The leaders of UFC parent TKO thought they’d need to divvy up rights to generate $1 billion a year in broadcast deals. Instead, they got David Ellison and New Paramount to make a statement with a $7.7 billion hammer-drop for all matches for the next seven years.

Runner-up: Joe Mann. Of everyone involved in Weapons, which opened to $43.5 million domestic this weekend on a $40 million-ish production budget, I’m gonna go with filmmaker Zach Cregger’s CAA agent, who negotiated a deal that paid Cregger $10 million upfront (he ultimately deferred $2 million of that) and gave him 50 points on the backend to dole out to collaborators as desired. The $20 million that Mann got Sony to pay Cregger for his next film, a Resident Evil reboot, now looks cheap. (More on the Weapons weekend from Scott Mendelson below.) And a little more on today’s Paramount news…

A lot of chatter today about David Ellison dropping $7.7 billion on seven years of domestic UFC rights for Paramount+. No way are the current financials of Paramount supporting this kind of move. To ultimately pencil out at that price—double the $550 million annual fee that Disney was paying for UFC—the subscriber and advertising gains would need to beat even the rosiest projections for the 13 “numbered” fights and 30 lesser “fight nights” per year.

The move will likely swing the newly profitable Paramount+ to losses, unless a big chunk of the costs are dumped on CBS, which will air certain matches. And without the incremental revenue from pay-per-view, which was key to the ESPN deal (though decreasingly) and is now being jettisoned by Paramount, this is a pure subs-and-ads play, hoping that year-round sports programming can bring over all those Monster Energy–drinking fans of people getting the crap kicked out of them and prevent churn on the service after NFL and golf. Okay, but… “overpaying” for UFC is exactly the kind of deal Ellison should be doing in the early days of New Paramount. A statement play, a declaration about the kind of company he wants Paramount to be, and an invitation to talent and other rights-holders to bring the biggest and best properties in the door. Ellison’s promise is that he can grow Paramount+ far beyond 77 million subscribers—no easy task, given the saturated market—and nothing moves the needle farther and faster than proven sports leagues. Especially the expensive ones. As my colleague John Ourand reported, Ellison made clear well before he knew the Paramount-Skydance merger would close that he was interested in UFC. I’m betting that not only would the previous Redstone regime have not bid—they likely wouldn’t have even been on the list to pitch. Here, Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube all wanted the numbered fights, and Amazon is said to have offered $800 million just for those. (It would have kept the matches as pay-per-views, per sources.) ESPN certainly wanted to keep the fight nights, possibly with a partner, and while Netflix bowed out of the bidding a few weeks ago, everyone from Warner Discovery to DAZN to Apple remained in the mix until almost the end. But nobody wanted all of it, at least not at the price Ellison was willing to pay. Maybe Ari Emanuel and Mark Shapiro, the leaders of UFC parent TKO, could have cobbled together comparable money from multiple bidders. But there’s a simplicity to working with one partner, especially if he’s willing to pay the new-guy tax that goes all the way back to Rupert Murdoch overpaying so the recently launched Fox could rip the NFL away from CBS.

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So no, I don’t believe the rumor that Ellison agreed to an outsize UFC fee as some kind of thank-you or quid pro quo to Emanuel, who also consults for Skydance and helped push the Paramount deal past the Trump folks. “That’s absurd,” Shapiro told me today. “Let the haters hate.”

Between UFC and the South Park renewal (both brokered in part by Ari), Ellison’s Paramount has now committed more than $9 billion to streaming content. And all signs point to additional splashy deals, both for film and television talent and whatever sports or live-event content hits the block, starting with international UFC deals as they come up. Where will that money come from? Efficiencies, Paramount says. Massive layoffs are looming. And if Ellison needs to raise more money—either from his father or others—he can just go back to his existing investors. Now, since the president and Dana White have said they want to host a UFC match on the White House lawn, we can hopefully look forward to Ellison participating in that awkward photo op.

14 percent Approximate increase in streaming subscription costs year over year, making this one of the highest year-over-year hikes in any category of consumer spending. [CPI]

35.6 percent Year-over-year increase in quarterly revenue at AMC Theatres, thanks to more and bigger box office hits this summer and the continued rise of premium large formats. No. 1 Ranking of Dolly Parton’s Dollywood on TripAdvisor’s new list of the best U.S. “Amusement & Water Parks,” beating Disneyland (No. 11) and Universal Studios Hollywood (No. 14) [TripAdvisor] $110 million Price paid by former Google C.E.O. Eric Schmidt for L.A.’s Spelling Manor, down from the $137 million list price and less than the $120 million that a Saudi national reportedly paid to buy it from Formula 1 heiress Petra Ecclestone in 2019. [WSJ] 0 percent Initial Rotten Tomatoes score for Ice Cube’s War of the Worlds. Regardless, an estimated 1.1 million U.S. households watched the film in its first five days on Prime Video. [Rotten Tomatoes and Samba TV] More: Take a bow, Amazon, for the year’s most idiotic product placement, including Cube stopping a scene to order a flash drive on Prime, right after a character refers to Prime Air as “the future of delivery.” Great stuff.

