We don’t live in normal times. That said, define normal.

I think everyone can agree that, business-wise, we are in the middle of a changing weather pattern. Not just a single storm but a shift in the system. And since we don’t know what that new system looks like, it becomes really hard to predict or plan around it, let alone get ahead of it. Some days you just feel like you’re hanging on. 

What Hollywood has been through in the past five years would be enough for a few decades, at least. A global pandemic. Two labor strikes. The arrival of AI. That alone would be plenty to navigate, but there’s also a war in the Middle East that has unleashed global reactions affecting media and entertainment. And a right-wing swing in our government that has meant profound pressures for media companies. 

The structures of 50 years are being reshaped, reconstituted. Whether that’s kids turning to YouTube instead of “Sesame Street,” or creators replacing movie stars as brand favorites, or sports eclipsing every other kind of programming, the new models are being formed. 

In the past year we’ve seen a major studio, Paramount, change hands, and in the coming months we will see other legacy studios break apart – Warner Bros., NBCUniversal – to split off their declining cable assets. Which means we’re about to see even more consolidation. 

And while, yes, tech has come to dominate entertainment, even the giants like Google and Apple are not impervious to the challenges of the breakneck shifts brought about by AI. 

In short, simply nothing is as it was even a few years ago. 

That’s the purpose of TheGrill – to make sense of all of this. We know by now that change is not only a constant in the world of content, but that its velocity has only increased. Those of us who are here for this conversation are the intrepid, the rock-ribbed and the fearless. The community here today is made up of people energized by change, not in retreat from it. We’re here to adapt, learn and grasp the moment.

So let’s look at some of the topics we are going to discuss at today’s conference:

• We will talk about the latest in artificial intelligence: Has this tech made the entertainment business stronger, more efficient? AI is taking longer to implement than was initially thought; we will explore that.
• Sports is probably the fastest-growing, most desirable category of entertainment; at the moment it feels like there’s no limit.
• We’re going to talk about exciting new concepts in live entertainment, some using drone technology.
• On our theatrical panel we will take a hard look at why that business has not yet climbed back to 2019 levels. 

Please ask questions and introduce yourself to strangers. It’s a day full of rich ideas and solutions, and we want to hear from you. 

One final note: I want to talk about stories for a moment. However much change disrupts this industry, ultimately we rely on stories, story-telling and story-tellers to make sense of our world. At this moment, our world does not really make sense to so many of us, and the ways we tell stories is dramatically shifting. So that makes the job that all of us do here much more urgent. The privilege we have here today is to make sense of the emerging trends from the people shaping the future. 

The post TheGrill 2025: The Systems Are Changing – Here’s How You Adapt appeared first on TheWrap.

He came by TheWrap’s studio at Sundance for an interview years ago. We were still really small and scrappy but you’d never have known it by his attitude – engaged and respectful, we might as well have been one of the legacy heavy-hitters. Craggy of face, tousled of hair and twinkly of eye – my God, the guy never lost it. And he then spoke across a range of topics: his new film, diversity in filmmaking, the state of indie film, before sailing along to the next recipient of his fairy dust. 

There will be many tributes and accolades to the man who indelibly embodied the rogueish Sundance kid in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” the dogged Bob Woodward in “All the President’s Men,” the bearlike mountain man of “Jeremiah Johnson” as well as the smooth Jay Gatsby in “The Great Gatsby,” to name just a few. But Robert Redford was a monumental figure in American cinema far beyond his prowess as an actor and Oscar-winning skill as a director. 

Redford determined early on to use his movie star status for causes more important than celebrity, and independent film is the most significant beneficiary of that.  

Small and scrappy was the vibe he created up in the mountains of Park City, Utah, at Sundance, the festival he founded in 1978 (the iconic name was introduced in 1991) and it practically invented the category of independent film, which took off in the 1990s. Along with the nonprofit institute and talent laboratory of the same name, Sundance has by now nurtured two generations-and-counting of film talent, including Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Chloé Zhao and Ryan Coogler, among countless others.

The filmmakers who got their first break at Sundance (and I’ve been privileged to be present for the cultural sonic boom when a new talent premiered there, from “Beasts of the Southern Wild” to “Donny Darko” to “Didi,” to name a few) owe it to Redford. And so do all of us lovers of film. 

“Bob,” as everyone at Sundance called him, would walk around the festival every January like a proud dad, greeting regulars and fans alike, doing what he loved – building a community for independent film, the creative pipeline that feeds Hollywood. The out of the box creativity that Sundance nurtures drives the vitality of the Hollywood movie pipeline, whether that’s Coogler moving on from the bare bones budget of “Fruitvale Station” to “Black Panther” and “Sinners,” or Zhao, whose “Songs My Brothers Taught Me” premiered at Sundance in 2015, moving on to her Oscar-winning “Nomadland” or this year’s “Hamnet.”

“That’s what started Sundance,” he told me in an interview in 2015. “We wanted to keep alive not only the opportunity for new filmmakers to have a place to develop, but also keep pushing that (diversity), because that’s the world of independence. Diversity is basically a description of independence. Diversity is what moves the ball for me. Give people a chance who have different points of view, let the audience decide whether they like it or not.” 

Redford knew enough to support but not dominate. To inspire, not lecture. He was as in awe of the young talent at his festival as everyone else. It is a sad reality that Redford’s passing coincides with struggles at his beloved festival, and the general decline of independent film as a category. 

Sundance will end its run in Park City in January 2026, moving to Boulder after several years of struggles with cost, crowding and lack of sponsors.   

But that’s not mostly the fault of the festival, which suffers from a broader crisis in the business model that underpins independent film. The model used to be low-budget films made on a credit card, sold for millions of dollars to arthouse distributors, and often enough they would become huge hits (“Garden State,” “Hustle & Flow”) and a talent pipeline for Hollywood’s major studios. 

