🎬 Prepping to Leave

👋 Good morning. If you're sick of the cold plunge, we have good news: a study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health tracked nearly 1,900 adults over 50 and found that regular moviegoers, theater patrons, and museum visitors were biologically about three years younger than those who rarely went out. Researchers credit the social connection, the mood boost, and the simple act of leaving the house, and say the effect may rival regular exercise. If we're slow to reply this afternoon, it's because the whole office is at the AMC Burbank 16 for the 2:30. For our health.

Welcome back to The Dailies, and congrats on making it to Friday. Gold star for you. Now grab your coffee and sit down, we've got industry news to catch you up on. 👇

Top-streamed chart (U.S.) Sep. 10 to Sep. 16. Data provided by Luminate.

For a while there, verticals were one of the few bright spots for L.A.'s working class. When the 2023 strikes ended and work was slow to come back, those phone-first, cliffhanger-every-90-seconds soaps kept a lot of actors, crew, and producers busy. Now AI's making that a lot harder to count on.

What's happening: In February, ByteDance released Seedance 2.0, an AI video generator that shocked everyone with how realistic it looked (it's the tool behind that viral Brad Pitt vs. Tom Cruise fight clip). Since then, microdrama apps have seriously ramped up their use of synthetic actors and sets.

Some, like My Muse, are fully AI. Bigger players like DramaBox and DramaWave are mixing it in more and more. And over in China, where the format was born, more than 95% of microdramas in Q1 were made with AI. The numbers explain it:

The fallout: One manager says casting breakdowns dropped from 15 to 20 shows a day to about four since June. Actors who were getting 15 auditions a week now get two. One production company lost its DramaShorts deal in July when the platform went "fully AI." Actors also say their performances are being reused in AI projects without consent, and it reaches all the way to A-listers: Reddit users have a running game spotting AI leads who look (and sound) like Henry Cavill in 'The Witcher.'

The bigger picture: This is one of the clearest cases yet of AI displacement in Hollywood with real names and numbers attached. Not everyone's sold on the doom, though. Shortical says AI just means more shows, and that it's actually hiring. Whether the US goes the way of China comes down to one question nobody can answer yet: will audiences actually watch?

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🚚  Paramount says it's preparing to leave California. Officially officially. The studio reportedly told L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and AG Rob Bonta it's "deadly serious" about exiting the state over the antitrust suit blocking its Warner Bros. Discovery merger, with Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas on the shortlist. Plenty of industry vets read it as a coat-on-standing-in-the-doorway negotiating tactic, since court-ordered settlement talks start Oct. 14. Bonta's office responded with the legal equivalent of "k," saying it "will continue to apply the law without fear or favor." Either way, Paramount's ~$7.2M-a-day "ticking fee" kicks in Oct. 1.

🎪 VidCon is leaving Anaheim and merging with Cannes Lions. After 15 years in Orange County, the creator convention is being combined with Lions, the company behind the Cannes Lions marketing festival, and rebranded as VidCon x Lions Creators. Over the past few years, Cannes Lions has catered more to creators, and more of them have been choosing Cannes over VidCon. It will fold into Lions' new Insight to Impact Festival, an annual marketing conference. The first edition is in Denver next month, and VidCon comes aboard with the second in Nashville next fall. A pretty clear signal that the creator economy's center of gravity has settled in the ad world, not Hollywood.

🤝 Three more studios signed on to save the career producer. Lionsgate, Neon, and FilmNation have agreed to Producers United's asks: healthcare during production and upfront development fees well above the standard $25,000 (a number set in 1971 that hasn't budged since). Producers don't have a union, so the 300-member group formed in 2023 to fight for the basics, arguing the job has been slowly hollowed out: years of unpaid development, no back-end since streaming, and stars taking producer credits without doing the work. Disney, WBD, Paramount, Universal, and Netflix are already on board. Still holding out: Amazon MGM, Apple, Sony, and A24.

🤝 Noah Baumbach is leaving Netflix for Warner Bros. and its new indie label Clockwork after five years and four streaming-only movies. The three-year first-look deal starts in 2027, and his first project is a wide theatrical release about two NYC college students.

🍥 Anime is growing on Netflix at nearly 10 times the rate of everything else, per a Media Partners Asia report. Anime hours climbed 39% since 2023 versus 4.5% for the platform as a whole, and MPA expects global anime spend to grow 10% a year through 2030. Big in Japan, and now everywhere else.

🕷️ 'Spider-Man: Brand New Day' is officially the biggest movie ever at the domestic box office, passing 'The Force Awakens' with $936.8M after 47 days. It's also No. 3 worldwide behind 'Avatar' and 'Endgame,' and still hasn't left theaters. Somewhere on the Sony lot, Tom Rothman is doing a victory dance.

🏛️ Hollywood now has a caucus in Congress, a bipartisan bloc pledging to champion its issues. Three House members launched MoMEntS, focused on creative rights, competition, and jobs. Momentum around Hollywood is picking up quite a bit in D.C. lately… did Congress just finish bingeing 'The Studio' or something?

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🎥 THEATRICAL

📺 STREAMING

🔮 BOX OFFICE PREVIEW: Zach Cregger's 'Resident Evil' is tracking for a $40-50M debut, which would blow past the franchise's previous best ($26.7M for 2010's 'Afterlife') and give a sleepy September a much-needed jolt.