Good morning! Here's the latest on Donald Trump Jr., Drake, "Pod Save America," Shaboozey, Angela Merkel, Maggie Haberman, Truth Social, and more... |
"Moana 2" is about to set sail. I tried to buy tickets for Wednesday afternoon and the first two showings I clicked on were practically sold out. That's when I knew this was a worthwhile lead story.
Disney's latest and greatest animated feature – which opens in previews this afternoon ahead of Wednesday's wide release – encapsulates so much about the state of the entertainment business:
"Moana 2" was originally greenlit as an animated TV series for Disney+, but Bob Iger decided it should be a theatrical feature release instead. And as the AP's Jake Coyle wrote, "when you look at some of the numbers, it's hard to believe 'Moana 2' was ever going to be anything but a movie."
The original "Moana," released in 2016, was the most-streamed movie last year on any platform in the U.S. "Fans have watched nearly 80 billion minutes of 'Moana,' the equivalent of seeing the picture 748 million times," Bloomberg reported earlier this month. My children have added to that total...
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Record holiday run in sight |
Some of the early assessments of "Moana 2" have not been entirely positive. Maybe the sequel's soundtrack isn't as catchy as the original's. Maybe the story isn't as emotionally resonant. But Iger was astute to convert it to a feature sequel: Now Disney can double or triple dip, earning hundreds of millions of dollars in theatrical revenue, then enjoying the long tail of streaming viewership for years to come.
About the theatrical launch: Deadline says Hollywood is expecting "a $225 million+ largely day-and-date global opening." Timed for Thanksgiving, the movie is "going for a record this weekend, looking to upset not just Disney's previous $93.5 million 5-day record opening for 2013's Frozen but also the $125 million 5-day Thanksgiving haul of 2019's Frozen II."
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Reinvigorating the box office |
"It seems like every big budget picture has the entire continued existence of Hollywood, the dream factory, resting on it shoulders," Vulture's Bethy Squires wrote the other day. She pointed out that "Wicked" is on track to break several box office records. "Gladiator II" should also have a long life. "Glicked" invigorated a box office "that fell apart after a good summer," David A. Gross told the NYT's Brooks Barnes.
>> Barnes said the pair of films "amounted to cinematic comfort food — escapist, over-the-top stories that allowed Americans to leave behind a bruising presidential campaign and the continuing impact of inflation. People reach for nostalgia in times of stress, and movies that remind audiences of the past have been succeeding."
>> Speaking of the past, the original "Moana" happened to come out in November 2016, also on the heels of a Trump election win...
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More family films, please |
"If Hollywood really wants to make a comeback, it needs to take this lesson to heart: If you want to sell a bunch of tickets and popcorn, families are the ultimate consumer group," Los Angeles Times culture columnist and critic Mary McNamara wrote. She bemoaned the relative lack of four-quadrant flicks, observing that for families, movies are a treat; an outing; a break; a "shared language;" and so much more. Read on...
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"My baby want a Birkin, she's been tellin' me all night long
Gasoline and groceries, the list goes on and on
This 9 to 5 ain't workin', why the hell do I work so hard?
I can't worry 'bout my problems, I can't take 'em when I'm gone"
I thought about those lyrics last week when Philip Wegmann, White House reporter for Real Clear Politics, wrote that "the No 1 song on Billboard for 18 weeks running is about malaise – Shaboozey's 'Bar Song' – but DC operatives wonder if the White House was just 'messaging wrong' about an economy that's ackshually quite strong."
As Democrats continue to process their election losses, I'll just note this: "A Bar Song" just hit "its 19th week on top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart," tying "Old Town Road" as "the longest-running No. 1 song in the chart’s 66-year history," per THR...
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Harris post-mortem on Pod Save America |
Last week, Michael Tyler, the Kamala Harris campaign's communications director, called Dan Pfeiffer and said the Harris team was ready to talk. The resulting episode of "Pod Save America," titled "The Harris Campaign On What Went Wrong," is out this morning. Jen O'Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter talk about mistakes, media narratives, "double standards," and a whole lot more. "This is the beginning of a conversation about understanding what happened in 2024," Pfeiffer says at the outset...
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Trump Jr. targets WH briefing room |
Kit Maher reports: "Donald Trump Jr. said Monday that he and President-elect Trump discussed the possibility of reordering the White House press briefing room so podcasters and independent journalists have more access than legacy media outlets." The comments came on his show, "Triggered," in conversation with Michael Knowles, who said "maybe it's time to... take away some people's seats."
>> Trump Jr. said the conversation centered on "opening up the press room to a lot of these independent journalists" given how the "media has behaved." While it remains to be seen if Trump will attempt to make good on the threat, it wouldn't be the first time a Trump admin has tried to limit journalists in official briefings or played favorites with right-wing outlets...
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>> Stephen Collinson's CNN headline about special counsel Jack Smith bowing to the inevitable: "Trump's evasion of January 6 accountability will echo for next four years and generations to come."
>> "If you voted for Trump because you thought he was going to bring grocery prices down, I have some very bad news for you," Catherine Rampell said on "NewsNight," teeing up a conversation about Trump's new tariffs vows.
>> How the president-elect gets informed and misinformed: Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's new NYT story about OAN host-turned-Trump aide Natalie Harp, a "funnel for conspiracy-minded information," has some remarkable detail about her devotion to Trump.
