As I write from my kitchen table in the throes of coffee withdrawal, the following major film festivals have either just recently ended, are currently ongoing, or are on the direct horizon: Telluride Film Festival, Venice International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and the BFI London Film Festival. (I miss being a critic). 

Film festivals are useful resources for both talent and distributors. Filmmakers can use them to premiere their work and spark industry interest. Studio executives use them as a screening ground to evaluate new titles. If a premiere goes over like gangbusters with the crowd, prospective buyers may walk out of theaters already on the phone with sales agents. If a bidding war erupts, the talent will likely try to extract more concessions from interested parties, whether that be financial terms, theatrical distribution or other considerations. 

I bring this up because nearly 75 percent of all Best Picture nominees premiere at film festivals. But just as quickly as the standing ovations erupt during awards season, we can’t forget to evaluate the business side of things. How have some of the most expensive film festival acquisitions performed once they entered the merciless jungle of mainstream commercial metrics? Let’s take a look. 

Nocturnal Animals: acquired by Focus Features at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival for $20 million

Legendary fashion designer Tom Ford has directed two feature films since making his directorial debut in 2009, with a third on the way. (Why don’t you leave some talent for the rest of us?!)

Ford self-financed $22.5 million for Nocturnal Animals, an adaptation of the 1993 Austin Wright book, Tony and Susan. Normally, that’s a risky proposition. But given his resources and the fact that cinema is just a side hustle for him, one can see the logic (and be left envious).

Universal’s specialty division, Focus Features, scooped up Nocturnal Animals for $20 million in a deal that additionally included an eight-figure marketing commitment. Despite good reviews—it’s an incredible yet darkly heavy film, not exactly overflowing with rewatchability—and a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for Michael Shannon, it only earned $30.3 million worldwide. Generally, studios hope to earn 2.5 times a film’s production budget at the box office.

Palm Springs: acquired by Neon/Hulu at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival for $17,500,000.69

In January 2020, Andy Samberg’s delightful timeloop romcom set the record for the most expensive sale in Sundance Film Festival history (that cheeky 69 cents was deliberate). The plan was for indie banner Neon to distribute domestically, with Hulu gobbling up the eventual streaming rights. You know what happened next. 

With theaters shuttered, the film was forced to release exclusively on streaming that July. At the time, Hulu claimed that the title broke its opening-weekend film record for hours watched, yet did not reveal any actual numbers. This was still when the streaming industry was guarding its overly generous long leash from Wall Street by staying silent on how its releases actually performed. Yet this business thrives on bragging about big numbers. Vagueness is the enemy of success. (The movie earned $1.3 million at the international box office.)

Despite its fun sci-fi hook and breezy tone, Palm Springs never made any of Nielsen’s weekly streaming top 10 lists. (It’s worth noting that Nielsen only released a Top 10 combined overall ranking beginning in August 2020, as opposed to the three separate Top 10 lists today.) Plus, Hulu only had around 35 million subscribers at the time. Given all that, the odds were stacked against Palm Springs. Just a bad beat. 

It’s What’s Inside: acquired by Netflix at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival for $17 million

Greg Jardin’s feature directorial debut premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2024, where Netflix acquired the $2.5 million horror comedy for a whopping $17 million. That’s a healthy return on investment for the filmmaker, but was the juice worth the squeeze?

Sadly, no. The film opened to an anemic 3.3 million global “views”—defined by Netflix as the total number of hours watched divided by the total runtime—ranking just eighth in its release week and staying in the Top 10 for only two weeks. Since then, it’s amassed just 27.9 million global views as of the first half of 2026. That’s not enough viewership to justify the price tag.

Obsession: acquired by Focus Features at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival for $15 million

Hollywood was obsessed with Obsession. It was easily the story of the year. An original horror movie made on a budget of less than $1 million, acquired by Focus Features for $15 million, and a global gross of more than $500 million worldwide? This is what dreams (and wishes, but let’s be careful there) are made of. 

It’s Focus Features’ highest-grossing film ever, and the highest with a budget under $1 million, surpassing Bruce Lee’s 1973 Enter the Dragon. It’s also the top-grossing festival acquisition of all time, surpassing Fahrenheit 9/11. Not to mention that it’s the least expensive film to top the weekend box office in 17 years, since Paranormal Activity in 2009, and the highest-grossing original film released in the 2020s thus far.

Anyone who says they’ve found the next Obsession is lying. It’s one of a kind.

Blinded by the Light: acquired by New Line Cinema at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival for $15 million

In 2019, Warner Bros.’ New Line Cinema won the auction at Sundance for Blinded by the Light, in a bidding war that reportedly included Fox Searchlight, Lionsgate and other distributors. Yet despite a rapturous response at the film festival from plugged-in movie lovers, general audiences weren’t as kind.

The film earned just $19 million at the global box office. Oof. Sure, it didn’t have any butts-in-seats stars (with all due respect to 2019 Hayley Atwell). But it did have Bruce Springsteen’s discography boosting the soundtrack and a wonderful coming-of-age feel-good story. One would have thought those elements and a late summer release window would’ve garnered a bit more attention. (I watched Blinded by the Light on a plane for the first time and wept throughout its moving ending. #NoShame.)

What to watch at this year’s film festivals

This year, Martin McDonagh’s Venice darling Wild Horse Nine is already generating rave reviews. Telluride and Toronto’s hot title Elsinore, starring Fleabag’s former “hot priest” Andrew Scott, is apparently an acting showcase. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s top-secret Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything debuted at Telluride and instantly became a viral meme sensation. 

Commercial success has no bearing on quality art. But it does, unfortunately, play a significant role in dictating what kind of art reaches the mainstream at a wide enough scale and who usually gets to continue telling stories at certain budget levels. It’s context worth keeping in mind as this year’s crop of buzzy titles hope to ride a wave of enthusiasm to golden glory. 

A24’s horror film Backrooms and surrealist dramedy Dream Scenario were both made on budgets of around $10 million. Yet the former delivered its studio’s biggest opening weekend ever ($81.4 million) en route to nearly $400 million worldwide. The latter, despite starring Nicholas Cage, earned just $12.4 million total. Similar low-budget specialty division titles. Completely opposite outcomes. This sort of outcome variance should be on the mind of every studio distributor hunting for the next ROI sensation during the fall film festival season. 

Audiences today are either overly fickle or increasingly savvy, depending on which Hollywood executive you speak to. Either way, the problem remains the same: prestige alone is no longer a consistent audience attractor. Commercially viable “art films”—or titles from smaller labels such as A24, NEON, Focus Features, Sony Pictures Classics and specialty divisions—aim for critical acclaim and strong box office returns on typically moderate budgets. But they now need some sort of hook to break through. Genre, concept, talent, spectacle, audience target—not in lieu of creative ambition and craftsmanship, but as an additional reason to buy a ticket. As the lines between arthouse and commercial filmmakers blur, specialty distributors are increasingly aiming for broader appeal. 

Recent hook-driven wins

Art plus something—that’s the growing aspiration. A movie can be incredible and still absolutely bomb at the box office (2023’s American Fiction may have been nominated for Best Picture, but it deserved far more ticket-sales love). We have a few post-COVID examples that speak to the benefits of this sort of alignment. 

Backrooms earned nearly 40x its budget as a horror film with source material rooted in online culture. Its success had less to do with courting the YouTube audience specifically and more to do with supercharging young audiences overall. Around 86 percent of its opening weekend gross was driven by moviegoers under 35, according to exit-polling service PostTrak. Neon’s Longlegs, which earned 12.8x its $10 million budget at the worldwide box office, followed a similar path. 

The timely political commentary draped over the action spectacle of Civil War (2.5x its $50 million budget) led to an impressive 47 percent of people saying they planned to see it in theaters, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy. 

The younger-skewing star power and chatter-spiking mystery behind Zendaya’s character in The Drama helped the film earn 4.7x its $28 million budget. Nicole Kidman’s erotic thriller Babygirl (3.2x, $20 million) drew valuable theater visits from infrequent moviegoers. Conclave’s (6.4x, $20 million) papal-conspiracy procedural thriller balanced prestige and ticket sales well. 

On the surface, each of these skewed closer to art films. Each likely reached profitability by selling audiences on an additional hook. 

Cautionary tales

Once upon a time, prestige and awards status overlapped far more with box office ticket sales. (Rain Man was the highest-grossing film worldwide in 1988!). Today, prestige is a budgeting risk. 

According to inflation-adjusted box office figures from The Numbers and Box Office Mojo, Oscar Best Picture nominees accounted for around $3.5 billion in annual domestic box office throughout the 1970s, hovered between $2.5 billion and $3 billion through the 1990s, and then settled much lower in the 2000s at $1 billion to $1.5 billion. Since 2010, despite the Academy increasing the number of Best Picture nominees from five to as many as 10, total box office has declined again. 

You can make good movies all day long. But trouble abounds when they aren’t made at budgets that can be supported by revenue. That’s both an art and a science, especially as audiences are less likely to turn out for awards contenders these days. For example, Spencer ($18 million budget) earned Kristen Stewart her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, but it still lost money. Keeper ($6.1 million gross), It Lives Inside ($6.5 million) and Cuckoo ($6.6 million) all had horror hooks and still underperformed. 

Hooks aren’t guarantees

Just because you’re playing with a reliable genre or pushing a buzzy narrative doesn’t mean success is set in stone. Michael Mann’s Ferrari had all the makings of a hit on paper: Thrill-inducing sports drama, a starry cast, a premium brand name and awards ambitions. But it made just $44 million worldwide against a $95 million budget. The joint power of Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson couldn’t propel the psychological drama of Die My Love ($12.2 million) to box office glory. One would think Saturday Night ($10 million) would’ve drawn some interest from older SNL devotees, yet Greenlight’s “Theatrical Intent” score among the 35+ crowd sat at just 34 percent at release. 

A consistent genre, attractive stars, and a core target audience can all be hooks. But the question is whether the hook is distinctive and aligned enough to capture enough attention in a highly crowded cultural environment. 

If climbing theater costs and inconvenience were the primary drivers behind non-event theatrical films falling out of favor, removing those obstacles should, in theory, draw larger audiences. Yet, even when the barriers of access are at their lowest, viewers still aren’t necessarily flocking to these smaller titles. Looking at the last several years of top annual streaming film performance data across Nielsen, Luminate, Samba TV, Digital i, and Diesel Labs reveals a trend: virtually no specialty/prestige dramas have ranked among the top 10s. Instead, these lists are dominated by family-friendly animation, superheroes and action thrillers. The few adjacent exceptions are Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Tom Hanks’ A Man Called Otto, wide releases with hefty star/brand power. A far cry from small-budget arthouse films making the festival rounds. There’s a very real attention hurdle here. 

The art film isn’t dead. But to remain alive these days, it needs more than just art to convince consumers. It needs a clutter-cutting hook and a responsible budget to avoid fighting an uphill battle. Adapt to the competitive times or risk going extinct. 

The Western genre is often viewed the same way we think of newspapers and dial-up internet: fossils from a bygone era best left behind. But audience behavior suggests otherwise. Nielsen named Gunsmoke the most-binged series of 2025, averaging a whopping 241 episodes per viewer. Meanwhile, Neo-Westerns such as 1923 and Landman, plus Western-adjacent romance drama Virgin River, are among the most-watched streaming original series of the last few years. 

A 70-year-old TV show and its modern-day genre descendants are generating billions of hours of viewership. Perhaps the death of the Western has been greatly exaggerated. 

Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan, who also has his hands in 1883, 1923, Mayor of Kingstown, Tulsa King, Special Ops Lioness, Lawman: Bass Reeves, Landman, The Madison and Dutton Ranch, didn’t magically create a new audience of Neo-Western crime-thriller fans out of thin air. Streaming performance data suggests that demand has been not-so-quietly enduring. A&E’s Western Longmire and Netflix’s Virgin River have both enjoyed multiple appearances on Nielsen’s annual most-watched streaming originals lists since 2020. 

Heartland audiences have long been misunderstood and underserved by Hollywood. But the volume of tailored programming has been picking up, and Sheridan is a major reason why. It’s not just that he revived cowboy hats and sweeping plains; he’s coupled Western’s traditional hallmarks with genre elements that particularly pop within serialized storytelling. 

