail, you will lose and you will lose bigger, especially now in a post-pandemic world where the cost of leaving your house is even higher. Well, part of me feels like people are sated on just sort of medium level quality that you get with the algorithm. It has to be great. I'm not so sure that

the reviews mattered very much. I'd ever read one of them. I think it helped, obviously, at the end. But Warner's, if you look, they set the review embargo for two days before release, which is not typically something you do. That's usually a bad sign. It's usually a bad sign. But I think in this case...

What they were seeing was that the marketing and the social conversation had so overwhelmed anything that a review could do that it was already a phenomenon. We saw it spiking based on influencer screenings, based on the marketing itself, and based on these conversations on TikTok and elsewhere. And we've seen this.

a number of times with movies post-COVID. We saw it last summer with the Gentle Minions movement, where kids on TikTok were going to see the Minions movie in suits because it was something that...

Brooke?

Yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree more with you, Matt. And I think, you know, watching these trends come up, I think the movement comes from the authenticity of the creators on TikTok or whatnot, sharing their experiences, whether it was the movie itself or just the experience, like Matt said, of dressing up in a suit and going to Minions that carried everywhere. Everybody wanted to be a part of it. They wanted to get that video of them doing it. And I think that's become way more relevant than a review or what people are saying in the news world. It's it's

Your power is coming from community of people either you know or people that you follow or just are interested in. Or they wanted to have a good time. My neighbor's daughter, who I don't think has ever spoke of Emily before, ran out with six girlfriends, like ran out. And I was like, what?

Whoa, what's happening here? Never seen it. Don't get me wrong. The reviews do matter, especially now going into second, third, fourth weekend, where those people who are a little bit more review savvy will see that and be like, Oh, these movies both got great reviews. Let's see them. But I think there's a larger conversation now. I should clarify that when I talk about reviews, I'm not just talking about critics. I am talking about influencer screenings and word of mouth, right? Like you,

When I talk about the value proposition that the studio has to offer now, it's not just a great movie from a New York Times critic. It is the people whose opinion matters to me said they had a good experience. And therefore, I believe that if I spend my money and time, I will also have a good experience. We'll be back in a minute. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify.

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Frank, I'm going to ask you, we're going to get to the strike in a second, but Greta Gerwig now takes the top slot as best opening for a female director in history, I think. Will it make a difference? The first one, I was thinking of Ryan Coogler. He was with $202 million in 2018 with the first Black Panther and then Wakanda Forever, $181 million domestic box office. And they always think it's an exception. Like this is an exception. Does this matter at all? They always say it does and then it never does.

I think it will matter to Greta, certainly. And I think Matt's absolutely right that she'll be able to make whatever she wants and she should be because her history as a filmmaker suggests that she'll make another great movie and then there'll be an audience for it. I don't think that it will infect the systematic thinking that has historically undervalued women filmmakers, women targeted movies, and people will still be surprised the next time this happens, even though it has consistently happened throughout film history. Yeah.

Right. Do you think, the question I have for Franklin is, do you think that other IP or kind of property-driven movies will be given more freedom? Will the filmmakers be given more freedom to put their- Right, to make fun of Mattel or whatever, which I think Mattel welcomed, by the way. Yeah, put their personal stamp on other properties. I actually think they will. I think they will, but I think it will still be within a very narrow band of

of subversion that is acceptable to the people that greenlight these movies. I think that Greta had a ton of overcomes to make the movie that she wanted to make. I think, you know, credit to her and Margot for managing to get those incremental wins across the board to make this version of the movie.

But I don't think that another female filmmaker in a meeting with the studio will be able to say, look what Greta did with Barbie. Let me do what I think works, even if you don't get it. And the studio will say, yeah, you're right. We defer to your judgment. And I think it's a product of multiple factors.

It's a product of the undervaluing of the female point of view in the industry and the point of view that's frankly not just white men, to put a very fine point on it. It's also an undervaluing of the contributions and the point of view of artists about the audience and what is viable as commercial. And I think that speaks to the strike and the extent to which the AMPTP underappreciates artists generally. Yeah, that's a fair point.

