WEBVTT - Paramount, Warner Bros. and How Monopolies Ruin Everything 0:00:01.760 --> 0:00:09.080 Also media Welcome to Take Back and Hear, a podcast 0:00:09.320 --> 0:00:13.960 about the consolidation of capital into increasingly centralized forms and 0:00:14.000 --> 0:00:15.200 how it's ruining your life. 0:00:15.360 --> 0:00:19.160 I am your host, Mia Long and with b today 0:00:19.280 --> 0:00:22.840 to talk about how the consolidation of media monopolies has 0:00:22.960 --> 0:00:28.000 ruined many, many, many many things for many years. Is 0:00:28.320 --> 0:00:33.720 Vicky Osterweil, friend of the show, author of forthcoming April fourteenth, 0:00:33.760 --> 0:00:36.640 twenty twenty sixth, The Extended Universe, How Disney killed the 0:00:36.680 --> 0:00:38.040 movies and took over the world. 0:00:38.760 --> 0:00:39.960 Vicky, Welcome to the show. 0:00:40.120 --> 0:00:41.840 Thanks, it's so great to be back. Thank you, Mia. 0:00:41.880 --> 0:00:45.279 I'm excited to talk about something a little less depressing 0:00:45.360 --> 0:00:46.239 than the things we could be. 0:00:46.240 --> 0:00:53.040 Talking about, right, you know, like this is a story, obviously, 0:00:53.240 --> 0:00:56.600 the story that we're talking about here foremost is Paramount's 0:00:56.640 --> 0:00:58.480 acquisition of Warner Bros. 0:00:59.120 --> 0:01:00.600 Or forthcoming acquisition. 0:01:00.720 --> 0:01:04.120 Since Netflix has backed out, it technically still could fail, 0:01:04.240 --> 0:01:07.840 but seems very very unlikely to. And you know, you 0:01:08.720 --> 0:01:10.760 could tell things are going great in the news where 0:01:10.800 --> 0:01:13.240 this is the fun one, and the fun one is us. 0:01:13.280 --> 0:01:16.240 Before we started recording, talking about who we think the 0:01:16.280 --> 0:01:18.200 sort of Nazi commis are they're going to put in 0:01:18.280 --> 0:01:21.840 charge of CNN. It's going to be there very wise, 0:01:24.080 --> 0:01:26.319 So things going very good. 0:01:27.400 --> 0:01:28.200 You can tell. 0:01:28.840 --> 0:01:31.600 Oh, God, but you you. 0:01:31.600 --> 0:01:34.600 Had the most cursed name that I've heard, so fun. 0:01:34.640 --> 0:01:37.360 Oh yeah, Tim, Tim Poole, I think is probably the 0:01:37.440 --> 0:01:40.920 most cursed. Yeah, that would be the most it's a 0:01:41.040 --> 0:01:42.880 dark horse candidate. I don't know whether were the numbers 0:01:42.920 --> 0:01:46.880 on poly market. Should we look who's. 0:01:46.080 --> 0:01:46.399 I know. 0:01:48.760 --> 0:01:52.280 They they've probably that's probably up now. Yeah, I hate 0:01:52.520 --> 0:01:54.840 I refuse to track polling market. Even if I could 0:01:54.960 --> 0:01:57.600 no facts ahead of time, I simply will not. They 0:01:57.600 --> 0:01:58.240 can't make me. 0:02:00.240 --> 0:02:03.120 God, but we're not talking about insider trading war crimes. 0:02:03.120 --> 0:02:06.000 We're talking about insider trading intellectual property. So that's that's 0:02:06.000 --> 0:02:06.440 pretty good. 0:02:06.560 --> 0:02:14.919 Yeah, yeah, okay, So to start, let's go back a 0:02:15.120 --> 0:02:18.280 ways and do you want to talk about I guess 0:02:18.360 --> 0:02:20.240 sort of the beginning of the history of what we're 0:02:20.240 --> 0:02:22.840 talking about here, which is the consolidation of all media 0:02:22.880 --> 0:02:26.280 into a handful of increasingly large conglomerates. 0:02:26.639 --> 0:02:30.640 Yeah, absolutely, so, in a way like consolidation is the 0:02:30.800 --> 0:02:34.960 entire history of the movie business. So obviously what's happening 0:02:34.960 --> 0:02:37.520 here with Paramount, which is one of the oldest, one 0:02:37.520 --> 0:02:41.520 of the old five studios merging with Warner Brothers. That 0:02:41.639 --> 0:02:46.160 leaves Disney and Paramount, Warner Brothers and Sony as the 0:02:46.240 --> 0:02:48.960 three companies that released movies. 