Julia Alexander

But we see that engagement from theatrical releases on streaming is also much higher than streaming originals.

And so to your point about money and why Hollywood would be interested in this, it's really hard to build yourself to be the next big Leonardo DiCaprio or Scarlett Johansson if you're not

in theaters.

And so I think this component of we have a nostalgic love for movie theaters, we want these more communal events, but we also don't want to be relegated to Netflix slop in an era of AI slop is a big reason why

I think you saw parts of Hollywood look at Paramount and David Ellison originally as the savior of Hollywood.

And I think now, once people have started doing the math on it and realized that that would mean Paramount had to release a movie almost every other week, which is an impossible load for a company like that to do.

And precedent, by the way, from the Disney-Fox deal tells us that that never was going to happen, as we've seen kind of happen with Fox Searchlight films going direct-to-consumer for a lot of them.

I think it was worked out in Netflix's favor in saying, like, we're still committed.

Even if they're not, it's giving Hollywood enough time to kind of process what may or may not happen, knowing that Paramount is a little bit less likely to kind of come through.

Yeah.

There is no difference.

And in part because they have the same businesses.

They're coming from the same position.

The only difference is that David Ellison has a personal bank from someone valued at a couple hundred billion dollars who can kind of come in and say, you know, his father, Larry Ellison, and we'll just continue to fund this.

But it –

There's no discernible difference between what David Ellison wants to do, at least that he's publicly said, versus what David Zaslav tried to do for the last few years.

I think if you compare the eras of Warner Brothers and Warner Media and Warner Brothers Discovery and whatever else it's been over the last 20 years, Time Warner, I think when you look at it,

The only person who really came in and said, I have an idea for what we want to do to make this a differentiated company in 2022, 2021, was Jason Collar, who was this kind of technologist futurist who was the CEO of WarnerMedia for a couple of years, but who also damaged the reputation of that company with Hollywood.

Yeah, he's more Silicon Valley in that way than he is Hollywood.

But I think if you look at what he tried to do with the WarnerMedia assets, he said we should have a CNN streaming service that was CNN+.