Today there are plenty of wealthy people willing to fund scrappy movies, but not enough distributors willing to buy and distribute them. The hits out of Sundance, such as the crowd-pleasing “CODA,” which won Best Picture at the Oscars, are enough to keep filmmakers hoping, but not enough to sustain a business. Streamers are generally making their own movies and have shut off the spigot that once saw bidding wars in the halls of the Eccles Theater in Park City.

Redford shepherded this legacy for the better part of 50 years, but it remains to be seen how the coming years will play out with his passing. 

One thing’s for sure: His death leaves a movie star-sized hole in our cultural universe, and an even bigger question mark for the future of independent film.

The post How Robert Redford’s Sundance Legacy Saved Hollywood appeared first on TheWrap.

His latest film, “It Was Just an Accident,” was made in secret while the filmmaker remains under a filmmaking ban imposed by his government in 2010, when he also was sentenced to six years in jail for alleged “security” crimes. He served seven additional months in 2022 before being released after going on hunger strike. His new film was shot without a permit and features women not wearing the hijab. It is his first film since being released from jail in Iran and his fourth film made since his ban. 

With all that, Panahi said he recognizes signs of rising authoritarianism in the United States in an interview with TheWrap at the Toronto Film Festival, where “It Was Just an Accident” screened this week on the heels of its North American premiere in Telluride, Colorado.

“The truth is that this time when I came to the States, I got scared,” he said, speaking through a translator. “My fear comes from the encounters I’ve had with the artists, the intellectual class and different groups of people. My sense was that they are all censoring themselves and they are afraid of what’s coming.”

He went on: “Sometimes, when they are talking, they bring their voice down, as if someone is listening to them. These signs are narrating a bad future. And the scary part is that we’re seeing these signs in the United States. This is not going to be anything good for the world. It can put the world at risk. I wonder how anyone could tolerate the situation here.”

While Panahi, 65, is not an expert on American freedoms or lack thereof, he is an expert on living under an authoritarian government. As an artist, he has made a choice to live on the edge of the regime’s tolerance, always at risk of arrest, interrogation or worse. Unlike other dissidents, he refuses to leave his country. Instead he pursues his craft, making human scale stories about morality, betrayal and difficult choices from a grey zone where his best protection is his world renown. 

“It Was Just an Accident” sprang directly from his experiences in jail over seven months. The story immediately subverts the viewer’s expectations in an opening scene with a father, mother and young daughter returning from a road trip at night, and the car breaking down. But the mechanic who helps the family recognizes the father as his torturer from prison. He determines to follow the man to his home and get revenge. 

Except he’s not entirely sure the man is the torturer. And so one by one he brings in a cast of fellow travelers, dissidents from prison also tortured by the same man – a bride, a photographer, a street vendor. And they have to decide whether they are capable of murder and torture themselves. It is a story layered with pathos, humor, absurdity and ultimately weighty moral decisions. 

After “It Was Just an Accident” won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May, France’s foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot called Panahi’s win “a gesture of resistance against the Iranian regime’s oppression.” The French charge d’affaires in Tehran was promptly summoned to the Iranian foreign ministry and told that Barrot’s message was “irresponsible and provocative.”

Panahi explained why, despite the ban and despite his prison sentence, he continues to defy the government and make films. 

“People aren’t afraid to take to the streets, women aren’t afraid to unveil and they come to the streets without their veil,” he said. “We’re not doing anything bigger than that … I think that what [ordinary] people do is greater than what we do, because they’re at a bigger risk every moment. When I was in prison, a lot of prisoners would go on hunger strikes, and no one heard about it. So compared to what other people do, really there’s no risk.”

The decision to continue to make films is less complicated than it may appear.  

“When you’re standing outside a place where there are problems, everything looks more difficult. You wonder, ‘How could something get done?’” he asked. “But people do find solutions. So then you come to the context of living in a dictatorship in a country, not just in Iran but, for instance, in the former Soviet Union, in China, in Eastern Europe, all these problems did exist, and people and artists still found a way, and they did what they wanted.”

He paused. “Of course, in regimes as such as the Iranian regime that are all over the world, making art comes with a price, and it’s a price that you would accept.”

The film is an homage to his fellow dissidents, some of whom are still in jail. “Perhaps if I had not stayed in prison for seven months, I would have not been able to make this film,” he reflected. “I might say that this is not my film. This is the film made by a government that has thrown me in jail. So – this is a film by the Islamic Republic.”

Absurd as that sounds, many situations arise that seem absurd in Panahi’s world. He continues to press through and finds a path to create. Almost no information was released about this film until it was announced as going to Cannes. 

“Artists are creative the same way that they’re creative in making the work. They’re creative in finding a way to make the work and show it,” Panahi said. “In fact, when an artist is just creative in their work, it’s not anything extraordinary. But when they become creative in showing the work, making the work, then that creativity, to me, is twice as important.”

Despite its Cannes debut and Palme d’Or win in May, “It Was Just an Accident” has not been shown in Iranian theaters. It opens in the United States in October, distributed by Neon. 

See all our TIFF coverage here.

The post Iranian Director Jafar Panahi Warns of Rising Threat to US Freedom: ‘Artists Are Censoring Themselves’  appeared first on TheWrap.

But I also know when I’m being scammed. 

For the second time, TheWrap has been sued over a 32-year-old Fox publicity photo by Michael Grecco, a photographer who makes a living by suing people, including lots of legitimate news organizations, for copyright violation. 

A publicity photo, you’re thinking? Aren’t those licensed for use by the news media all the time, as a matter of course?

Why yes, yes they are. 

But try convincing Michael Grecco, professional troll, who has sued well over 100 times in the past decade, demanding and getting what I conservatively estimate to be hundreds of thousands of dollars in settlements for photos that he claims violate his copyright. He can do this because since about 2015, the internet has created a tool for him to scrape every website for something that resembles an image he shot back in the 1990s.

