🎬 Last Dance

👋 Good morning! The Sphere's 'Wizard of Oz' experience just crossed $260M in ticket sales. Apparently classic IP plus 18,600 seats of immersive LED wizardry is a winning formula. Cue the pitch meetings for 'Jurassic Park,' 'Avengers,' and 'Harry Potter' for the orb. The Sphere, sensing opportunity, is spawning: a 6,000-seat baby version is heading to Maryland's National Harbor. Perfect for anyone who found the Capitol Rotunda insufficiently immersive.

Welcome back to The Dailies. It's Wednesday, and we're halfway through another week of Hollywood doing Hollywood things. Let's get into it. 👇

The Sundance Film Festival opens tomorrow for its final Utah edition before relocating to Boulder, Colorado in 2027. This year's fest carries emotional weight—it's the first since founder Robert Redford's death in September, and staff will also honor longtime communications chief Tammie Rosen, who passed in December.

The numbers: 90 new features culled from 16,200+ submissions, with only about a dozen arriving with distribution already attached. Translation: open season for buyers. And there are plenty of new hunters in town:

Cautious optimism is the vibe. Last year looked quiet initially but ~65% of the program eventually landed homes. Post-Covid, deals just trickle in slower.

Buzzy titles to watch: ‘The Invite’ (Olivia Wilde directing herself, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, Edward Norton), ‘The Gallerist’ (Jenna Ortega, Natalie Portman), ‘Wicker’ (Olivia Colman), and horror entry ‘Buddy’ from the ‘Barbarian’ producers.

Looking ahead… The festival kicks off tomorrow and runs through February 1.

If you’re a decision maker at your company, you need to be on the bleeding edge of, well, everything. But before you go signing up for seminars, conferences, lunch ‘n learns, and all that jazz, just know there’s a far better (and simpler) way: Subscribing to The Deep View.

This daily newsletter condenses everything you need to know about the latest and greatest AI developments into a 5-minute read. Squeeze it into your morning coffee break and before you know it, you’ll be an expert too.

Subscribe right here. It’s totally free, wildly informative, and trusted by 600,000+ readers at Google, Meta, Microsoft, and beyond.

📺 YouTube's biggest Shorts creator is heading to Hollywood. Alan Chikin Chow, whose channel has 99M+ subscribers and averages over 1B views per month, is teaming up with Netflix and Hybe America (the company behind BTS) on a scripted K-pop series. Chow built his empire with 'Alan's Universe,' a high-school drama that dominates with kids ages 7-14. He now joins a growing list of creators making the jump to the streamer, including Ms. Rachel, Mark Rober, and The Sidemen. Netflix has been treating YouTube as its main competitor lately, poaching creators and licensing video podcasts to win the battle for eyeballs. Ted Sarandos called YouTube a "farm league" last year, and apparently he's recruiting.

📉 Hollywood's real estate bubble is bursting: Goldman Sachs is taking over Radford Studio Center, a historic Los Angeles lot where 'Seinfeld' and 'Gilligan's Island' were filmed, after owner Hackman Capital defaulted on a $1.1B mortgage. Investors poured billions into sound stages betting the streaming boom would last forever. Reader, it did not. Production has shifted overseas, studios have tightened budgets, and Radford's revenue covered just 21% of its debt costs as of last June. The lot was appraised at $1.8B in 2021. Now it's headed back to the banks. With more empty stages coming online and no clear tenants in sight, LA's production real estate market could be in for a rough ride.

🐻 The Berlin Film Festival just dropped its 2026 Competition lineup. The 22-film slate leans into European arthouse and international auteurs, featuring Amy Adams, Sandra Hüller, and a starry ensemble in Karim Aïnouz's 'Rosebush Pruning.' Conspicuously absent: any studio titles, a big shift from last year when Bong Joon Ho's 'Mickey 17' and Richard Linklater's 'Blue Moon' premiered at the fest. Festival director Tricia Tuttle blames the 'Joker: Folie à Deux' debacle as a turning point, noting that studios now have "nervousness about reviews coming out long before release." With the majors pulling back, Hollywood's loss is indie cinema's gain, apparently. The fest kicks off Feb. 12.

Netflix dropped Q4 earnings yesterday amid an escalating Warner Bros. bidding war.

The TL;DR: Netflix is bigger than ever. 325M subscribers, nearly a billion eyeballs when you count whole households. Revenue's up 17.6%, profits jumped 30%, and they're projecting ad revenue to double in 2026. Despite the beat, NFLX stock dipped after hours. $NFLX ( ▼ 2.18% )

Meanwhile, on the WBD front: Paramount's been criticizing Netflix's original bid for including stock and overvaluing the Discovery spinoff. Netflix's response: fine, all cash. They bumped to $27.75/share in pure cash. Netflix still only wants the studios and streaming, while Paramount is offering $30/share for the whole company.

Ted Sarandos spent the earnings call arguing Netflix faces more competition than ever, a message clearly aimed at regulators. His soundbite: "TV is now just about everything." YouTube has the NFL and Oscars, Amazon owns MGM, Apple's winning Emmys, and "Instagram is coming" with its new TV app. Translation: Please don't block our merger.

The theatrical question: Theater owners have worried Netflix would kill theatrical releases if it owned a studio. Sarandos has been working to change that perception, noting Netflix had actually debated building its own theatrical arm over the years but it never made the priority cut. He says they'll maintain WB's $4B+ theatrical operation and keep a 45-day window.

Looking ahead… WBD shareholders will vote on whether to approve the Netflix deal at a special meeting in April, and Paramount is threatening a proxy fight to convince them to reject it.

_*sponsored