0:02:49.280 --> 0:02:55.760 Is this good? A twenty four is gonna get bonded 0:02:56.280 --> 0:02:57.200 three weeks from now? 0:02:57.280 --> 0:03:00.800 Yeah? God, and that's like an Amazon or the news 0:03:00.840 --> 0:03:03.280 of other studios and Netflix was in competition for this 0:03:03.840 --> 0:03:06.760 and with true as you said anyways, but like one 0:03:06.760 --> 0:03:09.760 of the things that the very beginning of the Hollywood system, 0:03:10.160 --> 0:03:13.600 Hollywood starts because Thomas Edison. So now we're going way 0:03:13.600 --> 0:03:14.960 back right the eighteen nineties. 0:03:15.040 --> 0:03:17.280 Oh god, yeah, yes, speaking of it, speaking a dude 0:03:17.280 --> 0:03:19.919 who ruthlessly consolidated their power, He's like that. 0:03:20.280 --> 0:03:25.400 Were intellectual, propercisely, dear God. So Thomas Edison is credited 0:03:25.400 --> 0:03:27.920 in the US with inventing the movie camera. He is 0:03:27.960 --> 0:03:29.520 one of five or six people in the world who 0:03:29.520 --> 0:03:31.799 came up with the technology around the same time. It's 0:03:31.840 --> 0:03:34.520 just not linearly possible to name any of them as 0:03:34.520 --> 0:03:36.960 the inventor of the movie camera. But he gets that 0:03:37.000 --> 0:03:41.160 credit because he sued the shit out of everyone who 0:03:41.280 --> 0:03:45.400 tried to make a movie for fifteen years. Jesus right, right, 0:03:45.480 --> 0:03:48.040 So he puts patents on the movie camera. He puts 0:03:48.080 --> 0:03:50.640 patents on his stuff. And then and this is in 0:03:50.720 --> 0:03:53.080 New York. He's in New Jersey. Menlo Park famously is 0:03:53.080 --> 0:03:55.680 where his lab is. And what he starts doing other 0:03:55.720 --> 0:03:59.360 than making really really boring movies, he's a mid film producer. 0:03:59.400 --> 0:04:01.680 His movies are not that exciting. And at this point 0:04:02.080 --> 0:04:06.280 a movie is fifteen seconds to about a minute, often 0:04:06.320 --> 0:04:08.520 seen in a nickelodeon, like in a really small screen, 0:04:08.920 --> 0:04:13.120 or like in a small room. These are short films. 0:04:13.400 --> 0:04:15.720 Ninety nine percent of them are loss of time. Can't 0:04:15.720 --> 0:04:18.280 we can't even watch these movies, right. But one of 0:04:18.360 --> 0:04:20.320 the things that he would do is he, because he 0:04:20.360 --> 0:04:23.440 had the patent on movie cameras, anyone who tried to 0:04:23.480 --> 0:04:27.680 film a movie, he would sue them. So it's eventually 0:04:27.680 --> 0:04:30.080 too hard to maintain this. So what he did is 0:04:30.080 --> 0:04:33.799 he teamed up with the other large Independence and Eastman Kodak, 0:04:33.839 --> 0:04:35.320 and they formed a thing I think it's called the 0:04:35.360 --> 0:04:38.239 Motion Picture Company, which is unreferred to as the Trust, 0:04:38.440 --> 0:04:42.880 quote unquote, and the Trust just did this at scale. 0:04:43.120 --> 0:04:45.400 So now instead of it just being him fighting against 0:04:45.400 --> 0:04:48.520 his competitors, it's all the leading movie filmmakers, all the 0:04:48.600 --> 0:04:52.440 leading filmmakers, and the literal film company will come down 0:04:52.680 --> 0:04:55.000 sue you sometimes even beat you up and like and 0:04:55.080 --> 0:04:58.120 shatter your cameras if you if you try to make 0:04:58.160 --> 0:05:01.280 a movie without their permission, without a license from them, 0:05:01.279 --> 0:05:02.280 and without their equipment. 0:05:02.600 --> 0:05:04.800 Right, this is such a good system, by the way, 0:05:04.920 --> 0:05:07.400 Like I just like, like just the system of property rights, 0:05:07.560 --> 0:05:09.240 so good, no problems, he. 0:05:10.920 --> 0:05:14.880 Exactly, So what happens? So what happens? A bunch of 0:05:14.880 --> 0:05:20.600 filmmakers move to this new land development out in California 0:05:20.960 --> 0:05:24.279 called Hollywood. You know, it's nineteen oh seven. They're really 0:05:24.320 --> 0:05:27.920 far away from New Jersey lawyers at Edison goons, right, 0:05:28.279 --> 0:05:30.760 they're as far as possible. So Hollywood is founded by 0:05:30.760 --> 0:05:33.320 a bunch of movie pirates, basically, right. 