🎬 RIP Franchise Era?

👋 Good morning! If your kitchen remodel has dragged on a little, take heart: George Lucas just spent eight years and a billion dollars on his passion project, and it's only now wrapping up. Stunning new images of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art are making the rounds this week (courtesy of a Vogue profile shot by Annie Leibovitz), and the verdict is in: the thing looks like a spaceship parked in Exposition Park. It opens Sept. 22.

Welcome to The Dailies, your three-mornings-a-week briefing on an industry that can't decide if it's dying or having a renaissance. (This week: renaissance.) Now, let’s get into those box office numbers. 👇

There's a feeling in town this week that the ground just moved. Two horror movies made by YouTube directors for almost no money took the top two spots and shoved a $165M 'Star Wars' tentpole into third. The takeaways, for a lot of folks: original ideas beat legacy IP, directors are the new movie stars, and the franchise era is finally ending.

The analogy making the rounds is the 1970s, when young film-school directors upended the old studio system with personal, original films. Jason Blum went there himself, pegging Parsons and Barker as the new version of those upstarts, schooled on YouTube instead of in a film program. It's not a hard case to make:

Looking ahead… There are no more major YouTuber titles on the 2026 docket, so the trend pauses here for now, and the summer slate goes back to bristling with tentpoles. 'Toy Story 5,' 'Supergirl,' Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey,' and 'Spider-Man: Brand New Day' are all loaded in the chamber.

Michelle Khare’s Challenge Accepted and Cleo Abram’s HUGE* If True are redefining nonfiction storytelling for a new generation of audiences.

For Your Emmy^® Consideration, Challenge Accepted transforms immersive, high-stakes challenges into cinematic stories of resilience, vulnerability, and personal transformation through Michelle Khare’s fearless authorship and emotional honesty. Meanwhile, HUGE* If True combines rigorous reporting, premium production, and unprecedented access to explore the technologies shaping our future, from AI and robotics to aerospace and clean energy, through Cleo Abram’s distinctly optimistic journalistic lens.

Bold, ambitious, and future-facing, both series are now streaming exclusively on YouTube. Television has a new home.

The dust is settling on CBS News naming Nick Bilton the new executive producer of ‘60 Minutes,’ the most-watched news show in America with north of 6M viewers a week. He’s only the fifth person to hold the job in the show’s 58-year history.

Who is he? A former New York Times tech columnist and Vanity Fair correspondent, Bilton has spent recent years in L.A. as a screenwriter and producer (including a stint on The Weeknd’s HBO flop ‘The Idol’) and made documentaries on the Ashley Madison and Theranos scandals. Critics are quick to note he’s never worked in TV news, making him the first ‘60 Minutes’ EP without linear broadcast experience. He’s also still mid-Hollywood, writing a Scorsese-directed mob film for Disney’s 20th Century that his CBS deal reportedly leaves room for.

Bilton's arrival is one piece of a larger shakeup: Editor-in-chief Bari Weiss installed Bilton as part of a post-Memorial Day overhaul under Paramount’s David Ellison-led ownership. The move replaced 25-year CBS veteran Tanya Simon and exited correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi, plus several senior producers. People are reading it two ways:

What he’s envisioning: Bilton calls the franchise “largely underutilized” and wants it to live beyond its Sunday hour, going to find audiences “in a multitude of different mediums” rather than waiting for the under-50s who don’t tune in to broadcast. He also wants to fold in “gonzo journalism,” the participatory, stunt-driven style of his documentary work. He’s been coy on specifics, planning to meet with staff and reconvene this summer to lay out the full vision.

Looking ahead… Many are asking: why mess with a hit? The show grew 9% last season, is still #1, and has survived cable, the internet, and streaming intact. The brass’s view is that it’s better to move before the decline than after. S59 returns this fall.

🔪 'Terrifier' director Damien Leone is going studio, signing with Lionsgate for an original horror movie called 'Tortures of the Damned,' with Sam Raimi producing. He'll write and direct after wrapping 'Terrifier 4.' His 'Terrifier' franchise has quietly become an indie powerhouse (the third film grossed $90M worldwide on a $2M budget).

😬 Amazon MGM's AI-generated series orders drew so much backlash that one director just bailed. Jorge R. Gutierrez ('The Book of Life') pulled out of 'Punky Duck' last week, having joined Amazon's AI pilot program despite previously opposing AI. "Actions speak louder than words," he wrote on X while apologizing.

💰 Hollywood's top 18 execs got a 51% pay bump from 2024 to 2025, per TheWrap's analysis, pulling in $746M combined. Almost a fifth of that ($165M) went to WBD's David Zaslav, who also posted the widest CEO-to-worker gap at 1,378 to 1. Not a great look, critics say, in a year the industry shed 17,000 jobs.

🛡️ A community-minded startup is trying to save Letterboxd from private equity. The owner of the beloved indie platform is shopping it around, so social entrepreneur Elizabeth Joyce launched a crowdfunding campaign to fund a bid and keep its 30M-user community out of corporate hands.