Sheridan’s laundry list of TV series blends family and dynastic drama with action crime elements. They toe the intersection of socioeconomic status and land ownership. Soap opera stakes and governance vs. independence flanked by horses and guns. Sheridan’s ability to merge multiple subgenres with contemporary tensions and package them all as Westerns has helped him dominate his home streamer, Paramount+. 

Landman, a big-oil drama about “roughnecks and wildcat billionaires,” is Paramount+’s most-watched original to date. It was the fourth most-watched streaming original of 2025 in total viewing time, per Nielsen. (Only Stranger Things, Squid Game and Wednesday charted higher.) Both of Landman’s first two seasons also ranked among the 10 most-watched streaming series in their respective release years, according to Luminate.

Taken together, multiple audience-measurement systems suggest that Western and neo-Western programming has become one of streaming’s most reliable draws. Marshals Season 1, which generated 221.6 million viewing hours, and Landman Season 2, with 145 million, ranked among the most-watched individual streaming seasons during the first half of the year. Landman and Virgin River also remain among the most-watched streaming originals overall, while The Madison and Dutton Ranch both made strong debuts earlier this year.

Yellowstone may have jump-started the modern Western trend. But now it can’t be dismissed as a fluke or one-hit wonder. The genre is delivering multiple new huge hits simultaneously. 

The power of Western nostalgia

Again, it isn’t just Sheridan driving the bandwagon. Legacy/comfort and new original demand both play a role for audiences. Making older IP broadly accessible is a turnkey to success for the former. Right now, audiences can find Gunsmoke’s massive library of episodes on Paramount+, Peacock and Pluto TV—multiple entry points for lean-back, laundry-folding TV. It’s a major reason why the show has revived itself as an older-skewing binge sensation. (We know older audiences are more loyal viewers). 

But can nostalgia and legacy comfort be converted into a contemporary hit? That’s what Netflix is attempting with its Little House on the Prairie reboot. The series debuted to 15.3 million U.S. TV viewership hours, per Nielsen. That’s a respectable domestic debut, yet below Netflix’s standard 20 million-hour breakout threshold. 

Globally, Little House on the Prairie garnered 42.7 million viewership hours, per Netflix. (Netflix’s global viewership hours measure TV and mobile device consumption.) As most Netflix binge series do, it grew in week two to 65 million worldwide hours, then fell sharply in week three to 26.3 million. For the Western genre, there’s not quite as much juice outside of North America. Enduring library viewership doesn’t always translate into massive reboot success. 

That’s particularly true at the theatrical level lately. Post-COVID Western and Western-adjacent films Killers of the Flower Moon, Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1, Cry Macho, and Eddington had combined production budgets of $317 million yet grossed only about $225 million worldwide. None of the individual films out-grossed their publicly reported production budgets.

Streaming also isn’t a sure thing. Netflix released two very different Western films in 2021: The Power of the Dog ($39 million budget) and The Harder They Fall ($90 million). Both generated a healthy amount of praise. Yet, neither landed among Nielsen’s Top 15 movies on streaming in 2021.

The Western hasn’t died out. But what constitutes a Western, and where best it succeeds, has evolved. We still have our old TV classics, as well as more recent series made in their image, pulling in considerable numbers. Contemporary Neo-Westerns, which mix and match elements from multiple genres, have become particular powerhouses. Big names, from Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford and Jeremy Renner to Michelle Pfeiffer, Helen Mirren and Nicole Kidman, have signed on to these modern updates. 

But whereas once John Wayne and Co. ruled the silver screen, the evidence suggests TV is where the genre fits best today. Whether or not Hollywood can redirect that appetite back to the big screen is a key question moving forward. But for now, don’t underestimate what a new coat of paint can do for a veteran genre.

Recently, fantasy author Brandon Sanderson announced that he had finished penning the first draft of his Mistborn screenplay. This was big news among his devoted following, because it’s the first on-screen adaptation of his stellar seven-novel Mistborn series. In a worst-case scenario, we’re about to see billions of dollars lit on fire in real time. But in a best-case scenario, this will be looked back on as the point at which the blockbuster hierarchy first began to shift.

Sanderson and Apple have partnered to bring his sprawling Cosmere literary universe to both the big and small screens in one of the most ambitious content plans in recent memory. Not only is it a desperately needed big swing for the subscale Apple, but it’s also an attempt to build new franchises in a new way. 

Hollywood doesn’t have an IP problem; it has a pipeline problem. Anyone paying a lick of attention to Hollywood over the last 15 years knows that established franchises and IP extensions are among the most popular offerings across film and TV. Harry Potter. The Lord of The Rings. Marvel. The Hunger Games. Game of Thrones. The last quarter century birthed new transportive fantasy worlds that transcended their source material to become pop culture pillars. Yet lately, new big-budget hopeful franchise launchers have mostly failed to ignite. Even when a new-to-screen movie is based on popular source material, it can be difficult to migrate fans from one medium to the next. Throw in rising theater costs and endless streaming options, and it’s easy to see why movie ticket sales continue slumping overall. Can Sanderson break the spell?

Sanderson had sold more than 50 million books worldwide as of December 2025. Unlike traditional author-industry dynamics, he carefully built a direct relationship with his audience. As a product of the internet age, he’s been as accessible and engaged as any popular author in recent memory. 

As a testament to his direct-to-consumer relationship-building, Sanderson has raised around $100 million through crowdfunding. This includes a record $42 million from Kickstarter campaigns, used for self-publishing premium deluxe books, producing monthly fan “swag” box bundles and launching tabletop games. On top of all that, he sells out his own fantasy convention every year. His fan passion is very real. 

His social media ecosystem also offers a structural advantage because many of the same users engage with him across YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, providing the audience with multiple potential on-ramps. Unsurprisingly, Gen Z (98 percent) and Millennials (58 percent) are the most engaged YouTube users (followed by TikTok and Instagram) and the exact viewers studios try to reach, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy. This online presence helped his crowdfunding, which speaks to the enthusiasm of his fans. He’s already done the hardest part in building a new franchise pipeline from scratch. 

Apple isn’t buying books; it’s buying an architect

Apple is granting an unprecedented amount of creative control to Sanderson, who has little experience in film, television and multimedia franchise IP expansion. Per The Hollywood Reporter: “Sanderson will be the architect of the universe; will write, produce and consult; and will have approvals. That’s a level of involvement that not even J.K. Rowling [Harry Potter] or George R.R. Martin [Game of Thrones] enjoys.” 

Only time will tell if this decision is foolish or genius. What we do know is that Apple is making an even more committed bet than Warner Bros. made with Rowling and Martin—that their worlds can yield enduring audience demand. The first two Harry Potter films were still the fourth– and sixth-most-watched general-audience movies in the U.S. last year, according to Nielsen, despite controversy surrounding the author and the decades since their release. The upcoming HBO reboot is guaranteed to be an early viewership sensation as Professor Snape swishes his cape about in dramatic fashion. Meanwhile, the Game of Thrones universe delivered its third breakout hit series earlier this year, and more are on the way. 

The most enduring value comes from building a content catalog that can be mined for years. Those long-running sure-thing franchises are absolutely necessary for healthy studio longevity. They print money across mediums. It isn’t just sequels, it’s merchandise, gaming, streaming retention and beyond. Low marketing lifts because audiences are already in love with the world. But does Sanderson have the ability to engineer a decades-long cross-pollinating media universe à la Marvel’s Kevin Feige? Apple certainly hopes so. 

Apple needs this

Apple’s entertainment division needs a franchise hit more than anyone else. Despite a deep library of acclaimed originals, Apple TV holds only a 10.3 percent platform share among sci-fi movie fans, behind Amazon Prime Video (24.2 percent), Netflix (17.1 percent), Disney+ (11.4 percent) and Hulu (11 percent). This is partially a function of Apple’s small reach. 

As of last year, the streaming service reportedly lost more than $1 billion annually while spending roughly $4.5 billion on content, with just 45 million global subscribers. It’s not even listed among the nine most-watched streamers in U.S. TV Time, per Nielsen’s monthly measurements. 

“Apple could afford to lose money, but they’ve never scaled streaming,” MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Nathanson told Puck News. The Cosmere universe—with dozens of novels, interconnected worlds, various tones, time periods, and settings, and ongoing stories—is built to help solve these genre and engagement gaps if it succeeds. (Big if).

Fantasy is a hard nut to crack. Amazon’s Rings of Power cracked Nielsen’s 2022 top 15 series (9.4 billion viewership minutes), but hasn’t returned to a top-10 list since. Netflix’s Wednesday, a young-adult horror-comedy-fantasy retelling of classic IP, is one of the few fantasy franchises that made it to the top titles by global reach in 2025. Solid viewership for Frankenstein and healthy early tracking for Narnia suggest Netflix is maintaining momentum in the fantasy genre across select TV and film titles.

The fantasy ceiling is enormous, while its floor is a deep, dark chasm of costly failures (RIP Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, the Willow TV series, King Arthur: Legend of the Swords, and many others). There are an estimated 1.75 million frequent indie fantasy adult moviegoers in the U.S., per Greenlight. This demo skews younger, urban and multi-cultural. Apple doesn’t need Harry Potter or Game of Thrones level reach. It needs to supercharge a loyal core first and grow from there. That’s been Sanderson’s modus operandi for 20 years. 

None of this comes without job-on-the-line risk. Apple will spend mountains of money bringing this multifaceted franchise to life. Historical Hollywood hit rate suggests it’ll be lucky if half the adaptations find an audience. But delivering a single breakout fantasy universe could be worth decades of value. 

Hollywood usually buys IP from a creator and takes it from there. Here, Apple is buying the creator himself and entrusting him to bring new life to it. If it succeeds, it may set a new precedent for the future of studio franchise management. 

Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is Hollywood’s latest attempt to launch an original blockbuster-scale property. It was a strong bet given its pedigree, solid quality and manageable $115 million production budget. Yet, with only $237 million at the worldwide box office as of this writing, it is expected to lose money. The torch has officially been passed to Christopher Nolan. Despite being a near-three-hour R-rated historical epic, The Odyssey nearly matched Superman‘s opening weekend with $123.5 million. Yet Nolan’s paradigm-shaking moneymaking with big-budget newness is virtually impossible to replicate. Disclosure Day joins a growing list of expensive original and new-to-screen bets that struggle to turn a profit, launch new franchises, or break out globally. 

In both 2024 and 2025, 13 of the year’s 15 highest domestic grossers were either sequels, prequels, spinoffs or reboots. As of this writing, eight of this year’s 15 biggest films are also franchise entries. This isn’t remotely surprising. We’ve arguably been living in the age of intellectual property (IP) since 2008. What’s more surprising is where new breakout IP tends to originate from.

The challenges of originality 

Hollywood can and does create successful original and new-to-screen properties. (We are going to define new-to-screen as movies that are not tied to established franchises, even if they are adapted from books or games.) But these winners mostly emerge from horror, thriller and general lower-budget genre filmmaking rather than expensive blockbuster originals. While IP remains vital, there is a growing appetite for freshness. The challenge is that originality appears far easier to monetize at $10 million-$40 million budgets rather than at $100 million-$200 million. Spending big on something new doesn’t seem to be working lately.

That is not to say that originality is dead. Weapons ($38 million budget), Smile ($17 million), M3EGAN ($12 million), Longlegs ($10 million), Obsession ($750,000), Backrooms ($10 million)—all of these recent movies delivered impressive attention-grabbing ROIs. But they did so largely because of their modest budgets. Adding up all of their worldwide grosses still doesn’t match the ticket sales of Inside Out 2 ($1.69 billion). 

Post COVID, only a small handful of non-Christopher Nolan, big-budget, new IP titles have financially delivered at or above expectations: Free Guy ($331.5 million at the worldwide box office versus a $100 million-$125 million budget), Elemental ($496.4 million vs. $200 million), Sinners ($371.3 million vs. $90 million-$100 million), F1 ($634 million vs. $200 million-$300 million) and Project Hail Mary ($684 million vs. $200 million) lead the pack. Even then, Elemental needed a super leggy run to overcome a weak opening, and Free Guy isn’t exactly a financial barn burner. Otherwise, 2018’s A Quiet Place ($17 million budget) and 2014’s John Wick ($20 million-$30 million budget) are the last live-action original franchise starters of note, yet neither has delivered an entry that topped $450 million globally.