0:05:33.360 --> 0:05:34.320 That's incredible. 0:05:34.440 --> 0:05:37.920 We're violating you know, Edison's copyright because they're sick of 0:05:38.000 --> 0:05:39.520 the of his of his legal harassment. 0:05:39.560 --> 0:05:41.120 So it's some real The mountains are high in the 0:05:41.160 --> 0:05:42.320 Emperor's far away shift. 0:05:42.440 --> 0:05:45.560 Yeah yeah, I mean exactly, literally, how far can we 0:05:45.600 --> 0:05:47.920 get away while still being on the continent, Like that's 0:05:47.960 --> 0:05:50.320 you know, let's do it from New Jersey, which, like 0:05:50.360 --> 0:05:52.640 many such cases, many people. Yeah, yeah, I can get 0:05:52.640 --> 0:05:55.400 that far away from New Jersey before. But uh, you know, 0:05:55.480 --> 0:05:58.520 so jumping forward into the classical Hollywood period are more 0:05:58.560 --> 0:06:01.359 familiar with. There are sort of five major studios and 0:06:01.360 --> 0:06:03.400 one of the ways that the major studios worked is 0:06:03.400 --> 0:06:07.520 that they had something called vertical integration, which is something 0:06:07.520 --> 0:06:09.320 we should all know about as we are living through 0:06:09.400 --> 0:06:12.600 times and monopolies. Amazon is a classic example of vertical integration, 0:06:12.880 --> 0:06:15.560 as is Google. What vertical integration means is that you 0:06:15.680 --> 0:06:19.839 own everything in the pipeline for movies. You have the 0:06:19.839 --> 0:06:22.600 offices where the producers work. You own the sound stage, 0:06:22.760 --> 0:06:24.880 you employ all the people who work on it, You 0:06:24.880 --> 0:06:27.919 employ the actors. You also then own the film that 0:06:27.920 --> 0:06:30.280 gets made. You own the cameras, You own the company 0:06:30.279 --> 0:06:33.080 that produces the film. Sometimes although those instas, they didn't 0:06:33.080 --> 0:06:35.360 always own those companies, those chemical companies. This is on board, 0:06:35.600 --> 0:06:37.039 but you know, and then you own the movie theater 0:06:37.040 --> 0:06:40.839 where it showed. Right, So like movie theaters before the forties, 0:06:41.080 --> 0:06:44.040 you would go to a RKO Pictures House. Arko is 0:06:44.040 --> 0:06:46.600 one of the early big ones, or a United Artists theater, 0:06:46.880 --> 0:06:49.760 and they would only show United Artists movies, right, so 0:06:49.800 --> 0:06:52.560 they would be an active competition with one another. So 0:06:52.680 --> 0:06:54.920 your neighborhood would have. You know, there'd be an MGM, 0:06:54.960 --> 0:06:57.200 there'd be an RKO, and you would go based on 0:06:57.240 --> 0:07:00.680 what movie was where. Then there's antitrust a done in 0:07:00.720 --> 0:07:04.160 the forties that breaks up these studios. The studio system 0:07:04.240 --> 0:07:06.760 sort of slowly collapses. They also then loses a lot 0:07:06.800 --> 0:07:08.719 of market share to television. This is a really pot 0:07:08.760 --> 0:07:10.640 into history, but I'm trying to give it as much 0:07:10.640 --> 0:07:14.240 as possible. So basically, so by the sixties or seventies, 0:07:14.600 --> 0:07:17.600 what you have is a lot of independent producers. So 0:07:17.640 --> 0:07:20.320 the studios just become a brand and a sort of 0:07:20.360 --> 0:07:23.520 pot of money and often a sound stage. They keep 0:07:23.520 --> 0:07:28.440 the sound stages right. But then like distribution, becomes independent actors, 0:07:28.480 --> 0:07:32.120 and like directors, they all are independent. They all have agents, right. 0:07:32.160 --> 0:07:33.520 It used to be that they would be hired by 0:07:33.520 --> 0:07:35.800 a company and they would just work for that company. 0:07:36.400 --> 0:07:39.040 That's why you know classical Hollywood director would make like 0:07:39.080 --> 0:07:40.760 sixty movies because they would just churn them out. They 0:07:40.800 --> 0:07:42.720 would just be like directing them. Show up, do it 0:07:42.720 --> 0:07:43.920 for two weeks, show up on the next one, do 0:07:44.000 --> 0:07:47.440 for two weeks, et cetera. Just the studio system. So 0:07:47.520 --> 0:07:50.320 then by the sixties and seventies, it's starting to look 0:07:50.360 --> 0:07:53.280 more like what you have now, which is the studios 0:07:53.320 --> 0:07:56.800 are basically they're the homes of all the producers, the 0:07:56.800 --> 0:07:58.760 producers and people who connect the money and the talent, 0:07:59.160 --> 0:08:01.480 you know, and put it altogether and package a deal 0:08:01.520 --> 0:08:06.120 then market it right, and that process. It seems like 0:08:06.200 --> 0:08:08.320 it's sort of a losing proposition. The business isn't doing 0:08:08.360 --> 0:08:12.360 super well until the emergence of the blockbuster with Star Wars, right, so, 0:08:13.040 --> 0:08:14.880 Star Wars and Jaws and a bunch of other movies 0:08:14.920 --> 0:08:16.720 in the seventies. We're going so fast right now and 0:08:16.760 --> 0:08:18.080 trying my best, but I'm sorry, this. 0:08:18.040 --> 0:08:19.400 Is no e'ree. 0:08:19.560 --> 0:08:22.240 This is like I was like, here, let's talk about 0:08:22.440 --> 0:08:26.920 like one hundred and fifty years of history. 0:08:27.280 --> 0:08:30.440 So anyways, with the emergence of the blockbusters, one of 0:08:30.480 --> 0:08:33.199 the other things that happens is that the way blockbusters 0:08:33.240 --> 0:08:35.480 work is that they are released everywhere in the country 0:08:35.480 --> 0:08:39.120 at once. Film comes on used to come on literal 0:08:39.120 --> 0:08:41.400 physical objects, and you can only have so many and 0:08:41.440 --> 0:08:43.600 they can only be so many places at once, right. 0:08:44.120 --> 0:08:46.000 So the way film used to work is they would 0:08:46.000 --> 0:08:48.880 make a certain number of film reels if they thought 0:08:48.920 --> 0:08:50.160 it was going to be big. There was a star, 0:08:50.480 --> 0:08:53.120 but the studio was always gambling on how many how 0:08:53.160 --> 0:08:55.040 big it would be, how many people would pick it up, 0:08:55.160 --> 0:08:57.640 and then they had to sell it to the movie theaters, right, 0:08:57.720 --> 0:08:59.360 and then the films would circulate when they did well 0:08:59.360 --> 0:09:01.840 the print more so, movies would circulate for like a year, right, 0:09:01.920 --> 0:09:05.040 two years sometimes even. But with Star Wars and the 0:09:05.360 --> 0:09:07.320 day and date system that we have now, what they 0:09:07.360 --> 0:09:10.920 started doing was just putting it in every movie theater 0:09:11.040 --> 0:09:13.840 in the country. You also get the emergence of multiplexes, 0:09:13.840 --> 0:09:16.439 white flight in the suburbs. I'm really going faster up trying. 0:09:16.880 --> 0:09:22.320 But the result is that movies get both more potentially valuable, 0:09:22.960 --> 0:09:25.360 but that value gets more and more concentrated in the 0:09:25.440 --> 0:09:28.440 early period of the release, right in the early window. 0:09:28.960 --> 0:09:32.360 Opening weekend was not very meaningful until the eighties really, 0:09:32.640 --> 0:09:36.360 you know, late seventies, early eighties. As that happens, do 0:09:36.400 --> 0:09:39.079 you suddenly need more financing and you can make more 0:09:39.160 --> 0:09:43.120 money off of bigger gambles. Simultaneously, the rest of the 0:09:43.160 --> 0:09:45.720 economy is going through financialization, right, which is a process 0:09:45.720 --> 0:09:47.000 that you've talked about on the show before. 0:09:47.040 --> 0:09:49.440 I can't get into that, but yeah, we can't. 0:09:50.520 --> 0:09:54.319 And then Reagan deregulates everything, right, Reagan refts a part 0:09:54.320 --> 0:09:58.360 of the FCC in many ways, deregulates media ownership stuff. 