🎬 Hollywood's Secret AI Club

👋 Good morning. The window between theatrical and streaming has been shrinking for years, but this week it briefly hit negative two days. On Wednesday, Amazon Prime Video accidentally made all of 'Mutiny' streamable for about an hour before yanking it. The Jason Statham thriller opens in theaters today. Amazon doesn't produce or distribute the film, so this is less "studio leak" and more "left the neighbor's garage door open." Somewhere, a Prime Video intern is drafting a message to their boss that starts with "so, funny story" and ends with "anyway, loved my time here."

Welcome aboard The Dailies. Your weekend starts soon. Here's everything worth knowing before it does. 👇

Top-streamed chart (U.S.) Aug. 13 to Aug. 19. Data provided by Luminate.

YouTube is having the "so, are we exclusive?" talk with its creators. It's reportedly offering its biggest creators millions to keep new videos YouTube-only for a set stretch before posting anywhere else. Nothing's signed yet, but a few deals are said to be close.

This is YouTube's answer to a year and a half of Netflix poaching its stars. Netflix has been paying creators like Ms. Rachel, Mark Rober, the Sidemen, Alan Chikin Chow, and Nick DiGiovanni to post their videos on both platforms the same day, and 'Hot Ones' is reportedly next on the list. For creators, it's an extra paycheck for videos they're already making, plus 325M+ new eyeballs. Hard to say no.

CEO Neal Mohan used to wave this off, saying creators who work with rivals end up driving viewers back to YouTube anyway. Recent weeks changed his mind. YouTube now says concurrent posting hurts viewership, makes it look like channels are deprioritizing the platform, and makes a video a tougher sell to advertisers when Netflix has it too.

Looking ahead… YouTube maintains it has no interest in being a studio or giving creative direction. It just wants first dibs, and it's willing to pay. Deals could close any day.

For Your Awards Consideration, HBO Max presents DTF St. Louis. Nominated for 13 Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Limited Series, this darkly comedic story follows a love triangle that spirals into unexpected consequences. Don't miss the series TV Guide calls "Transcendent & Audacious." Now streaming on HBO Max.

The first rule of Kathleen Kennedy's AI club was apparently working, because nobody talked about Kathleen Kennedy's AI club. Since November 2023 (so, right after the strikes), Kennedy and AFI dean Susan Ruskin have been quietly hosting off-the-record summits with Oscar-winning filmmakers, actors, studio execs, and Silicon Valley types to figure out how AI fits into filmmaking without replacing the people who make films. Yesterday, after three years behind closed doors, their first document went public.

Where they landed: Step one is agreeing on what we're even talking about. Right now "AI" is one word doing way too much work. It covers everything from denoising in Premiere to a synthetic actor replacing a real one, and because the scary version carries so much stigma, the everyday stuff gets swept up with it. Contracts, credits, and guild talks end up treating it all the same.

HGW is the one they actually care about. They'd like it treated as the next step after CGI, not lumped in with the scary stuff. Exhibit A is 'Dear Upstairs Neighbors,' an animated short that premiered at Tribeca in June. Pixar and DreamWorks vets hand-painted the concept art, trained custom models on it, and built the pipeline with Google DeepMind engineers. No frame was drawn by hand, but humans made every creative call.

Looking ahead… This is a vocabulary, not a deal. The document leaves the harder questions (training data, actor consent, job loss) for later, and most participants still won't be named. We'll see if "HGW" catches on or joins "metaverse" in the buzzword graveyard.

🏍️ The 'Sons of Anarchy' cast is getting back together at FX, and it's very meta. The limited series 'Legends' has them playing themselves at a fan convention when a real-world threat shows up. Charlie Hunnam created it, Jonathan Groff's showrunning, and most of the original crew is back. Kurt Sutter gave his blessing.

🏛️ Warnamount could put about 4,500 L.A. production jobs at risk, per a new county report (technically "job-years," so the headcount's likely lower). Paramount's response was essentially "see, told you," arguing the industry's already shrinking. Either way, it's going in Bonta's binder for the March 2027 trial.

🤠 Meanwhile, David Ellison is house hunting in Austin. He's reportedly eyeing a 415,000-square-foot warehouse on the east side of town as a potential new Paramount HQ, his stated plan B if California doesn't settle by Oct. 1. Nothing says "we love L.A." like a Zillow tab open to Texas.

🤝 Netflix is co-producing shows now. The streamer struck a first-of-its-kind deal with AMC Studios to jointly develop originals, starting with Shane Black's spy drama 'Bannerman.' It airs on AMC first, then Netflix 90 days later. That's two Netflix deals in two weeks for AMC, following the $500M deal to keep 'The Walking Dead' on Netflix.

🎥 THEATRICAL

📺 STREAMING