The list of high-priced, bottom-line-ruining new disappointments in recent years is twice as long and spans every studio: Disney (Amsterdam, Strange World), Apple (Argylle, Fly Me to the Moon), Amazon (Masters of the Universe), Warner Bros. (Supergirl), Lionsgate (Megalopolis), etc. Despite nine-figure budgets across the board, none have surpassed $200 million at the worldwide box office as of this writing (and I cut several so this article wouldn’t devolve into an assembly line list). And it’s not just the big-budget arena that proves so difficult for new concepts. Sheep Detectives, The Breadwinner, Power Ballad, Is God Is, and I Heart Boosters were all met in theaters this year by an apathetic audience. As analyst Entertainment Strategy Guy recently wrote: “We’ve had years before that were about or better than 2026 in launching new franchises.”

The hit rate becomes dramatically less reliable—and far more damaging—as budgets rise. 2021’s Dune may be the last big-budget live-action franchise launcher, though it wasn’t technically original/new-to-screen since it was previously adapted in the 1980s. Meanwhile, 2009’s Avatar may be the last successful big-budget franchise launcher that wasn’t directly tied to a pre-existing brand. It’s been a long and arduous road of expensive trial and error since, especially as Hollywood spent a decade unsuccessfully chasing Marvel’s shared cinematic universe model. 

Why small-budget titles are more likely to become hits

So why are new hits and franchises mostly sprouting from smaller-scale titles? Basic economics. Lower-budget originals can succeed with narrower audiences. Their path to profitability is shorter. Expensive originals require broad appeal and big-ticket sales, and therefore familiarity increasingly matters as budgets approach blockbuster scale. Books, games, historical figures and other source material provide a bridge between originality and familiarity, reducing the risk and uncertainty of unexplored territory. It helps partially explain the successes of Barbie, A Minecraft Movie, Five Nights at Freddy’s and more. The latter two video game adaptations proved to be hits with younger moviegoers, giving the $150 million budgeted Minecraft Movie a rare big-budget new-ish win. 

Taking a step further, familiarity is even more crucial to slightly older moviegoers. There are an estimated 42 million U.S. moviegoers aged 35 plus who are likely to attend opening weekend based on nostalgia, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights and Content Strategy. Pre-existing connections cut down on studio marketing challenges and provide audiences with more certainty in a subjective industry. Older, more infrequent moviegoers were the driving force behind the shattering success of Top Gun: Maverick ($1.5 billion worldwide box office), while multi-generational appeal across 20 years of Marvel storytelling helped Spider-Man: No Way Home set franchise highs ($1.9 billion). 

The issue may not be the demand for original stories, but convincing audiences to leave home and spend $15 to $20 on an unfamiliar story. On streaming platforms, for example,  audiences still consume large amounts of new-to-screen content. Wicked, Back in Action, and The Electric State were three of the 10 most-watched general audience movies on streaming last year, per Nielsen. Wicked, KPop Demon Hunters, Back in Action, The Wild Robot and Nonnas also landed among Luminate’s top 10, while Back in Action, Sinners and A Complete Unknown all made it onto Samba TV’s most-watched year-end list. Streaming has become the low-risk, low-cost arena for unfamiliar stories. One click away is an easier ask than a trip to the theaters. 

Hollywood hasn’t stopped creating new IP or delivering new stories. It may simply have become far more expensive and risky to create it at a blockbuster scale. Disclosure Day becomes the latest test of whether the industry can still consistently launch the next big thing at blockbuster levels without relying on pre-existing audience familiarity, or if new IP/franchises will continue to mostly evolve out of lower-budget fare. Given the economics, expect the next generation of Hollywood franchises to sprout more from the fertile ground of $20 million gambles rather than $200 million studio extravaganzas.

Christopher Nolan may be done with the superhero genre, but his own superpowers are as potent as ever. He’s become arguably the most bankable Hollywood director today. Yes, that’s in large part due to the sheer quality of his work. But we can actually quantify exactly what separates him from the pack.

Nolan’s movies tend to win over audiences late in their release and draw in people who don’t usually go to the movies, at levels his competitors rarely match. These are the true levers to the filmmaker’s odds-defying, consistent success. And we’ve got the data to prove it. 

Understanding Nolan’s edge requires us to begin with in-genre comparisons. His recent historical epics have consistently outperformed similar titles by other directors. According to Greenlight Analytics, in its final tracking wave before release, Oppenheimer’s Awareness (53 percent) and Theatrical Intent (47 percent) topped the final tracking scores for Napoleon, Ferrari and Nuremberg while roughly matching Gladiator II’s intent with notably less awareness. No one else taking a trip through history’s memory is enticing audiences at quite the same frequency. 

The Odyssey, which will arrive in theaters this Friday, is on a similarly impressive trajectory. General audience Awareness (58 percent) and Theatrical Intent (47 percent) are in very healthy positions as of nine days before release. Crucially, the marketing is reaching more people as its awareness is higher than all but Gladiator II at this point. The anticipated ensemble has already surpassed Oppenheimer on several tracking metrics at similar pre-release points, most notably in Theatrical Intent for Women older than 35 (The Odyssey’s 39 percent vs Oppenheimer’s 30 percent). There are few benchmarks left for the director to beat outside of his own. 

Homer’s The Odyssey is one of our most popular and enduring myths. This adaptation follows the cursed Greek king Odysseus battling mythical monsters and angry gods to survive the seas and reclaim his kingdom after 10 years of fighting in the Trojan War. This story feels thematically aligned with the filmmaker’s previous cinematic ambitions. Inception saw a dream spy’s reality-bending determination to reunite with his children gross $840 million worldwide. Interstellar explored how a heroic father’s love for his children can traverse the universe ($681 million worldwide). World War II-set Dunkirk ($527 million) proved to be a paradigm-shifter within the industry, while Tenet ($365 million) delivered an entirely new take on time travel.  

Sight unseen, Nolan’s entries into the genre garner more goodwill than the average title in the field. But it’s the way in which he accrues such buy-in that is really interesting. 

When movies become events 

It’s not just that audiences want to see a Christopher Nolan film. It’s that his releases inspire a frenzied urgency. Audiences want to see his movies as early as possible and on the biggest screens as possible. They become monocultures in an era of niche echo chambers. 

From 30 days pre-release to nine days out, The Odyssey’s audience is showing a swelling wave of deep enthusiasm. General audience Opening Weekend Intent has risen by 17.4 percentage points, a strong signal of upfront demand, per Greenlight. Premium Large Format, or those willing to pay higher ticket prices for IMAX, Dolby, and 4DX screenings, has risen by 3.4 percentage points, underscoring ticket sales upside. And Opening Weekend Intent among aware audiences (those that know about the film) has skyrocketed by 33 percentage points. 

That’s far better than the movement Superman (+0.5, +2.3, -1.8) and The Fantastic Four: First Steps (+2.1, +3.4, -0.5) showed in the same pre-release stretches. Both superhero properties see opening weekend intent remain relatively flat during this span. Meanwhile, The Odyssey’s opening weekend commitment is spiking by an abnormal amount. Two examples do not make a trend, but you get the idea. There’s a voracious audience hunger out there made all the more impressive by Nolan’s work outside of standard franchise fare (though I’m sure someone at Universal will ask Nolan if he wants to make The Iliad next). 

Nolan movies attract non-cinephiles

It’s not just Nolan’s compelling non-linear narratives, practical in-camera spectacle and genre-juicing stories that set him apart (or his impressive scarf collection). It’s his ability to bring casual moviegoers—and even people who usually prefer watching at home—into theaters that makes him a true box office star in his own league. Folks who don’t usually buy theater tickets are far more likely to for a Nolan flick, and that’s real power.

As of this writing, The Odyssey’s Theatrical Intent for casual moviegoers is running slightly ahead of where recent $80-ish million openers Project Hail Mary, The Mandalorian & Grogu and Avatar: Fire and Ash all debuted, per Greenlight. Specifically, casual moviegoers under 35 are running 10 percent higher than in the first two films. 

Casual female moviegoers over 35 follow the same generous pattern, and young casual moviegoers, both male and female, are tracking well ahead of those films. Among infrequent moviegoers who prefer watching at home, the upcoming ancient Greek epic is tied with Mando among men under 35, ahead of Project Hail Mary in the same group, and 10 percent+ ahead of both Mando and Project Hail Mary among women under 35. This is practically found money, given how rarely these viewers actually head to theaters. 

Urgency, enthusiasm and varied audiences all contribute to the big box office. It’s a simple formula, but difficult to execute. The Odyssey looks to be another example in Christopher Nolan’s long track record of drawing out all of the above, especially for non-franchise fare. In a world of subjective art and overblown expectations, he is the closest thing to a guarantee that Hollywood has to offer.

It’s unnerving to think how hundreds of thousands of jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars are at the whims of chance meetings and golf course conversations. But that’s billionaire summer camp for you. Entire industries change the moment the right person has a lightbulb flicker of an idea. And if that flicker is validated by any semblance of an uptick in share price? Watch out. 

This is the buzzy outcome of the annual Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, the unofficial breeding ground of Hollywood dealmaking. Every travel log, handshake and non-invite is scrutinized by the media with the frenzied intensity of Homeland’s Carrie Mathison. How could they not be? AOL-Time Warner, Google-YouTube, Comcast-NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery-Paramount Skydance; practically every consequential media merger and acquisition of the last quarter century owes its roots to this annual luxury getaway. 

For years, expectations have held that Hollywood would contract to just three to five major entertainment players. But following Wall Street-driven streaming disruption, colossal debt financing, increased regulatory skepticism, and rapid audience movement, a more calculated equation has emerged. The industry’s power brokers are no longer asking whether consolidation is necessary, but what kind of assets are actually meaningful contributors.

Consolidation is no longer a given

Historically, deals at the highest levels don’t have the rosiest ROIs. It’s hard to integrate different businesses, no matter how much overlap there is. It’s hard to manage a Jenga tower of a balance sheet laden with crushing debt. So is major consolidation an absolute certainty moving forward? 

“No, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen,” media analyst Entertainment Strategy Guy, who has previously worked at studio conglomerates, a major streamer, and independent production companies, told Observer. “I do think some executives in town want it to be inevitable, and some executives understand consolidation will strengthen the survivors with both more supply and buying power, but it’s not inevitable.” 

Regulatory approval has become an expensively time-consuming headache. Antitrust concerns from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) haven’t made it easy. Federal judges killed Penguin Random House’s $2.2 billion acquisition of Simon & Schuster in 2022, and more recently, halted the $6.2 billion Nexstar-Tegna merger. Paramount Skydance is still working to get its WBD acquisition signed, sealed and delivered. 

That deal was made possible in part because of WBD’s inability to fully operate under the crushing weight of debt accumulated in the initial Warner Bros. and Discovery mash-up. Even then, the combined assets never turned their flagship streaming service, HBO Max→Max→HBO Max, into a true Netflix competitor. Even Disney’s more fruitful (but highly expensive) acquisition of Fox limited the Mouse House’s ability to invest in streaming innovation initially due to debt.

The big takeaways: mergers are expensive, integration is hard, capital is best positioned when flexible, and profitability is vital. Scale at all costs is as outdated as the tastes of these 60-something CEOs. 

Theatrical’s comeback changes the math

As of this writing, the annual U.S. box office is on pace to surpass $10 billion for the first time since 2019. Project Hail Mary, Obsession, Backrooms—the enthusiasm around new-to-screen stories and storytellers is palpable. But many wonder if a healthier theatrical business expedites or reduces the urgency to consolidate. 

“Probably neutral,” Entertainment Strategy Guy surmised. “The regulatory forces impacting mergers have a bigger impact on dealmakers’ minds. If they can’t actually close a deal, that makes them much more hesitant.” 

Joel Roodman, former senior Miramax executive and current CEO of MUS Immersive, believes the current momentum helps stay any potential executions for the moment. “When theatrical is working, studios get some breathing room. A stronger theatrical market gives studios more confidence in the value of premium storytelling, which could reduce the urgency for larger mergers.”