Consider this: Between 2002 and 2025 Grecco has sued 220 times, according to a Lexus-Nexus search. Between 2016 and this year he has filed 85 actions in California, and 33 more in New York, all copyright cases, according to the Pacer database.

He has sued everyone from tiny blogs like AwardsDaily to media giants like Meta, Verizon, TikTok, Twitter, Paramount and Warner Bros. 

He’s sued Bloomberg. He’s sued the New York Performing Arts Academy. 

He has sued media companies across the spectrum: IMDb, Time Inc., PopMatters, Penske Media, Shutterstock, Valnet, Ain’t It Cool News, Fandom, Hearst, Uproxx, Guardian News, Buzzfeed and Tribune. 

And TheWrap. Twice. 

These cases all settled. This tally does not include demand letters that usually also settle, my guess is in the range of $10,000 a pop. Some might call it a very savvy moneymaking scheme from a past career shooting photos in Hollywood. 

***

In 1993, Grecco was hired by Fox to shoot promotional photos of Mulder and Scully – David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson – in character on the set of “The X-Files.” 

Amazingly, Fox does not own all those photos. (I know – crazy.) 

Their status isn’t exactly clear, as I found out when I tried to figure out why we kept making the same error of using a non-licensed image, which is a cardinal sin in our newsroom. Grecco says that he owns the copyright to these photos.  But at one point, Fox claimed that it owned the copyright in these photos.   

Here’s the photo, viewable in the lawsuit that we settled.

Looks like a publicity photo. In fact, it is a publicity photo — it was included in a press kit that we found and secured from a memorabilia collector. (See image below.) And it’s a frame or two away from the photo displayed with this article, part of the same shoot, with the photo we’ve published, that one owned by Fox.

But unless I go to trial, I can’t prove it. 

Here’s the thing, though. In 2019, Fox learned that Grecco was suing people left and right and sent him a notice to cease and desist. But it turned out that Fox had not done what it needed to do legally to maintain copyright over the publicity photos. In the end, the parties settled, with Grecco releasing Fox from any liability, and agreeing that Fox had the right to use the photos for publicity. 

The settlement reads: “[Fox] agrees and acknowledges that the scope of Grecco’s license to Fox in the remaining Gallery photographs is limited to the Permitted non-exclusive uses, which, for the avoidance of all doubt, permits all advertising and publicity uses, including but not limited to retrospective advertising and publicity uses and archival advertising and publicity uses.”    

The settlement was meant to be kept secret, which was helpful to Grecco’s living as a copyright troll. 

But attorney Joshua Koltun learned about the settlement in a lawsuit that Grecco had brought against Koltun’s client Livingly Media. And it became public after Grecco’s attorneys chose not to defend the documents’ secrecy, which they initially claimed were “trade secrets.”

Court documents from that case show that Grecco never made any money by licensing this photograph prospectively. His licensing income from this photograph has come from suing people for copyright infringement and settling for a fee for a retrospective “license” for the past use.

Asked about the secrecy, a lawyer for Grecco wrote to TheWrap: “To claim that Grecco is trying to keep a Fox agreement ‘secret’ is absurd as the agreement is confidential and has disclosure provisions that need to be followed.” Regardless of who is correct, the settlement is now visible to the public.

Koltun represented a defendant who, like TheWrap, was sued over Grecco’s publicity photos for exorbitant sums. Livingly decided to fight the case. (Almost no one ever does so, because the cost of litigating is enormous. One Grecco lawsuit I found in the docket was against Fandom, which in a rare instance Fandom won by proving they had never received Grecco’s demand letter. But Fandom’s request for $600,000 in attorney’s fees – what the company paid to prove it was right – was denied. You see the problem.) 

Not only did he discover the Fox settlement, Koltun won numerous arguments in a summary judgement motion over whether media companies had a right to use the photos, and rejecting a number of arguments Grecco made. 

In a court order, the judge wrote: 

 “The Fox Settlement Agreement states that Fox has a ‘worldwide, non-exclusive, fully paid, perpetual, advertising and publicity use of the Gallery Photographs, including the right to sublicense the Gallery Photographs for advertising and publicity purposes‘ (emphasis mine) and defines the Gallery Photographs as The X-Files photographs Fox engaged Grecco to take around August 1993. Fox Settlement Agreement at 15.”

“The Gallery” photographs are “the photographs Fox engaged Grecco to take of The X-Files in August 1993,” the order said. The Court’s full decision is here. A useful summary of the facts is in Koltun’s summary judgement motion.

From Grecco’s standpoint, he believes that he is entitled to sue media companies that used these publicity photos in articles about “The X-files,” despite the 2019 settlement. But who can say?

You’d think that would be that, but my lawsuit just ended in a second, expensive settlement. Which it shouldn’t have.  

For comparison’s sake, a photo license for online use averages $300-$500 per use, depending on the subject and the photographer.

According to Koltun, “Anyone receiving a legal complaint from Michael Grecco would be well advised to review the public record in the Livingly case, which discloses a lot of information Grecco’s attorneys had claimed was a ‘trade secret.'”

I’ve reached out to Disney, who now owns Fox, to try to get some clarity on this. I find it hard to believe the studio is pleased that legitimate news organizations are paying out extortionist sums over photos that were taken on their behalf. I haven’t heard back thus far. 

Bottom line: Most media companies are under the gun right now, figuring out a future that is likely to exclude Google search, which drives revenue for many of us. A troll like Grecco is more than a nuisance, it’s a loaded gun aimed at the already pock-marked revenue model for news. Most especially entertainment news, where he used to work. 

So for any other news org that finds itself in a fight with Grecco, know that there are two judgements in your column worth taking all the way to a jury, even if I could not get there. 

