🎬 Talking Settlement

👋 Morning. Today is the last day of summer, so get your sun in. Legally, you have until sundown. Yes, Labor Day claimed to end summer two weeks ago, but that was more of a soft launch. Tomorrow it's official. Cue the knitwear, the pumpkin spice, and pretending you like it dark at 6:45. If you need some easing in, we have a Letterboxd list of fall movies to get you back in the mood. If you think we missed one, reply and let us know. We take sweater-weather submissions seriously.

Welcome back from the weekend. We've tallied the box office, sorted the news from the noise, and packed it all into one email. Top off that coffee and we’ll catch you up. 👇

Indie corner milestone: 'Backrooms,' a $10M movie from a then-20-year-old YouTuber, crossed $400M worldwide this weekend and is now A24's biggest release ever. It also carried A24 to a $237M summer, fourth among all distributors and ahead of Paramount and Warner Bros. Indies don't usually beat majors in popcorn season.

Up next: Friday brings DreamWorks' animated 'Forgotten Island' and Brad Pitt's 'Heart of the Beast,' both tracking $20-30M, plus A24's 'Primetime.'

Paramount and California AG Rob Bonta are reportedly close to settling the antitrust suit that's been holding up the $111B Warner Bros. Discovery merger since twelve states and the WGA sued in July. It comes after weeks of Paramount threatening to leave the state if it couldn't get a deal. What's reportedly being floated, from both sides:

The big one, though, is a "hold separate." Basically, the merger closes now, but Warner Bros. keeps running on its own, walled off from Paramount, until the antitrust case is decided. If the states win at trial, the deal unwinds. If Paramount wins, the wall comes down. It works for both sides: Paramount owes Warner shareholders a $7M-a-day "ticking fee" starting October 1 for every day the deal isn't closed, and closing now makes that go away. Bonta gets to settle without dropping the case. The states also dodge a real risk: this Thursday's hearing on whether they have to post a $1.88B bond, basically a deposit to cover those ticking fees if Paramount eventually won. Settle now and that risk disappears.

Looking ahead… None of this is agreed to yet, but some insiders think a deal will be done by tomorrow. Worth remembering Bonta is one of twelve AGs, and New York's Letitia James and at least two others reportedly don't want to settle. The WGA is its own plaintiff and isn't even in the room, so it'd need its own deal.

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Private equity found a new catalog to buy: books. Two firms are leading the charge right now. International Literary Properties (ILP) has been quietly buying up estates since 2019 with hedge fund money. And Atticus Works launched in June with $100M+ from Primary Wave, the same people who bought the Bob Marley, Prince, and Whitney Houston catalogs.

And the banks are in. In January, ILP borrowed $100M from Fifth Third Bank to buy more estates. Banks only lend against things they're confident will hold their value, like a house or a car. Now a dead novelist's royalty checks qualify.

It's the same thing that happened to music catalogs. Investors bought up the rights to old hits, then found new ways to make money off them. In book terms: buy an author's whole catalog (dead or alive, doesn't matter), then wring more out of it via audiobooks, foreign editions, merch, stage revivals, and of course, Hollywood. Right now these catalogs go for 8 to 12x what they earn in a year. Music catalogs started there and peaked near 30x (hi, Springsteen). Investors are betting books do the same.

Bigger picture: Whoever's sitting across from Hollywood in these deals is a different kind of seller now. It used to be an author's family, who might take a small check because they liked the director. Now it's a fund with investors to pay back. Expect more old books and short stories getting pitched, but at higher prices and with tighter terms.

🇨🇦 That's a wrap on TIFF. The Toronto International Film Festival closed yesterday with its top prize, the People's Choice Award, going to Netflix's Spanish drama 'La Bola Negra,' from Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi. Unlike most festivals, TIFF's big award is voted on by the audience rather than a jury, and it's one of the most reliable Oscar bellwethers around (16 of the last 18 winners scored Best Picture nominations). The film, which also won Best Director at Cannes, hits theaters Oct. 16 with Netflix's longest theatrical window ever. 'I Play Rocky' and Siân Heder's 'Being Heumann' were the runners-up for the award. See the full winners list here. 👈👀

✍️ California post is finally getting its own incentive. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 2319 on Friday, and here's the gist: starting in 2027, productions can get 35% to 50% back on editing, sound, music, VFX, and finishing done in California, even if they never shot a frame there. That last part is the real shift. Runaway production has hit post workers hardest, since a shoot that leaves for Georgia or Vancouver usually takes its edit with it. It's been a long fight, and unfortunately the program launches with just $10M, a tenth of what the bill originally asked for. Bill author Nick Schultz says they're "just getting started," so expect a push for more money in next year's budget.

🏰 Disney has its first-ever CTO. Karandeep Anand, until now the CEO of chatbot startup Character.AI, will join as senior EVP and chief technology officer on Oct. 2, reporting directly to new CEO Josh D'Amaro. That's the same Character.AI that Disney sent a cease-and-desist to in 2025 for hosting unlicensed versions of its characters. If you can't beat them, make them your CTO, apparently. A Microsoft and Meta veteran, Anand will oversee infrastructure, data, AI platforms, product, and engineering across the entire company, with several Character.AI engineers following him. It's an early sign of where D'Amaro wants to take Disney, and technology is at the center of it.