0:09:58.360 --> 0:10:01.079 This is a big move. And then across the eighties 0:10:01.280 --> 0:10:04.120 the home market opened, so you start getting VCRs and 0:10:04.160 --> 0:10:08.520 this completely transforms the business another time, because movies can 0:10:08.559 --> 0:10:11.959 flop in the theater, but you can guarantee rentals, right, 0:10:12.080 --> 0:10:14.760 So so for like the eighties and the nineties, the 0:10:14.800 --> 0:10:18.360 big studios kind of could print money because it was 0:10:18.480 --> 0:10:20.880 pretty hard to lose money on a movie. Now the 0:10:20.880 --> 0:10:22.640 people who lost money on movies were like, you know, 0:10:22.880 --> 0:10:24.880 dentists from the Midwest who they get to invest and 0:10:24.920 --> 0:10:27.160 they'd be like, oh yeah, you need sorry, like those 0:10:27.240 --> 0:10:30.600 arcane deals. People still got rinsed. Obviously it was Hollywood. 0:10:30.640 --> 0:10:32.920 It was shady as well. But as so with the 0:10:32.920 --> 0:10:35.280 deregulation and with all this money flowing and with the 0:10:35.320 --> 0:10:39.959 integration of the home market, suddenly technology companies like Sony 0:10:40.360 --> 0:10:43.719 and the emergence of of like Lucasfilms that they also 0:10:43.800 --> 0:10:46.440 get really into computers. Lucas Turgeocus famously is into like 0:10:46.520 --> 0:10:49.280 the computer side of the business. All these different technologies 0:10:49.320 --> 0:10:51.760 get brought into the cinema at the same time as 0:10:51.800 --> 0:10:54.600 you get to see regulated, so companies start snatching up 0:10:55.200 --> 0:10:58.800 these other film studios, right and so, where once there 0:10:58.800 --> 0:11:00.640 were five studios, and then the same season seventies, you 0:11:00.640 --> 0:11:02.920 actually got a ton of independent studios, a lot of 0:11:02.960 --> 0:11:05.960 really small ones, and they start getting gobbled up by 0:11:05.960 --> 0:11:09.080 these bigger conglomerates. You know, Sony is the one that 0:11:09.400 --> 0:11:11.840 was also a mega corp in the eighties already that 0:11:11.840 --> 0:11:14.240 that would eventually go on to own to buy out 0:11:14.480 --> 0:11:17.440 a bunch of movie companies. The same thing is happening 0:11:17.440 --> 0:11:20.640 though with radio with TV. The main thing that happens 0:11:20.760 --> 0:11:23.920 under the SEC regulation stuff is that they loosen up 0:11:23.960 --> 0:11:26.760 whether a movie studio can own a TV studio. They 0:11:26.840 --> 0:11:30.160 used to be fully separate. And then and and broadcast 0:11:30.280 --> 0:11:33.360 rules changed. Broadcast rules changed, so studios could own a 0:11:33.360 --> 0:11:35.720 movie theater or you could own a movie company, a 0:11:35.840 --> 0:11:37.520 radio station and a TV station. 0:11:38.000 --> 0:11:39.320 All oh good God. 0:11:39.559 --> 0:11:43.160 And as you can imagine, that is how things started 0:11:43.200 --> 0:11:45.760 to alerate. You get like the ABC Disney merger in 0:11:45.800 --> 0:11:50.280 the late eighties, NBC Universal mergers and acquisitions become the 0:11:50.280 --> 0:11:53.000 big thing. You know, the stock market is booming. Then 0:11:53.040 --> 0:11:55.000 you get other big corps buying them out. And then 0:11:55.040 --> 0:11:58.160 we're just in the classic phase of consolidation where bigger 0:11:58.160 --> 0:12:00.319 and bigger fish eat up the small ones. 0:12:00.679 --> 0:12:02.800 And this is how I guess importantly for this story, 0:12:03.400 --> 0:12:06.320 suddenly like all of the television news media is owned 0:12:06.400 --> 0:12:11.880 by these giant ass movie companies, which exactly, surely. 0:12:11.559 --> 0:12:12.559 That's like we'll go wrong. 0:12:12.760 --> 0:12:14.400 Well, yeah, we and we come to you here from 0:12:14.400 --> 0:12:17.079 iHeart Radio, which you know is a lovely. 0:12:17.160 --> 0:12:19.480 Bread of kind of making. 0:12:19.559 --> 0:12:24.599 We are iHeart Media, Okay, excuse me, a technically distinct company, 0:12:24.840 --> 0:12:27.679 I think. Actually, don't ask me to explain exactly how 0:12:27.720 --> 0:12:30.360 that whole right I heard media I Heart Radio split works. 