🎬 BBQ Beats Minions

👋 Good morning! Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce got married at Madison Square Garden on Friday, in front of roughly 1,000 guests, with Adam Sandler (ordained for the day) officiating. The black-tie crowd was stacked, with Steven Spielberg, Emma Stone, Brad Pitt, and Bradley Cooper among the many who made it in. If your invite didn't show up in the mail, don't take it personally (ours didn't either). Most of the actual details are still being kept quiet, so we'll assume Sandler kept it dignified and only did the “Opera Man” bit during the rehearsal dinner.

Hope you had a solid Fourth and made it out with all ten fingers. Now that the smoke's cleared, let’s get you caught up. 👇

The bigger picture: It was a sleepy holiday frame, down from both last week and last year. A Saturday July 4th plus a nationwide heat wave meant the BBQ and fireworks won the weekend. 'Minions & Monsters' wasn't the movie to change that. Still, the year's still doing just fine, comfortably ahead of 2025 YTD.

Up next: Disney's live-action 'Moana' is up next weekend, and then July closes out with a heavy hitter each in Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey' and 'Spider-Man: Brand New Day.' If they all land, summer could reach $4B for just the second time post-pandemic.

Ever since 'Backrooms' and 'Obsession' proved internet-born horror could pack theaters with younger audiences, the town has been trying to bottle the same lightning.

In the weeks after those hits, agency assistants were reportedly combing through Reddit, YouTube, and TikTok like truffle pigs, sniffing out the next viral property. One agency vet claimed they'd already flagged "a bunch" of subreddits and short stories as potential films (a Sydney Sweeney project pulled from r/nosleep is reportedly already in the works). That land grab is now producing deals, and two big ones landed within 24 hours of each other:

The two deals take opposite approaches to who's behind the camera: ‘Mandela' hands the job to its creator, with Alex Kister directing his own IP (the same path Kane Parsons took on 'Backrooms'). 'Siren Head' goes the other way, handing the property to two outside filmmakers (Cregger and Duffield) who had no hand in creating it.

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Three years ago, AI fears helped fuel the 2023 strikes. Now, with Hollywood work harder to find, some of those same writers, editors, and execs are taking side gigs training the very AI models that could one day compete with them.

The work is called RLHF (Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback), which is a fancy way of saying humans grade the machine's homework. You score a model's outputs (say, whether a character would really crack a joke two seconds after a funeral), and that data eventually trains the AI to do it on its own. Some details:

Opinions are all over the map. Some have leaned in out of curiosity, wanting to understand the tech from the inside before it understands them. Others took the work out of necessity, to cover rent after long dry spells. And some want no part of it, arguing it's a short-sighted trade that quietly hollows out the creative sector.

The guilds are in a tough spot, and so far they've stayed quiet on it. With LA on-location production still running nearly 20% below its five-year average, more workers may take these gigs to bridge the gap, and leadership can't really tell struggling members not to earn a paycheck (even one that funds the very thing they're fighting).

🔫 Christian Bale and Leonardo DiCaprio will star in 'Heat 2,' shooting this November. Michael Mann’s returning to direct, with Bale in the Pacino detective role and DiCaprio in the Kilmer part. Mann’s also reuniting with producer Jerry Bruckheimer (first time in 45 years) on the roughly $170M Amazon MGM project.

🏆 The Emmys are hunting for a new TV home starting in 2027, since the rights run out after this year's ceremony. Broadcasters keep paying to host a show they rarely win, while streamers grab the trophies for free. One fix being floated: a simulcast, where networks and streamers air it at once and split the yearly cost.

🌍 Paramount is dropping United International Pictures, its distribution venture with Universal, to win EU approval for its WBD merger. European cinema operators had flagged antitrust worries, and giving up the venture seems to be smoothing things over. Regulators pushed their decision to July 22 (a sign approval could be close).

⚽ The 2026 World Cup is smashing US ratings records, and the numbers keep climbing as the tournament goes on. The USA-Bosnia win drew 24.4M on Fox, the biggest English-language soccer telecast ever. Today's Round of 16 clash with Belgium (a shot at the quarterfinals, first since 2002) could top even that.