Mailbag! Marvel’s Future, Johnny Depp’s Comeback, L.A.’s Recession, and Awkward Celeb Interactions.

0:04Matt Belloni:This episode of The Town is presented by HBO Max. HBO Max presents The Pit, nominated for 26 Emmy Awards, including outstanding drama series. The staff of Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center juggle personal crises, workplace politics, and high emotions in this Emmy-winning drama series. Don't miss the series USA Today called The Absolute Best Show on TV. The Pit is now streaming on HBO Max. This episode is brought to you by Netflix, presenting The Diplomat, now nominated for seven Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Drama Series. Variety lauds it the finest chapter of The Diplomat to date, and AFI hails it the TV program of the year, starring Emmy nominee and actor award winner Kerry Russell, alongside dynamic performances from Emmy nominees lead actor Rufus Sewell, supporting actress Allison Janney, and guest actor Bradley Whitford.

0:54Matt Belloni:With Emmy-nominated writing from Deborah Kahn, Decider calls The Diplomat a masterclass in storytelling.

1:24Matt Belloni:from the LA recession to Johnny Depp's comeback to the future of Marvel and Netflix and much more. Today is the Town Hall episode from the Ringer and Puck. I'm Matt Bellany and this is The Town.

1:40Matt Belloni:Okay, we are here. No guests today. I guess I'm the guest. We've got a Town Hall episode, a mailbag. Craig, it's been a while since we've done this. It's been a long time. We should do more. We get good questions. I know, we actually do. So we put some feelers out on the Twitter and we took some emails from the town email address, the town pod, what is it, Craig? The town at spotify.com? The town at spotify.com. Okay, so you can always email us. I try to respond to everyone. Don't always get to them, but - You do, you're good about that. You can get a response from Matt if you want to. I try my best, not always, but I get there.

2:16Matt Belloni:All right, so we're gonna go through the questions. I will do my best to answer them. and if you don't like it, suck it. Okay, perfect. Great way to start. We're gonna start with a question from Andrew who asks, with continued job cuts and consolidation in Hollywood, what do you think when you hear people say that LA is the next Detroit? Good question. This was a Scott Galloway thing, the pundit. He has been pushing this. The difference here, and I know the Hollywood stuff gets so much attention. There was just a study that came out this past week saying that, If this Warner Brothers Paramount merger goes through, 4 ,500 jobs will be lost in LA County, which is definitely a lot.

2:58Matt Belloni:Paramount pushes back on that a little bit, but yes, it's a lot. When you look at the overall LA economy, the entertainment sector, and this is according to the local economic development group, it's only 3 % to 4 % of the total employment in LA County. And that includes direct entertainment, motion pictures, film, TV. It's around like a little less than 200 ,000 workers. Now, if you include the larger community and all of the wider creative economy, meaning like influencers and the service industry and the daycares and all the other things that support the entertainment economy, they say it gets up to like seven, 8 % of the region.

3:44Matt Belloni:Which is still, I think, a smaller number than people would have guessed. Absolutely. I mean, LA, people who don't live here, they don't realize it is such a gigantic place, gigantic economy. Guess, Craig, what do you think the number one employer in the LA County area is? What industry? I don't know. Tech? Healthcare. 22%. Sure. Which makes sense because there's like 40 million people that live in the Southern California area. So that makes sense. There's accommodation and food services is 11%. Retail is 10%. Professional services and scientific services and different consultancies are 8%. And it really is a global trade economy, aerospace, tech.

4:33Matt Belloni:Like, you know, the SpaceX IPO has done more for the region. I know it's mostly in the Bay Area and some in Texas, but the SpaceX IPO is creating like hundreds and hundreds of millionaires. And that's all concentrated in the LA area of the South Bay for this region, mostly in the Bay Area and Texas, I said. So what you're basically saying is like the rise and fall of Hollywood, the fluctuations of Hollywood is not as impactful to the bottom line of Los Angeles than people think. Yes. However, let me caveat that. The kinds of jobs that are associated with the entertainment industry are pretty valuable jobs.

5:09Matt Belloni:They are considered mostly white-collar jobs, upper-middle-class jobs, people that have had some pretty extraordinary wealth created around the entertainment industry. I'm talking from the talent community and screenwriters and directors and executives that get paid a lot of money to greenlight the movies. So there is the kind of jobs that you want in a community. These are good jobs. When you hear the politicians talking about the kinds of entertainment jobs that might leave, that's what they're talking about. And to be honest, that is worth saving because they can be an engine. You don't want a like Detroit style downward spiral where first the good jobs leave and then kind of everything else follows.

