Explaining the Business of Entertainment
Weekly looks at the biggest news in entertainment.
The goal this week? Keep this column under 2,000 words and not split into two parts. Can we do it? Sure. Even better? We can do it with a story most folks missed! The only challenge will be restraining myself on Covid-19 thoughts. Let’s get to it. (Sign up for
Last week’s news was notable for how much “lots of news with no news” that came across my inbox. In other words, part of me thinks that following the news closely last week probably resulted in more misunderstanding than wisdom. Which we’ll get to, but first, a few companies reported
Jeff Bezos ending his run as CEO of Amazon is certainly neé clearly neé absolutely the biggest story in business this week. Is it also the biggest story in media, entertainment and communications broadly? Sure. Bezos is a man who built Amazon to be “the everything store”. That includes your
For the last two weeks, my weekly column overflowed into two articles. I promise I won’t make this a habit…unless everyone likes it better. Let me know on Twitter. Meanwhile, here were the other stories vying for the top spot last week. But we’ll start with the story that had
It’s rare–though not as rare as it seems–for a company to compete not just for the top spot in my weekly judgement of the most important story in entertainment, but to have two different stories compete. HBO Max has actually done that a few times, and so has Netflix and
As The Stranger told The Dude, sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you. Such was last week’s weekly column for me. (By the way, check out this great article on the origins of the quote above.) I had a lot of thoughts percolating about the most
When a Netflix earnings report comes out, it generates lots of news. Usually, though, they don’t claim the top spot in my most important story of the week, because not much really changes. This week, though, Netflix did make some news. So let’s make it… (Sign up for my newsletter
Well, living through the last two weeks of news has shown that the pace of news in 2021 isn’t slowing down. The most notable story for entertainment—though it was pushed off the front page within 24 hours—has to be the Democratic Senate wins in Georgia last Tuesday. This week, we’re
Well, give 2021 credit for trying to catch up with 2020 in terms of monumental new stories. This is absolutely one of the craziest weeks in my lifetime and I assume many of the folks who read. (Though, for historical hindsight, we tend to forget how absolutely chaotic the 1960s
Last week felt like the “winter finales” of the fall TV business season as we resolved two long simmering dramas in the land of TV. CAA settled with the WGA, bringing one of the last two major agencies into alignment with the WGA’s demands for agents. And HBO and Roku