“Scott, it’s not 1995. No one gives a sam hill what Dean Cain thinks.” —Van Lathan, the CNN commentator and Ringer podcaster, responding on-air to Scott Jennings’s claim that Dean Cain joining ICE will help with recruitment. Lathan added: “Dean needs the $50,000—that’s what got him off the couch.”

Now here’s Scott with his take on the Warners hot streak…

What a difference six months makes in Hollywood. In early March, my colleague Kim Masters headlined this space with Can Mike & Pam Survive at Warners?, which chronicled the incessant industry debate over whether Warner Bros. Discovery C.E.O. David Zaslav would replace Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy as co-heads of Warner Bros. Pictures. Her story came in the long wake of the disastrous Joker: Folie à Deux, which De Luca and Abdy had said was their “first greenlight” at Warners, as well as the failure of Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17, a $120 million R-rated sci-fi comedy greenlit by the prior regime.

At the time, marketing chief Josh Goldstine and international distribution head Andrew Cripps had been shown the door. Pam and Mike were offering big budgets and creative freedom, and had even given up the Sinners I.P. to director Ryan Coogler 25 years after its release. Depending on who you asked, it was either aspirational or suicidal. But as Labor Day approaches, Pam and Mike are still standing and may have reason to gloat. The studio has become the first in Hollywood history to notch six straight $40 million-plus openers. Three of those six films are live-action originals. Last weekend, Zach Cregger’s Weapons topped the box office with $43.5 million domestically and $71 million worldwide on a $38 million budget. Sinners was both a big test for Pam and Mike’s vision and the cause for much industry handwringing related to Coogler’s unusual deal. But it earned $366 million worldwide and 5.8x its $48 million North American debut, becoming the top-earning live-action original in raw domestic gross since Christopher Nolan’s Inception 15 years ago. Admittedly, the Mike-n-Pam narrative—both their anticipated demise and now their resurgence—is a little more complicated. They didn’t greenlight Zaslav’s personal passion project, the double–De Niro–starring The Alto Knights, which flopped in March. And A Minecraft Movie, which grossed $955 million worldwide in the spring, was a long-gestating co-production with Legendary that took its final form just before Toby Emmerich exited the top studio job in June 2022. The Jared Hess–directed Minecraft earned $425 million in North America, more than any movie this year, on a $150 million budget. So the studio’s biggest hit was born and bred under the old regime, but Pam and Mike’s marketing and distribution teams helped launch what could be the first blockbuster-sized new-to-cinema live-action franchise since The Hunger Games. After Sinners and Minecraft, the pressure was off Superman, which delivered nonetheless. The first movie from director James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DC Studios did what Superman Returns and Man of Steel could not—earning $350 million-plus domestically and $600 million-plus globally. That is above the previous reboot’s $291 million domestic gross (sans inflation) but below Man of Steel’s $668 million worldwide gross, on a similar $225 million budget. However, reviews, real-world buzz, and interest in what might come next resemble Batman Begins and Iron Man far more than Man of Steel or Amazing Spider-Man.

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That doesn’t mean that DC Studios will become a butts-in-seats brand. In 2025, even the Marvel Cinematic Universe has seen its drawing power subside. However, when you can push an R-rated, original vampire movie like Sinners to nearly $300 million domestic and turn a Minecraft comedy into a near–$1 billion grosser, who cares if DC Studios becomes the next MCU?