0:12:30.360 --> 0:12:35.120 But exactly, you know, so media consolidation, this is you know, 0:12:35.320 --> 0:12:39.280 consolidation is the story of capitalism famously right like that, 0:12:39.400 --> 0:12:42.520 Like you know, an industry builds, lots of new entrepreneurs 0:12:42.559 --> 0:12:44.520 come into the space, people figure out what's possible with 0:12:44.559 --> 0:12:47.280 the industry, has more and more money flows in, a 0:12:47.280 --> 0:12:49.440 few winners come and consolidate. We've seen it happen in 0:12:49.440 --> 0:12:52.840 tech as well. But yeah, it has particularly perverse effects 0:12:53.000 --> 0:12:56.199 when we're talking about the visual culture, the audio culture, 0:12:56.280 --> 0:12:59.880 and the news media. The way information is spread all, 0:13:00.000 --> 0:13:01.920 so I wouldn't you know, I would argue that the 0:13:01.920 --> 0:13:04.280 effects are still pretty perverse from the way social media 0:13:04.760 --> 0:13:07.480 and tech giants have control things. I think that's pretty 0:13:07.480 --> 0:13:08.480 pretty obvious. 0:13:08.640 --> 0:13:14.080 Oh yeah, it is extremely bad, I would say, you might. 0:13:13.960 --> 0:13:26.280 Say it's extremely bad. You know, a lot of people 0:13:26.280 --> 0:13:29.760 are very upset about the news that David Ellison, who 0:13:29.880 --> 0:13:32.400 is the NEPO baby to end all net bo babies, 0:13:32.400 --> 0:13:35.319 because he's not a Hollywood netbo baby. He's not the 0:13:35.360 --> 0:13:37.240 son of a previous He's just the son of a 0:13:37.320 --> 0:13:40.280 rich guy who wanted to be in movies. So he 0:13:40.360 --> 0:13:43.160 bought his way into like acting roles, and then he 0:13:43.280 --> 0:13:46.200 like just threw money around until he got sky Danced Global, 0:13:46.480 --> 0:13:49.520 which is this company that you know, he's been in 0:13:49.559 --> 0:13:52.320 Hollywood for ten years. Technically he's like an experienced producer. 0:13:52.360 --> 0:13:54.040 This man is forty three years old, which for like, 0:13:54.280 --> 0:13:57.120 you know, the CEO of a billion you know, he 0:13:57.200 --> 0:14:00.000 started with a generous loan from Daddy Larry. Let's just say. 0:14:00.800 --> 0:14:03.800 And yeah, you know, I think people are very upset 0:14:03.840 --> 0:14:06.280 obviously because he's a Trump ally, right, the Allison's or 0:14:06.280 --> 0:14:10.280 Trump allies. He has literally said I'm gonna make more 0:14:10.360 --> 0:14:12.760 right Wing movies, you know, like you know, the Daily 0:14:12.880 --> 0:14:15.440 Daily Wire. You know, they were all washing out, but 0:14:15.480 --> 0:14:17.520 now they'll probably have contracts or whatever. You know, who knows, 0:14:17.520 --> 0:14:19.720 Like it's going to be money. But a lot of 0:14:19.720 --> 0:14:21.680 people are also saying that this is just for CNN, 0:14:21.880 --> 0:14:24.960 and that's actually not true. So a thing that is 0:14:24.960 --> 0:14:26.960 important to know is that the cable part of this 0:14:27.080 --> 0:14:29.800 deal Netflix was going to spin off the cable. The 0:14:29.840 --> 0:14:32.720 Discovery channel at CNN was going to spin off all 0:14:32.720 --> 0:14:35.560 the cable. So if he just wanted CNN, he could 0:14:35.600 --> 0:14:37.840 have waited for the Netflix deal to go through, and 0:14:37.920 --> 0:14:39.440 he could have just bought it on the market for 0:14:39.480 --> 0:14:42.000 a steal. Because the thing about cable is it's losing 0:14:42.040 --> 0:14:44.800 money if you look at Okay, this is a really 0:14:44.920 --> 0:14:46.840 dark fact and I apologies everyone, but if you look 0:14:46.880 --> 0:14:50.960 at the rate of cable subscription costs, if you look 0:14:50.960 --> 0:14:54.360 at a meta aggregate data of it, the price of 0:14:54.400 --> 0:14:59.760 the annual subscription to cable goes up by the distributed 0:15:00.080 --> 0:15:04.440 out of the previous years subscription costs that were lost. 0:15:04.120 --> 0:15:05.960 By boomers dying Jesus Christ. 