5:52Matt Belloni:So I see what they're talking about. And now this is like an issue in the L.A. mayor's race. We saw this week that Karen Bass, the current mayor, she is pro settlement of the Paramount merger. And Nithya Raman, the challenger, she wants this decided in court. So you have a real difference there of the two candidates. and the Paramount side represented by the current mayor, the Rob Bonta side represented by the insurgents. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. Also, like the whole, is LA the next Detroit? There's a million reasons why that's not a good comparison. I mean, sure, like the idea of Detroit getting depleted because of the auto industry hurting the city is a fair argument.

6:36However, Los Angeles is a better place to live than Detroit. Even if Hollywood completely left LA, people are always going to want to live in Los Angeles. It's the best weather in the country. And we were talking about this last week, like the ability to live a certain kind of lifestyle in LA, near big business and commercial business in LA, it's kind of unique to any other city in the country.

6:56Matt Belloni:It is where you can like live in the hills, but still drive down the hill 10, 15 minutes and get to your white collar corporate job. Like that's pretty unique. The weather is unique. Doesn't mean there's not challenges. Listen, like I see this stuff and I say these studios and Rob Bonta, they are playing a dangerous game with this Paramount merger. Like they could leave and it could cause a domino effect. And when you take a studio like Paramount out of an area like Hollywood, it will cause problems like that whole Larchmont area around Paramount. Like that's just starting to come back after COVID.

7:38Matt Belloni:and I do think it's because Paramount is five days a week in the office now and the writers' rooms and all the corporate employees and it's just there's more activity and LA has a lot of problems with homelessness and with the cost of living and all of these other reasons why people complain about it and take business elsewhere and if that continues, it could impact not just this small aspect of entertainment but the wider economy and that is a problem. I don't want to be seen as downplaying here. It's a real problem But in the grand scheme of things, I don't think it's becoming Detroit anytime soon.

8:11Yeah, this dovetails. We got a question from JF that says, how close are we to the Bonta Ellison fight over Warner Mount turning into another self-inflicted wound that kills any momentum that the industry bounce back has had? Basically, is this just another extended Writers Guild strike or COVID? Like, is this just the third body blow to Hollywood in the last six years? Do you think it'll be that significant?

8:31Matt Belloni:Well, it's interesting because this delay is causing a lot of stagnation. and uncertainty and people are just kind of in a waiting period. And I do think it impacts the market because people are like, well, I don't want to green light that for development because the new regime might not believe in this project. On the other hand, you still have two robust buyers in Paramount Plus and HBO and HBO Max that are trying to compete with each other. A friend of mine was just talking about this the other day about how there's a movie in the market right now, a project, a package, and Paramount and Warner Brothers are both bidding on it.

9:06Matt Belloni:And they're like, guys, you're running up the price here. And sellers love that. And that could be good if they are still doing this for the next eight months, trying to outbid each other. But ultimately, it's a stagnation problem where the longer this drags out, the longer there's, you know, the more there's uncertainty and there's no clarity on what's going on. And that ultimately does hurt things. So yes, it is a momentum killer. All right, let's pivot here to what you wrote about your newsletter last night. Somebody asked us, this is from XX, will Johnny Depp's comeback work? Okay, from XX, anonymous XX person on Twitter.

9:46Do you think this is Johnny Depp asking you if his comeback will work?

9:49Matt Belloni:No, it's clearly a Russian bot because Johnny Depp seems to have a lot of Russian bot fans, as we know. All right, so I wrote about this in my newsletter at Puck last night. Paramount thinks this is a smart move. they bet a 40 million dollar version of christmas carol called ebenezer on him the trailer is out he showed up at cinema at comic-con in costume of course he doesn't want to answer any questions as himself he came out at cinema con too i believe he did come out of cinema con but that's another safe environment no media questions there and the numbers on this movie at least from the first test screening were positive for the movie but really positive for johnny depp and that is what's interesting here.

10:32Matt Belloni:That movie, Ebenezer, in his test screening in New Jersey, scored an 86 for Depp, which means 86 % of the people who saw the movie rated Depp's performance good or excellent. I mean, look, if Americans can do one thing, it's compartmentalized, and they can overlook problematic behavior if they like a guy in a movie. Yeah, but for some, they do. Some, they don't. It's interesting. I think that Depp is particularly amenable to a comeback because he's always been weird. He's you never have bought into Johnny Depp as a person. Well, yeah, you buy into the weird characters that he does. It's not like Will Smith or when Will Smith is in a movie, he's kind of playing charisma.

11:16Will Smith, you buy into Johnny Depp disappears into these people. You don't really know what normal Johnny Depp, who that is.

11:23Matt Belloni:Yes, I agree. And that's why when Will Smith showed his real personality hitting Chris Rock, people were like, holy shit. And it's, you know, it's taken a while for him to come back. I do think Will Smith. Bad boys worked, but yeah. Bad boys did. Yeah, it was fine. But it's taken a while for him to get off the ground on the comeback. And I just think with Johnny Depp that this is the kind of thing people expect to see him in. A weird character doing a voice and under makeup. And, you know, the trailer looks fine. It's got kind of a gothic look to it. Yeah, it's kind of like slapstick. Ty West directed it, who's traditionally does a lot of horror.

