🎬 No IMAX For You

👋 Good morning! On our end, the big weekend accomplishment was spending the extra daylight saving hour as nature intended: asleep. Jimmy Chin, meanwhile, was rappelling down the side of a 12-story building in WeHo. The 'Free Solo' director and ski mountaineer Jim Morrison went down their own billboard, specifically, to plug 'Everest: The Other Side,' their new Nat Geo doc. The film follows Morrison skiing Everest's north face, which five people had climbed and exactly nobody had skied. Somewhere, Tom Cruise saw the footage and sat up a little straighter.

Welcome back to The Dailies. Hope your Halloween was more ‘Hocus Pocus’ than ‘Hereditary.’ Anyway, here's what else happened while you were resetting your microwave clock. 👇

The bigger picture: Halloween landed on a Saturday for the first time since the pandemic, and the major studios did the thing where you turn off the porch light and pretend nobody’s home. No need to panic: October still finished at $590M, up 37% over last year, and 2026 is running about 20% ahead of 2025 at ~$8.3B domestic, on pace for the best post-Covid year and a projected $10.5B finish. Deadline has worldwide heading toward $36B, the best since 2019.

Next weekend: at least five wide releases, led by 'The Cat in the Hat,' 'Godzilla Minus Zero,' and Martin McDonagh's 'Wild Horse Nine.' On the limited side, the Stallone biopic 'I Play Rocky' (wide on Nov. 20) and A24's 'Club Kid,' Jordan Firstman's Cannes breakout that's sitting at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Netflix's theatrical era hit its first speed bump. 'The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth' (David Fincher directing, Quentin Tarantino writing) was set for a two-week IMAX-exclusive run from Nov. 25, before hitting Netflix Dec. 23. Now Regal and Cinemark have declined to play it on their IMAX screens, leaving AMC and a few smaller circuits to carry it on roughly 200 domestic screens. (IMAX usually decides what plays on its screens, but it came to this one late and left the call to the chains.)

Regal's SVP of US Content basically said "No IMAX for you," Soup Nazi style, in a press statement:

Translation: premium screens are Regal's best real estate, and a 28-day window won't cut it. Regal would rather hand those screens to 'The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping' over Thanksgiving, one of the biggest moviegoing weekends of the year.

The subtext: Netflix has been increasingly testing the theatrical waters, mostly with AMC. Sarandos says the strategy has "evolved," but Netflix is still streaming-first. For the chains, it's less about this movie and more about the next ten. Netflix is already giving 'Narnia' and 'Charlie vs the Chocolate Factory' nearly 50 days next year, so the chains know longer windows are possible. Turning down a 28-day run is their way of making sure the short ones don't become the norm.

Looking ahead… Netflix could still widen 'Cliff Booth' beyond IMAX to regular screens, the way it did with 'Glass Onion' in 2022. Or it takes the L, keeps the IMAX branding, and quietly moves on to 'Narnia.'

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Reese Witherspoon's production company Hello Sunshine (the one behind 'Big Little Lies' and 'The Morning Show') laid off about half its staff on Friday, roughly 30 people, reportedly including its entire direct-to-consumer team. That's three weeks after Reese bought the company back, with French studio Mediawan, from Candle Media, the private equity-backed startup that took a majority stake in 2021 at a $900M valuation. A number that has since aged like a 2021 NFT.

The D2C part is the tell. Candle paid up because it thought it was buying the next Oprah: Reese's fans as customers, with the merch, events and podcasts to match. That’s what the $900M was for. What Reese bought back last month, for roughly $50M at best, is the production company and a very good book club. The missing $850M is the consumer business that never happened. One Candle insider’s summary: “We were just wrong.”

Zoom out: Hello Sunshine was one of a handful of star-fronted production companies private equity poured money into during the early-2020s streaming boom, a period in which a lot of checks were written and very few calculators were consulted. Let's check in:

The bigger picture: private equity spent the early 2020s paying celebrity prices for companies that don't own the shows they make (Apple owns 'The Morning Show'), betting that a famous name plus a fan base equals a business. It doesn't, at least not at those prices. Now the stars are buying back what they sold, at a steep discount. The investors have moved on to podcasters and YouTubers, who already own their audience. And the private equity still in town is buying cheap: KKR-backed Mediawan owns Brad Pitt's Plan B and now Hello Sunshine.

Cate Blanchett's nonprofit, the Human Consent Foundation, filed a brief Friday backing the New York Times in its suit against OpenAI and Microsoft. That's the case where the Times says OpenAI scraped millions of its articles to train ChatGPT without asking or paying, and OpenAI says that's fair use (the legal exception for quoting, reviewing, and parodying copyrighted work without permission, which it argues should cover training too). CAA co-signed the brief, and the appendix includes Anne Hathaway, Emma Thompson, Helen Mirren, Ron Howard, Madonna, and Olivia Wilde.

OpenAI's position is that licensing all this stuff for training just can't be done. Too many owners, too much money, nobody even knows what it's worth. The brief's response is basically, "have you met this industry?"

Why it matters: the biggest question in the case is whether training on copyrighted work counts as fair use, and both sides have asked the judge to settle it without a trial. If he says yes, every AI company will wave the ruling around the next time it scrapes a library. If he says no, paying for training data stops being optional, and CAA signing on suggests the agencies would like to broker those deals.

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