🎬 Tom Cruise Film School

👋 Good morning. Tom Cruise made a six-hour video recapping everything he knows about making movies, and he screens it privately for young stars he's mentoring, like Glen Powell. Cruise confirmed the whole thing himself, calling the content "very basic," just things like lenses, frames, and where cinema began. The idea, he says, is to understand certain things so well you can forget about them. Where the video lives is unclear (we're picturing a Cruise-controlled location, retinal scan required for entry, where Tom personally threads the projector). Presumably hour five is running technique, though nobody who's seen it is talking.

Welcome back to The Dailies for your midweek check-in. If you haven't stopped by our Instagram lately, our team is on the ground at TIFF posting updates all week. Now, let's get you caught up. 👇

The NFL's audience is roughly half women. Its content library is roughly 100% dude. The NFL saw an opening, and Hallmark filled it the only way it knows how: with Christmas movies.

The partnership between Hallmark, the NFL, and Skydance Sports is already three movies deep, and each one follows the same formula: pick a team, set a rom-com in its city, cast a few players as themselves. This year's is 'Holiday Touchdown: A Bears Love Story,' opening Countdown to Christmas on Oct. 17. Lyndsy Fonseca plays a journalist profiling a Bears superfan, Robert Buckley plays the superfan's firefighter grandson, and you can guess the rest. The numbers so far:

What they’re hoping for: football and Hallmark Christmas movies are both things people gather around every year. The movies are barely about the game, they're about a city and its fans, so Bears fans show up for Chicago and Hallmark fans leave caring about the Bears. Each side gets the other's audience.

Why it matters: leagues looking to grow their audience mostly stick to two plays: a live-rights deal or a docuseries (see: 'Drive to Survive' and everything it spawned). The NFL is trying scripted instead, cheaply and fast (about $2M and 16 days per movie), aimed at the half of its fans nobody bothered to program for. And the format scales. 29 teams to go.

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⏱️ The revamped ‘60 Minutes’ returned Sunday. Its first episode since Bari Weiss and EP Nick Bilton overhauled the show pulled 7.7M viewers, down 19% from last year's opener and 33% in the 25-54 demo. Worth noting the NFL game leading into it was down 22% too, so the show actually held up slightly better than its lead-in.

🏛️ A new study says a federal film tax credit could double U.S. production spending by 2035 and add 143,500 jobs a year. (It's MPA-funded, so read "could double" in the voice of a very enthusiastic realtor.) Studios and unions are lobbying hard for a bipartisan bill, hoping to push it through after November's midterms.

🎤 ‘American Idol’ is leaving LA for Atlanta come S25, though producer Fremantle hasn't inked a studio deal yet. Georgia offers up to 30% back on unscripted shows, and ‘Idol’ apparently didn't qualify for California's. It's the second big singing competition to leave California this year, after ‘The Masked Singer’ picked New Jersey.

🔪 Universal and Blumhouse are closing a $10M+ deal for ‘River,’ a TIFF slasher from first-time director Joshua Giuliano. That'd make it one of the fest's biggest sales. Focus did the same thing with Curry Barker's ‘Obsession’ at TIFF last year, and we all know how that went. Toronto's market wraps today.

Surely the Emmys have found their way into your inbox by now. If you're still catching up, check out our full winners list (all three ceremonies, plus the scoreboard) here. A few things worth chewing on:

Looking ahead… this may have been the last Emmys under the broadcast wheel, where ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC have taken turns hosting since 1995. The Television Academy is reportedly in advanced talks to move the whole show to Prime Video. First time off broadcast since 1949. The networks were paying a little over $8M a year. Expect that number to go up.

For years, streamers have seemingly assumed long waits between seasons are fine. A new report from Luminate just put a number on how not fine they are: past a 1.5-year hiatus, basically every hit loses audience. The damage (U.S. views in the first 12 weeks, compared to the previous season):

Meanwhile, the shows that came back a year later didn't just hold their audience, they grew it: 'The Pitt' S2 was up 132%, 'The Traitors' S4 up 121%, and 'Landman' S2 up 52% (to 25.5M views). Turns out the boring old network TV schedule was the growth strategy all along.

Of course, that’s easier said than done: getting a season out every year means greenlighting the next one before you know how the current one did, and skipping the year-long post schedules VFX-heavy shows like 'Wednesday' and 'Rings of Power' depend on. Not every show can pull that off.

Markets move. Headlines catastrophize. But somewhere inside the noise is the story that matters — the opportunity, not the fear. 

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