If WB can make new stuff into big-deal hits or rework older franchises into top-tier blockbusters, it won’t have to live or die by the performance of a few annual DC flicks. (Indeed, in a letter to shareholders last week, Zaslav promised 12-14 movies in theaters per year, including 1-2 from DC.) If Disney were currently minting new franchises, it wouldn’t be as concerned that the MCU isn’t returning to its mid-2010s glory days. WB’s streak now continues with Weapons, a shockingly well-received horror title that also skewed 72 percent under-35 in its opening weekend. It will likely last through Labor Day, after which The Conjuring: Last Rites will grab the baton and cruise to a potential $250 million–$300 million worldwide. Considering WB’s April-to-August track record, Paul Thomas Anderson’s $140 million One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, doesn’t need to be a hit. Assuming it’s well-reviewed and scores some awards nominations, the loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland can stand on its own as a prestige art project, and no one will lose much sleep if it plays closer to Killers of the Flower Moon ($159 million worldwide in 2023) than Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood ($395 million in 2019). In the midst of all this, a Warners playbook has emerged in the Abdy–De Luca era. They’ve placed big bets on projects they believed in, and made sure that the franchise and brand offerings had something of value for general audiences. Sinners offered two Michael B. Jordans fighting vampires in 1932 Mississippi, a genuinely unique theatrical experience. Minecraft, one of a number of fruitful collaborations with Legendary, offered the in-game material alongside Jack Black going full Jack Black while bouncing off a kid-friendly cast-to-type Jason Momoa. Final Destination: Bloodlines was just a Final Destination movie, but the promotion (and the film itself) hyped the franchise-specific gimmick— watching hot actors get Rube Goldberg-ed to death—and made it appealing even for audiences with no attachment to the prior films. Even Superman offered in-movie bonuses like a misbehaving superdog, topicality, and Edi Gathegi’s scene-stealing Mr. Terrific, which appealed to the Superman-indifferent. October’s Mortal Kombat II will offer a chance to test whether S.V.O.D. glory (the 2021 reboot earned just $85 million worldwide, but was the largest viewership weekend that year on HBO Max) can translate to a theatrically successful follow-up—assuming it can appeal both to fans of the source material and those merely showing up for some R-rated mortal kombatting. Even a moderate upswing from its predecessor will help kill any lingering doubts about Abdy and De Luca’s luck with Minecraft and Gunn-Safran’s meaningful hit.

When it’s on its A game, WB remains Hollywood’s best studio at turning less-conventional titles (Magic Mike, American Sniper, It, Barbie, etcetera) into overindexing blockbusters. And blockbusters take time to gestate, which is why there may be a temptation to attribute Abdy and De Luca’s success to prior eras. But that’s standard Tinseltown business. Mark Canton got fired from Sony in late 1996 only to watch his 1997 summer slate—My Best Friend’s Wedding, Men in Black, and Air Force One—rank among the year’s biggest earners. Ditto Paramount’s Brian Robbins, who benefited from films like Top Gun: Maverick, The Lost City, and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 that Jim Gianopulos put into play for release in 2022.

The same is true for Warners. If the current co-heads of the studio shared blame for Mickey 17, which was greenlit before their time, they should also share credit for Minecraft. Meanwhile, many of WB’s big franchises, like Dune, the Monsterverse, and Minecraft, are Legendary co-productions. But as long as both sides stay chummy, with those franchises remaining WB-distributed even if Legendary buys Lionsgate, that’s also business as usual. Amid all this success, WB eliminated 10 percent of its workforce last month, and WBD’s recent earnings were dragged down by the ongoing struggles in linear television. So it’s not clear how much anyone at the company should be celebrating. Still, the biggest issue facing the movie portion of the studio is that its success this year will just create challenging comparisons when 2026 rolls around. But that’s not the worst problem to have, especially in this business.

For David Ellison fetishists, here’s his full interview with CNBC’s David Faber. Faber seems to think Ellison has already made a deal with the NFL to avoid the change-of-control opt-out in the CBS contract. [CNBC]

As I predicted, Fox’s NFL games (plus the World Series and your granddad’s “news” shows with Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters) will be available with the ESPN stand-alone streamer. You’ll just need to pay $40 instead of $30. [CNBC] Bill Cohan sees stock price challenges at New Paramount and Warner Discovery into next year. [Puck] Turns out Disney Adults aren’t just serial killers in training, they’re also an important theme park demo to which Disney is increasingly catering. [Bloomberg] Jimmy Fallon, who lost the late-night ratings crown after his Trump hair-tousling incident, now seems to want it back via the calculated move of welcoming Fox News’s Greg Gutfeld. [Vulture] A Slate writer attended the Kill Tony comedy show in Austin and hilarity did not ensue. [Slate] Someone stole $25,000 worth of Labubus. [The Cut]

Thursday’s breakdown of David Ellison’s first day at Paramount drew a thoughtful voicemail from a longtime CBS News veteran. I condensed it here…

“I just wanted to say thank you for highlighting the importance of the new owners making the rounds here yesterday and at least pretending to care about the quality of the news we produce. For a lot of us, being used as a political volleyball has drained our morale and made us question why we do what we do. I’m serious about that. What is the ultimate goal when your leadership will sell you out [to the president] to get a deal done? … Now we are hearing a lot about ‘down-the-middle’ news. That’s what they want. But that is too simplistic. People who work in broadcast news know that few of the good stories have two easy sides. It’s always more complicated than that, so we will only know the motivations of these new owners when their assumptions are tested.” —A CBS News producer

Have a great week, Matt

Julia Alexander and Maya Tribbitt contributed research for today’s issue. Got a question, comment, complaint, or someone who loves you like J.D. Vance loves boy bands? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

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