I reached out to Grecco for comment. His lawyer replied: “The business of our client in this case … is photography. Photography is protected by copyright, just like journalism. The internet has decimated the businesses of our clients who make their living from their creativity. Their copyrights protect their productive output, as do yours.”

The post Copyright Troll Michael Grecco to Media: Pay Up or Drop Dead appeared first on TheWrap.

Merely eight years ago, the righteous rage of women abused at the hands of powerful men shook the foundations of power across the world and birthed the hashtag #MeToo, all sparked by the fall of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, spreading quickly across the entertainment industry to include directors, producers, CEOs and agents. 

It was a movement aimed at change, meant to clear out the dark attics and scary basements where the bogeymen live and create a world that was better for our daughters. The women in Hollywood created Time’s Up and took up a social justice mantra that sought equity: “50/50 by 2020.”  

Reporting on this at the time, I was shocked at the depth and breadth of the misconduct. Not just the proverbial casting couch, and not just Weinstein. This was a widespread culture of men helping themselves to women in the workplace and pressuring them to stay silent – until the dam broke. 

For the most part, the men pushed out by that movement remain persona non grata, though some have defiantly returned to the spotlight. Louis C.K., canceled for masturbating in front of multiple women, is now on a national tour titled “Ridiculous” and will headline the New York Comedy Festival in November.

Jeff Shell, who had to step down as CEO of NBCUniversal in 2023 over allegations of sexual harassment, has just been named to a top job at Paramount Global with the Skydance merger complete. 

From Hollywood to politics, it feels like the #MeToo chapter is closed; Andrew Cuomo — who, after first winning praise with his high profile during COVID, had to resign as governor of New York — is back running for New York City mayor, for God’s sake.

Where are the women? #MeToo may now be a 501c3 called “me too,” but no one’s talking about it. Time’s Up disbanded in 2023 over conflicts of interest and problems in its leadership. Even women who have sought the highest office, including Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, appear to have lost their voice. 

A palpable fatigue seems to have followed that initial flurry of complaints. Even as new and lurid cases of misconduct emerge, such as accounts of Sean “Diddy” Combs’ sex parties during his recent trial, they have been greeted with more weariness than alarm. Combs, found not guilty of racketeering and sex trafficking but convicted of less serious offenses of transportation to engage in prostitution, is reportedly seeking a pardon from President Trump.  

Women, especially famous ones, sense that speaking out now is not just out of fashion, but carries real reputational risks. No one wants to be “the target of the administration’s ire,” says Leigh Goodmark, an expert in gender-based violence and the Marjorie Cook Professor of Law at University of Maryland Carey School of Law.

And undoubtedly confidence has been lost as the national movement for women’s rights has clocked one defeat after another: from the loss of Roe v. Wade to the re-election of  Donald Trump a year after he was found liable of sexual abuse in the E. Jean Carroll case. Already besieged, Planned Parenthood is fighting a legal battle for its survival with the Trump administration over Medicaid funding.

Now comes the Epstein case, which no one in Hollywood sees as a newfound rallying cry for the cause of women. It’s just an intra-MAGA political football. The survivors who say they feel abandoned also say they are simply exhausted, trying to manage their trauma, fight their court cases and make ends meet.  

“Survivors aren’t stupid. They understand that calling for the [Epstein] files to be released is a political move,” Goodmark said. “No one thinks it’s about survivors.”

Of Trump, she added, “He’s a serial violator of women. They know already he was a friend of Jeffrey Epstein. They don’t believe he doesn’t make little drawings. So continuing to weigh in on this when Epstein is dead, when the people who support him don’t care, doesn’t seem like a great use of time or resources.”

More ominously, a lawyer who has worked on the Weinstein case said that both Epstein and Diddy involved too many powerful people, and the current silence is just plain fear of the consequences.

“These guys are in a power network rubbing elbows with presidents and senators — people with real power. It’s paralyzing,” said the lawyer, who said she declined to represent victims of Diddy and Epstein. “I’m as guilty as the women who aren’t saying anything. I didn’t want to have a great career and then have it ended — either dead or bankrupt or vilified. And that’s the math on everyone else’s mind. The men were too powerful.” 

When I reached out to speak to some of the women who came forward in 2017, I was met with the harsh sting of their disappointment.

“We are drowning in sorrow,” said Rosanna Arquette, who has said she was blacklisted from working as an actress in Hollywood after she rebuffed Weinstein. A longtime activist against sex trafficking, she is friends with women who came forward with claims of abuse by Epstein.

More concretely, “there’s a real dearth of a national-level, umbrella organization that focuses on sexual violence,” said Weinstein survivor Louise Godbold, who counsels victims of sexual abuse.

“Survivors are busy dealing with their personal trauma, that’s the level I’m working with. It’s a formidable foe if you’re talking about the entrenched establishment power who have so much to lose if it came out that they were perpetrators. It’s an uphill battle. Most survivors are dealing with their PTSD and trying to hold down a job. They’re caught up in court cases that take every ounce of their energy. They don’t have the capacity to do more.” 

Is the silence a tacit agreement in Hollywood that #MeToo may have gone too far? I wonder. If pressed, I would argue that people seem to just want to get on with their lives, get back to work and declare a truce. 

The power dynamics may never permanently shift in an industry where men dominate decisions and beautiful women will always vie for media attention and roles. But in Hollywood right now, the silence is deafening.

The post The Silence of Hollywood Women in the Age of Epstein appeared first on TheWrap.

Soon-Shiong broke the news on Monday during an interview with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show,” saying he wanted to “democratize” the newspaper by taking it public, earning applause from the host and his audience. But as details emerged the following day, it wasn’t so simple.

It turns out that Soon-Shiong — whose meddling in the newsroom and cuts to staffing have made him unpopular and a cause for skepticism among much of his editorial team — is likely mimicking a successful bid to raise capital and go public earlier this year by Newsmax, the ultra-conservative cable news network run by Trump devotee Chris Ruddy and a fan of conspiracy theories related to the 2020 election and Jan. 6.

