Derek Thompson

Warner Brothers' discovery is a distressed property, is that it's an old school legacy player in a world that's being completely transformed by streaming and TikTok.

I mean, just two statistics, give people a sense of just how, in what trouble the movie industry is in.

Number one, in the long picture,

Americans used to buy 35 movie tickets a year in the 1940s.

Now we buy 2.5, 2.7 movie tickets a year.

That's an enormous decline.

But that change is not just over, say, 80 years.

Just since the pandemic, I think Morgan Stanley...

Yeah.

J.P.

Morgan recently did this analysis where they looked at different businesses in terms of their recovery since the pandemic.

And so they showed that restaurant sales were up like 20 percent and cruises were up and hotel revenue is up like 20 percent since the pandemic.

And you go all the way down to movie tickets bought.

and it's down 40 to 50% since the pandemic.

I mean, the movie industry is never coming back.

Films sold about 1.2, 1.6 billion movie tickets a year every year of the 21st century before 2020.

At this rate, at current trajectory, Americans will never buy 1 billion movie tickets ever again, ever again.

The movie industry will never get back to 2019.

And in that context,

You're dealing with companies that just aren't built for the next 5, 10, certainly 20 years.