🎬 The Last Guild

👋 Happy Wednesday. Behold the Trojan Horse popcorn tub, the latest entry in the popcorn bucket arms race. AMC, Cinemark, and Regal are selling 'The Odyssey' popcorn out of a sculpted, rearing wooden horse, which feels like a strange pick for the one object in history famous for not holding what it claims to. So we have to wonder what's really in there. Trail mix with the M&Ms already picked out? A crudité platter? A dozen armed Greeks? A smaller horse? We’ll see.

Welcome back for your midweek edition of The Dailies. Rest assured, this email delivers exactly what's on the label. Pour the coffee and let's get into it. 👇

The three biggest names in AI are all going public at the same time, and the filings make one thing clear: they are setting money on fire to get there. Here’s the lineup:

Why they suddenly need your money: These tools don't run on magic, they run on enormous data centers full of chips, and the electricity bills are gigantic. Anthropic alone has committed over $100B to cloud computing and locked in power equal to about five nuclear reactors, all so it can render a hand with the correct number of fingers, give or take. SpaceX is renting AI computing to Anthropic for more than $1B a month. Going public is how they cover the tab and convince investors there's a payday at the end of all this.

Need a sense of how brutal the compute bills get? At Cannes, the AI-generated film 'Hell Grind' cost $500K to make and $400K of that went straight to compute. Now picture that bill, but for a company serving millions of people at once.

To be clear, these firms aren't gunning for Hollywood specifically. They're building general-purpose AI, and entertainment is just one corner of it. The one direct swing was OpenAI's video app Sora, which folded in April after users wandered off and the costs got ugly, dragging a planned $1B Disney character-licensing deal down with it. Mickey dodged that one.

The takeaway: Hollywood spent years bracing for these firms to make content infinitely cheap. The filings suggest the opposite. The real cost is tens of billions in servers and power. The vendors pitching studios on cheaper production are themselves bleeding cash at a staggering clip, which means their prices, terms, and priorities can turn on a dime the second Wall Street's patience runs dry.

In this darkly comedic series, a love triangle between three adults experiencing middle-age malaise leads to one of them ending up dead.  Don't miss the series TV GUIDE is calling “TRANSCENDENT & AUDACIOUS”. DTF St. Louis is now streaming on HBO MAX. 

🤝 The DGA reached a deal. The Directors Guild of America has signed onto a tentative four-year contract with the studios and streamers, closing out a 2026 bargaining cycle that, against all odds, wrapped with zero drama. DGA boss Christopher Nolan wasn't interested in a five-year term when the idea got floated earlier this year (kind of funny for a director who never met a long runtime he didn't like). But once the WGA and SAG-AFTRA both settled at four, the directors fell in line. As with the other two, the fine print stays sealed until the guild's national board signs off. The current contract runs through June 30. With the writers, actors, and directors all signed, Hollywood gets a clean run of labor peace through 2030.

🗳️ California's runoff lineup is locked. The Associated Press has called it: Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton, the British former Fox News commentator, will square off for governor in November. IATSE-backed Tom Steyer couldn't crack the top two. The count technically isn't done (California takes its time, and certification isn't due until July 10), but the race-callers have seen enough. Over in the LA mayor's race, incumbent Karen Bass and councilmember Nithya Raman advanced to their own November runoff, with reality star Spencer Pratt narrowly missing second. Each has a different fix in mind for runaway production, so we'll cover where they stand ahead of the November 3 runoff.

⚖️ Paramount is suddenly in a deal-making mood. After months of waving off the lawsuits against its $110B Warner Bros. deal as "misguided" and "clumsy," Paramount has quietly slipped California AG Rob Bonta a list of concessions to settle his antitrust probe. (It's reportedly ready to give up some of its kids' TV networks in Europe to keep regulators there happy, too.) It won't say what's on the list, but going from swatting away challenges to cutting deals is quite the pivot, especially with a state-led lawsuit expected within a month. California's also reportedly lining up Robert Van Nest, a heavyweight tech lawyer who usually reps the likes of Google and Netflix. Paramount has every reason to keep things moving smoothly, since a "ticking fee" to WBD shareholders kicks in if the deal doesn't close by Q3.

Add daily watch time to the pile. New numbers from measurement firm Digital i clock the average YouTube account at 99.1 minutes a day, pulling ahead of Netflix's 93.4. A year ago Netflix led at 100.5, so it’s more of a lead change than a runaway. (And no, this isn't the Nielsen Gauge number you've seen. That's share of time on the TV set. This is minutes per person, every device.) Some numbers: