🎬 The Next 'Spotlight'

👋 Good morning! Nathan Fielder's LinkedIn just got its strangest update yet: federal legislation. On HBO's 'The Rehearsal,' the comedian builds life-size replicas of real places so people can practice having hard conversations. S2 took on pilot mental health, arguing pilots hide their struggles for fear of losing their license, and Fielder committed so hard he flew a 737 full of passengers himself (yes, really). Well, now the Senate has passed two long-stalled bipartisan bills tackling exactly that, and Senate staffers said the show "pushed them" to get it done. We couldn't reach Fielder for comment, presumably because he's building a full-scale replica of the Senate to rehearse his reaction.

Welcome back to The Dailies. Hope the Sunday scaries held off until dinner. Box office numbers below, plus the rest of what the industry got up to over the weekend. Let’s get into it. 👇

Specialty corner: Amazon MGM's 'Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother' had the best per-screen average of the weekend by a mile, pulling $199K from just six theaters in New York and LA (about $33K a screen). The Mahershala Ali action thriller is sitting at 97% with critics and 80% of exit-polled moviegoers said they'd recommend it, so expect Amazon to widen it out over the next few weeks.

The big picture: Nobody expected a stacked weekend at the end of September, but here we are. Everything found an audience, the overall number nearly doubled this frame last year, and it did it while heavy storms were keeping people home up and down the East Coast. Not bad for a month that's normally a dead zone.

A milestone: Universal is the first studio to cross $5B worldwide this year, on the back of three $1B movies ('The Odyssey,' 'Michael,' 'Super Mario Galaxy') and the sleeper hit 'Obsession.' Only the third time they've ever done it.

Up next: Tom Cruise goes against type in Iñárritu's political satire 'Digger' (tracking under $20M after mixed early reactions), and Colleen Hoover adaptation 'Verity' with Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson tries to break the $48M ceiling the last two Hoover movies hit.

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A Boston Globe write-up went very, very viral last week. The last time that happened to the paper, it was the Catholic Church investigation that became 'Spotlight' and won Best Picture. Does the Globe have another one on its hands? Let's just say this one's less "systemic institutional cover-up" and more "bar owners vs. their own regulars, over masks."

The bar at the center of this one is Last Ditch, a lesbian bar and arts venue in Greenfield, Mass., which had required KN-95 masks since the day it opened. Then, this August, things unraveled fast:

Bad week for the bar, great week for the Globe: the story pulled in several thousand new subscribers in about 72 hours and became one of the most-read pieces in the paper's history. It also got Hollywood's attention. UTA, which reps the Globe, is reportedly fielding calls from producers about adapting it, scripted and doc.

The bigger picture: the Globe wouldn't be the first newsroom to double as a development slate. This weekend's 'Primetime' started as a 2007 Esquire article, and The Washington Post, the New York Times, the New York Post, and the Daily Mail all have deals in place to turn their journalism into film and TV. Every story in the archive is a potential pitch, and a story like this one, already gone viral, feels like tested IP.

🗽 The New York Film Festival opened Friday. James Gray's 'Paper Tiger' skipped Telluride and TIFF to open here, and it mostly won over the crowd, with Adam Driver, Miles Teller, and Scarlett Johansson on hand for the premiere. On Saturday, 'Godzilla Minus Zero' drew raves and mid-screening applause at its world premiere, and the Venice-winning documentary 'NAZA' played to a sold-out house. As the last stop on the fall festival circuit, NYFF is where late-breaking awards contenders make their debut ('Marty Supreme' premiered here last year), and Neon has a big presence this year: it has 'Paper Tiger,' 'Fjord,' and Luca Guadagnino's 'Artificial,' which premieres this week alongside Tony Gilroy's 'Behemoth!'. The fest runs through Oct. 12.

🎨 Jeffrey Katzenberg is launching an AI animation studio. Just days after he posted a roughly 2,400-word essay on X urging Hollywood to stop fighting AI ("to resist technology is to risk irrelevance"), the former Disney animation chief and DreamWorks co-founder revealed he's starting a new studio built around the tech. There's not much to go on yet: no name, no funding, no timeline, just a plan to team up top filmmakers with AI tools he admits were "slop" until a couple of months ago. When Katzenberg says he's seen the future, he's been right often enough to listen and wrong often enough to hedge. He greenlit 'The Lion King' and 'Shrek,' but also spent $1.75B on Quibi (RIP, 2020-2020). We'll see if this one's a 'Shrek' or a Quibi.

🤖 Disney is getting leaner, and AI is looking like a big part of the plan. Disney's top lawyer told his roughly 1,000-person legal team it "will be a much smaller organization" as the company automates workflows and outsources work. He framed it as part of "Josh's vision," meaning CEO Josh D'Amaro's push for a leaner, more tech-driven Disney. The memo never says "AI," but a week later Disney posted a job for a "Director of AI Enablement," someone to rebuild the legal department around the technology. The cuts are limited to legal for now, but staffers across the company are reportedly bracing for another broader round as soon as this week. Either way, it's a glimpse into how D'Amaro sees the future of the company.

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