Improving studio financials may make for a more attractive target while emboldening internal confidence. But it is regulation that truly directs traffic. In the meantime, a succession of box office hits can enable a studio to be more selective. Rather than scouring quarterly reports to try to figure out who is in desperate need of a life raft to survive, some companies may be embracing a modicum of discernibility. Finding the deals that are actually worth doing can be the new north star. 

The next media deal may look more like gaming

Studio-on-studio consolidation hasn’t always worked out as hoped. Those types of misses often become financial albatrosses. So what should savvy movers and shakers be looking for instead? We have enough evidence to suggest that younger audiences in particular are responding to different forms of content. Relying on long-running existing brands and franchises may be running out of runway. 

“Maybe you buy some form of other business. But it’s not so easy to learn another business. We’ve seen this time and time again in the past,” Simon Pulman, partner and co-chair of Pryor Cashman’s Media + Entertainment group, told Observer. “You could see different types of deals as companies look to acquire new media and gaming businesses, particularly in areas with Gen Z-friendly brands. Maybe Roblox…Ultimately, it’s all driven by content and the desires of audiences. What do people under 30 want?”

Smart folks who keep an eye on Wall Street for a living are already speculating along similar lines. Instead of barking up the same old traditional studio merger tree, LightShed Partners recently laid out an argument for the future spun-off NBCUniversal to go after Nintendo, Riot Games or Take-Two Interactive. These are interactive gaming companies that could bolster NBCU with IP that stretches into every corner of its entertainment ecosystem. 

Conversely, despite a spotted track record, some wonder if atypical buyers can benefit from acquiring more audience reach. “Does retail media like Walmart need to match their investment in ad tech with a content play?” Simon Andrews, publisher of the Mobile Fix newsletter, mused to Observer. “They need eyeballs to unlock the value of their proprietary data. Everyone has seen Amazon leverage its Prime Video.”

The game has changed. It isn’t enough to only command attention on film and TV screens. Disney has led all studios in domestic box office market share every year from 2021 to 2025 and  accounts for the second-largest total U.S. TV usage by any company, per Nielsen. Its stock is still down around 46 percent over the last five years. 

Modern media companies need to extend beyond the typical screens to be a common touchpoint on laptops and mobile devices while building connective tissue between all of the above. Gaming, sports, direct-to-consumer creator economy business models—it’s a potluck of assets and approaches. Easier said than done, of course. 

Netflix is the canary in the coal mine

Ups-and-downs, push-and-pull, give-and-take. Few things are obviously one-sided in modern Hollywood. But Netflix is the obvious case study to demonstrate the pros and cons of consolidation. 

There’s a clear argument to be made that moving into selective theatrical distribution, acquiring a backlog of engagement-driving programming, gaining sports rights and reducing the number of competitors makes sense. Yet Wall Street punished Netflix’s stock price upon reports of its interest in WBD. 

Overpaying for an asset, muddying free cash flow and expanding into new businesses are all very real challenges with tangible strengths and weaknesses. “Netflix does not need a splashy acquisition, but they did say the Warner process made them build their M&A muscle,” Hernan Lopez, founder of media research firm Owl & Co, told Observer. 

It’s a perfect encapsulation of the industry-wide dilemma. Strategically, acquisitions can shore up weak points and/or compound strengths. But financially, Wall Street doesn’t always see the wisdom (fair or not), which may hurt share prices. Catch-22 incarnate. Netflix may be the current poster child for this tension, but no one is immune.

The next power play may not be a studio merger

“Executives float ideas at Sun Valley,” Smart Investors Daily CEO Ian Skjervem told Observer. “However, in my observation of these cycles, Idaho’s July words seldom make it to New York’s December doorstep.” 

Anything can happen at Sun Valley. But in reading the tea leaves and talking to insightful industry professionals, blockbuster game-changing deals don’t seem to be the modus operandi coming out of this year’s sessions. Sexy, enticing, and legacy-making? Sure. But sensible and valuable? That’s another question entirely. Whether it’s newfound prudence or old-fashioned fear, the biggest companies appear to be reevaluating the genetic components of industry power. 

The next deal that shakes the Hollywood hierarchy to its core may not involve a standard content company at all. Instead, whichever company has the best grasp of where the next generation allocates its income and attention may be best positioned for the future.

Raw box office totals are too blunt a measure of an actor’s star power. Over the past 15 years, franchises and IP have increasingly done the heavy lifting, often overshadowing individual performers. An actor may also be the second or third lead, making it hard to credit them with every dollar a film earns. Many moviegoers turn out for The Avengers, not necessarily for any one cast member. As a result, it’s difficult to pinpoint what, exactly, is driving audiences.

To get a better sense of value in this maddeningly subjective field, Greenlight Analytics’ Talent DNA tracker asks audiences a simple question: Would you see a movie in theaters if this person is in it? Across tracking waves covering hundreds of actors and hundreds of thousands of responses, four distinct types of star power begin to crystallize. 

The genre contractors

This category includes actors who are broadly popular but particularly strong draws within specific types of films. Among the top-ranked names in Theatrical Intent are long-time mainstays such as Denzel Washington (57.9 percent of respondents said they would see him in theaters), Samuel L. Jackson (56.2 percent), Jackie Chan (51.3 percent), and Liam Neeson (48.5 percent). These veterans have built loyal followings over decades. While their careers span a wide range of roles, each has come to thrive in a particular lane.

Washington is often the center of ethically ambiguous crime dramas. Fans love Jackson’s adjacency to action-genre flicks. Chan is arguably the most celebrated martial arts star in cinematic history. Neeson kick-started the “old man action” trend. 

Washington’s oeuvre has grossed nearly $5 billion worldwide across his career. But it is the remarkable consistency of his three Equalizer films—all grossing between $190 million and $192 million worldwide—that is most illustrative of his consistency in the genre. His biggest career box office hit (unadjusted for inflation), Gladiator II, isn’t even his own franchise; instead, his acclaimed supporting performance added weight to a legacy sequel without its original star. Fans love Denzel, and that affection takes different shades that manifest in ticket sales. 

The platform draws

Some actors’ magnetic pull spans across platforms. Audiences love to watch them not only in theatres but also at home. Brad Pitt (49.1 percent Theatrical Intent) is a great contemporary example. F1: The Movie ($634 million worldwide) was the highest-grossing “original” film of 2025, but it was rooted in a popular sport with global appeal. The alignment between Pitt’s star power and a familiar concept helped elevate the film, which broke out as an adult-skewing tentpole without traditional franchise backing.

Adam Sandler (47.7 percent Theatrical Intent, 55.9 percent Streaming Intent) also thrives in this lane. His animated hit Leo (224.1 million views) and Happy Gilmore 2 (135.1 million) are among the most popular Netflix original movies in the last three years. 

Washington fits this category as well. His Streaming Intent (65.9 percent) is eight points higher than his already elite Theatrical Intent. His audience will follow him anywhere, which is likely why Netflix felt comfortable paying him a reported $35 million for the upcoming Here Comes the Flood. 

The emerging tier

This category speaks for itself: younger, rising stars who are establishing themselves through standalone leading roles and original or new-to-screen material. Michael B. Jordan may be the most illuminating case study at the moment, with Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya also firmly part of the conversation.

Jordan’s Theatrical Intent score of nearly 49 percent places him ahead of Harrison Ford, Liam Neeson and many others. His Fandom score of 72.6 percent points to a deeply embedded appeal across broad audiences, built over two decades of film and television work. On paper, he already looks like a fully formed star, and the data increasingly support that view.

Creed III ($276 million on a $75 million budget) showed he could expand an existing franchise’s audience. But Sinners ($370 million worldwide) is the real proof point: an original film in which he appears in nearly every scene, playing two distinct characters, that became both a box office hit and an Oscar winner. Director Ryan Coogler’s pedigree and the film’s genre certainly contributed, but the results suggest audiences will show up for a Michael B. Jordan-led project.

Elsewhere on the spectrum are Keke Palmer (48.7 percent Theatrical Intent) and Hailee Steinfeld (42.8 percent), who represent emerging stars of different ilk. Both have worked steadily for years, but Palmer’s appeal cuts more broadly across demographics and more closely resembles that of established genre-driven performers. The success of her original comedy One of Them Days ($50 million domestic on a $14 million budget) is a major feather in her cap. 

Steinfeld’s audience scores are slightly lower but notably consistent. With roles across Transformers, Marvel (both live-action and animation), and the video game–adjacent Arcane, she has developed a strong following among franchise and genre fans. Neither actress has yet had the opportunity to fully test her draw with a blockbuster original film. (Give us the Keke Palmer/Hailee Steinfeld two-hander horror movie we deserve.)

Final words

These tiers are not in competition with one another. A Genre Contractor is not inherently more bankable than a Prestige Draw, and actors are not confined to a single category over the course of their careers. Denzel Washington was a top-tier leading man long before The Equalizer, and Brad Pitt was an established movie star well before F1.

This framework isn’t about which actors have generated the most box office revenue. It’s about the relationship each star has cultivated with audiences and how that connection translates into fandom and potential.

When you turn on your television, how do you decide what to watch first? YouTube, Netflix and Disney+ are among the most popular individual video platforms. But the growing answer dictating your TV selections may very well be Roku, Amazon Fire and Apple TV. Why? Because these companies are controlling distribution, not just content programming. All three operating systems house the streaming services and apps we use daily. That’s what makes Fox’s acquisition of Roku so compelling. It’s a bet one level up from the streaming wars. Rather than competing directly with Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max, Lachlan Murdoch is moving to own the monetizable distribution layer of entertainment alongside Amazon and Apple. 

Earlier in the streaming wars, individual services fought over content. Everyone wanted the biggest shows that built the largest subscriber bases. Netflix’s Stranger Things, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Amazon Prime Video’s The Boys—breakout originals that attracted new customers en masse. The all-consuming cultural maw of HBO’s Game of Thrones spurred rivals to throw tens of millions of dollars at splashy IP. Marvel, Star Wars, DC and Lord of the Rings. 

These programming skirmishes are still ongoing, but on a smaller scale. As the industry matures, focus has somewhat shifted away from individual content lineups and towards controlling discovery, recommendations and placement. That’s where real power and value lie. Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Walmart’s Vizio are all operating systems that house the YouTubes, Netflixes and Disney+s of the world. Those watching Paramount+’s Landman or HBO Max’s The Pitt are likely doing so via one of those companies’ devices. 

Imagine the TV operating systems are like properties in Monopoly, and the individual streamers and apps that consume our attention are the houses and hotels built atop them. It’s easy to see where leverage is hoarded in that dynamic. (Investors remain more wary as Fox shares fell 18 percent in the first hour after the deal was announced, and Roku stock slipped 1 percent).

How Fox is leveling up

The further we move away from the 2010s, the clearer it becomes that Fox slimmed down in order to beef up. This Roku acquisition is the loudest evidence yet. 

On the micro side, it gives the company a strong foothold in the small but growing world of free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST). Combined, Fox’s Tubi (2.2 percent) and Roku’s The Roku Channel (3.0 percent) account for monthly U.S. TV screen viewing time that’s within spitting distance of Disney+ (5.3 percent), according to Nielsen’s The Gauge. (However, the one-third overlap between the two audiences, or viewers who use both, would reduce the combined total somewhat.) One quarter of Roku Channel viewing comes from home-screen tile placement, while the other 75 percent comes from search and discovery. The combination of all of Fox’s distribution, Roku and Tubi positions the company as the third-largest connected TV distributor in the U.S., per Nielsen. 

But Roku isn’t just another streaming service. At the macro level, it’s a front door to all of streaming. Transactional video on demand (one-time rental or purchase of titles) and third-party subscription marketplaces (signing up for streamers available on these apps) are lucrative businesses. “Amazon Channels is, by all accounts, the largest distributor of streaming services with close to 100 million subscriptions globally, from which they take a commission,” Owl & Co founder Hernan Lopez wrote in his Streamonomics newsletter. Fox is clearly chasing a similar quarry. 