The announcement is just the latest twist in the topsy-turvy saga of the Los Angeles Times, the hometown paper of the second-largest city in the country, but has been beset by multiple changes in ownership and, in the last several years, waves of layoffs and questions about its editorial integrity — largely set off by Soon-Shiong’s own interference.

“This sounds like just another harebrained scheme from Dr. PSS, this time to mitigate his losses,” said one former senior editor who left a year ago.“He has a habit of announcing or starting things that never happen, such as the eSports venue in El Segundo and a rechargeable zinc-air battery.” 

Even if Soon-Shiong makes good on this promise, there’s little confidence in the newsroom that the results will be positive.

“If this does play out, what people are thinking is most scenarios are not good,” said a newsroom insider. “Some staffers think this is a move to get rid of the union. And if it does happen — who would the buyers be? The concern is you’re going to get investors who don’t care about quality of journalism, but on getting a return on investment – hedge funds, vulture capitalists, maybe even some right wing types who want to push the MAGA envelope.”

Said a recently exited newsroom leader: “I don’t know who would invest in this. It’s very odd. What is the business model you have to offer? What is the path to profit or sustainability? What is the unique value offer? I’m very puzzled.”

This person added: “If you’re losing money, why would I give you money?”

The LA Times is losing money, about $30 million this year, according to two company insiders. (A report earlier this year in Adweek that the newspaper lost $50 million last year was said by those sources to be inflated.) The newspaper laid off more than 20 percent of its newsroom staff last year.

But not making money didn’t stop Newmax from going public.

Newsmax pulled a two-step raise in March of this year, selling 7.5 million Class B Common shares at $10 per share under something called Regulation A, which gives private companies the ability to sell shares to investors without the regulatory requirements of a standard IPO, capped at $75 million.

Ruddy raised the maximum $75 million allowed under the rules. Within the same time frame, Newsmax closed a $225 million private offering of Series B Preferred Stock. It exceeded the initial $150 million goal thanks to participation from over 8,000 accredited investors, according to multiple reports earlier this year.

The private and public capital raises, which offered a “crowd-financed” solution that blended both institutional and retail participation, took the company public without having to do a full IPO. 

Soon-Shiong may well have exactly this maneuver in mind. His Nantworks revealed on Tuesday that he has hired the same investment bank, Digital Offering, to handle the sale. Calls to the CEO of Digital Offering Gordon McBean were not returned by time of publication. The LA Times head of communications responded with an out-of-office email after TheWrap sought comment.

A news release said the billionaire plans to roll the money-losing newspaper into the newly created L.A. Times Next Network, including curated creator platform LAT Next, e-sports and gaming-focused Nant Games, NantStudios Virtual Production and streaming and live-event support company L.A. Times Studios.

The fact that the LA Times is bleeding so much from losses likely won’t matter.

That was the case with Newsmax. In 2024, its revenue rose 26% to $171 million — but its net loss widened to $72.2 million after losing $42 million in 2023. The company also settled a defamation lawsuit in 2024 by electronic voting systems maker Smartmatic for $40 million over its false claims regarding vote alteration and manipulation in the 2020 presidential election.

Nonetheless, the stock is up from its Reg A “IPO” price of $10 per share, and now sells at $14 per share on the NYSE.

According to The Motley Fool, “Newsmax stock is overvalued relative to its growth potential, but it’s attracting short-term traders.”

That may be enough to rescue Soon-Shiong from devastating ongoing losses which he has to cover from his own pocket, monthly. 

Soon-Shiong may be betting that his tack to the right since Donald Trump got elected will benefit his media properties overall. Certainly Trump’s election has been an enormous boon to Fox News, whose ratings have spiked upward, and to Newsmax, which successfully raised hundreds of millions and a long list of right-wing podcasts. Trump’s Truth Social raised money in a 2024 SPAC (special purpose acquisition company) offering and is now listed on the NASDAQ.

What it means for a traditionally non-ideological newspaper is another matter.

Meanwhile at the LA Times, the staff was still processing the news.  

“It could be bad, I think it’s a toss up. We don’t really know,” said one veteran LA Times staffer. “It does seem like he’s doubling down on having the LA Times belong to him. He believes in LAT Next. It’s his baby. He’s not giving up.”

The post Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Plan to Take LA Times Public Follows Newsmax Mini-IPO  appeared first on TheWrap.

The movie launched 100 copycats, set the mold for the post-feminist femme fatale and made a boatload of money in release and forever-after in video and streaming.

But while Eszterhas has been holed up in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, living a post-Hollywood life of faith and family with his wife Naomi (also writing memoirs and such), apparently he’s not quite done. Last week he made a mega-deal to reboot “Basic Instinct” for Amazon-MGM, at a maximum fee of $4 million if the movie gets made. 

WaxWord, who for better or worse has known the writer over many years, spoke to Eszterhas about his dip back into the world of sexy thrillers. 

I’ve interviewed you so many times over the years about all kinds of things, the first time was in your house in Malibu when a new baby was born. And now here you are back with this incredible deal to write a reboot of “Basic Instinct.” So I really wanted to get on the horn with you and understand where did this come from? You’ve not really been in the business of writing thrillers for quite a long time.

Yeah, this is preposterous. The notion that you’re going to pay four million bucks to an 80-year-old f–k of a guy who lives in Cleveland for God’s sakes, right? You’re going to do all that? OK, so they did. Now, the only thing I can say in defense of all this is, for people who are concerned about my age, I’m a huge Mark Twain fan. And then I’m going to paraphrase Twain and say that the rumors about my cinematic impotence are exaggerated and ageist. And I have a co-writer who is a twisted little man who lives somewhere deep inside me – I won’t name where – who’s 29. He was born 29. He will die 29.

I love it. Yeah.

