The Hollywood Stock Market: The Rock, Louis C.K., Kevin Feige, Sora 2, and More!

0:00Matt Belloni:If you care about Hollywood, and I assume you do if you're listening to The Town, you should really be getting the whole story about Hollywood. That's what you get with Puck. I'm a founding partner at Puck, and I write a newsletter called What I'm Hearing. It's got exclusive news for insiders and analysis of the biggest stories. Puck has a bunch of great journalists. We just hired Kim Masters, who also covers Hollywood from the inside, plus media, sports, fashion, politics, and finance. It's a must-have for plugged-in people. Fans of the town get a discount on the description page of this episode or at puck.news slash the town.

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1:09Matt Belloni:This summer, serve up the cookout classics, Oscar Mayer hot dogs and Heinz mustard. Grill up a dog, add classic yellow mustard, or load it Chicago style. We all know it's not a cookout without Oscar Mayer and Hines. It is Monday, October 13th. Today, it's a live show. Lucas Shaw, our normal Monday guy, he hosted his Bloomberg Screen Time event last week here in LA. Really great guests, very delicious tacos, ice cream. Thank you to the listeners who came up and said hello. Very nice. Once again, we did our Hollywood Stock Exchange episode. Lucas and I picked some buys and some sells. These could be people, companies, trends.

1:49Matt Belloni:The goal is to, of course, buy things with upside, either at a low point for them or with tons of room to grow or sell at either a high point or when something is about to fall even further. It was a great time. Some surprising choices, I think. So today it's the Hollywood Stock Exchange 2025, live from Screen Time. From The Ringer and Puck, I'm Matt Bellany and this is The Town.

2:15Matt Belloni:This is great. Thanks, everyone, for coming. I was all excited that we got moved to the big room this year. And then I realized that they just eliminated the small room. But you're the only thing from the small room to make it to the big room. That I survived? Okay, I'll take that. It's the small wins here. You beat Shade. Everything else lost to Shade. Okay, great. Yes, no, the big improvements this year. Shade, the food is amazing. And of course, this guy, a little applause for Lucas. This is really the marquee event. This is like Essence Fest for corporate communications executives. They're all here.

2:54I thought you were going to get canceled later. You're already trying to get canceled now.

2:57Matt Belloni:No, I'll be canceled later. All right. So what we are doing is something that we have made a tradition for this live episode, which is the town's Hollywood stock market. We are going to pick a couple things to buy, a couple things to sell. The goal being you buy low. The goal being you sell high. These are not personal endorsements of these entities or people. We are simply evaluating them on their business prospects. Is that a good disclaimer? Yes. At least one of mine is not so much the business prospects, but more sort of a vibe. But yes, I'm with you. Okay. So why don't we start and I'll give you the first pick.

3:38Matt Belloni:Do you want to start with a buy or do you want to start with a sell? I'm going to start with a sell because I feel like I've enjoyed my sells more. Why is it John Krasinski and why do you hate him? I'm trying to avoid the personal attacks this year. I'm not. I'm not going to blindside people. Mine is, I'm a little worried that mine is going to require a lot of explanation. Okay. But my first sell high is basically the AI freak out. Okay. clarify clarify um i there'll we spent the last week or two with everyone convinced that sora is about to replace filmmaking as we know it i think we spent a lot of the last couple years you can say me you can highlight me in particular i wrote something too that i think i will look back on perhaps not so fondly so you think these agencies are going overboard putting out statements saying We disavow Sora.

4:32Matt Belloni:We're opting out our clients. I think concerns about copyright violation and Hollywood sort of once again missing out on a lot of value creation in a new technology are very real. So I just want to be clear about that. I think the notion that you are suddenly going to have a lot of movies wholly written by, starring, or directed by artificial intelligence is utter horseshit. You do? Yes. Okay. But for how long? Forever? Or five years? Ten years? I'm not a technologist. But I think looking into the future, it is more likely that it creates a bunch of tools that get used. But you're not suddenly going to replace Timothee Chalamet with AI Timothee Chalamet.

5:19But Timothee Chalamet, maybe instead of having to be on set for two months and then also go back for reshoots and also doing a bunch of other voiceover stuff, that stuff is what gets stripped out. But the main actor is still required. Interesting.

5:34Matt Belloni:Would you give your photo to Sora? I'm sure Sora... You don't have a child, but if you did have a child, would you let your kid put their photo on Sora? I'm sure that Sora already has my photo. But they are saying for now that they won't use it until you opt in. You mean would I opt out of it being there? No, you have to opt in for your photo to be used to create an avatar. Well, I'm not a celebrity. In this room, you are. Everybody's a celebrity in their own world now. I guess if given the choice, I would rather not be a part of it. You wouldn't want to see an AI Lucas Shaw reading the Wall Street Journal in a video?

6:17Matt Belloni:I mean, look, a lot of respect for the Wall Street Journal. There are much worse things, even if they're a competitor, there are much worse things that some random person could make me do using Sora. Or cheering for the Yankees or whatever. You understand what I'm saying. I definitely don't need me cheering for the Yankees. But I would make that video and I would send it to you. I have a lot of friends who would, you know, I once at an event like 10, 12 years ago at this point, I interviewed Shaq and he gave me a noogie. And a friend made a gif of him giving me a noogie. That, if someone could, because I think that's sort of lost to time.

6:47If someone wants to bring that back, I'm all for it.

6:49Matt Belloni:But in the AI version, he could body slam you. He could throw you around the room. He could do all sorts of things to you. Sure. All right. We're going to move on. Are you going to start with a buy or a sell? I'm going to do a sell. I'll do a sell as well. I'm going to sell Comcast. Okay. Does it count as selling high if their stock is going down? You give me shit about this. I know. The stock is down 25 % this year. But I think this is a very challenged company. The whole prospect of a broadband-based company and where things are going right now, the declines in mobile subscribers, the declines in video, Peacock not being scaled.

7:29Matt Belloni:They could be the odd man out when it comes to Warners and Paramount. Where does that leave them? The Versant stuff is a big question mark whether that's going to work or not. I feel like of all the big media companies that you're looking at right now, tell me what the Comcast strategy is, and I don't totally know. Interesting. I guess it's funny that you say that because for the last several years, people would have said, well, they're one of the only stable ones because entertainment doesn't matter to them. Matters less. Yeah, but that was when the broadband business was a bigger business. Yeah, there's way more competition in connectivity than ever before because of the phone companies.

8:11Matt Belloni:I mean, would you want to be a Comcast shareholder right now? Like, not great. No offense to people that are... I don't know that I... Well, setting aside the fact that I am ethically prohibited from owning any of this stuff. I don't know that I would be itching. like if you told me you can invest in five companies, they wouldn't be on that list. But I would be more comfortable having stock in them than some of the other media companies. You would? Yeah. Oh, interesting. We don't have to go through the list. But all right, give me your first buy. I will buy Dwayne Johnson. Oh, really? Interesting.

8:46He just had a movie that did not open at all, Smashing Machine.

8:50Matt Belloni:Even though he cried at Venice. and he was pigeonholed for so many years and could not make the kind of movie that he just made. The public stuff, kind of annoying. Even though he produced all those really bad blockbuster movies. He is undeniably a star with a big following and I'm really not worried about his long-term career prospects. I think that what you have to remember with any actor or actress these days is there is pretty much no one who can open a movie or who can open any movie, right? We just thought, okay, people have gone crazy over the PTA movie. That's one of the worst openings of Leonardo DiCaprio's career.

9:28And it won't make money. It will not make money. I hope I could have said that. No, they said that it would leg it out in the launch.

9:34Matt Belloni:Yeah. The ultimate, maybe the 30-year waterfall. He maybe took that movie from$5 million to$20 million. But there's a limit. And I think with any actor, there's a limit. That was not a movie that people were going to pay to see Dwayne Johnson in. But does that mean that when he's in the next Jumanji movie, No, he's got Jumanji, he's got Moana next summer, he'll be fine. I don't know that I would buy his Oscar chances right now. I think that has gone bye-bye. Well, if we were doing Oscar chances, I would have made some different selections. But we're talking about commerce here. And he'll strong-arm A24 into spending$3 or$4 million to pretend that they think he's an Oscar contender.

10:10Matt Belloni:And when he doesn't get it, they'll call and say, I can't believe you didn't get it. Do you think that he's someone who can have that Oscar moment in like 15 years? I mean, anybody can. Anybody can reinvent themselves. I think the lift here for him was much harder. He's been so famous for so long doing a particular kind of thing that it's not a Brendan Fraser situation or a John Travolta situation where they sort of went away and then reemerged as this different kind of actor. He's just like plotting this in as one of his stops on the Dwayne Johnson road to infinite fame. He's like, oh, I could be a serious actor now.

