🎬 A Second Swing

👋 Good morning! A PSA for our LA readers: stay away from Inglewood today, unless you're headed to the World Cup. The US Men's National Team opens its tournament against Paraguay at SoFi tonight, the first home-soil Cup match for the Americans since 1994. Fans are flying in from every corner of the planet, and parking is already hitting $300. The tournament runs across the US, Canada, and Mexico through the July 19 final.

It's Friday, which means two things: the weekend is close, and we've got a fresh batch of streaming numbers and industry news to send you into it. Grab your coffee, we'll handle the rest. 👇

Top-streamed chart (U.S.) June 3 to June 10. Data provided by Luminate.

Hollywood's biggest agency just put $250M behind a simple idea: today's YouTubers are tomorrow's media moguls, so buy in early. CAA teamed up with private equity giant TPG to launch Compound Creative Holdings, a new outfit built to buy and grow the businesses creators build around themselves.

The vision: take a creator already pulling tens of millions in sales and build them into the next Oprah or Reese Witherspoon. The goal is to own businesses with staying power, so the value sticks around even if the creator's views dip. Here's the early shape of it:

This is the kind of move the guilds would never allow in scripted Hollywood. The 2021 packaging fight forced WME to offload Endeavor Content precisely because the guilds objected to agencies repping talent and owning the businesses that profit off them. Creator culture has no such guild, so CAA gets to play both agent and owner with nobody to stop it.

The bigger picture: Everyone in town is wrestling the YouTube gorilla differently. Netflix licenses the podcasts (Charlamagne, Jay Shetty), Amazon pays a reported $100M a season for 'Beast Games,' and Fox's Creator Studios (launched earlier this year) funds creators while letting them stay on whatever platform their audience already uses. CAA and TPG's answer is the most aggressive of the bunch: own the businesses outright.

From creator Richard Gadd, this explosive drama series chronicles the fraught relationship between two "brothers" over four decades. Don’t miss the series The Guardian called “A MASTERPIECE.” HALF MAN now streaming on HBO Max.

Lionsgate has taken an equity stake in the generative AI company Runway. The two first partnered back in 2024, and now the studio is deepening things into an actual ownership stake. Here's what they want to do with it:

When Lionsgate and Runway first got together in 2024, Lionsgate became one of the first major studios to make a big AI bet, and the pitch was enormous. Vice chairman Michael Burns famously bragged the studio could take 'John Wick,' tell the AI to "do it in anime, make it PG-13," and have a brand-new, resellable movie three hours later. The whole library would become an endless source of cheap remixes. But most of that never happened.

The plan ran into a wall that turned out to be pretty fundamental, which is that a single studio's library just isn't enough material to train a good model on. These things need an astronomical amount of data (the kind of bottomless library YouTube is sitting on, which is what trains a model like Google's Veo). Four 'John Wick' movies doesn't get you there.

The legal side was reportedly tricky too. Owning a film library doesn't mean you own everything inside it (ancillary rights for actors, writers, and directors are still unsettled). So this is less an expansion than a second swing. We'll see whether it pays off this time.

🗽 Tribeca handed out its competition awards at the festival's 25th edition, with 'Cotton Fever,' 'Labrador,' and 'Jail Time Records' taking the top narrative, international, and documentary prizes respectively. Still pending: the Audience Award, the fan-voted prize decided by festivalgoers rather than a jury, which lands Sunday. Full list here.

🤝 Warner Bros. is reuniting with Maggie Gyllenhaal, optioning Rachel Kushner's novel 'Creation Lake' for her to write, direct, and produce. That's a real show of faith, considering her ambitious Frankenstein retelling 'The Bride!' grossed a wince-worthy $24M on a $90M budget back in March. Short memories, or genuine belief.

📉 Emmy submissions fell for the third straight year, with 84 fewer shows and nearly 150 fewer actors on the ballot than 2025. The numbers dropped yesterday as nomination voting opened, basically solidifying the early-2020s slowdown as the new baseline. Drama shed 16 shows; comedy added a whopping two.

🎮 Paramount's new games studio has the 'Sheridanverse' in its sights, with 'Yellowstone,' 'Landman,' and 'Tulsa King' named as priorities for future video game adaptations. Creative head Shawn Kittelsen insists they're cultural stewards, not IP value extractors. Nothing's official—keep your Dutton Ranch simulator hopes in check.