He wrote much of the first “Basic” and he tells me that he is quote “up to write this” and that he will give everyone a wild and cinematic ride. I was very happy to hear my twisted little man say that because it gives me some confidence that we will really do something together.

OK but enough about you. What about the movie?

I can’t talk very much about the storyline at this point because much of it isn’t formed yet. It begins in 2025. The Catherine Trammel character I will write and I hope Sharon [Stone] agrees to do the picture because I thought she was brilliant the first time out.

Yeah.

In my reboot she is not the star of the picture but she is the main co-star of the picture. It’s about the serial killers. It’s about copycats. There’s a demonic element to it that I think will be spooky.

I’ve really not told this story before. The character came when I was in college. I was 18 years old and I met a professor’s wife who was in her mid 30s and we had an affair, and she was beautiful and smart and really well read and outspoken and fiery and funny and totally open about her sexuality. After near the end of the year, she came to me and said we were done, and she broke my heart.

And the cop character — I was a police reporter and met a cop who’d been involved in three or four shootings. I liked him. We were drinking buddies, but I realized through the course of our relationship that he liked pulling the trigger.

Okay, so flash forward nearly 20 years. About four or five months of thinking about it, I went off to to Hawaii by myself, let the sun beat me up… That’s how it evolved and that’s how it became “Basic Instinct.” I don’t know how in the creative process you meet two people, they influence your life, you think about them and they get swirled around together somehow.

The woman with whom I had the affair when the movie came out sent me a note and she said, ‘I saw Basic Instinct I loved it, and then she added, ‘I think about you, too. Thank you.’

Oh, that’s really great. She got it. She saw herself.

Yeah, that’s how it came about.

When we were talking earlier you said the film will be anti-woke. In your mind what does that mean — “anti-woke”?

It means that dialogue-wise she will be open about her sexuality, character-wise she will be raunchy at times, funny, iconoclastic and all of those things.

So what are your thoughts generally about jumping back into a controversial topic and the environment that we’re in right now?

In terms of the woke culture, I think that there is a segment of the population that’s had it with woke culture. But then there’s also a huge segment that hasn’t. I don’t believe in woke and I don’t believe in being politically correct because I think it’s not the truth, and I like the truth spoken.

The absurdities come when a woman who is sexual and open about her sexuality, you know, the culture that that I grew up in would describe that woman as a nymphomaniac. If a man did the same thing he would be a stud. And then this moves into religion in my mind as well because there are some faiths — including the one that I officially belong to — that are totally sexist. Women aren’t allowed to be priests.

Well, why the hell not? You know, by what justice are they not allowed to be priests? They can be nuns, they can be assistants and all of that. Those things are wrong and in my mind there are things that should be changed even in terms of religion.

Let me talk to you about Trump because I think it relates to this. Yes I liked Trump and I like some of the things that Trump does, but I’m very concerned about the immigrant situation. I’m concerned about going after not just MS13 but immigrants who’ve been here 10 years illegally and then the whole campaign with that. The whole Epstein thing has blown up in the past couple of years. If I were a journalist — and I don’t understand why this hasn’t happened — I would ask the president at a press conference specifically if he went to that island and specifically if and when he went to that island, he had sexual relations with underage women. No one’s asked that question bluntly. And I think that question has to be asked because it it relates to everything about our president and who he is and all of that.

What’s your time frame getting a draft?

Three months. But I think it’ll be much less than that. I’m guessing it’ll be a month and a half or two months. At night, I wake up and I hear lines of dialogue.

I’m sorry. You’re talking about the guy inside.

Of course, he’s speaking in gibberish, part-Hungarian part-English. But I get it.

So, you think you’ll have a draft within a couple months?

Yes. Yes, I do. I used to be a Hungarian refugee kid, but I moved a centimeter. Now I’m a Cleveland guy.

Well, you know what? That’s one thing we share since, as you know, I come from Cleveland, too. And that goes pretty deep somewhere. So, thank you. God bless.

This interview was edited for length and clarity. 

The post Joe Eszterhas on Rebooting ‘Basic Instinct,’ Going Anti-Woke and His Wavering Trump Support | Exclusive appeared first on TheWrap.

Not about how she betrayed the bedrock principles of media ownership in settling with the Trump administration over a specious lawsuit involving “60 Minutes.” True, a mountain of editorials, tweets and official statements from non-profits and politicians are excoriating her for weakening the First Amendment and empowering a presidential bully. 

But that’s not the conversation that’s happening privately on the Upper East side of New York or in the wealthy enclave of LA’s Beverly Park where her father Sumner once lived. 

In those circles they are saying that she was just managing an unfortunate set of circumstances. That the non-executive chairwoman and controlling shareholder of Paramount Global — forced to swallow her dignity and write a $16 million check — was a treacherous settlement hurdle in order to win FCC approval for the sale of Paramount Global to Skydance Media, backed by another billionaire Larry Ellison. 

They’re saying that because they all know it could happen to them next. She did what needed to be done, they argue.

It isn’t only Barry Diller who believes that. But, in typical fashion, he said the quiet part out loud. He told Maureen Dowd it’s understandable to “bend the knee if there’s a guillotine at your head.”

And the rest of those in journalism who will be the target of his next nonsense, multi-billion-dollar lawsuit — well, not her problem. 

This is a reality other billionaires and centi-millionaires understand. “She really doesn’t have a choice,” one media honcho said to me recently at a dinner party, more “poor Shari” in tone than “what the hell?” I’ve now heard this repeated enough to know it’s the wagons of the wealthy being circled. 

But having covered this transaction for a year and seen all the signals indicating that a “deal” would be required, this fight was over before it began.

Unlucky, she was backed into a corner. About two years ago she made the agonizing decision to sell the company her father bought, built, split, merged and grew into the Viacom powerhouse as the decline of legacy entertainment companies built on cable and broadcast assets became inexorable.

