🎬 Actual Hail Mary

👋 Good morning! Searchlight Pictures held a screening of its upcoming horror sequel 'Ready or Not 2: Here I Come' Monday night where blood cannons blasted moviegoers every time a character died on screen. Ponchos were handed out beforehand, the universal sign for “you're about to regret your seat choice.” The clip has predictably gone viral. Somewhere, a Warner Bros. exec is eyeing a leaf blower and a bag of sand for the 'Dune 3' rollout.

Welcome back to The Dailies. Hope you had a great St. Paddy's Day, and if you’re in LA, condolences to your electric bill this week. Now, let’s get you caught up on what’s happening in Hollywood. 👇

Amazon MGM is putting nearly $200M on the line with its biggest theatrical swing yet. 'Project Hail Mary,' the Ryan Gosling-led sci-fi adaptation of Andy Weir's bestselling novel, opens this weekend with a lot riding on it. The gross production budget hit $248M before tax credits brought it just under $200M, making it Hollywood's priciest non-franchise sci-fi film since 'Tenet' in 2020.

The thing is, Amazon still hasn't proven it can win at the box office. The studio's combined 2023-26 theatrical gross sits around $945M total. The recent track record:

Early signs for 'Project Hail Mary' are promising, though. The film holds a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes from 61 critics, with multiple outlets calling it the first must-see movie of 2026. It's tracking for a $63M-$65M domestic opening, which would top Amazon MGM's current record ('Creed III' at $58M) and mark the biggest debut of 2026 so far.

But the math doesn't care about your Rotten Tomatoes score. The standard 2.5x break-even rule means the film needs roughly $500M worldwide to justify its cost. And star power just doesn't move the needle the way it used to. Gosling's 'The Fall Guy' topped out at $181M. Brad Pitt's 'Babylon' bombed. Even Margot Robbie couldn't save 'A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.' The era of a marquee name carrying a $200M movie is basically a thing of the past, which means 'Project Hail Mary' has to sell itself on concept and word of mouth, not the face on the poster.

The pressure is real. Sources say there's internal anxiety at Amazon after 'Crime 101' and 'Melania' underperformed, and executives are leaning on 'Project Hail Mary' to change the narrative. Amazon can always frame a modest theatrical run as a marketing funnel for Prime Video, but leaning on that excuse repeatedly, especially on $200M movies, undermines its credibility as a serious theatrical studio. And unlike a decade ago, Hollywood can't count on China to bail out a soft domestic run. Local films dominate there now, and the government has tightened the spigot on foreign releases.

Looking ahead… Theater owners are rooting for Amazon to figure this out. Box office revenues are still running about 20% behind pre-pandemic levels, and Amazon's 13-film 2026 slate (including 'Masters of the Universe' this summer and the Colleen Hoover adaptation 'Verity' in October) is exactly the kind of volume exhibitors need.

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📉 Another year, another ratings dip for the Oscars. Sunday's ceremony pulled 17.9M viewers, down 9% from last year and the smallest audience since 2022. The 18-49 demo took an even steeper hit, dropping 14%. To put that in perspective, the 1998 telecast (the year 'Titanic' swept) drew 57M viewers. Last year's Hulu simulcast gave the ratings a temporary bump, but temporary is the key word. Disney was reportedly already having second thoughts about the $75-100M annual price tag before this latest slide. Starting in 2029, the show heads to YouTube under a five-year deal, streaming free globally. The Oscars were one of the last major awards shows still anchored to broadcast TV, and at this point the move feels less like an experiment and more like an inevitability. The 100th Oscars in 2028 will be ABC's last.

🤑 David Zaslav's WBD exit package could top $800M. That's more than previously reported: the company's latest SEC filings peg the total as high as $886M, thanks to a last-minute tax reimbursement approved by WBD's board. The final number depends on when the Paramount acquisition (the largest leveraged buyout in history) closes, but even at the low end, other estimates put the floor between $677M and $711M. Four other executives are set to collect a combined $465M, for a total of nearly $1.2B across five people. The numbers aren't sitting well in an industry that's still bleeding jobs, especially given Zaslav's four-year run saw negative 14% revenue growth, a struggling streaming strategy, and thousands of layoffs. For perspective, WBD stock rose about 30% over his tenure, roughly half what a basic S&P 500 index fund returned over the same period.

🇭🇰 While Hollywood grapples with AI, Asia is going full speed ahead. Filmart, Asia's leading content market and media convention, kicked off yesterday in Hong Kong, and the vibe is quite different from the cautious, contested approach back home. The event is devoting 28 panel discussions to artificial intelligence, covering everything from AI screenwriting to presentations of AI-generated films. Google, Alibaba, Midjourney, and a deep bench of Chinese AI startups are all presenting. Warner Bros. Discovery is the only U.S. major in the building. Exactly one of those 28 talks addresses a potential downside (copyright risk, for the curious). Hollywood's unions have spent the last few years negotiating AI guardrails through collective bargaining, but Asia's screen industries don't have that infrastructure. Over there, market forces and tech boosterism are running the show.

Bob Iger is stepping down as Disney CEO today, handing the reins to parks chief Josh D'Amaro at the company's annual shareholders meeting. Meanwhile, incoming President Dana Walden is already showing what her newly created Chief Creative Officer role looks like in practice. In a company-wide memo Monday, she unveiled a restructured Disney Entertainment that pulls film, TV, streaming, and games under one creative roof (hers). The broad strokes:

The bigger picture: Walden's positioning herself as the single creative authority across every format Disney touches. It's a clean creative-vs-business split with D'Amaro. Disney's last attempt at a tidy succession plan lasted about two years before the board hit the eject button. Here's hoping this one ages better.

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