🎬 Do-Over Pilot

👋 Good morning! Hats off to 'Spider-Man: Brand New Day,' which crossed $1B worldwide in just six days, the second-fastest of all time behind 'Avengers: Endgame.' A week ago every exec's calendar was packed with meetings about original IP, first-time filmmakers, and horror. So much for that. Sympathies to the assistants clearing every one of those meetings and rebooking the entire week around anything with a numeral in the title. Kidding. Mostly.

Happy Wednesday and welcome back to The Dailies. Pour something hot, sit back, and let us walk you through everything the industry got up to since we last spoke.

When FX chief John Landgraf pulled the streaming data on 'Adults,' he could see the exact moment people were tuning out. It was the pilot, and for many, it was its very raunchy cold open. Ninety seconds in, a big chunk of viewers were already gone.

Most execs read that data and reach for the cancellation. Landgraf treated it as a fixable problem. He believed in the show, and he believed in creators Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw enough to call them potential generational talent. The viewers who did make it past the cold open stuck around, handing the show strong reviews and a loyal young following. So the three of them went and built a replacement pilot… sort of:

What FX is actually up against: the sheer difficulty of getting a first episode watched. A new comedy is now competing against social feeds, plus effectively every movie and series ever made, sitting one tile away. Back in the cable days, a new FX series inherited about a million viewers who'd just finished watching a movie on the channel, then picked up another million each time it reran that week. Streaming, as Landgraf put it, gives you no way to focus "a bazooka of attention" on a launch.

Looking ahead… S2 drops all eight episodes Aug. 27 on FXX and Hulu, making it the first real read on whether a do-over pilot works. If it does, it could inspire other networks to try something creative before hitting cancel on their own underperformers.

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🕷️ 'Spider-Man: Brand New Day' is officially the biggest domestic opening ever, its $360M actuals edging past 'Avengers: Endgame's' $357M. It cleared $1B globally in six days, and $47M of that came on Monday (happy sick day to all who celebrate). The film's now coming to IMAX, bumping 'The Odyssey' off some screens.

🤝 'Poetic License' has a happy ending after all: Maude Apatow's directorial debut landed at Sony Pictures Classics after original buyer Row K's very public unraveling involving unpaid bills and staff exits. The TIFF favorite, starring her mom Leslie Mann and Cooper Hoffman, will be released sometime in 2027.

🍿 Netflix stretched 'La Bola Negra's' theatrical run to 47 days, its longest window ever. The Cannes winner from Los Javis now opens Oct. 16 instead of Nov. 6, before its Dec. 2 streaming debut. Awards watchers see it as a play for Oscar voters who've long dinged Netflix for skipping theaters. Next stop, the film hits TIFF in September.

🏛️ David Ellison broke his silence on the Warnamount antitrust suit, writing in an op-ed that he believes the real issue is whether he can be trusted with CNN, not market share. He says he's voted for both parties, and that the deal has always been about the movies. Meanwhile, the trial has been set for March 2027, by which point Paramount will owe WBD shareholders over $1B in ticking fees.

Hollywood is betting big on video game IP at a rough moment for the people who make the games. Last week alone, indie horror video game ‘Tormented Souls’ sold its film and TV rights, days after Universal scooped up 10 classic Atari properties. Meanwhile, the gaming industry's recent lowlights:

Meanwhile, on screens, the same IP has never been hotter. 'The Super Mario Galaxy Movie' was 2026's first $1B film (on a $110M budget), 'A Minecraft Movie' grossed $960M last year, 'Five Nights at Freddy's' turned a $20M budget into $297M, and 'Fallout' drove an estimated $80M in game revenue for Bethesda.

It wasn't always this way. For decades, game adaptations flopped so reliably the industry gave the phenomenon a name: the "video game movie curse." Ironically, Hollywood cracked the code at the exact moment the industry behind the games started to buckle.

The takeaway: Producers say the chaos will probably help Hollywood. Publishers under financial pressure are more open to licensing their IP, and smaller independent studios come with less corporate red tape on rights deals. The turmoil may end up speeding the pipeline, not slowing it, with even more deals likely on the way. And more games on screen is a win for both sides of the table.

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