🎬 A24 🤝 AI

👋 Good morning. This summer's breakout stars keep coming: Curry Barker, Kane Parsons, and now, ranch dressing. World Cup visitors came from around the world for the soccer and discovered ranch dressing, and now they want to take it home. That got dire enough for the TSA to issue an actual advisory telling fans to pack the dip in checked bags and "avoid chugging ranch outside of security." Kraft, never one to let a craze go uncommercialized, answered with a limited "TSA-Compliant Ranch" trimmed to clear a carry-on. Somewhere over the Atlantic, a man is weeping over a confiscated bottle of ranch.

Happy Wednesday and welcome back to The Dailies. With the condiment news safely behind us, top off your coffee and let us catch you up on everything happening in Hollywood. 👇

Somebody go check on the Letterboxd crowd. A24, the studio that turned good taste into a brand, is getting into the AI business with Google. Some details:

It's an interesting bet for a studio that made its name building a loyal following of film enthusiasts and taking risks on young, emerging talent, some of whom would rather eat glass than touch this stuff. Case in point: right as 'Backrooms' becomes A24's biggest film ever, its director Kane Parsons has been out there repeatedly calling generative AI harmful. Fans wasted no time either, with plenty canceling AAA24, the studio's paid membership that comes with a ticket to every A24 release.

The big picture: A24 jumping in means the prestige-holdout thing is basically over, with Netflix, Amazon, and Lionsgate all already in the AI water. What sets this deal apart is what A24 is keeping off the table. Where Lionsgate is letting Runway train custom models on its actual catalog, A24's partnership explicitly walls off its library, no films, no data for Google to train on.

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🎙️ An AI Michael Caine is narrating 'The Odyssey.' AI audio company ElevenLabs put out a 13-hour narration of Homer's epic this week, voiced by a clone of Caine, who didn't do much beyond lending the voice. Caine retired from acting in 2023, but last year he made headlines by licensing his voice to ElevenLabs alongside Matthew McConaughey, in a deal that pays the actors every time their voice gets used. The audiobook has nothing to do with Christopher Nolan's film version of 'The Odyssey,' but conveniently lands weeks before his July 17 release, and leans on a narrator who's been a Nolan regular for years. For an industry still hashing out digital replica terms, it's a preview of how name, image, and likeness licensing might play out.

🌶️ Netflix is bringing 'Hot Ones' to streaming. The streamer ordered 'Hot Ones: Extra Heat,' a spinoff of the wildly popular YouTube series where host Sean Evans interviews celebrities while they sweat through a lineup of increasingly hot wings. This version moves the show out of the studio and onto location for splashy 30-minute specials tied to big Netflix moments, kicking off July 13. It's the latest move in Netflix's campaign to chip away at YouTube, which has topped Nielsen's TV-viewing chart for nearly a year (the streamer's also been licensing popular podcasts, like 'The Bill Simmons Podcast' and 'The Breakfast Club'). This won't pull Evans off YouTube, it just gives 'Hot Ones' a spot on the streamer too.

📺 Instagram wants in on your living room. The Meta-owned platform is rolling Instagram for TV onto Samsung Smart TVs (it's already on Amazon Fire TV and Google TV) and testing horizontal video, a departure from the vertical format it built itself on. It's also testing longform creator content, episodic series, and live programming, leaning on its creators to fill them out (think serialized microdramas). The pull toward the couch makes sense, since VP of product Tessa Lyons calls TV the app's "next frontier" and the living room commands far richer ad rates than a phone feed ever could. If it lands, Instagram could put an entirely new competitor in front of the streamers, the same way YouTube became one.

With the summer box office off to a promising start and a little optimism creeping back into theaters, the Art House Convergence 2026 National Audience Survey says the good vibes go deeper than the tentpoles. They polled more than 27,000 moviegoers about their local independent theaters and found that side of the business quietly doing just fine. Some numbers:

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