But is the star director back, Matt? Do you think the star director, these are two star directors? Oh, these are two star directors. I mean, don't forget, Greta Gerwig had a pretty major hit with Little Women. This was not like she went from straight indie to this movie. She's been someone that

has been on this trajectory. And, you know, thankfully for the industry, she has chosen more commercial projects. She is attached to a Narnia movie that she may do for Netflix. So, you know, she wants to do these kinds of bigger template movies, but I don't think the star director...

ever really went away. There are star directors that matter just as much now as they... Not Spielberg. Indy did not do well. He may be older. Let me just stop you guys because I'm going to get to the strike. But is there anything trending online right now for another movie at all? Anything? Is there anything trending? I mean, I think there's no room for anything right now. I mean,

in terms of that's Barbenheimer right now, will it come up? I mean, it's interesting to think about, you know, the Mel Gibson movie or whatnot still came in from what I understand of a hundred million, but it didn't, it didn't reach the social. Not Mel Gibson. No, that's Jim Caviezel. Jim Caviezel. Sorry. Sorry.

But, you know, the social response to that was just sort of mockery. And yet they did very well. Yeah. It wasn't mockery within the MAGA social media. Within the MAGA thing. Right. So the MAGA social media certainly fed that. I haven't seen anything come up. There's no room for it. Yeah.

Okay, so good news all around, except the strike still is here. So they settled their contract, the directors, speaking of directors, not so the other legs of the stool, the writers and the actors. Let's get to the strike, the first in 63 years, like, joint like this. Matt, where are we? We are in a standoff. They're not even talking. The actors have been out for a couple weeks now, the writers for a couple months.

And they are sort of devolved into a war of words where they keep putting out competing statements. The other the two sides accuse each other of misinformation mongering. Yeah. And there's really no sign of any progress. No progress whatsoever. All right. Are the unions aligned?

Franklin? Compare the attention, say, Drescher has gotten. I did an interview with her on two episodes ago. Gotten versus the WGA head. I have no idea who that is, but I'm not even going to say their name because Van Drescher is sucking up all the oxygen. Well, I think it's inevitable that the, I mean, this is sort of the lot of the writing community generally is that they are sort of

not as interesting to the general public as the actors are. And they certainly don't have anybody who I think can command a room and command an interview quite the way that Fran Drescher has. You know, if it was just Duncan Crabtree Ireland out there, I think the tenor of the conversation would be a little bit different. He runs SAG-AFTRA.

Yeah, he's the executive director of SAG-AFTRA. And I think he did an excellent job as a one-two punch with Fran in their press conference, actually, and in the Q&A afterwards. But I think, look, people know the names of a lot of their favorite actors. They don't necessarily know the names of the writers who write their favorite things. But are the unions aligned together, the writers and actors, or just working in parallel? Yeah.

I think they are, for the most part, aligned. They want more money. They want to have sort of consent and payment when it applies to AI, or they want the control of AI in the case of the writers. So I think that generally speaking, they are aligned. And I think, frankly, the way the AMPTP has responded to each of them individually has... This is the alliance. I'm just sorry, people. Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. They're the studios. Yeah.

No, thank you for clarifying. I think the way in which AMPTP has responded to them individually has aligned their membership in a way that I don't think it otherwise would be because it really does begin to feel for most of the rank and file like, oh, wow, we really are in this together against this sort of faceless group.

Greed entity, as Fran described it, that wants to prevent us from paying our mortgages. Right. Fran Descher does suck up all the oxygen because in the interview, she's like, they want to give us ice in winter, which was great. But Brooke, Drescher is using very loaded class war for a vocabulary victim, greed. It's disgusting. That's up.

Is it working from a communications perspective? Well, from communications and pop culture, I think you can see it. I mean, the growing TikTok sort of mindset, and again, I'm not speaking on all things, but certainly on a TikTok mindset. Studios are not in there making arguments. The generational thing is rich versus the poor, the sort of you're rich, I'm poor kind of mentality. And

You've seen this sort of take into effect and dinner table conversations I've had even through Europe, people are referencing that Bob Iger interview where he's like dipped in Laura Piana sitting in a director's chair in Sun Valley being interviewed by CNBC and criticizing the actors for wanting more money and saying they're unrealistic or whatnot.