0:15:05.960 --> 0:15:08.800 So basically, it is a literally dying It is a 0:15:08.880 --> 0:15:12.040 literally dying market. The only people who still pay for 0:15:12.080 --> 0:15:15.920 cable other than institutional forces are like people above sixty 0:15:16.200 --> 0:15:18.800 and they're just literally dying, and the price goes up 0:15:18.800 --> 0:15:20.440 as more and more of them dying. It is, it 0:15:20.520 --> 0:15:24.240 is over as a business cable. Even ESPN. Disney is 0:15:24.240 --> 0:15:26.600 trying to get rid of ESPN, right, Even sports are 0:15:26.680 --> 0:15:30.040 valueless now, not valueless, I means some billions of dollars obviously, 0:15:30.080 --> 0:15:30.400 but to. 0:15:30.480 --> 0:15:33.320 These yeah, yeah, you know, if you look at what 0:15:33.480 --> 0:15:35.320 ESPN's like trying to do about this, they're like just 0:15:35.360 --> 0:15:38.680 turning into an influencer factory, yeah, with just like rich 0:15:38.720 --> 0:15:43.680 eyes and then like all these fucking unhinged dipshits exactly. 0:15:43.800 --> 0:15:47.200 So anyway, so people are pretty like despairing about it 0:15:47.200 --> 0:15:49.280 because I think it's about CNN. But if it was 0:15:49.320 --> 0:15:51.000 just about CNN, like I said, they could have just 0:15:51.040 --> 0:15:53.840 waited and gotten it for a song. David Ellison really 0:15:53.840 --> 0:15:56.880 thinks he's a he's cosplaying as a movie producer, but 0:15:56.960 --> 0:15:59.200 because he has so much money, he's succeeding. Yeah, of 0:15:59.280 --> 0:16:01.680 the movies. He's pretty that you might like, although I 0:16:01.680 --> 0:16:03.080 didn't like it, and a lot of people like top 0:16:03.120 --> 0:16:04.400 Gun Maverick like it's fun. 0:16:04.440 --> 0:16:07.360 I guess, like everything about that movie. Suddenly just like 0:16:07.440 --> 0:16:08.520 clicks into focus. 0:16:08.520 --> 0:16:11.240 It's like, yeah, oh, I just want you to know 0:16:11.320 --> 0:16:14.240 that Top Gun Maverick is the greatest work of art 0:16:14.280 --> 0:16:18.160 that he produced by some extreme margin. This guy's responsible 0:16:18.200 --> 0:16:20.960 for Terminators five and six that would be a dark 0:16:21.000 --> 0:16:25.400 Fate and Genesis. Oh no. He produced on Geostorm, which 0:16:25.400 --> 0:16:28.960 you may remember came too late to capitalize on the 0:16:29.320 --> 0:16:32.560 disaster thing. In twenty seventeen, he made the Gemini Man movie, 0:16:32.560 --> 0:16:34.960 which is what Will Smith fought Will Smith with weird 0:16:35.080 --> 0:16:36.280 yet aging technology. 0:16:36.360 --> 0:16:39.040 Oh I remember seeing TV correction. 0:16:41.520 --> 0:16:44.360 It kind of killed Will Smith's marketability as a star. 0:16:44.760 --> 0:16:48.000 Like that was kind of the film like after Earthly Chad. 0:16:48.280 --> 0:16:51.240 But he's responsible for ending Will Smith. He did this 0:16:51.960 --> 0:16:56.360 the Spy Kids reboot which my Kids Armageddon from twenty twelve. 0:16:56.440 --> 0:17:01.560 Way no, this guy Jesus has made just really bad movies. 0:17:01.920 --> 0:17:04.280 All of these weird right wing people are all like 0:17:04.440 --> 0:17:06.080 the thing they want to do is make movies. This 0:17:06.160 --> 0:17:09.080 is like what's like killing the Daily Wire is that 0:17:09.119 --> 0:17:11.680 they decided to be a movie company and it turns 0:17:11.720 --> 0:17:13.480 out they can't make movies. But it's like this guy 0:17:13.600 --> 0:17:16.400 is like what if you had that but backed by 0:17:16.480 --> 0:17:19.560 like the entire tech capital apparatus, and your dad was 0:17:19.920 --> 0:17:22.359 fucking Larry Ellison, the Oracle guy, like one of the 0:17:22.440 --> 0:17:24.040 richest test fascists who's ever lived. 0:17:24.080 --> 0:17:25.520 Then you can do it. Then you can just buy 0:17:25.560 --> 0:17:27.440 yourself a movie studio, and you can do it because 0:17:27.480 --> 0:17:29.040 the thing movies need is money. 