🎬 $50 Movie Ticket

👋 Good morning! Quentin Tarantino's list of not-the-tenth-film projects keeps growing. The director has long vowed to retire after exactly ten films, so anything he doesn't direct himself doesn't count against the sacred ten. Latest addition: Sony has tapped Brian Helgeland ('L.A. Confidential') to script a 'Django/Zorro' crossover film, based on the 2014 comic Tarantino co-wrote that teams the bounty hunter with the masked swordsman. QT gave his blessing, but won't be directing it. That puts it alongside a 2027 West End play, a Netflix 'Cliff Booth' sequel directed by David Fincher, and now this comic adaptation. Final film count: still nine.

Welcome back to The Dailies for your midweek edition. Grab your coffee. Here's everything you need to know to start your Wednesday. 👇

Swift is the latest A-lister to try turning her own voice and likeness into federally registered IP. Her company filed three applications with the USPTO last week: two sound marks ("Hey, it's Taylor Swift" and "Hey, it's Taylor") and a visual mark covering a pink guitar, iridescent bodysuit, pink stage, and purple lights (in case any imitators were considering this exact combination).

She's following Matthew McConaughey's lead: McConaughey secured eight USPTO-approved trademarks last year, including audio of his 'Dazed and Confused' "alright, alright, alright." Swift's filings borrow the same logic, that trademark protection gives talent a federal-court weapon against AI replicas, layered on top of state right-of-publicity laws.

She has reason to try it: Her likeness has already been impersonated by Meta AI chatbots, non-consensual explicit deepfakes, and fake presidential endorsement images during the 2024 election cycle. Meanwhile, the NO FAKES Act (the federal bill that would create a right to sue over unauthorized AI replicas of someone's voice or face) is still stuck in Congress with no vote in sight.

Looking ahead… It's still the wild west out there with AI, so this is really just a shot at trying something. But Swift validating McConaughey's experiment turns a one-off into a trend. CAA is reportedly running the same strategy at scale through its Vault initiative, which would trademark its entire client roster. If it holds up, expect the ™️ to become standard issue on the A-list rider.

🌍 Almost half the new Paramount will be foreign-owned. Paramount asked the FCC this week to bless the financing behind its $110B Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition, and here's the breakdown: 49.5% of equity in the combined company (which will own CNN, CBS, HBO, and Warner Bros.) will sit in foreign hands. Three Gulf sovereign wealth funds (Saudi Arabia's PIF, Abu Dhabi's L'Imad, Qatar's QIA) are contributing $24B for a 38.5% stake. Paramount's case is that the Ellisons and RedBird hold every voting share, so the foreign funds have no formal say. Critics argue capital that big shapes a company regardless. Paramount’s request exceeds the FCC's 25% cap on foreign ownership of broadcast license holders, so the agency will have to decide whether granting an exception serves the public interest.

📱 Kevin Hart is testing whether vertical has a sense of humor. His production company Hartbeat is rolling out a slate of vertical comedy on its LOL Network, starting with 'Freshman 15,' fifteen 15-minute stand-up specials from digitally native comics shot for the phone-shaped screen. Short-form mobile isn't new turf for Hart: He was an early Quibi partner, and 'Die Hart' was the app's biggest summer hit before the whole experiment collapsed six months in. The bigger swing here: Hart is the first A-lister trying to diversify a format that's caught on fast but stayed locked into one lane (namely soapy romances about alpha werewolves and secret billionaire husbands). If it works, verticals open up past romance. If it flops, at least the industry gets a useful data point on why the genre monoculture exists in the first place.

📈 California's tax credit is working, mostly at the movies. Q1 2026 is the first quarter to offer a real read on the state's expanded $750M film and TV credit, which took effect last summer and is only now showing up in production data. The early picture is mixed: LA shoot days rose 11% quarter-over-quarter to 5,121, with features doing the heavy lifting (up 52% year-over-year and 20% above the five-year average). But TV fell another 28% and now sits 60% below its five-year average, while reality TV (which gets no state incentive) dropped 52%. Mayor Karen Bass called it "turning a corner," and she might be right: More credit-funded projects are queued, and a political push to lift the cap entirely (which would open the credit to every qualifying in-state production) could give the rebound more runway. Time will tell.

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Remember when "going to the movies" was shorthand for "cheap night out"? Regal just sold $50 opening-night tickets to December's 'Dune: Part Three' in 70mm IMAX in minutes, eight months ahead of release. It's an outlier in dollars, not in direction. Premium-format prices keep climbing. Some numbers:

Why it's happening: Audiences are smaller, the slate is shrinking, so chains are squeezing more money from the die-hards who still show up. Moviegoing is splitting into two markets: a shrinking pool of enthusiasts paying premium prices, and a casual audience that's mostly migrated to Netflix, YouTube, and TikTok.

Which explains why the fight over premium real estate is heating up. Disney debuted "Infinity Vision" at CinemaCon, a new premium large-format brand for 'Avengers: Doomsday,' after 'Dune: Part Three' booked every IMAX screen for the same December 18 release date. Chains are wary of co-branding, since it hands Disney leverage over screens they've spent years marketing under their own names. With premium screens in short supply, more of these collisions are coming.

The bigger picture: Sony's Tom Rothman used the CinemaCon stage to publicly warn that moviegoing has to get cheaper. The studio worry is that premium pricing turns a movie into a splurge, accelerating the casual audience's drift to streaming. Theaters point back: ticket sales are down a third from pre-pandemic, and studios are releasing 25% fewer films, they say, so the math has to work somewhere. David Ellison promised exhibitors 30 films a year if the Paramount-WBD deal closes (vs a combined 19 in 2025). More supply could eventually ease the pressure. For now, the chains are betting the other way.

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