🎬 One Man Mission

👋 Good morning! As 'Project Hail Mary' continues its box office tear, the film's unlikely breakout star is a sweater. Ryan Gosling wears a chunky zip-up fox cardigan in the movie, designed to make his reluctant astronaut look warm and deeply uncool. Costume designer Glyn Dillon found the original at a London vintage fair, and the internet has since traced it to Mary Maxim, a small Michigan yarn company whose $90 knitting kit sold out overnight. You do have to knit it yourself. Knockoffs are already flooding the internet for people with less patience.

Hope you had a good weekend. Grab your coffee, we've got the latest stories and box office numbers to get you caught up. Someone forward this to you? Sign up here.

The bigger picture: It's a one-film show right now, with 'Project Hail Mary' accounting for more than half the entire weekend gross. It's now Amazon MGM's highest-grossing film ever and the top-grossing US film of 2026. The good news: non-franchise original IP is carrying the box office. The bad news: everything below it is scraping by. On the year, 2026 domestic grosses are up 23% over last year ($1.75B vs. $1.42B through March 29, per Comscore). Looking ahead, 'The Super Mario Galaxy Movie' opens Wednesday and is tracking for a potential $150-200M+ five-day debut.

"Clipping," or paying freelance editors to cut short clips from longer content and post them across TikTok, Reels, and Shorts, has quietly scaled into a full-blown industry. You've probably seen the format: intricate edits that splice together scenes around specific characters or moments, set to trending music with filters and flashy transitions. Some recent examples of studios leaning in:

It makes sense why: an Ogilvy survey found that 86% of Gen Z identify as belonging to a fandom, and half say fandoms help them make sense of the world. Studios are just meeting them where they already are.

There's real infrastructure behind all of this now. A startup literally called Clipping generated ~$7.7M in sales in 2025 with 23,000+ editors on its roster. MrBeast launched his own clipping company, Vyro, last October. Airrack's ClipFarm lists HBO Max as a client for 'Paul American,' and Whop (a creator-focused business platform) ran a campaign seeding clips of Luc Besson's 'Dracula' on TikTok. Nearly all major music studios now use clipping services, and movie campaigns are increasingly following suit.

The appeal is obvious: it's cheap, it scales fast, and it looks organic. The catch is that studios are trading control for reach, handing their IP to freelance editors whose entire incentive is engagement. And the whole point is that the clips don't look studio-made.

Remember when the news was about what happened, not how to feel about it? 1440's Daily Digest is bringing that back. Every morning, they sift through 100+ sources to deliver a concise, unbiased briefing — no pundits, no paywalls, no politics. Just the facts, all in five minutes. For free.

Read the newsletter trusted by 4.5 million fact-seekers.

✈️ The streaming wars are heading to 35,000 feet. United Airlines is rolling out free Starlink internet across its fleet, letting passengers stream Netflix, YouTube, and TikTok at broadband speed mid-flight. That's not great news for Hollywood: In-flight entertainment is a ~$300M/year licensing business, and studios have counted on seatback screens as both a revenue source and marketing funnel. United is leaning into it, upgrading to 4K seatbacks and rolling out streaming integrations (Spotify is already live). But with Alaska and WestJet also adopting Starlink, the captive audience that made in-flight licensing valuable is about to have options.

⚖️ A judge just threw a wrench into the Nexstar-Tegna deal. A federal judge slapped a temporary restraining order on Nexstar's $6.2B acquisition of Tegna on Friday, pausing what would create a nearly 260-station broadcast behemoth. DirecTV filed the lawsuit, arguing the combined company would have the leverage to hike retransmission fees (what distributors pay to carry local stations), costs that inevitably roll downhill to consumers. The messy part: the FCC and DOJ had already approved the merger, and Nexstar announced it closed the deal before DirecTV's lawsuit was even a day old. The two sides are back in court April 7.

📱 TikTok wants to make its own micro-dramas now. The platform's been testing a dedicated micro-drama feed in the US, and now it's reportedly casting actors for an in-house soap opera-style production. It also quietly filed a US trademark for "TikTok Drama" back in November, covering short drama series and webisodes. There are already ~20 micro-drama companies distributing through TikTok's minis feature, so you can imagine how thrilled they are to hear their distribution partner is becoming their competition. That said, TikTok has a habit of flirting with media ventures (book publishing, music label services) without making a lasting dent, so we’ll see.

Netflix hiked prices across all tiers last week, and the timing raised some eyebrows. The company just pocketed over $2.8B in breakup fees after losing the Warner Bros. bid to Paramount Skydance, then turned around and asked 86M U.S. subscribers to pay more. But the play here isn't about padding the subscription line. It's about funneling people toward ads. The ad-free standard plan jumped to $19.99/mo (+$2), premium to $26.99/mo (+$2), and ad-supported to $8.99/mo (+$1). The cheap seat barely moved.

Streamers have spent the last few years building out their ad infrastructure, and the targeting has gotten good enough that ad-supported subscribers are approaching (and in some cases surpassing) the value of ad-free ones. Streaming ad rates are already more than double those of cable and broadcast.

The nudge is landing: 45% of Netflix's viewing time now comes through its ad tier, up from 34% last year. Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, and Paramount+ have all been widening the gap between their ad-free and ad-supported pricing, and Amazon went even further in 2024, turning ads on for everyone by default. The only major holdout is Apple, which says there's no plan to add ads in the short term, but also offered a very reassuring "never say never."

Looking ahead… Streaming has entered its profitability era, and expect the nudge toward ads to only get more aggressive from here.

Your digital footprint begins long before you understand what it means. “Free” Big Tech inboxes like Gmail scan your emails to fuel advertising, personalize content, and build data profiles. Proton Mail offers truly “free” email. Free from data profiling. Free from tracking. Free from ads. And free to use.

Get free private email