Redstone dithered for months over making a deal as the share price dropped. Shareholders were grumbling. Her executives were told to institute deep cuts, even as their own future job stability looked unlikely. 

And then, fatefully, came the “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Harris, a fairly straightforward interview which Trump claimed was fraudulently edited to hurt his election chances. Lawyers near-uniformly said this was nonsense. 

What did it matter? The lawsuit was leverage. 

Privately, Redstone believes that the storm will pass, that CBS News will survive and that too much is being made of the matter. It’s not that she doesn’t care, but is it really so irredeemable, one individual close to her has told me.

An individual close to the network said that the fact that there was no apology with the settlement made it a win. Corporations settle lawsuits all the time, this individual said. 

Still, in May, all seven correspondents from “60 Minutes” pleaded with Paramount to “put up a fierce and unrelenting fight” against the $20 billion lawsuit.

Now those who toil in the trenches of media, even such celebrities as “60 Minutes” staple Lesley Stahl, cannot do much but complain (she did) or quit (the head of CBS News Wendy McMahon left last month over this.)

The notion that Redstone take a stand — as the AP has done in suing for access to the Oval Office, as the Times did in standing by its reporting on the settlement talks last week despite yet another Trump threat — does not enter the conversation. After all, the magnates argue, the Walt Disney Company did what was necessary in settling its own Trump lawsuit against ABC over a George Stephanopulos interview for $15 million. 

Now at least we have a market price for media companies buying off Trump: average cost $15-$16 mill. 

Redstone is not on the guest list for the annual Allen & Co retreat this year, an event she rarely misses.

But if she does show up, she’ll be among friends, the billionaires who understand the tough choices required of the poor little media moguls in the age of Trump.

The post Shari Redstone Did Her Best … for a Billionaire appeared first on TheWrap.

The nannies will not come out of the house. He said: “It’s like Anne Frank or something.”

The nannies in this town are mostly Hispanic and like so many other Latinos doing important jobs in our community, they’re now living in a state of terror. Because ICE agents will pick up anyone with brown skin, regardless of whether they are legal or not, and sometimes even if they are American. It doesn’t seem to matter. 

With their faces obscured, no warrants and no identification, ICE is showing up at the Home Depot. They’re showing up at parks. Car washes. Restaurants. Schools. Colin’s wife is a pediatrician and ICE agents have come into her medical office looking for patients and staff, he said. The other day, Hispanic staff crowded into an examination room and huddled there when agents showed up because ICE is not allowed in the exam rooms.

Not yet anyway. 

This is the kind of insanity and terror that’s being spread in our city. According to the Department of Homeland Security, over 1,600 immigrants have been detained in Southern California over a period of more than two weeks as of June 25th. This equates to roughly 101 arrests per day.

In a quest to punish a Democratic majority city – nearly half Latino by last count — and in an obsession to meet made-up quotas to deport undocumented immigrants, the Trump administration has set Los Angeles on edge.

His intent to terrorize our city is working. My local car wash on Sepulveda is closed. The owner said he needs to protect his labor force.

Now the latest is we have ICE wannabes. Local television KTLA reported that on Friday an LA man was arrested for impersonating a federal agent. He had a loaded gun, fake documents, cop gear and a blinking light on his car. No biggie. 

“People are staying home. It does feel very scary out there right now,” said immigration attorney Jaclyn Granet, who works closely with entertainment clients. 

“It’s incredibly disturbing to witness as a human and also as an immigrant attorney, who works with foreign talent,” she told me. “I support the idea that America is better when we have a global community within our borders. It really feels like this program of mass ICE raids and mass detention is extremely short-sighted… If you’re raiding the farms, the restaurants – how long does it take until a restaurant has to close, or we don’t have this crop or that crop?”

A lawyer friend of mine said she was in Van Nuys on Friday picking up boxes from a storage place and talked to a group of Hispanic men who find work outside the store. They were scared, they told her. “They’re afraid to go out for work right now,” said this friend who did not want to be named. “Their families are staying in their home.”

Her housekeeper, who is legal, said people are afraid to leave their houses. Her client told her that her nanny, like Colin’s, won’t leave the house. “Even if they’re legal they’re afraid to take the kids to the park, afraid to take them to school. This is affecting not just the undocumented, it’s affecting people who are legal who have brown skin,” she said. 

ICE is operating aggressively all over – from the wealthy west side where many undocumented folks work, to the working class section on the east where many live. If you’re going to Gelson’s watch out. You might see men pull up in one SUV, or several, armed to the hilt and dressed in combat gear surround a young woman no more than 100 lbs or so. That was in Ladera Heights.

Here is a video of a full-on military raid–military uniforms, night vision goggles, rifles – descending on a home in Huntington Park where they unceremoniously blast open the door and then we see a young mother with child and toddler in her arms being escorted out. 

The overkill is the point. 

Colin comes from the fifth generation American family of Chinese origin. He said his family first came here to build the railroads back in the 1800s. His father now lives in South Carolina and is a Trumper. He recalled the discrimination his parents felt, especially during the Second World War (even though they are not Japanese). We both shared our immigrant backgrounds — mine from Ukrainian and Polish descent only two generations in — and wondered aloud: It’s not that hard to imagine the descendants of today’s terrorized Latino population in 20 years from now marveling at the criminality, the inhumanity and the deliberate aggression.

And we all wonder what can be done. For the moment, it seems, not very much.

“Do I think that this level of force is necessary? Absolutely not,” said Granet. “That is part of the chaos and scare tactics meant to be communicated through these raids. Part of Trump’s plan is to create chaos.” 

Scenes from ICE terrorizing civilians in LA:

The post ICE in LA Sets Hollywood Summer on Edge as Latino Workers Hide: ‘It’s Like Anne Frank’ appeared first on TheWrap.