12:01It's kind of like supernatural, silly. It almost looks like an episode of Wednesday. I don't mean that in a derogatory way. Yeah, you do. It's kind of like supernatural, funny horror elements.

12:13Matt Belloni:But this is a$40 million movie. If this were a$200 million or$140 million movie, then Paramount should be questioning their judgment. But if this movie makes$200,$300 million around the holidays, then the Paramount executives look like geniuses. You know, they bet on this guy. And ultimately, the audience is what decides. This was the point of my column. The audience is going to decide whether Johnny Depp is back or not. Not these executives, not, you know, the Twitter police or anyone who has come after him for the, frankly and objectively, pretty awful behavior over the years. The audience, if they want him back, they want him back.

12:52Matt Belloni:And we'll see very soon. All right, next question. Yeah, speaking of, are they back or are they not? This question came from multiple people. Why didn't Meghan and Harry succeed in Hollywood? All right, there's such a thing as product market fit. What does that mean? Harry and Meghan, as a product, they did not sell themselves as a product that people want to buy. And I know I'm commoditizing them, but this is the first rule of Hollywood. The audience is in charge. They didn't do what people wanted them to do. If you look at the projects that they made for Spotify and for Netflix, who wants to listen or watch Megan, Duchess of Sussex, talk to like founders of startups?

13:44Matt Belloni:That was what her podcast was. Well, that was her new one. She had archetypes of Spotify. She has a new one that's like something about female CEOs that did one season. and I don't know if it's coming back. They don't want to see her that way. Like I know for, I mean, Bill Simmons got a lot of attention for calling them grifters and I happen to agree with him on that, but they were never willing to go there. I know for a fact they were offered projects that would be more fun or would show them in a more traditional reality show life or would take advantage of, you know, their access to the Royals and Harry talking about the Royal family and growing up and all of these things, that is what people want out of them.

14:29Matt Belloni:They don't want them taken seriously. And the problem is, is that they want it to be taken seriously. And you know what? There's no market for that. I thought it was always thin. I thought the well of possibilities out of the two of them was very shallow. Like, I don't really know what you can get out of them that could extend into this larger universe of podcasts and documentaries and features and shows. I don't think there's enough there for them to even deliver on that. Like, to me, it felt they just felt like a much smaller entity than what they were sold as. If there was a real reality show showing the behind the scenes of their life and living in Montecito and dealing with problems and her acting career and him trying to figure out what he wants to do, like that would have worked, I think.

15:17Matt Belloni:But they don't want that. They don't want to be reality stars. Also, to me, that feels short-lived. It's like, I feel like you get that for a year. And once you kind of see it, you can move on from it. I don't know if that's a five or 10-year show. But she's an actress. Listen, she's doing this project in the UK, apparently. The Guy Ritchie show for Netflix. Like, she could have taken acting roles. But she never did. Because they probably weren't up to what her ideal of herself as a princess is. So you didn't watch With Love, Megan? I did not. No, nor did I sample her jam. and also the trying to brand herself as this like goop style influencer american riviera orchard like nobody in montecito calls it american riviera that is not a thing like it's just not like i know jam session has covered this extensively if you want megan markle coverage go to jam session the career stuff like it was just wrong from the beginning and it's them i know people in their inner circle who have tried to coach them and help them.

16:19Matt Belloni:They have WME. They've had publicists. They've had people around them from the business that are smart. It is them. They are the problem and good luck to them. I'm excited to see the third podcast they launch and what that is. Yes, exactly. All right. Next question here's from Steve. Although, Craig, we did see Cookie Queens at Sundance. We did. Which is the Girl Scout cookie documentary. Megan produced that, yeah. produced, please. She slapped her name on it and agreed to promote it. She came out and spoke, yeah. The documentary was very cute. It was good. It's cute, but that's not what people want from her either.

16:53Matt Belloni:That is not a career plan. That's like when the Obamas came to Hollywood and they had lofty goals and they were like, oh, we're doing highbrow stuff. Then they realized that that only goes so far. Putting your name on documentaries that already exist only goes so far. You actually have to produce stuff that people would actually want to watch. And when they figured that out, they had a little bit more success. I just feel like there was never enough there to begin with. And if the interest around you depends on you revealing secrets, it's just inherently hard to grow that way because once you say the secrets, there's nothing else to say.

17:26And people like Obama doing his podcast or Meghan and Harry, it's like there's only so much you're willing to say. And after that, there's nothing there.

