🎬 Breaking Up

🍌 Good morning! Hollywood crowned its first Minionese Idol this past weekend (…and yes, that's a real thing now). At the ‘Minions & Monsters’ premiere at the Dolby Theatre, four contestants sang pop songs in Minionese, the Minions' signature all-gibberish language. Rynia Kando won the Golden Banana for 'I'll Be There,' beating out renditions of 'Bohemian Rhapsody' and 'drop dead.' The crowd was reportedly moved to tears, which in Minionese is just "banana" said softly.

Welcome back to The Dailies. Quick heads up: this is our final issue before the country sets off $3B in fireworks to celebrate its 250th birthday. We're taking Friday off, back on our usual schedule Monday. Now, let’s get you caught up. 👇

Comcast, one of the six legacy majors, is breaking into separate public companies: one keeps the cable-and-internet business (and the Comcast name), the other becomes a pure-play media company built around NBCUniversal. It's all a tax-free spin-off. Here's how the assets shake out:

It’s the end of a 15-year experiment: since the early 2010s, the bet was that owning both the content and the cables that carry it would make the two unbeatable together. In practice it rarely worked. AT&T, Verizon, and Warner Bros. all tried it, then split the pieces back apart. Comcast was the one company everyone pointed to as proof it could work. Now it's walking away too.

Cut loose, NBCU stands on its own books. Universal's movies and Peacock's spending get judged on what they earn, not propped up by cable's cash flow, which makes the company leaner and easier to value. Pressed repeatedly on whether the real plan is to sell NBCU once it's on its own, Roberts said "absolutely not." Wall Street isn't convinced, though. A leaner, standalone NBCU is an easier company to buy, and analysts already have Netflix and Amazon pegged as likely suitors.

Looking ahead… The spin-off needs board and regulatory approval, with close targeted for roughly mid-2027.

Wall Street just bet billions on a small collection of stocks.

And after a volatile first half of 2026, it looks like they’re about to shift even more.

MarketBeat’s updated 10 Best Stocks to Own in 2026 report reveals the 10 names attracting fresh capital right now.

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👀 Luca Guadagnino's OpenAI movie finally found a buyer. 'Artificial,' the biopic about Sam Altman's brief 2023 ouster from OpenAI, is closing in on a new home at Neon. Amazon MGM Studios dropped the nearly finished, $40M film just two weeks ago (notably, just months after Amazon committed $50B to OpenAI). Once it went up for grabs, a handful of other studios took a look and passed: A24, Netflix, Focus, and Warner Bros. each said no. Neon and Mubi were the last ones in. Neon’s already planning an awards push, adding it to its 2026 slate alongside Cannes winner 'Fjord.'

🇬🇧 The UK's gearing up to intervene in the Paramount deal. After the DOJ signed off, Paramount Skydance's $110B takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery seemed set to clear its remaining hurdles, the UK included. Britain now appears to have other ideas: Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said she's "minded to intervene" (government-speak for "about to") over media plurality, given the combined company would control Channel 5, CNN International, Paramount+, and HBO Max. The companies have until Monday to respond. Nandy's threat could delay the close, force divestitures, or extract remedies.

🎩 Netflix is using AI to bring back Willy Wonka. The streamer just revealed 'Wonka's The Golden Ticket,' a competition series that leans on an AI-recreated version of Gene Wilder's voice (the actor passed away in 2016) as a core part of the game, built by AI voice company ElevenLabs with the blessing of Wilder's widow, who controls his estate. It's one of the more mainstream uses of posthumous voice cloning we've seen so far, taking the tech beyond things like one-off audiobook tributes and into a marquee unscripted show. The game show premieres in September.

The global entertainment and media industry as a whole is expected to grow 4.6% in 2026, according to PwC's annual industry outlook. By 2030, the industry is projected to reach $4.2T, up from about $3.5T last year. That's roughly $600B in new money over five years. But that growth isn't spread evenly. A few highlights from the report stood out:

The takeaway: The industry's still growing, but the way it makes money is quietly shifting underneath. Worth a grain of salt, too, since these five-year forecasts get revised every year.

🎥 THEATRICAL

📺 STREAMING

🔮 BOX OFFICE PREVIEW: The Minions are cruising to a holiday win. 'Minions & Monsters' is tracking around $80M over the five-day frame, which would be the rare 'Minions' opening under $100M but still good for a big global weekend. 'Toy Story 5' should hold strong in its third week, while the real wild card is 'Young Washington,' eyeing around $15M. Meanwhile, 'Supergirl' is projected to drop as much as 70% in its second weekend.