🎬 Even Scorsese

👋 Good morning! After a century of handing trophies to the people who make movies, the Academy is finally toasting the places that show them. AMPAS announced the Academy Marquee Theater List on Monday, a new annual nod to the 50 best cinemas on Earth (25 U.S., 25 international). Think a Michelin guide for movie houses, graded on programming, design, and concessions. One assumes the Academy is already training a fleet of undercover inspectors to slip into Tuesday matinees (Anton Ego-style) and quietly grade the recliners and the structural integrity of the nachos.

Welcome back to The Dailies, your midweek dispatch from the industry trenches. Top off the coffee, we've got ground to cover. 👇

Californians voted yesterday, and while affordability and homelessness drew most of the attention, film and TV production became a marquee issue in its own right. Up and down the ballot, candidates have pitched themselves as the one who'll bring the cameras home.

The backdrop: California's $750M tax credit seems to be moving the needle. On-location shoot days in LA jumped 10% in Q1, and projects like Fox's 'Baywatch' reboot are rolling again. Whoever wins these races will shape where LA production goes from here. The LA mayor’s race has three frontrunners:

How it works: These are nonpartisan primaries, not the final vote. A candidate could win outright by clearing 50%, but nobody's expected to. So the top two in each race, regardless of party, will advance to a November 3 runoff, and that's when the winner is decided.

As of this morning, the votes are still being counted. In the mayor's race, Bass has locked up one of the two runoff spots, while Pratt and Raman fight for second. The governor's race is still too early to call. California counts slowly, so final results may not land for a bit. Follow the live count here. 👈📊

Sean Evans’ Hot Ones and Kareem Rahma’s SubwayTakes represent a new generation of television, transforming simple conversations into distinctive, culturally influential formats.

For Your Emmy^® Consideration, Hot Ones reimagines the talk show through its signature menu of increasingly spicy wings, turning celebrity interviews into candid, revealing conversations driven by Evans’ meticulous preparation and incisive questioning. Meanwhile, SubwayTakes transforms quick encounters aboard New York City subways into sharply constructed comedic exchanges, proving that short-form storytelling can be both structurally disciplined and culturally immediate.

Original, conversation-driven, and built for today’s audiences, both series are now streaming on YouTube. Television has a new home.

🤖 Even Martin Scorsese is dabbling in AI now. The 83-year-old who once dismissed Marvel movies as "not cinema" just revealed he used start-up Black Forest Labs (where he's also an advisor and backer) to build storyboards during preproduction, possibly on his next film, 'What Happens at Night.' After 70 years of hand-drawing them, he says the AI tools help him share his vision faster. The move drew quick backlash online, with fans calling it disappointing and hypocritical given his legacy, and storyboard artists arguing the tech threatens their jobs. Still, many have noted a softening stance on AI within the industry lately, and one clear sign is the old guard starting to embrace the tech: the likes of Paul Schrader, James Cameron, and Darren Aronofsky have all warmed to the tech too.

🗽 The Tribeca Festival kicks off today in New York City. The 25th-anniversary edition opens with a Questlove-directed Earth, Wind & Fire doc and is packing its biggest slate ever (118 features, 103 of them world premieres), including a Katie Holmes-Joshua Jackson reunion. And in yet another example of softening AI sentiment, one of the most talked-about screenings wasn't shot with a camera at all. 'Dreams of Violets,' a 75-minute docudrama about Iran's January protests, was generated entirely by AI for around $2,000, with no actors, sets, or crew, making Tribeca the first major festival to embrace a fully AI-generated feature. Festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal defended the pick despite waves of backlash over the trailer online, praising its emotional urgency. The festival runs through June 14th.

⏱️ Another big name just walked out the door at '60 Minutes.' CBS News fired veteran correspondent Scott Pelley yesterday effective immediately, a day after he reportedly accused editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of "murdering" the show in a heated staff meeting and challenged the credentials of new executive producer Nick Bilton. Pelley anchored the 'CBS Evening News' for years, and is among the most recognizable faces in American broadcast journalism. Bilton handled the firing himself, saying Pelley's "antipathy to the future of the show" had come through loud and clear. Pelley's the fourth correspondent gone since February, after Cecilia Vega, Sharyn Alfonsi, and Anderson Cooper. That leaves just three correspondents heading into the 59th season this fall, and with newsroom tensions high, there's chatter more could follow him out.

After years of soft numbers and hand-wringing over whether audiences would come back, theaters just had a genuinely great May. A couple milestones:

Every other $1B May had a Marvel movie doing the heavy lifting. This time, no cape in sight. With 'Avengers: Doomsday' bumped to December, many expected the month to be a pre-summer slump. Instead, a wonderfully random lineup picked up the slack, from Lionsgate's Michael Jackson biopic 'Michael' to the 'The Devil Wears Prada 2' legacyquel to A24's YouTube-born horror hit 'Backrooms.'

Looking ahead… Analysts are projecting a domestic summer haul of $4.1B–4.3B, which would be the strongest since 2019.