Then you also had Zaslav, David Zaslav, who's the head of Warner, who gave a graduation speech. I believe it was at one of the universities. Boston University. And they've just, the screaming and this, the screaming of people protesting, like pay your writers, pay your writers, this is before the SAG went on strike.

And that went viral. I mean, those clips went viral. The community of creators are certainly saying like this is the inequity is wild. And Fran Drescher is definitely, I mean, she's using those words as sort of like a

rallying cry to those communities saying this is about inequality, this is disgusting, this behavior, this and that. And the young generation are really, really responding well. What's the strategy? That's a strategy. So it works. Sometimes it cannot work, right? Correct? When you're thinking from a communications... Well, that's the challenge here. Yeah. All right, Matt, I'm going to make you take the studio side. Actually, when I saw him say unrealistic, even though he was accurate, I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. But Matt, talk about the studio's

strategy then because it isn't really they're looking like fat cats and the thing that seems to be catching on is that the studios want to turn the business into a gig economy like uber um the unions are alleging this they say of course uh that they have made a one billion dollar offer which you took apart was someone in puck it was taken apart the numbers do it from their perspective how are they doing

Well, what they're looking at is the overall entertainment landscape right now. And nobody except Netflix has figured out how to make money in streaming. These companies are bleeding money in this medium that is supposedly the future of the business. So they're saying, and Iger tried to articulate this. I don't think he did it very well. You know, this is probably not the time to go back in and, you know,

redo these deals to change the economics for the creators. I don't actually agree with that because I think once this is all figured out, entertainment has proven itself over decades now to be a very profitable business. And once this period of transition figures itself out, we are going to likely see entertainment emerge just like music did as a very profitable business.

But that is at least what they're saying. And they're saying, you know, the usual labor impasse arguments that these are unreasonable. These, you know, the actors want an 11%

rise in wages, that's a significantly bigger increase than the others want. So they will eventually come to some kind of a compromise on these issues. But that's the studio perspective, at least. Franklin, what do you think is in the studio heads mood? You know, studio heads now, one of them

I spoke to is not inclined to settle until at least January. I've heard that from three now. I don't really write a Daily Beat, so I don't think they're being particularly disingenuous, as most people are in general. But what's in their head right now? I'm skeptical about this January claim because I think if they're not back up and running by this fall, they're not going to have summer movies 2024. Totally agree.

and that will be a real problem for them. I think that is a scare tactic designed to force the rank and file to call on their leadership to capitulate more quickly or more substantially. I really can't clock the studio head's position here. Look, my position on this has been sort of the same since the beginning, which is

The both SAG and WGA, I think, have made very compelling arguments. Put aside for a moment, hey, we want more money, which of course the labor unions do. Part of their argument is in order for there to be a sustainable, viable industry over the next 10 to 20 years, you need up and coming talent. And up and coming talent can't sustain itself on the contracts as they currently exist. This is particularly true for writers.

So if you don't have, if you can't subsist in the early stages of your career, you're not, we're not going to find the next Tom Cruise or Margot Robbie. We're not going to find the next great writers, the next Shonda Rhimes is the next Ryan Murphy's and Aaron Sorkin's. And so, you know, part of their position. And I think the reason why, unless you are a studio head, you should be siding with the unions for the most part on this is if you want to see good movies and television for the next several decades, um,

There needs to be a sustainable ecosystem that allows for the evolution of these artists to make what they make. The studios don't seem to have a...

If you embrace our position, this is the world that we get. And ironically, I don't even think you have a compelling business case for if we as the studios get what we get, you'll get better movies and television, you'll get better economics for the industry as a whole. So I actually think that, you know, sort of fundamentally the studio's position on this is not just,

ethically questionable. It's not really about sort of class warfare. I actually think it's bad business. If you're a good capitalist, you should be trying to solve this situation as quickly as possible. You absolutely should be giving a larger piece of hopefully an enlarging pie to both the actors and

And the writers so that we can all... Which hasn't sorted itself out. They're under great pressure. They're under great pressure right now from Wall Street. Absolutely. Absolutely are. But if Wall Street wants better results for these media companies, they want more Barbies and Oppenheimers so that they can make more money. They should be kicking more money to the people who are actually making these things. Can I ask you guys a question?

