(Welcome to the “Most Important Story of the Week”, my bi-weekly strategy column analyzing the most important (but often not buzziest) news story of the last two weeks. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. Please subscribe.)
Man, the list of articles I’d wished I’d written is long. So many topics; so little time. How to cover it all?
For example, I wish I’d called my shot last year—and I kinda did, but didn’t write a full article on it—on whether or not we’d see a mergers and acquisitions explosion under a second Trump administration. Frankly, I thought merger activity would likely increase, but not “explode”, a subtle but crucial difference.
(Historically, I’ve been very merger skeptical. Almost as soon as I started this website/newsletter, I expressed skepticism about the state of M&A. Back in 2018, after the AT&T merger deal with Warner Bros won its court case, a slew of folks predicted a wave of M&A. That wave never really hit shore.)
Everyone else disagreed. And I mean everyone. After Trump won, multiple articles in multiple publications predicted a wave of predictions about a wave of M&A coming.
I saw so many headlines that even I doubted my own take last month, writing, “The M&A landscape will remain muddled, though more deals will definitely happen than during the Biden administration.” (To his credit, the lone analyst/journalist I saw buck this trend was Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw, who argued M&A had pretty much continued throughout the Biden administration.)
Recently, though, we’ve been treated to headlines like this instead:
I bring this up, because while there are still a lot of other news stories in the entertainment and media biz—like Apple rethinking sports, Warner Bros Discovery trimming back on games, or Amazon changing film strategies—let’s be honest: the new Trump administration is disrupting…everything. And doing it quickly. And we’re all thinking about it.
So that’s the story of the week: what does the new Trump administration mean for the entertainment industry?
Let’s dive right in.
Most Important Story of the Week – What President Trump’s Second Administration Could Mean for Entertainment
One of the staples of the comic book industry is the “year one” book. We all know Batman, for example, but what was his first year on the job like?
I feel like someone could write Trump: Year One, describing what Trump did in 2017, and how his new administration learned from that time period, for good or for ill, depending on your political leanings. In year five, he’s taken those lessons and figured out how to really deliver his style of politics up-and-down the government.
Normally, I try to avoid political issues in this newsletter, unless they directly impact the media & entertainment business and the strategy therein. As such, I have to opine on President Trump, because it will have real world impacts, though I recognize, no matter how carefully I choose my words, some folks won’t like what I have to say. That’s politics. But I wrote about Biden and antitrust and I’m applying the same standard to the current President.
Moreover, I waited to cover this important subject matter until we actually saw what President Trump would do, not what he and his allies messaged. And now we know.
Or I should say we know what we don’t know:
Things are going to be very uncertain moving forward.
The Theme? Uncertainty
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