>> Trump lashed out at The Times on Truth Social overnight, falsely claiming that "they do no fact checking," and asked "WHERE IS THE APOLOGY?"
>> Trumpworld's vow "to dismantle the leftwing 'censorship cartel' has thrown a shadow over the cottage industry of academics, non-profits and researchers that sprang up to combat a tide of digital misinformation," the FT's Hannah Murphy reports.
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Fight for Infowars continues |
Hadas Gold writes: A proper in-person hearing will be held next month to determine whether The Onion can continue forward with its purchase of Alex Jones' Infowars conspiracy platform. Jones and his allies have objected to a court-appointed trustee declaring The Onion, backed by some of the Sandy Hook families, as the winner in an auction for the assets to help pay off the nearly $1.5 billion Jones owes the families of school shooting victims. On Monday, the judge in the case said they will convene in Texas next month to determine whether the auction was handled appropriately, and whether the trustee made the right call...
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>> Oliver Darcy has lots of rich detail about the Washington Post's strategy to "win back" alienated subscribers... (Status)
>> NBC News Now "is launching in Mexico and Brazil, Latin America's biggest markets, as it continues to expand across the world," Anna Marie de la Fuente reports. (Variety)
>> NewsNation, which remains much lower rated than rival cable news networks, is revising its slogan from "News for All America" to "News For All Americans." (Variety)
>> The recent Hearst layoffs were worse than we knew: "All told, 192 people were laid off across all categories of editorial, ad sales, product, and PR," Charlotte Klein reports, citing a union rep who was among those laid off. (NYMag)
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Today's new nonfiction releases |
Germany's former chancellor Angela Merkel is out with her memoir, "Freedom," today. Also new in bookstores: Emily Mester's "American Bulk: Essays on Excess," Stephanie Gorton's "The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America," and Fox host Emily Compagno's "Under His Wings: How Faith on the Front Lines Has Protected American Troops."
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As Threads looks to regain ceded ground to Bluesky in the battle for former X users, the Mark Zuckerberg-owned platform "is experimenting with allowing users to set the non-algorithmic 'following' feed as the default," Engadget's Karissa Bell reports. The move is just the latest in a series of user-requested changes to Threads that Meta executives are suddenly embracing, including algorithm tweaks, updates to the search function, and reminders about the platform's default limits on "political" content.
>> Bluesky's user base has "grown by more than 50%" since last month, Casey Newton reports. The company says it is going to "quadruple the size of its moderation team..."
>> Remember Nuzzel? A similar news-aggregating tool now exists for Bluesky," NiemanLab's Sarah Scire reports...
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Truth Social's true growth |
"For the fourth consecutive month, the Donald Trump-controlled Truth Social platform generated significant year-over-year increases in unique visitors" in October, according to new data compiled by The Righting president Howard Polskin. Truth Social remains relatively puny, with 4.3 million unique visitors in October, but its relative gains are real. The site ranked #6 on Polskin's chart of right-wing websites, behind Fox News (which is 10x bigger than any other brand), the Fox-owned Outkick, Rumble, Newsmax, and Epoch Times. Before The Righting goes wide with this data later today, you can check it out here...
>> Last week, Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell filed this useful reality check about Truth Social's inflated valuation...
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>> New this morning: Trump "is considering naming an AI czar in the White House to coordinate federal policy and governmental use" of the tech, Mike Allen scoops. (Axios)
>> "Lawyers for the United States on Monday said that Google had created a monopoly with its services to place ads online, closing out an antitrust trial over the company's dominance in advertising technology that could add to the Silicon Valley giant's mounting woes,” David McCabe and Cecilia Kang report. (NYT)
>> "On Monday, Apple’s list of finalists for its coveted ‘iPhone App of the Year’ award once again reveals how the iPhone maker is downplaying the impact of AI technology on the mobile app ecosystem," Sarah Perez reports. (TechCrunch)
>> Amazon is betting big on A.I. as the company looks to bolster engagement, Lucas Manfredi reports. (TheWrap)
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"Drake alleges that Universal Music Group 'conspired' to artificially boost Kendrick Lamar's searing diss track 'Not Like Us' on Spotify, according to a pre-action petition submitted to a New York court on Monday," CNN's Alli Rosenbloom wrote overnight.
The petition claims that UMG used "bots" and pay-to-play agreements to "artificially inflate the spread of 'Not Like Us' and deceive consumers into believing the song was more popular than it was in reality." UMG called Drake's charges "offensive and untrue" and said "no amount of contrived and absurd legal arguments in this pre-action submission can mask the fact that fans choose the music they want to hear."
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>> The resentencing hearing for Lyle and Erik Menendez has been delayed until January 30... (CNN)
>> "The future of animation work in the AI era is beginning to take shape," Katie Kilkenny writes: "The Animation Guild has reached a tentative deal with studios and streamers over a new three-year contract for members in the L.A. area..." (THR)
>> Alec Baldwin spoke with Nick Vivarelli about "Rust," the film's recent festival premiere, media misreporting, and more... (Variety)
>> Charlize Theron "is the latest A-list talent to join Christopher Nolan's new feature." So far "Matt Damon, Zendaya, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o and Anne Hathaway are all set to star..." (THR)
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