As I previously covered, Fox sold its entertainment assets to hyper-focus on sports, news, Tubi and the growing creator economy. In what may or may not be a sign of the fragmented future, abandoning blockbusters for passionate niches has worked. The stock is up 33 percent over the last five years. But the model was heavily reliant on the rapid decline of linear TV. This move takes a unique angle on streaming that’s more meaningful than Fox One and Fox Nation. 

Is there now an argument to be made that Fox is the best-positioned legacy media company thanks to a slimmed-down content focus and owning highly valuable consumer on-ramps? Roku, Amazon, Apple and Vizio have figured out how to let programming from rival companies deliver money into their own coffers.

Quietly winning the streaming wars

I previously argued Sony won the streaming wars by sitting it out. Fox largely did too, saving itself billions in the process. The biggest differentiator now? After assuming control of Roku, Fox is poised to take a bite out of its competitor’s subscription and advertising revenue. 

Roku typically takes around 20 percent of every third-party subscription sold or in-app purchase made through its OS, and an advertising cut of roughly 30 percent. (Apple famously collects 15-30 percent from TVOD). So the company makes money every time, say, a Dove ad pops up on Hulu or you subscribe to HBO Max through its system. With more than 100 million global households using Roku, few rivals, if any, can afford to abandon the service.

As we’ve seen across the industry in recent years, subscriber growth is harder to come by. That’s partly because the streaming audience is becoming more homogenous, according to data from Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy. Since 2024, streaming-exclusive viewers who don’t use linear TV have grown older, more female, less diverse and less engaged. That makes content discovery more important than ever. 

Hollywood has spent a decade trying to catch and beat Netflix on the assumption that becoming the default destination is the only way to survive. Fox is betting that it might be more lucrative to own the bridge that gets you there. 

In a world in which the combined media rights value for North America’s Big Four sports leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL) currently eclipses $15 billion annually, bargain hunters must beware. The 2026 World Cup may be the last major sports broadcast deal secured at a real discount. And that might just be the first domino in a problematic chain reaction for Hollywood. 

Back in 2015, Fox was able to extend U.S. World Cup rights through this year for a pittance. Yet, that is exactly why the next round of negotiations is expected to produce fireworks. Sports rights are the last vestige of consistent mass-audience appeal on linear television and the best way to engage high-risk subscribers and juice ad-supported tiers on streaming. But with every new envy-inducing deal that crosses the finish line, the entertainment ecosystem is forced to contract. 

How Fox landed the deal of the century

The 2022 World Cup Final between France and Argentina was watched by around 1.5 billion people. So how in the world is Fox only paying $485 million for this year’s cushy U.S.-held tournament when the rights are estimated to be worth more than three times that amount? 

Over the decades, FIFA has cultivated a reputation as a financial shark always on the hunt for the best meal. In doing so, it agreed in 2014 to hold the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the New York Times reported. Yet the nation’s hot climate wasn’t conducive to the tournament’s usual summer schedule. So FIFA offered Fox a rights deal through 2026 in exchange for not challenging the shift to fall, when the broadcast network knew the World Cup would have to compete with the NFL, College Football and the NBA. A mere concession in the moment transformed into laughably monumental value in the present day. 

Neither FIFA nor Fox knew 10 years ago that the 2026 games would be held in the U.S. with an expanded 48-team roster, following years of domestic soccer growth and a ballooning market for live sports rights. All of these factors turned this year’s games into the deal of the century. Yet it’s set the stage for a massive price hike in future World Cup negotiations that aligns with broader recent sports broadcast trends. 

The World Cup’s value has exploded because networks and platforms are desperate for events that draw tens of millions of viewers to justify higher ad rates. Most of the “good stuff” has migrated to streaming, and attention spans are more fractured than the San Andreas Fault (yes, I did just drop a geology joke). 

Scarcity, FOMO, impulse buying and other factors have created a consistent trend: viewers are more likely to buy an advertised product while watching a live event, such as a sporting event. Annual ad spending on sporting events is expected to reach roughly $25 billion by 2030. That’s a lot of money—and it isn’t the only backdrop that makes the World Cup bargain so astonishing. Recent data from Antenna proves that live spectacle such as Netflix’s NFL broadcasts consistently attracts a greater share of “light viewers,” or households that watch the least on a given platform, than the baseline. That’s powerful. 

The rest of the sports market is famously moving in the opposite direction. The crowning example is professional football. Annual combined NFL rights cost around $10 billion at the moment, accounting for 31 percent of all sports media rights and 8 percent of all content spend (film, TV, sports rights, etc.), per State of the Screens. Amidst ongoing renegotiations, that total number is expected to rise by another $6 billion or so in the next round of deals. That’s all well and good for the NFL, but all that new money has to come from somewhere. Therein lies the rub. 

The real cost of sports deals

Every additional cent spent on the NFL, World Cup, NBA, College Football and the UFC is money taken from another division’s budget. In layman’s terms, that means less money to go around for other programming. 

The NFL’s price hike is expected to result in an estimated 7 percent reduction in scripted TV, film and other content allocations. In the words of Puck News’ John Ourand, the new NFL media deals are “widely expected to suck billions out of the pool of money available for lesser sports properties, not to mention Hollywood entertainment budgets.” He describes it as a “blast radius.”

This moves the economic reality from conceptual bean-counting to tangible winners and losers. In theory, this may prevent the Disneys of the world from delivering the next Shogun. This partially speaks to the decline in Netflix original volume as the streamer allocates more money towards sports: multiple NFL games, WWE, MLB’s opening night, Home Run Derby and Field of Dreams game, the 2027 and 2031 FIFA Women’s World Cup, combat sports, etc. Why spend enormous sums of money on original question marks when sports deliver a proven guarantee? 

Fox obviously won the negotiation for the 2026 World Cup and will reap enormous benefits as a result. But after taking this lump, FIFA is well-positioned for the future. Fox knows its deal of the century is on borrowed time. NBC knows what the World Cup property should be worth. So do Amazon, Apple and Netflix. 

The next round of negotiations will be made with the media landscape of the 2030s firmly within the scope of dealpoint discussions. That world is defined by the scarcity, high demand and soaring value of live sports rights. This could be the last sports bargain to be had for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, that might mean Hollywood needs to be worried about what it will be forced to sacrifice to fund the next round of media deals.

I love that classic old Looney Tunes bit where Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck argue back and forth about whether it’s rabbit-hunting season or duck-hunting season. Their mutual goal is to avoid the wrath of Elmer Fudd’s shotgun. Any argument can and will be made to keep them alive. Strangely, that 1951 scene is eerily reflective of today’s Hollywood. Every stakeholder in the entertainment industry—studios, movie theaters, streamers—is working toward different goals. That means they all have different definitions of success. Coupled with Hollywood’s unparalleled PR spin, a consensus is hard to reach as a result. 

Hits still exist, but every success story comes with asterisks, caveats and qualifiers. Box office hovers around 15 percent below pre-pandemic levels globally and roughly 20 percent domestically. From 2014 to 2019, 28 Hollywood films crossed the $1 billion mark at the box office. In the last five years, as of this writing? Only 11. Streaming success can be measured and argued via endless Beautiful Mind-esque permutations. Total hours viewed, total views, unique households, completion rates, subscriber acquisition and retention, engagement among high-risk users…I need an Ambien just thinking about it. 

No one can agree on which metric matters most. 

As Comscore head of marketplace trends Paul Dergarabedian told Observer, “It depends who you’re talking to—audience, studio, theaters, financiers. What is their north star in terms of what they deem successful?”

Success then vs. now

Despite the best efforts of infamous Hollywood accounting, success has been fairly straightforward throughout cinema’s history. A movie was released, ticket sales were counted, and the marketplace delivered a verdict. Bob’s your uncle. 

The 2010s, when annual domestic box office topped $11 billion in five consecutive years, were especially easy to read. Opening weekend and total gross relative to budget were widely accepted evaluation tools.  

Similarly, the early streaming gold rush revolved around relatively binary equations. Through mid-2022, Wall Street rewarded Netflix for consistent subscriber growth. The streamer’s quarterly gains were enthusiastically covered by the media like a draft list for the rapture (I was guilty as well). It was an easy and exciting narrative to peddle. 

Yet neither framework applies as cleanly as it once did. As TVRev founder and media analyst Alan Wolk notes, “The industry has never had the patience to let a show or movie find an audience. They demand instant metrics,” he told Observer. 

Studio success = lifecycle monetization

Home entertainment, such as VHS and DVD, long served as a financial safety net. This market’s collapse, coupled with Hollywood’s increasing fragmentation, has elevated the importance of multi-window success. 

Digital and streaming claw back value in new ways. Sony’s Madame Webb flopped at the box office, but was the studio’s most-watched film on Netflix in 2024. F1: The Movie was a box office hit, but never made Nielsen’s Top 10 weekly streaming charts. Greenland 2: Migration struggled in theaters, yet ranks in the Top 10 for digital rental/purchase across Amazon, Apple TV, Google and Rakuten TV as of this writing, per FlixPatrol. Theatrical whiffs can become streaming hits. Streaming flops can be licensed externally. Around and around it goes as studios must evaluate a longer performance lifecycle to understand a given title’s contributions. 

Avengers-level hits move the needle more than anything. But at the studio level, success often comes from maximizing potential across as many windows as possible rather than dominating just one.

Streaming success = retention

Streaming growth has slowed considerably in recent years. Plenty of streaming performance data exists. But context doesn’t. 

Samba TV recently announced that the first episode of Apple’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles was watched by 1.2 million U.S. households, yet no timeframe was given, as Entertainment Strategy Guy pointed out. Netflix boasted in its latest Engagement Report that non-English programming accounts for more than a third of all global viewing. Yet viewership of top non-English shows pales in comparison to that of their English counterparts. 

Data-driven arguments decrying failure and declaring success are easy to conjure. For example, the studio behind Show A announced that it drew 7.5 million viewers in its first five days, while Show B has never made a Nielsen streaming list in two seasons. Which would you rather have? Trick question, they’re both Daredevil: Born Again. The industry has yet to standardize a clean evaluation rubric. 

Data from Digital i shows that around one-third of 2025 streaming viewership was driven by customers at a greater risk of canceling their subscriptions due to low usage. At the same time, only a minority of elite shows manage to grow their audience season over season. Title-level ratings are still massively important. Shows don’t get renewed if their viewership doesn’t justify the budget. But overall platform success has less to do with a single show’s performance and more with what viewers do after watching. 

Wolk hits on what executives really want to see: “The most important metric is one that is notoriously hard to measure—attention. In the fragmented world of feudal media, it is not how many people see your series or movie, but how passionate they are about it.” 

A small, intentional audience, even at a high risk of cancellation, can be more valuable under the right circumstances than a large audience of passive consumers. Macro success now orbits retention, churn reduction, and sustained engagement rather than raw reach and growth at all costs. 

Exhibitor success = stability

Movie theater owners loved Barbenheimer. But you know what they love even more than one outsized weekend flanked by uncertainty? Consistency. 

Exhibitors protect against the downside by programming for predictability. The opening weekend is still crucial. But according to Dergarabedian, it is not necessarily the most important metric. 

“The most accurate measure of success is how long it stays in the top five or top ten, how it holds up week-over-week,” he said. “It’s a direct reflection of how the audience feels about the film.”

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania...We’ve seen huge openings followed by cataclysmic drops that cut box office legs and ruined narratives. Exhibitors will trade the volatility of massive potential for the guarantee of steady health. Once again, their definition of success differs from their partners. 

The cost

Why does this lack of a uniform understanding even matter? It’s not just the cloudiness of post-performance analysis on our end. Without mutually agreed upon benchmarks of success, decision-making that powers the creative across development, budgeting, distribution and beyond can be misaligned. 

Studios need titles with hit potential across every window. Exhibitors eye films that deliver guaranteed results. Streamers want to keep you in their digital ecosystems for as long as possible. Marketing departments try to whip viewers into an opening-weekend frenzy. Sony laments a box-office bomb, while Netflix may rejoice. Different departments are working toward different goals all at the same time. If no one can agree on what constitutes a success, all you may have is a recipe for failure. 

“It would be lovely to say opening weekends don’t matter,” Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman University’s film school, told Variety in 2024. Unfortunately, Hollywood hasn’t found an alternative yet. The economics of moviemaking dictate that many films with hearty budgets must open big to set the tone of the discourse and start the difficult march toward profitability on the right foot. But that systemic structure may actually be capping audience interest overall. The opening weekend has become too much of an exclamation point instead of an ellipsis for the fate of films. 

