🎬 Theatrical's off the Table

👋 Good morning! AMC added 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. opening-weekend showings of 'The Odyssey' at CityWalk, the kind of times usually reserved for airport departures and bad decisions, and they're nearly sold out. The 2h52m runtime means the 3 a.m. faithful greet actual sunrise on the way out, where the real odyssey begins: waiting for the Cinnabon to open.

Monday again. Hope the weekend treated you well. We've got the weekend box office numbers and the latest from around the industry. Top off that coffee and let’s get into it.

The bigger picture: For once, the weekend didn’t ride on one giant hit. The top two movies made up just 45% of domestic grosses, compared to 70% in 2004 and over 90% in 2022, when one or two tentpoles did almost all the work. This time six movies cleared $10M, led by a horror trifecta of 'Scary Movie,' 'Backrooms,' and 'Obsession.' It's a healthier kind of box office, where people spread out across a lot of different movies.

It's been a strong stretch, too. May crossed $1B domestically with high attendance, and a lot of that probably comes down to volume. Studios put out a steady stream of wide releases last month, a pace we haven't seen in recent years. More movies, more variety, more reasons to show up. Spielberg's 'Disclosure Day' is up next.

'Obsession,' the Focus Features horror breakout made for $750K, passed $220M worldwide this past weekend. Last week its art director, Sally Choi, went public on Instagram with what she was paid: $300 a day, or $6,741.36 after taxes. She says she knew the indie rate going in and signed on anyway, reportedly with only one prior credit, a short film. She adds that some of the crew were essentially paid in gas money.

She also says she regrets not "flipping" the production, indie shorthand for converting a non-union shoot to a union one, which would have meant scale wages and benefits for the crew. She said she was encouraged not to, and listened.

Some were sympathetic, saying it's absurd that crew never see a dime of the upside when a micro-budget film hits the jackpot. They point to people trying to change that, like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon's Artists Equity. The company negotiated a deal with Netflix to bonus everyone on their streaming release 'The Rip' if it performed well enough, and when it did, the checks went out.

Others pushed back, saying that as one of her first credits, a film this big is a major résumé boost she can leverage into more work, and that publicly wishing she'd flipped a production over a rate she agreed to risks burning bridges she'd be better off keeping.

And some point out the filmmakers front the risk and so earn the reward, since for every 'Obsession' there's a graveyard of micro-budget indies nobody ever heard of, ones the crew still got paid on without sharing in the losses.

In the aftermath of mistaken news reports that Deborah passed away, she and Ava return to Las Vegas, determined to secure Deborah’s legacy as a comedian. Don't miss the series Variety is calling “ONE OF TV’S BEST COMEDIES EVER.”  HACKS is now streaming on HBO MAX.

🚪 Netflix's film chief says theatrical is off the table. Just as Hollywood was warming to a more theater-friendly Netflix, Dan Lin told the NYT: "There is a group of filmmakers who still want theatrical. Those are filmmakers that we've accepted we just won't work with." That’s a splash of cold water on some recent optimism. Netflix had pledged "industry-standard windows" while bidding for Warner Bros. Discovery (a promise that faded once it lost to Paramount), and a couple of recent moves looked like a pattern: 'Cliff Booth' gets an exclusive IMAX run this November, with AMC (once Netflix's sworn enemy) facilitating, and Greta Gerwig's 'Narnia' was bumped to a wide release with a proper 49-day window in February. Lin says those are just exceptions for the marquee names (Fincher, Tarantino, Gerwig). Netflix declined to clarify, so we'll see.

⚖️ State AGs are gearing up to block the Paramount-WB deal. A California-led coalition of up to 10 state attorneys general is reportedly drafting a lawsuit to stop the $110B merger, with a filing possible before the end of June. So even if federal regulators wave the deal through, the states could still throw a wrench in it. Ironically, Paramount's lead lawyer is antitrust heavyweight Jeffrey Kessler, who normally spends his days fighting mergers like this. He just won a case against Live Nation/Ticketmaster on behalf of 36 state AGs. Now he's switched jerseys to argue the merger is actually pro-competitive: Paramount and WBD aren't dominant players, they're far behind Netflix, Amazon, and Disney in streaming. If the AGs do sue, Kessler will be in court facing down some of the same people he just went to bat for.

🎮 Paramount is getting serious about games. Paramount Skydance launched Paramount Games Studio, rolling its two existing game shops into one in-house operation pointed at the company's IP vault (Star Trek, Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and friends). For years Paramount mostly licensed those franchises out to other developers. Now it's building the games itself, and calling gaming a core pillar of its content strategy, right alongside film, TV, and streaming. Former Epic Games exec Tony Driscoll runs the new studio, and with the Warner Bros. Discovery merger closing soon, Paramount is set to inherit a deep vault of legendary IP (Harry Potter, DC, Game of Thrones, and more) that will almost certainly get fed into the games.