10:45Matt Belloni:This is a role that I could actually do well. He tried it kind of with pain and gain. and didn't work there either. So I don't, I just... An underrated Michael Bay movie. Yeah, okay. But, you know, I mean, he's Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold, like, tried to do more serious movies, never tried to do the Oscar movie for a reason. Like, I just don't... Just stick to what he does well. Yeah, exactly. And he had a long career. All right. So my first buy, and this is not someone who is particularly low, but it's someone that I think has the long trajectory and it's based on stuff you and I... Did you just say this is someone who's not necessarily low?

11:24Yeah. So you sold a company whose stock is down here and you're buying someone who's not actually low. I just... Okay, got it.

11:30Matt Belloni:But I'm going upside. You don't have to be a successful market player. You don't have to always buy the worst. You can buy something that has upside. You're buying a dip. Okay. I think that Josh DeMauro is a buy. I think you've got to buy it. I'm sorry. The guy who everybody says it's going to be the next. No, no, no. Okay. Everybody says that. Not everybody, by the way. I hate to break the Jimmy Kimmel. I don't think his person's getting it. Are you really just trying to use this to curry favor with the next CEO of Disney? No. Oh, God. Please no. No. If that were the case, I would not be telling you why I'm dicking him.

12:00Matt Belloni:What happened this week, to me, is the ultimate I want to be CEO. What has everyone been complaining about for the past year? The prices at the parks. And what does he do? Screw you. We're raising him again. the price hike at the parks this week is outrageous like the fact that they can just be like you know what everyone's complaining where these videos are appearing on social media about how Disney World is empty screw you that is aimed at the bottom line that he knows is going to push him over the top with the board they want someone who is not afraid to enrage their customer base I think it's as simple as that like if he's willing to do that and he knows the pricing power that they have, what are you going to do?

12:47Matt Belloni:He's basically saying to these Disney adults and Disney fans, what are you going to do? You're going to pay it. Yeah. You're going to pay. I'm not going to pay. I'll pay. I have a nine-year-old kid. Of course I'm going to pay. But that's the business they're in. Do you think there is a point at which because you're closer to this because you have a kid. Is there a price at which it really becomes an issue? Great question. I think that New York Times story that you cited on the show a couple weeks ago was not great for them. A whole story about how Disney is contributing to the stratification of America.

13:19Matt Belloni:There is now two Americas, one for rich people, one for not rich people. Disney, if they don't watch themselves, they will become the poster for that conversation. And there is a point. I don't know where it is. I'm not an expert on this. I think Disney clearly says they are far away from having reached that. I mean, I interviewed Bob Iger, this is almost seven, eight years ago. And he said, we could double the prices if we wanted to. At this point, they sort of already have, but inflation's kept up. And he said, we could double the prices and make more money. We choose not to do that because we see Disney as an accessible brand.

13:55Matt Belloni:And the question is how long it's going to be an accessible brand. And when it costs$300 a person to get a park hopper in Anaheim for the day, like... Well, it was also the debate that they had about Disney Plus, which was they chose to come in and underprice it to sign up as many people as possible. There were people who felt, though, that they are a premium product. They are not trying to appeal to everyone. And so if you're not appealing to as many people as Netflix, but you know that the people who love your service will pay a premium for it, you should have the highest price in the market.

14:27And they're sort of belatedly trying to figure that out.

14:29Matt Belloni:It's a scaled version of what's going on with Taylor Swift, where she's extracting the most money possible from her superfans via all of these versions. Is that a way of saying that you're selling high on Taylor? I'm not. I do not want them coming for me. I already, yeah. But it's exactly that. They are all of these things. It happens with Donald Trump. Donald Trump is charging his fans to buy his Bitcoin and buy his stakes and products and stuff because he knows there's a super fan that's going to do it. And Disney knows that there's a super fan for Disney products that they can get pricing power over.

15:03So we're going to give out Trump gold at the next live show? Yes. All right. So give me your next sell. I'm going to... Can I do my next one as a combo?

15:13Matt Belloni:Sure. It's your event, man. I'm selling mini dramas and buying... Oh, dude, I have that. And buying scripted on YouTube. Oh, you are. Okay. I have this as a sell microdramas. Yeah. I think this is one of these media manufactured narratives where there is an audience for it. I'm not dismissing that. But it's mostly Chinese women watching kind of racy... It's like softcore porn. Softcore porn, yes. And what happens is that there is a bit of an audience for it. And you have these... And it's something... They may be popular in parts of East Asia. And then there are some people who watch it here. And then some people start writing about it, including Bloomberg.