This is a question for all of you, and I hear this from so many people. So many people ask me, and it's just specific to Netflix, but I don't know the answer. Why doesn't Netflix reveal numbers? It seems like this is a constant. Why? I'll take that one. Take that, Matt. Go ahead. Because if you're playing poker, why would you reveal your hand? Exactly. It's as simple as that. I get that.

that answer now. But now, like after all of this with all of the mounting criticism, does it not change anything? They just don't care. It is fundamental. And it's not just Netflix. I mean, they say they're more transparent than other services. They do put out a top 10 list. It's, in my view, pretty insufficient. But the

The streaming first companies know that data is power. They have the consumption data. They know exactly who is watching what. They know who finishes an episode. They know if you watch an episode of Dahmer, you're also going to watch an episode of Queen Charlotte. They have immense power in that data. Any data they give up is losing some of that power. Simple as that. Agreed.

What about, look, you know, we come from the startup internet world where people get a piece of the pie. People have thought is maybe design it like that, get some stock. I've had so many conversations with actors and writers and show creators who ask why the internet people make so much money. I'm like, well, they own it more than you. And to be fair, the media moguls make most of their dough through stock options and investors, obviously, through ownership. I don't think it will become like that ever. That's not part of it. The problem with something like that is it's very difficult to discern what's

Whether a specific piece of content is responsible for more subscribers or for higher revenue or, you know, it's very difficult. And it is a Pandora's box. Once they agree to something like that, you know, the actor's claim is they want 2% of

of the revenue from hits. Right, 2%. I was going to ask you about that. They want 2% of the revenue. Streaming is now money losing. It will sort itself out, as you say, but there are no profits, at least not in form of real money, but value only created via stock increases. Why shouldn't it be a percentage of profits? Wages, I think, they'll settle somewhere in the middle, as you said. How

How do they get to something when they are actually losing money at this point? It's very difficult. Except for Netflix. Except for Netflix. It's very difficult to make that determination, especially when you have companies like Apple and Amazon that are not driven by revenue from their content. They're trying to use the content to sell more toilet paper on their website. In Amazon's case. That's why I think a viewership mechanism.

metric makes a lot more sense here. It's not perfect, but at least it is a objective barometer of how many people are interested in watching your show. It's not correlated necessarily to profits. And these streamers have other metrics that determine whether a show is quote successful or efficient, but viewership is,

If they required basic disclosure of viewership, we would have a better sense and talent would able to say, yes, I made this and it's a hit. Matt, I think the Pandora's box argument holds, but I'm very skeptical of the claim that these companies don't have a rough,

computational guess as to the relative value for each of their shows within their own ecosystem. I think we know that Netflix has one. You know, the number reported about Squid Game sort of certainly suggests that they have a guess as to how valuable those shows are. And certainly if they're making decisions about what to greenlight, at what budget, and whether to continue to greenlight, you know, to pick up additional seasons of those shows, they have to have some sort of financial assessment of, is this worth it?

So the idea that they don't know how valuable the show is or how much money it's bringing them strikes me as, again, we're going to say that so that we don't have to share the information because once the Pandora's box is open, we'll never get it closed. We'll be back in a minute.

That brings us to AI, which will indeed change in three years. Even its growth will definitely reduce job opportunities. It's unclear at the moment. The writers and actors want consent and also profit, which is not there yet. Again, studios are trying to offer a version that doesn't make any sense, any of it. It's hard to come to an agreement when so much is uncertain, even among the tech people, except let's fund this thing. Let's fund this project.

Yeah, I mean, well, it's so interesting to see. Again, I don't come from it from a Hollywood perspective, but from the strike perspective in a social world, you're seeing people explain it in a very visual way. So via TikTok, you're seeing actors, just an example, showing their residual checks of what it used to be. And same with AI.