Box office forecasting and reporting have become a dense galaxy of their own within the film industry universe. Opening weekend predictions, Thursday night previews, Friday-through-Sunday holds, second weekend drops, domestic multipliers, etc. Every element of performance is canvassed and cataloged like a professional sport. We know that wide releases are largely judged in the first 72 hours. We know that marketing budgets shrink to next to nothing post-release, depending. Meanwhile, smaller movies may see their screen count cut dramatically after quiet opening weekends. By that time, a public narrative had already taken hold and prematurely squashed potential. 

Why is the opening weekend important? 

Hollywood sees opening weekend as an immediate signal of urgency or apathy. But really, it’s more of an audience trigger. Strong openings lead to more positive WOM and more screen availability. This results in greater visibility, which supports a sustained box office run. Weak openings are like fatal cascading effects: They generate negative narratives, which reduce screen count, which hurts discoverability, which tanks box office. That isn’t a measure of performance. It’s the director of it. It creates a self-fulfilling catch-22. 

At play here is a challenging reality for movie theater owners. They prefer to reduce risk and protect against the downside rather than chase upside. The business is built on increasingly thin margins and reduced screen count post-COVID. Short-term weekly performance stability is more important than what a film could earn long-term.

Traditional audience tracking exacerbates the problem. It’s national and opaque. It isn’t designed to answer how the film tastes of the northeast and southwest might diverge, or how infrequent moviegoers can be enticed into theaters. 

In this system, the opening weekend becomes a do-or-die dart throw for smaller films angling for a platform release (gradually increasing their screen count as word of mouth builds). Screen expansion is often dependent on financial performance. So exhibitors will tell smaller distributors that they will add a limited release if it performs well on opening weekend. But limited screens make it difficult for audiences who may be interested to find a showing, which suppresses demand and ticket sales. The inevitable soft opening that results erases any chance of expansion in week two. 

If the industry requires proof of concept, but doesn’t create an environment to deliver it, then the system is designed for failure. In a healthier industry, a film’s debut should serve more as a snapshot instead of the entire picture. The overarching trajectory is more important. 

Anyone But You ($6 million opening en route to $88 million domestic), Puss in Boots: The Last Wish ($12.4 million opening, $186 million domestic), Smile ($22.6 million opening, $105 million domestic), Where the Crawdads Sing ($17 million opening, $90 million domestic), Elemental ($29.6 million opening, $154 million domestic)…There are a number of post-COVID releases that opened relatively modestly but legged it out to impressive totals. These aren’t just one-off exceptions. They are examples of how movies can still cultivate active interest beyond opening weekend when given the space to breathe. 

Who did the system hurt?

Prestige pictures, adult-skewing dramas, movies aimed at older demographics, non-IP films—there are countless genres and movie types that are facing steeper uphill battles as a result of opening-weekend hyperfixation. These movies historically succeeded on slow-burning footprint expansions. Today, they are classified as failures before they’ve been given the opportunity to build. 

As Chapman University’s Galloway noted, some blockbusters carry costs so enormous they require massive upfront revenue to achieve any semblance of ROI. Opening under expectations can create negative narratives that hurt films early on in release, even if the quality and legs are there. Remember the whole Sinners coverage fiasco? 

Streaming films are not immune either. They recreate a similar problem in which homepage real estate, Top 10 carousels, and recommendation algorithms are designed for early visibility and sampling (even though market leader Netflix prioritizes viewership within the first 90 days). There’s little post-release strategy for reaching and activating audiences once these titles are replaced by the latest batch of originals. Recommendation algorithms are built on viewing history. So accounts largely interested in, say, romance may never be properly exposed to an action release. 

Marketing is still too focused on broad reach at the expense of the core audience. When target demos are emphasized, studios (and especially streamers) often don’t have the money and/or care to target secondary audiences that might also be interested. In fact, Hollywood ignores the upside of paradoxical audiences, a term my firm Greenlight Analytics uses to describe audiences who hold contradictory views, values or behaviors that defy categorization. 

For example, there are an estimated 2.1 million what Greenlight calls “adult arthouse Republicans” in the U.S., or conservative voters who consume foreign or indie film, and 5.4 million R-rated viewers with family values, or religious parents who consume mature content. These are sizable audiences that represent millions in lost box office potential. They aren’t primary opening weekend pre-release targets, and there’s little in the way of post-debut targeting.

The pandemic forced Hollywood to experiment with shorter theatrical windows, aggressively so in some cases. Yet the major studios are returning to longer stays in movie theaters. Why? Because the audiences are there. Hollywood just needs to keep looking after the opening weekend. 

Between 2019 and 2023, Netflix released several hundred movies each year. The company cannonballed into the deep end of original film to secure validation as the new industry interloper. But under Dan Lin, who took over as the streamer’s head of film in 2024, Netflix is changing its course. In the first three months of 2026, the most popular subscription streamer on the planet released “just” 23 original movies—that’s a prodigious volume compared to legacy studios, but an eight-year low for Netflix. Executives are conceding to an overlooked truth: streaming doesn’t reward original movies the way the industry once assumed it would.

The reality was that many of Netflix’s films came and went without any real impact. Roughly one in four movies (original and licensed) garnered 100,000 or fewer viewership hours per quarter from 2023 to 2025, barely registering with audiences.

Historically, successful movies on streaming cause mad dashes of viewership before fading. Longer TV series, on the other hand, sustain engagement and drive better retention. A never-ending flow of movies sounds like an addictive prospect on paper. But they rarely live up to the hype, especially against their theatrical counterparts. 

Comparing nine Netflix movies to 11 films released in theaters at the same pre-release point yields a consistent gulf between the two. Theatrical movies scored better in Awareness, Interest, Theatrical Intent, Willingness to Pay and other measures of demand, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy. That’s not an indictment of Netflix’s quality, but a reflection of consumer sentiment. Straight-to-streaming movies start from a lower baseline and decay faster. 

What the data shows

Long-running series with massive episode libraries unsurprisingly generate the most time spent in the scripted streaming world (procedurals, sitcoms, kids’ entertainment). 

Here are the 10 most-watched licensed series in the U.S. last year, per Nielsen: Bluey, Grey’s Anatomy, NCIS, SpongeBob SquarePants, Bob’s Burgers, Family Guy, The Big Bang Theory, Law & Order: SVU, Criminal Minds and The Rookie. I can’t tell you how often I have sitcoms on in the background while I eat lunch, fold laundry or zone out during all-hands Zoom meetings in which I never once unmute myself. 

The average minutes watched for these shows in 2025 was a whopping 33 billion, per Nielsen. The average of the Top 10 streaming originals? 18.2 billion. Both TV totals still dwarf the averages of the top 10 kids movies (7.4 billion) and general audience movies (4.91 billion). 

TV is a habit. Movies on streaming are, for the most part, a moment. 

Netflix’s course correction

Netflix’s reduced film volume isn’t just about content budgets and ROI. It’s an acknowledgment that the streaming business model is built more on TV than film. There’s a reason McDonald’s fries sell better than their McChickens. Netflix’s TV library has generated more audience demand than its film library in every single quarter since 2022, per Parrot Analytics, which tracks piracy viewership and social activity.

Theatrical movies making their streaming debut are often first selections when logging on, especially among Gen Z. That’s valuable. Original streaming films can be select event-driven releases that feed into one another. January’s The Rip spent seven weeks in Netflix’s global top 10s, leading into March’s War Machine, which has remained in the Top 10 for five straight weeks since release as of this writing. That’s just good old-fashioned quality scheduling. (The action genre consistently performs on streaming.)

Films will always be crucial to culture. But they’re less efficient in a subscription model. Red Notice (118 minutes) carried a $200 million budget and was watched for at least 454.2 million hours. All three seasons of Squid Game (22 episodes totaling 21.37 hours) reportedly cost just $91.4 million. The show has been watched for approximately 4.48 billion hours. The Night Agent Season 1 reportedly cost up to $30 million and generated 803.2 million viewing hours. Longer runtimes also create more advertising inventory, a top priority in Los Gatos. 

Last year, three of the top five Netflix titles watched by low-usage global subscribers at the greatest risk of cancellation were TV series (Squid Game Season 2, American Primeval, Squid Game Season 1), per Digital i. (Original films Carry-On and Back in Action were also in the top five). That same study also revealed that just one movie, KPop Demon Hunters, ranked in the Top 15 acquisition-driving titles across Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+.

You tell me which is the better investment overall. 

Netflix is (rightly) not abandoning movies; it’s just right-sizing its content strategy, especially as live events and sports chew up more of its budget. Streaming rewards extended stays, not momentary fly-bys. Film will always be the best medium for launching financially lucrative multimedia franchises that spawn TV extensions. Netflix knows this better than most as the home to Cobra Kai, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, XO, Kitty, two different Jurassic World kids series, two different Boss Baby series, and many more. 

Streaming didn’t remotely kill movies. It just reduced their importance inside the new business model. Netflix is simply adapting its strategy based on the results. 

Famously or infamously, 20th Century Fox sold its entertainment assets to The Walt Disney Company in 2019 to focus on news and sports. With a stripped-down operation, industry observers would be forgiven for believing it was the last time Fox would be a relevant media force. But to paraphrase the same studio’s iconic Independence Day, they opted not to go quietly into the night. 

While legacy media fights over franchises, New Fox has been betting on the creator economy. January’s deal between Fox Entertainment and YouTuber Dhar Mann Studios (163 million followers, 20 billion views across platforms for his scripted long-form content) to create a video slate of microdramas is a microcosm of the company’s strategy. Acquisitions of free ad-supported streaming TV service (FAST) Tubi in 2020 and one-stop-shop digital media company Red Seat Ventures last year make it clear where Fox is aiming. The question is whether or not the target is worth hitting. 

Betting on creators to drive the future of entertainment

As Observer previously reported, early versions of Superman (2034), Batman (2035), Joker (2036) and Wonder Woman (2037) are entering the public domain in the next 15 years. They’re not the only examples. It’s a reminder that studio reliance on major franchise IP must contend with mounting external competition, including from creators gaining access to famous faces. Fox, having sold its IP library, is trying to build something different, especially with NFL rights siphoning off more than 25 percent of Fox’s annual content spend. 

Tubi accounts for 2.1 percent of U.S. TV time, more than Peacock (1.8 percent) and WBD’s streaming operations (1.4 percent), per Nielsen. The service earned chest-pounding moments when it became profitable in Q3 2025, surpassed 100 million-plus monthly active users (MAUs), and reached $1 billion in annual revenue. While its impressive catalog of Hollywood content is a driving force, the FAST library also consists of 16,000 episodes of creator content. This ranges from non-exclusive licensed feeds of MrBeast to scripted original entertainment featuring popular creators such as TikToker Noah Beck’s Sidelined, which became the platform’s most-watched title. 

“Viewers want long-form entertainment that is built more on authenticity and cultural relevance than big stars,” Tubi CEO Anjali Sud said at an event hosted by Paley Media Council in New York in March. 

Working in the service’s favor: most FASTs prioritize pre-scheduled linear-like channel surfing, while Tubi has emphasized its on-demand element. In that way, it’s become a notable free ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) service behind YouTube. Creator-driven content hasn’t exactly become must-see for the mainstream outside of kids media (even Amazon’s Beast Games is more of a ratings base hit than a home run), but passionate niches can help justify properly budgeted programming here.

“It’s not always about the size of their reach. It’s about the depth and passion of the fandom,” Sud said of creators without legions of followers still driving solid viewership on Tubi. 

The potential of the creator-activated audience 

There does exist an audience for creator content across mediums. YouTube boasts 202 million U.S. adult users that are 7 percent more likely than the average consumer to be streaming viewers, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy. Nearly 98 percent of Gen Z TikTokers also use YouTube. The platforms don’t compete; they share, making it easier to target for businesses. 

These are monetizable audiences (with a caveat, which we’ll get to). Around 38 percent of consumers say they sometimes or often make purchases based on influencer recommendations. There are 6.6 million young social media-driven moviegoers who are significantly more likely to be influenced by creators and subscribe to multiple streamers. Creator recommendations function as cultural currency for this group. It is the cordless audience Fox is going after. 