15:51We've done stories on it. And then every media outlet under the sun thinks this is a cool trend story to do. And so you end up having 20 trend stories on the rise of the microdrama. And yet I would challenge any of those authors to tell me, do they know someone who has actually watched one? We don't use personal anecdotes. But if you asked across 20 reporters and none of them had someone in their lives who even watched them. It's like people who are interested in Tron Aries. No disrespect. I would normally put you in that demographic.

16:23Matt Belloni:I am not interested in Tron Aries. I do think there will be scripted programming. There is scripted programming on social channels or in shorter form that will pop. We have Kinegra Dion speaking here. she's one of the people on YouTube, eventually scripted programming on YouTube, scripted programming on TikTok. Platforms of the real following will take off. But these are sort of like second, third tier services. You don't think there will be a house of cards of micro dramas? No. It seems like you agree. I agree. Yeah, we don't have to debate that.

16:58Matt Belloni:Let's go to my second cell. And this one is going to be controversial, but it's not because I don't like this guy. Very nice guy. I think seems talented. This is not a John Krasinski situation. It is not. It is Glenn Powell. Ooh. I'm selling Glenn Powell. Someone earlier today suggested I should... Why are you selling? Okay, so he had his moment. He's high off of Twisters, off of Anyone But You, off of Top Gun, Chad Powers. Not good reviews. We've not seen the ratings on him. Maybe it's huge. I kind of doubt it's huge. He's got a couple movies coming. He has an A24 movie with Margaret Qualley, which is a smaller movie.

17:35Matt Belloni:It's like a revenge thriller. Then his next two movies are starring vehicles with Judd Apatow directing and Ron Howard directing. Two filmmakers that have had their day, very talented. But haven't had a hit in a while. Haven't had a hit in a while. And in fact, have had pretty famous flops and have had trouble even getting movies made. In Ron's case, certainly. Well, not made, sold. No, and Apatow shopped his cancel culture movie and nobody bought it. and the movie before that that he did was The Bubble. Did you see that during COVID? It was tough. So I'm just saying, we all want Glenn Powell to be Tom Cruise.

18:13Matt Belloni:I just don't think he's Tom Cruise. Now, do you feel like he's just going to hit a rough patch? Or that his... He'll always work. He's not going to be a big star. Michael B. Jordan is a star. Timothy Chalamet is a star. He's not going to join that club. And he is often discussed in that same group. and he's not in that group. So, sorry. So, I did debate. Very nice guy. I did debate also selling high on Sidney Sweeney. Where do you land on that? I didn't commit to it, but where do you... Is this a Scooter Braun thing? No. I know you hate Scooter. I don't hate him. I just think he's a fraud. So, can we talk?

18:56Can we just take a moment on Sidney Sweeney since they're linked? I'm sure.

18:59Matt Belloni:What would you like to talk about with respect to Sydney Sweeney? I was asked, what do you think of the... You're a long-term buyer. My problem with her choices so far... High volume, limited impact. High volume. It seems like her team, her representatives, are trying to cash out before she ultimately goes to one of the big agencies. She's at Paradigm. And no disrespect, if this is coming from her, I don't have any reporting on this. Maybe she's saying, I want to do this, this, this, this. but sometimes when you have a star that goes from nothing to someone who matters the representatives that you had when you were nothing try to just book book book book because they know that the big agencies are going to come calling and you won't have that client forever so it seems like that she's producing everything she's i just worry about over overexposure yeah and although apparently this the boxing movie is good christy yeah so you know maybe maybe she's got a new for She'll get a big hit off Euphoria when that comes back.

19:58Matt Belloni:Right. So we'll circle the wagon for the year. I was not prepared to list her in any way here. But since you went there, that's my take. I had her with a question mark at the bottom. Okay. So give me a buy. I think I'm on for it. No. Okay. I'll do a buy instead of a sale. I'm going to buy Ed Sheeran. Oh, okay. Even though... So he's already one of the biggest stars in the world. Yes. Mr. Criticizing Me for picking people at their height. But if you follow music sales, his most recent album, Tanked. he released a new album in September you probably didn't even know that so that is a problem isn't he still one of the biggest touring artists so this is why I'm by I think Ed Sheeran is entering the phase of his career kind of like Coldplay where he does not matter as a recording artist like not a pop star the albums aren't going to sell but he will be one of the biggest touring artists for the next 20 years you think he's done as a pop star he generates his own material he seems like a guy who will have another big song He's entered a new phase of his career.