0:17:29.800 --> 0:17:32.760 And then you can keep buying all their movie studios. 0:17:33.760 --> 0:17:38.560 But and this is a bit contrarian. I'm not sure 0:17:39.119 --> 0:17:42.200 that this is worse for movies than Netflix getting it, 0:17:43.000 --> 0:17:49.200 because Netflix would have likely sabotaged what was remaining of 0:17:49.680 --> 0:17:54.679 WB's theatrical business model, right, Like, Netflix doesn't like the 0:17:54.680 --> 0:17:57.720 theater now, they've been trying to get into theatrical because 0:17:57.760 --> 0:17:59.600 that's like, you know, it's cash on the table. You know, 0:17:59.640 --> 0:18:02.360 it's how you build. It's the greatest marketing on earth. Right, 0:18:02.400 --> 0:18:04.080 And you when you have a big hit film, then 0:18:04.240 --> 0:18:07.359 that's a franchise. You get TV shows, you get theme parks, 0:18:07.560 --> 0:18:11.360 you get you know, lunch boxes, you know, toys, t shirts, 0:18:11.680 --> 0:18:14.040 you get resales, you get a reboot ten years down 0:18:14.080 --> 0:18:17.840 the line, right, you get licensing. So they want that. 0:18:17.920 --> 0:18:21.479 But but Netflix is really, i mean, they hate movies. 0:18:21.680 --> 0:18:25.720 Netflix literally has a production design a design philosophy of 0:18:25.760 --> 0:18:28.639 making movies that are designed for people who aren't looking 0:18:28.680 --> 0:18:31.600 at them, so that the characters say what they're doing. 0:18:31.680 --> 0:18:33.280 I mean, there's a big article that came out about 0:18:33.280 --> 0:18:35.520 this a few weeks ago, Like, yeah, Netflix is a 0:18:35.600 --> 0:18:38.680 nightmare company, so it's a real it's a real Cilly 0:18:38.720 --> 0:18:41.160 in Caribtis kind of situation. Yeah, right, Like you've got 0:18:41.200 --> 0:18:43.760 this fascist creep, but at least he like really thinks 0:18:43.760 --> 0:18:46.080 he likes movies, you know, Like I don't know anyway, 0:18:46.480 --> 0:18:48.760 the plaint being people are very upset about this news 0:18:48.760 --> 0:18:50.520 because it's happened to you because he's a Trump Ally, 0:18:50.560 --> 0:18:53.000 there's this political angle they were making all this noise, 0:18:53.000 --> 0:18:55.840 they were begging Trump to do it. Y'all are thirty 0:18:55.880 --> 0:18:57.879 years late to this being a problem, Like I'm not 0:18:57.880 --> 0:18:59.199 trying to be like I'm not trying to be like 0:18:59.200 --> 0:19:03.960 that whatever, Like no, yeah, but we are well, but 0:19:04.119 --> 0:19:08.000 like having three movie studios instead of two, like you're 0:19:08.040 --> 0:19:11.919 already doing pretty bad. Like in the thirties, as I 0:19:12.119 --> 0:19:14.160 gave you in that little pot of history, in the thirties, 0:19:14.359 --> 0:19:18.879 Hollywood was so brutally integrated that they literally the federal 0:19:18.920 --> 0:19:22.560 government literally broke it apart. At the height, at the 0:19:22.600 --> 0:19:25.760 height of the studio system, the biggest company at the time, 0:19:25.760 --> 0:19:29.040 which I believe was MGM, was the big studio controlled 0:19:29.320 --> 0:19:31.800 eighteen percent of the market of the film market, which 0:19:31.840 --> 0:19:34.600 is massive. I mean the market of anything. Eighteen percent 0:19:34.600 --> 0:19:39.040 of my market is obscene hideous. Yeah, Disney in a 0:19:39.080 --> 0:19:42.000 bunch of the past years has run forty percent of 0:19:42.000 --> 0:19:48.639 the market worldwide, worldwide. Not so like we are already 0:19:48.640 --> 0:19:51.720 at this level of concentration, like the fact that it 0:19:51.840 --> 0:19:54.080 keeps going, Like, yes, it does mean there will be 0:19:54.119 --> 0:19:56.760 fewer and fewer movies, It does mean more layoffs. It 0:19:56.800 --> 0:20:01.480 means things are getting worse. But you know, we've been here, 0:20:01.760 --> 0:20:04.600 you know what I'm saying. Yeah, I think it's actually 0:20:04.640 --> 0:20:05.639 only thirty seven percent. 0:20:06.440 --> 0:20:08.800