Sure, say Zaslav’s peers, decoupling the streaming and content-producing side from the declining linear world makes sense now. NBCUniversal just did the same, spinning off its cable channels into a new entity, Versant. Lionsgate has just separated streamer Starz from its studio. 

But Zaslav only arrived in Hollywood a hot minute ago, bringing a vision of creating a 21st-century Hollywood studio with barely enough time to buy the Beverly Hills digs of producer Robert Evans, get a convertible Rolls-Royce and hang out at the Polo Lounge.  

What was the point, after all, of combining Warner Bros. with Discovery in order to create streaming scale to compete with Netflix and Disney+ in 2022, if only to unwind the whole thing three years later with a 60% drop in the Warner share price? 

“This whole thing was a waste of time,” said one openly-disgusted media executive, one of several who spoke to WaxWord. “They lost tremendous shareholder value. It was a failure.” This executive added: “It’s a deal that never had a shot and shouldn’t have been done. But they’ve also done a terrible job running the company.”

“The cable bundle has been rotting the business for the past eight years,” said another top media executive, who also declined to be named. “For him [Zaslav] and [shareholder John] Malone — as much Malone as Zaslav — they were trying to exit Discovery.” 

And doing so bought more time, at the expense of WBD employees, who have already experienced several rounds of layoffs and face heightened uncertainty now. 

Spinning out the cable channels “is a huge problem off his plate. It gives it to Gunnar [Wiedenfels, WBD’s CFO],” said yet a third top media executive. “Everyone is doing it — Lionsgate, Comcast, now Warner Bros. and the last person who’ll figure it out is [Disney CEO] Bob Iger.”

Doing the AT&T deal in 2022 may not have helped Warner, but it helped Zaslav. “He’s still at the table. If he hadn’t done the deal, he’d own Scripps and Discovery, and those things are the great disappearing act,” said this executive. “So he paid way too much, but he’s still at the table. In the end, for him, it was great. For the shareholders, it’s a disaster.”

The overpayment is what has made Zaslav’s challenge particularly daunting, saddling the company with a stunning amount of debt that is now down to $37 billion for a company with a $26 billion market cap. The spinoff will require another $17.5 billion loan. 

But Warner executives, not surprisingly, see it differently. In his call with analysts on Monday, Zaslav observed that he’d grown the Max streaming service – despite renaming it three different times – to a global content force. 

“When we formed WBD, HBO Max was largely a domestic streaming service that lacked scale, basic technological proficiencies and a differentiated content strategy, as well as losing more than $2 billion,” he said. “We remain on track to surpass 150 million subscribers by the end of 2026 and to deliver at least $1.3 billion in Adjusted EBITDA this year.”

The company reported 122 million streaming subscribers in Q1, including 57 million domestically. 

But Zaslav’s missteps have been well documented:  renaming HBO Max to Max (they’ve reverted); betting that HBO Max and Discovery+ subscribers would cross over and enjoy each other’s content (they didn’t); figuring that no one would really care if he shelved a couple of completed movies (the creative community had a new Big Bad at the studios).

And one former HBO executive reflected the concern among those who toiled at the premium network: “It is another (sad) attempt to salvage a sinking ship,” said this individual. “I have spoken with a few of my former surviving colleagues from the ‘glory’ days and they are quite concerned that this is another nothing-burger that gets press and does not move the needle as a long-term strategy. They are concerned about cuts and the devaluation of their work.”

But perhaps the most salient outcome of the split announced on Monday is the likelihood that both Warner Bros. and the Turner cable properties will become targets for M&A, as each becomes small enough to attract an acquirer once the split happens next year. 

“Anyone who thinks that Warner-HBO thing is going to continue as an independent company is missing what’s going on here,” said the second executive. “That thing is extremely attractive. It’s small enough in net value for any of those [streamers] – Netflix, Amazon, Disney – to buy it. Which they will.”

The third executive agreed. “This is just setting everyone up for the next M&A dance,” he said. “We know these things trade for 12-15x EBITDA, and they get sold 15-30x. That’s what Amazon paid for MGM. But none of that is going to happen when you’re dragging along a dead body. How do you get ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ and cut the dead corpse loose?” 

This executive argued that ultimately Disney will need to do the same with its linear properties, including ABC and ESPN.

Merging Warner with Discovery “was a huge miscalculation, but was it any more a miscalculation than Iger made in buying Fox? He spent $71 billion for a bunch of cable assets. Both these guys thought they were buying a studio with a bunch of IP and linear was coming along. But it turned out the linear fell off a cliff.” 

Warner vehemently disputed that its version of SpinCo would be a “dead body,” and said that Wiedenfels was committed to investing further. 

“There is a misperception that our Global Networks is the same bad bank as Versant is,” said a Warner executive. “It’s definitively different and set up to have a chance to do well, stretch its wings, see what it can do. It’s global. It has digital assets. We didn’t cleave off a favorite network like Bravo – they’re all going. And it will have up to a 20% stake in the streaming and studios.”  

The first executive strongly disagreed, arguing that CNN faces a particularly dire future. “It’s a really bad day for CNN. The two biggest brands on that side of the equation are TNT and CNN. [TNT] now goes forward without the NBA. And CNN has been incredibly diminished.” 

Historians will argue over whether the pivotal moment for a glorious legacy brand like Warner Bros. was the $85 billion sale to AT&T in 2018. It took only three years for AT&T to then pivot and spin out that asset in the merger with Discovery led by Zaslav. 

All three top executives said that move merely staved off the inevitable outcome on Monday, resulting from the linear decline that most Hollywood legacy studios failed to predict.  

“All of them together missed the one fact, which is obvious here: The white walkers were coming,” said the second executive. “The fact that you’re following the Starks, the Lanisters, whoever – who cares? That was all going to happen.” 

WBD stock closed down 29 cents on Monday, to $9.53.

Lucas Manfredi contributed to this article.

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