17:34Matt Belloni:Yeah, but Obama at least used his clout to get a Julia Roberts movie made by the Mr. Robot creator. And that did very well on Netflix. Yeah. So it's just, they were never willing to go there and it's over. All right, let's go. Okay. Steve asks, does Netflix move to a movie theater window of 45 days or longer in 2027 or 28 as a way to keep and attract top directors and actors? I'm assuming Steve is thinking about Greta Gerwig doing Narnia, this Charlie versus the Chocolate Factory movie that's getting a 45 day window. the Cliff Booth Fincher movie, which might be pushed to 2027 also. No, no, no.

18:12Matt Belloni:I think they say that's coming out. It's coming out? Yeah, it's going to stick to the Thanksgiving window that Narnia had for IMAX. And that's getting like a month, right? A month in theaters? It's getting a month of a theatrical window, but it's only two weeks in IMAX. Yeah, okay. And then it'll be on Netflix on Christmas. Yeah. The short answer is yes. They will continue to, what they call experiments. They say, we're not changing our model, even though every single one of these is changing their model. They are increasingly realizing that it's very tough for them to win awards in the Oscars if they don't give these movies theatrical releases.

18:50Matt Belloni:They bought a movie at Cannes, and they are now giving that. I think it's called La Bolsa Negra, which they are trying to stuntize or eventize by giving it a 45-day or longer theatrical release. not that the theaters are clamoring for a foreign language film from Netflix. They want the big star-driven movies. But Netflix is using the window to promote its movie for awards because it knows that the awards crowd wants to see that theatrical window. And for the bigger movies like Narnia and like Animated Family Tentpoles, I do think we're going to see more of this experiment. They have this relationship with IMAX now.

19:31Matt Belloni:They have the relationship with AMC where AMC is willing to give them theaters for, you know, a 30 or 45 day window. I do think we're going to see more of it, despite what Ted Sarandos says. And do they release, do they distribute them wide themselves or do they get help from somebody? They get help from Sony. Sony. Sony helps distribute. And that's the real thing is like if they were going to go all in on theatrical distribution, they would create a theatrical distribution arm for themselves, which is what Amazon did. Amazon first started with domestic distribution, and now they're working on building out international, which is much tougher.

20:07Matt Belloni:Amazon has used Sony as well. So Netflix hasn't gone there yet. And that would be the big tell. If they all of a sudden hired a big crew to do domestic and international distribution, that would be the signal. They haven't done that yet. But I think they'll continue to do these stunts. Do you think it's mostly about awards or do you think it's about making money in theaters? I think it's about filmmaker relationships. They know that it's not getting better. It's getting worse. They thought Ted thought by now that everybody would come around to his point of view. Theaters are over only for the big IP driven movies and everything else is direct to platform or short windows.

20:51Matt Belloni:And the filmmakers are not buying that the big ones that they want to be working with. They see what Ryan Coogler got out of sinners. They see what Greta got out of her deal. Like they want that. And for the right filmmaker and the right project, I think the agents feel like they can get it. So that's, that's where they are. And Ted wants to work with the best people. It kills him that they have a deal with Spielberg's Amblin to make movies for Netflix, but Spielberg himself will not make a Netflix movie. Yeah. I maintain that it is damn near impossible to make a cultural, you know, moment out of a streaming only movie.

21:31Matt Belloni:We don't have to get into that. I agree with you. There's outliers here and there, but I know it's definitely impossible to create a star out of Netflix. You can have Netflix stars or streaming stars, but you put Millie Bobby Brown in a big universal summer tentpole, it doesn't open. Well, I'll make you do a quick prediction like it's a call sheet. Do you think the K-pop Demon Hunter sequel will get a 45-day window in theaters? Yes, yes. Yeah, I do. Too much money there. And they will recognize the promotional marketing value of it and they will give it a 45-day window. I mean, it could make half a billion dollars or more.

22:11Matt Belloni:And I think by the time it comes out, I think we will have moved closer and closer to the big movies all getting theatrical releases. Yeah. Could be wrong. Could be wrong on that one. Netflix is pretty steadfast in their beliefs, and that is their biggest franchise by far. So it would be a huge statement for them to just put it on platform. But I could see them. You know, it's like, why not? Why not take an extra$400 or$500 million? And who knows? by then it might be Paramount, Warner Brothers, Netflix. Yeah. By then they might have Warner Brothers, so they would have a slate of theatrical movies anyways.

22:45Matt Belloni:Yeah. Yeah, we don't know. This episode is brought to you by Peacock, presenting All Her Fault. Nominated for seven Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Limited Series, and nominations for both Sarah Snook and Dakota Fanning. NPR praises the series' exceptional performances, and The Wrap calls the series an adrenaline-filled psychological thriller full of jaw-dropping twists and turns. All Her Fault is streaming. For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Tremphaya offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tremphaya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks.

23:32If your doctor decides that you can self-inject Tremphaya, proper training is required. Tremphaya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Tremphaya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit TremfireRadio.com.