People are now able to, it's a tangible fear. We've seen deep fakes come up a lot on TikTok. Tom Cruise is a big one. There is a young man out there who's done incredible work with a deep fake as Tom Cruise that have really like...

tricked a lot of people. We've on the music side, we had a single that became popular over a weekend that was Drake. It turned out not to be Drake. Somebody made it in their bedroom and used AI. So this is becoming tangible. Then we saw this Black Mirror episode that really sort of brought it to life with Salma Hayek and showing what could happen when somebody's AI rights are bought by a studio and they don't have the rights anymore of what their AI version of themselves does. So people, I think, now see it, experience it. There's a tangible visual to it.

And it's really putting clear boundaries on what people are going to be comfortable with and what they see the future is and what could come. So that's different. All right. Franklin, what are your thoughts on AI very briefly? Yeah.

First, shout out to Miles Fisher, the deepfake Tom Cruise, who I think has done an incredible job with that. I've actually known him for 20 years now, and it's been fascinating watching that continue to evolve. I think that there's – on the actor side, I think there is an ethical question. The idea that a company could scan an actor's face and then use it and profit on it with neither consent nor payment strikes me as –

deeply troubling conceptually. And especially knowing the reality of early actors' careers, you need money, you're going to give up your essentially image rights for posterity to be used however anybody sees fit

Those could be sold off to other folks. That just strikes me as not something that any corporation should be reasonably asking for, and those are sort of broader ethical questions. When it comes to AI in writing, I tweeted back in December when ChatGPT3 dropped that the Writers Guild needed to be the one sort of authoring the guardrails on this.

You know, Kara, you and I had a conversation back in January of 2020 where I said, look, I don't believe that AI is going to be delivering written storytelling of a level of Shakespeare that comments on the human experience in the way that great writing does. I still hold to that.

I do, however, believe that it could generate mediocre writing that could pass for most of the mediocre things that we see. There's a lot of mediocre writing, frankly. Exactly. By regular people. Absolutely. And so I think the Guild is right. I think that the official position is that, you know,

AI written material cannot constitute like written material for legal purposes of contracts in the context of making these deals. And I think that that's, it was a very clever position to take. I think it's probably a wise position for the studios to embrace if again, they want a viable ecosystem that may deliver them Barbie and Oppenheimer. Because if they don't do that, they're never going to get the next Greta Gerwig or Chris Nolan because they're

It wouldn't make sense for them to endure never making money for 20 years and then hoping to emerge fully formed. Franklin, someday the computer will do it. All right. Very briefly, Franklin, strike prediction for when the strike ends. I will never make a prediction on when the strike ends publicly. Okay.

All right. I will. I'm still sticking to middle end of September. I think it's going to get really perilous for these studios. They said if it doesn't end by then, it doesn't end until January. Okay. All right. So we'll see. So middle to end of September. All right. Last thing we're going to talk about. A lot of talk of sales, ABC, Warner merger with Comcast, Paramount. Where are we, Alex?

And then, Brooke, I'd like you to follow up with, will big tech dominate entertainment or will the old structure survive? And I have one for you, Franklin, in a second. But Matt, why don't you start? With where we are? I mean, Iger, Bob Iger has put out the for sale sign. He's entertaining offers for the linear TV assets. He wants an investor for ESPN to help them compete with some of these tech companies for sports rights. Perhaps the leagues themselves will.

will be an investor in ESPN. CNBC reported that. But Iger needs money, and he has recognized that these linear TV assets are dying faster than people thought. He has not been able to make money on streaming yet, and they got to make money somewhere. So it makes sense. Okay. And, Brooke, big tech. They don't have to make money on anything. I mean, we have X now. What can we say? We keep changing the world. We're going to get to that. That's my very last question. Okay.