The second side of the company’s influencer push is Red Seat Ventures, which helps creators build direct-to-consumer media businesses. Both conservative-leaning public figures who have left traditional media and standard creators have opted to launch efforts with Red Seat. The company was acquired by Fox in 2025. 

Red Seat has engineers who will build home studios for creators to be coordinated by remote control rooms. They provide editing and marketing services, an ad sales team, and general talent development and management. The company emphasizes “creator monetization” above all else, CEO Chris Balfe said on the same panel with Sud last month. That’s video and audio podcast revenue, short-form content, branded content, subscriptions, off-platform ventures, etc. Balfe argues that the benefit of the D2C model vs standard Hollywood is that it empowers the talent themselves to “control the destiny long-term. You own it.” 

Red Seat cultivates relationships and business foundations, while Tubi provides an incremental audience. 

Where’s the real money in the creator economy?

But is there enough money to be made in the creator economy to justify such deliberate attention? There are arguments to be made both ways. 

Linear TV still generates more than $120 billion in annual U.S. revenue, while FAST revenue is projected to hit “just” $17 billion by 2029. It’s growing, but streaming is not expected to replicate the generous economics of pay-TV. Migrating audiences from creator-led platforms (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc.) to these expanding corporate destinations is another headache entirely. A consistent conversion funnel has yet to be built. 

Creators themselves are not spared from the universal law that shapes traditional entertainment: content is a historically top-heavy game. Only 4 percent of creators earn at least $100,000 annually, while half of all creators make less than $500 per month. Media analyst Doug Shapiro argues that fewer than 1 percent of creator content accounts account for 99 percent of revenue.

“It’s still early among Fortune 100 companies,” Sud said of creator economy advertising among top brands. “Madison Avenue is pretty traditional.” Red Seat serves top-tier creators only, as long-tail revenue democratization hasn’t materialized for lower-tier creators.

One clear hurdle is attribution. Advertisers understandably want to know their campaigns are reaching and activating the right audiences before shifting big dollars. While streaming offers more personalization opportunities than linear, formally tracking this sort of cause-and-effect remains tricky outside of affiliate links. Media spending on internet-connected TVs can be infamously inefficient. 

Then there’s the audience wealth gap. Yes, social media consumers are willing to spend. But 52 percent of adult TikTok users in the U.S. have a household annual income under $50,000, per Greenlight. This speaks to its younger-skewing audience. Until a more direct throughline to higher-earning audiences can be established, upper-echelon advertisers may remain wary.

There’s a logic behind opting out of the battle between the 37th Marvel Cinematic Universe film and the 12th Fast & Furious franchise installment. After failing to acquire Warner Bros. in the 2010s, Fox patriarch Lachlan Murdoch took stock of the deep-pocketed tech companies sniffing around Hollywood and decided enough was enough. 

Now, Fox’s bet is smaller-scale differentiation—swapping in creator-connected content for the blockbuster-IP model. The audience does exist, and is growing. But ad dollars are volatile, as the infrastructure is still developing, and we don’t yet know how scalable passionate niches can be. Can my favorite pop culture sketch comic or NFL analyst TikTokers support dedicated channels on different mediums? Time will tell if the monetary opportunity will catch up to the ambition. Fox is betting the gap between the audience and business model will continue to shrink. I’m betting it’ll be fun to watch either way. 

Picture this: elevated fashion wowing onlookers with immediate trend-setting appeal. A who’s who collection of star-power shining so brightly that someone should warn NASA. No, I’m not talking about the recent Academy Awards. I’m talking about May’s The Devil Wears Prada 2. The highly-anticipated legacy sequel, which is already tracking like a surefire hit, arrives 20 years after the original. But what’s even more impressive than the attractive ensembles adorning its original cast is how the film serves as a microcosm for an important trend.

Franchise fatigue is a real threat in Hollywood, but often misdiagnosed. The Devil Wears Prada 2 exists because there is still enduring demand for the original despite two decades without any continuations. Meanwhile, a meaningful portion of audiences say they’re no more likely to watch new entries from long-running active franchises like Marvel (36 percent), Game of Thrones (49 percent), The Walking Dead (54 percent), according to Hub Entertainment Research. The audience issue isn’t with general franchises. It’s with franchises they consider to be oversaturated and creatively exhausted. (With all due respect to the absolutely fantastic A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and Wonder Man).

In a market that’s been far too concentrated on the same small handful of franchises for years, The Devil Wears Prada 2 feels like a breath of fresh nostalgic air rather than bloated overexposure.

I asked Parrot Analytics to compare the most in-demand film/TV concepts that haven’t released a new installment in at least 10 years to the top active franchises. The gap between the former (20 times more in-demand than the average title) and the latter (24.6x) was much smaller than expected, suggesting inactive IP can rival in-the-moment franchises.

Standout examples included LOST (the 34th most in-demand TV series globally), Interstellar (4th among films), The Truman Show (20th) and Inception (24th). The TV side of the equation was dominated by genre storytelling (LOST, Hannibal, Person of Interest, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stargate)—exactly what fatigued episodic franchises used to deliver well. (It’s worth noting that a recent Buffy revival was scrapped by Hulu). On the film side, the aforementioned high-concept and sci-fi titles mixed with historical epics (Troy) and war stories (Black Hawk Down) are among the leaders.

It’s not as if Christopher Nolan is returning for sequels anytime soon. But studios can build out these worlds with creatively justifiable continuations. Many of these titles have remained in the cultural consciousness not just through sheer quality, but optimal placement in a crowded media warzone.

Studios are underestimating the sizable fanbases for older one-off films and/or legacy TV series. Chatter surrounding a potential LOST continuation has soldiered on for years without any tangible movement, while false rumours lit Film Twitter ablaze in 2020, suggesting Tenet was set in the world of Inception. Why is that? 

There are roughly 42 million U.S. consumers aged 35-plus who are nostalgic moviegoers of older titles and are likely to attend opening weekend, per Greenlight. Older millennials and younger Gen Xers are premium demographics with disposable income. But they’re mostly targeted via family entertainment that studios hope they’ll take their children to. Yes, adult-skewing dramas have become volatile box office bets. But that’s partly because Hollywood is aiming in the wrong direction. 

Hollywood has eaten itself alive spending the last 15 years squeezing every last drop out of notable franchises. Meanwhile, social platforms such as TikTok and YouTube have served as crucial discovery and reactivation tools for concepts that haven’t been over-exposed. There are nearly 114 million adult sci-fi moviegoers in the U.S., and many of them are heavy users of YouTube, per Greenlight, where fan culture is organically sustaining demand and engagement for titles like Interstellar. A viral TikTok/YouTube video, a news hook, a celebrity mention, a platform push—all of these elements can drive renewed surges.

Streaming data tells what audiences want

As the market-leader, Netflix is the default streamer. Its viewership serves as an important behavioral signal and not just empty nostalgia. Licensed titles are constantly rotating on and off the platform at varying intervals due to differing contractual agreements, but the streamer’s bi-annual engagement reports speak volumes about viewer appetites. 

Between 2023 and 2025, the first three seasons of LOST accumulated nearly 800 million global viewership hours (hat tip to What’s on Netflix). Interstellar (101 million hours) and The Truman Show (31 million hours) showed strong completion rates (total hours viewed divided by total runtime). That speaks to how immersive these stories remain years later.

Every Netflix view becomes a potential fan for a future installment. Around 65 percent of people rarely (or never) watch a sequel without seeing the original, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy. Streaming is quietly building legions of new fans for dormant IP while owners collect lucrative licensing revenue. It’s a win-win. 

Troy’s demand peaked at 58 percent above its own already-elevated average in the past year, followed by The Truman Show (46 percent), per Parrot. Other prime candidates for dormant IP continuation include Scrubs and Malcolm in the Middle (both of which have received revivals), as well as Scarface (a film reboot in the works) and V for Vendetta (an HBO adaptation in development).

These types of titles are waiting to re-explode when re-activated by the right digital switch. Hollywood has more than enough IP to choose from, but lacks the compass to navigate it effectively. Studios chasing the sixth sequel of a tired series are fighting over shrinking slices of diminishing returns. The people who want a mix of classic and new, the audiences who only watch sequels to films they’ve seen, and the 800 million global hours of viewership dedicated to LOST seem to tell a consistent story.

At its best, the Academy Awards function as a time capsule for the year’s national (and increasingly international) consciousness. Long before hashtags, nominated films reflected what was “trending” on our minds. Platoon (1986) and The Hurt Locker (2009) revealed the harsh realities and cultural considerations of very different wars. Wall Street (1987) and The Big Short (2015) explored two sides of the same greed-driven coin. When art and technology intersected alongside this cultural mirror, the Oscars became a microcosm for larger behavioral shifts. The ceremony expanded to not only externalize our collective cares, but make a direct comment on where our attention is heading. 

Irony is not without a sense of humor. The Oscars, America’s most-watched awards show celebrating cinematic big screen storytelling, is heading to YouTube in 2029, a digital destination most commonly accessed on ever-shrinking screens for a couple of minutes at a time. Once a pillar of the monoculture that unified Hollywood and its consumer constituents, the awards show is losing gravitational pull to never-ending new niches. 

For the first time, the Oscars are chasing the audience rather than leading it. 

Finite attention in the Entertainment Everywhere era

You need no reminder that the Academy Awards have been bleeding viewers so profusely that it should be eligible for its own Makeup nomination. The ceremony has failed to crack 20 million viewers from 2021 to 2025 after decades of easily clearing that mark. Its decline speaks to how viewers consume media these days. We now exist in the Entertainment Everywhere era. 

U.S. audiences spent 16.7 trillion minutes streaming in 2025, per Nielsen. Instagram developed a TV screen app. Podcasts are now on Netflix. You can watch a creator play video games on YouTube or Twitch while playing the same game on your phone. You can build whole worlds in Minecraft and Roblox! Awards shows aren’t just competing with their same-night TV schedules. They compete with entire digital ecosystems. 

The 1980s and 90s often saw around 50 million Americans watch the Academy Awards coronate cultural sensations, experienced together en masse. Today, our cultural inputs are determined by personalized recommendation algorithms.

Mainstream box office hits struggle to consistently score nominations, while lauded smaller prestige films aren’t always sexy or sticky with audiences. Four of this year’s 10 Best Picture nominees (Bugonia, Hamnet, Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent) failed to earn more than $50 million worldwide. Two nominees (Frankenstein, Train Dreams) are Netflix exclusive titles, which historically see sharp declines in engagement. This has more or less become par the course as we progress through the 21st century of film. 

I love arthouse movies as much as the next cinephile. But awards recognition no longer galvanizes the masses. So if your Best Picture slate is filled with more Maestros and Fabelmans than Top Gun: Mavericks and Barbies, you’re not going to capture as much attention. 

Social media has dismantled Hollywood mystique

Audiences used to only interact with celebrities through filtered traditional channels: magazine cover stories, the E! Channel, and dial-up internet (cut to Gen Z’s collective shudder). But celebrity today has gone direct-to-consumer. Social media builds unimpeded bridges to and from fanbases. 

This has demystified celebrity in ways that have likely contributed to the Oscars’ decline in cultural relevance. As experienced on live linear TV, the awards show once offered rare access to Hollywood’s biggest stars adorned in the finest (and most flawed) fashion. But celebrity’s novelty has been eroded now that fans have 24/7 access to their favorite figures. Why watch an hour of the red carpet to catch a single glimpse of Zendaya’s dress when she promotes her own fashion to more than 176 million Instagram followers? Hollywood’s longstanding fenced gateway has been punctured from the inside. 

Young social media-driven moviegoers, an audience of nearly 6.7 million adult Americans, are more than twice as likely as the average person to be influenced by online creators and over-index on multiple streaming platforms, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy. But the pop culture conversation increasingly takes place on Twitter/X, TikTok, YouTube, Letterboxd and memes across all of the above. The overall live audience is smaller, and the virality is less centralized. The origin of influence has shifted from the big screen to the phone screen. 