But I think, you know, I think tech, I think, you know, there's this, as we've always seen, when I started in tech, it was its own category and you had finance and media and entertainment and now tech is everything. And sure, do I think there'll be another platform or another way people are consuming content? Sure, I don't know about making the content, how that's happening. I mean, more and more people are into reality. They don't care where it's from. They don't care if it's Bravo or Disney. They just like what they like wherever they find it.

Franklin, government would have to stop these merger guidelines. They just put new merger guidelines. They can allow more consolidation. A lot of the traditional media companies say they aren't big enough. Yeah, I mean, look, fundamentally, I think that the film and television business...

got soft and entitled. They expected that they would be able to rule the roost forever. I remember when Netflix emerged and people laughed at it. The notion of a streaming service was a joke. And because people just assumed, oh, well, we're movies and television, we'll always be here, they got their lunch eaten. And I think that the same thing is happening now. They chase to catch up to streaming services. And the reality is,

Audiences have more options for their leisure time and you have to deliver a better product. And when you do deliver a better product, whether it's Black Panther or Barbie or Oppenheimer, you reap rewards. And in order to do that, you need to trust and be partners with the creative people who make the things that make you money.

And the failure to do that, in my opinion, has less to do with class warfare than anything else. It has a lot to do with incompetence. It's the same incompetence that leads people to not make enough movies made by women. It's the same incompetence that leads people to not make movies made by diverse directors. And everybody loses as a consequence.

If you want to win in this space, you need to adapt. You need to be innovative. And the film and television industry has historically laughed at innovation and said, you'll never disintermediate us and look where we are now. So that's kind of my overtake, which is we need better leadership. And the people that are running things now

To paraphrase Logan Rory, not terribly serious people. All right. So I would be. All right. Last very quick questions. We only got one more minute. I would be remiss if I didn't ask each of you what you thought of the Twitter rebrand, not the rebrand itself necessarily, which seems silly. But CEO Linda Iaccarino, I guess alleged CEO, tweeted, X, I don't know. X is the future state of unlimited interactivity centered in audio, video, messaging, payments, banking, creating global market piece for ideas, marketing,

Good services and opportunities powered by AIX will connect us in all the ways we're beginning to imagine. I don't think there's a word, a ridiculous, meaningless word, except synergy that she left out of that. She said it will be everything. Barbie made $150 million in one weekend. Elon can't make $50 on Blue. Will Twitter ever be able to become the media giant it hopes to be with Tucker Carlson and others? Matt, Franklin, and then Brooke, you end it. No. No.

I mean, easy. No.

It's, I mean, not on the current trajectory they're on. Linda's a marketer. She can say whatever she wants. She's, you know, it's just, the product's got to be there. And the product, the Twitter product has gotten markedly worse since Elon took over. Markedly worse. Okay. Franklin? If I was in the Silicon Valley writer's room, I'd be going through my old notes for Gavin Belson speeches to make sure that she didn't steal one. I...

The short answer is not undercurrent management. I think that Twitter, my biggest frustration with Twitter is not Elon's politics. It's the incompetence of running the platform. There were a lot of ways to make it better. He has chosen none of them and made it quite a bit worse. So I don't really see it becoming what Linda claims it might be if those are the people running it. I don't even know what those words salad means. I mean, I think I suspect it was written by AI, by the way. Yeah, I guess it was. Okay, Brooke.

I think for me, I think it's a classic. We like to call Elon in my world Space Karen. It's a classic move of Space Karen. I don't believe Space Karen knows how to run a media company. I think he has a gang of little merry dwarves around him that think they know media. But it just is a disaster. And no, it's not going to be a place we look to for content. All right. So with that, everyone,

to worry about that, Holly. You don't have to worry about Elon. Anyway, he's going to Mars. Space Karen. Space Karen is going to Mars. Thank you guys so much. That was very quick and full of a lot of really great information and observations. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Brooke, Matt, and Franklin. Thanks, Kara. Thanks, Kara. Thanks, guys. It's on! It's on!

On with Kara Swisher is produced by Nei Miraza, Blake Nishik, Christian Castro-Rossell, Megan Cunane, and Megan Burney. With special thanks to Sheena Ozaki and Andrea Lopez Cruzado. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. And our theme music is by Trackademics.

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