The goal of the YouTube migration is clear. The Academy wants to reach and recruit younger viewers, be more accessible to international audiences, and align with modern viewing behavior. But there exist logistical challenges. 

YouTube’s reported nine-figure commitment bested Disney’s eight-figure offer for Oscars rights, but the platform lacks experience producing live events in-house. Streaming struggles to match the broad reach of broadcast. YouTube’s exclusive NFL game in September drew 17.3 million viewers globally, less than the 18.7 million viewers the NFL averaged per game last season across linear TV and streaming platforms. Swapping out distribution platforms is no guarantee of an immediate audience increase.

The Oscars’ popularity has fallen in lockstep with landslide changes reshaping the audience and industry. Streaming and social media fragmentation, the loss of the monoculture, greater celebrity visibility and access, and changing tastes have all changed the game. The cultural shifts depicted in Best Picture contenders now stand in the shadow of what the waning ceremony says about culture at large. 

Escaping traditional distribution for a more modern alternative makes a certain amount of long-term sense. But it’s also a concession. The Oscars no longer set the cultural agenda. The best the nearly 100-year-old Academy Awards can hope for today is to try and keep up. 

AT&T paid $85.4 billion for Warner Bros. and failed to create value. The Walt Disney Company paid $71.3 billion for 20th Century Fox, and analysts still debate whether it was the right move. Discovery forked over $43 billion for Warner Bros. and is now selling. David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance is now committing $111 billion for the same asset. Yes, there has often been sound business logic behind major media mergers in recent years. But they consistently disappoint because properly integrating all those moving parts—creative, financial, cultural, etc.—is really damn hard, time-consuming and expensive.

“Large media mergers rarely disappoint because the strategy lacks logic. They disappoint because asset scale is easier to combine than operating models,” M&A integration expert and NYU instructor Klint Kendrick told Observer.

WarnerMount, ParaBros, or HBO-CBS (whatever they end up calling themselves) now has a war chest of blockbuster franchise IP, a roster of recognizable and popular network brands, a hefty collection of news and sports, a nine-figure streaming subscriber count, a ton of production space and global distribution infrastructure, and a backdoor into TikTok’s algorithm—thanks to the acquisition of the social app’s U.S. operations spearheaded by David Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison. It’s also the company with the greatest exposure to declining linear assets, a harsh debt load, a whole host of redundancies, conflicting KPIs and hierarchical Jenga dynamics. 

Can it work? Absolutely. Will it work? It depends entirely on execution.

The question of finding a new identity

Beyond the cavernous combined libraries, WBD delivers roughly 80 shows per year across in-house and third-party platforms, while Paramount Skydance delivers around 120. While those numbers may come down as a singular company, the new entity will be the most powerful content arms dealer on the market. 

The mountain of debt from the transaction ($79 billion) will necessitate an ocean of licensing revenue. But that scale gives the company immense leverage at the negotiating table. It may be able to rewrite the rules of engagement in TV free agency with higher license fees, shorter lending windows, and smaller incremental payouts.

“If Paramount spins cable assets, repositions them, or leans into scaled third-party studio supply, the financial logic may hold,” Kendrick said. “The execution question is whether leadership rapidly resets decision rights and aligns incentives around IP profitability rather than legacy linear benchmarks.” 

Paramount is sitting pretty from a content-volume standpoint. But how do Warner Bros.’ fantastical franchises blend with Paramount’s slightly more earthbound blockbusters? Does HBO’s elevated prestige mesh alongside CBS’ engineered accessibility? Can Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, CNN and CBS News realistically co-exist under the same roof? 

“Paramount’s biggest problem isn’t their content. It’s their identity,” Tracy Lamourie, media strategist and founder of Lamourie Media, told Observer.

On the theatrical side, the combination offers headache-reducing stability but doesn’t necessarily yield a huge ceiling increase on paper, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy. 

Evaluating which brand assets to emphasize and which to reduce will be a painfully necessary process. Along the way, developing a true brand identity will be crucial. What defines a ParaBros film? Coherence is needed for dealmaking behind closed doors and audience perception. What should subscribers expect from and associate with an HBO Max-Paramount+ original streaming series? What are you known for?

Between Washington and Silicon Valley

For months, the entire media industry has banged the drum about the Ellison family’s close ties to the Trump administration. Yes, that should, in theory, grease the wheels of this merger. But are we sure there aren’t any U.S. regulators who might consider the consolidation of CNN and CBS news, a dominant 35 to 40 percent cable TV market share under one umbrella, and Middle East money backing this deal to be worth a second look? What about European regulators who may be itching to throw a wrench into American media plans? Either way, expectations are that the deal won’t close for anywhere between six to 18 months. 

Paramount now has a stockpile of scaled assets. But its ravenous spending must be followed by strategic discipline and brand clarity. The risk is collapsing under the weight of all that ownership. Anything short of surgical precision in execution threatens to derail what could be a transformative new era. 

In one way or another, trillion-dollar companies Apple ($3.78 trillion), Google ($3.63 trillion), Amazon ($2.32 trillion) and Meta ($1.64 trillion) have all entered the content game in the 21st century. This has left legacy media companies such as Paramount Skydance ($13.4 billion), Warner Bros. Discovery ($69 billion) and even the Walt Disney empire ($178.6 billion) at a distinct disadvantage, especially when it comes to pouncing on attractive assets. 

Google snatched up YouTube (and, more recently, NFL Sunday Ticket), Amazon could easily afford to overpay for MGM (and Thursday Night Football), and Netflix almost snagged WBD. Wall Street has never put as much pressure on tech stocks to deliver immediate profits, allowing their entertainment divisions to operate at a loss for extended periods. Legacy media does not receive the same gentle treatment. 

Driven by the endless pockets of Big Tech, going it alone has become more financially fraught than ever before. But this era of consolidation will not be won simply by acquiring the shiniest toys available. Instead, those who know exactly what they’re selling and how to endure a war of attrition are best positioned for the future. 

We stumble forward in a daze with the slow realization dawning over us amidst an indescribable fatigue. Our body uncurls itself from tension’s chokehold as the never-ending burden finally lifts. “It’s done,” we whisper. Okay, you caught me. I’m describing the climax of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King when Frodo and Samwise finally rid Middle Earth of that pesky little trinket. But you have to admit, it completely applies to our exhaustive gratefulness that the Warner Bros. Discovery sweepstakes are finally over. Netflix bowed out of the race, leaving Paramount Skydance to gobble up the historic legacy studio (regulatory approval notwithstanding). 

While Netflix lost an industry-defining asset, it gets to walk away with a $2.8 billion breakup fee and, to the delight of its shareholders, returns to its core business of streaming. But now that this massive deal is off the table, the company has lingering questions about its future identity and execution.

“Netflix doesn’t need to win the scale war. They’ve already won the scale war. Now they have to win the durability war,” Tracy Lamourie, media strategist and founder of Lamourie Media, told Observer.

Traditional Hollywood has long been envious of Netflix because Wall Street treats the content company as a tech stock. However, Netflix’s share price tumbled roughly 35 percent after the December news that it had “won” the WBD arms race, before recovering after Paramount’s 12th round TKO. Investors did not respond well to the market-leading streamer operating like a legacy media company.

Shareholders seem to want financial discipline and global scale rather than the integration complexities of such a major transaction. Now, Netflix has an extra $2.8 billion to play with. This is more than the company’s average free cash flow of $2.2 billion over the last five quarters. Essentially, the breakup fee nets Netflix an additional quarter of generous business virtually out of thin air. “The breakup fee is not transformational capital, it’s optionality,” Lamourie said. 

The million-dollar sports question

Netflix has flirted with live events but has only found success with a very select few (Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson, NFL Christmas games, etc.). Sports rights are very expensive. So the cost-benefit equation comes down to whether or not they are among the last true growth drivers or a needless loss leader for Netflix. 

“Live sports is the only content category that cannot be time-shifted, pirated or faked by an inferior competitor at a lower price,” YouTube strategist Mike Dee told Observer. Very true. But do they fit on Netflix, which has built an empire largely without them? “Sports is an interesting growth area,” film production expert Matthew Celia mused. “The question is whether it fits Netflix’s DNA long-term or just answers a short-term pressure.”

Netflix already boasts 325 million-plus global subscribers, the company disclosed at the end of 2025. It’s fair to wonder whether it needs more raw size. As of now, the company seems content to experiment with peripheral engagement drivers such as podcasts, YouTube creator recruitment, and vertical video. (Co-CEO Greg Peters even hinted that Netflix might be rerouting some of that breakup fee to podcasts and video games, though the latter has proved largely immaterial since launching in 2021).

“The real risk is cultural saturation.”

Netflix’s subscriber growth has slowed, hence why it stopped reporting quarterly numbers. Its U.S. share of TV time is relatively flat over the last three years, per Nielsen. Yet it still maintains the industry’s lowest churn rate (around 2 percent monthly) by a wide margin, according to Antenna data.

“The risk isn’t subscriber churn; the risk is cultural saturation,” Lamourie warned.

Netflix is the largest streamer and most prolific movie studio on the planet. In its all-consuming quest for broad buffet appeal, its global daily engagement per viewer declined from 2023 to 2025. Fair or not, the streamer must battle consumer perceptions of quick cancellations, formulaic slates, and fewer culturally defining breakthrough moments. 

Wall Street is rewarding its careful consideration of cash flow. But the financial discipline of not getting into a bidding war with Paramount must eventually be matched by reinvention. Netflix already possesses scale. Facing a future without WBD requires a new growth path that doesn’t distill or sanitize its creative quality and cultural footprint.

Here’s a blinding glimpse of the obvious: streaming audiences love sports! But the cost of sports rights has grown to untenable proportions. The amount of sports content across the five global streamers (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Paramount+, Disney+) has grown by 52 percent since January 2024, according to Nielsen. Across the industry, streamers will spend a bottom-line-busting $14.2 billion on sports in 2026, per Ampere Analysis. The NFL’s looming renegotiations will be so expensive that legacy media executives are already talking about “rebalancing” their portfolios (i.e., cutting spending elsewhere) to afford it. 

As the streaming industry matures, these platforms desperately want to shift sports rights from loss leaders to money-makers. Raising subscription prices is a temporary band-aid. Long-term, streamers need to build content libraries that maximize retention well into the off-season to have any hope of recouping their investments. This brings us to an obvious yet complicated question: who are sports fans and what else do they like to watch? 

Given increased competition, price sensitivity and overall saturation, premium streamers are finding it harder to attract new subscribers in recent years. Despite this, sports remain a consistent draw for fresh sign-ups, similar to how Thin Mints are guaranteed to get my money when the Girl Scouts come knocking. 

The start of each NFL season continues to be kind for subscriber numbers at Paramount+ and Peacock. The recent migration of UFC to the former has also helped. Netflix’s mix of Christmas NFL games, weekly WWE programming and high-profile boxing matches is bringing new eyeballs on board. Apple TV has benefited more moderately from its collection of Friday Night Baseball, F1 and MLS rights. 

Netflix’s prize fight between Canelo Alvarez and Terence Crawford in September brought in 238,000 new subscribers, accounting for 15 percent of new sign-ups that month, per Antenna. Three of the top 10 Netflix titles in sign-ups that month were WWE events. Sports are so immensely valuable because they serve as the most effective on-ramp for new customers entering new streamers. 

Who are sports fans, and what else do they watch?

There are more than 145 million U.S. adult sports fans spanning nearly 90 million households, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights and Content Strategy. Within that large bucket, 68 percent of fans are male, while 32 percent are female. They still over-index with older audiences: Age 65+ (28 percent), 55-64 (17 percent), 45-54 (17 percent) are the three largest contingents. This suggests that the broad reach of broadcast TV still matters even as sports fans engage with streaming platforms. 

Sports fans are multi-streamers and are heavy users of digital media. They are 12 percent more likely than an average American adult to be Hulu subscribers, followed by Amazon (9 percent), YouTube (7 percent), Peacock (2 percent) and Paramount+ (2 percent). They also like podcasts, live TV, cable and streaming in general. But platforms need to keep these audiences on the paying hook well after their favorite teams or athletes are done playing.

Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are leading by this measure. Seven of the top 10 titles viewers watched right after Canelo vs. Crawford were on Netflix, per Antenna. The other three were Thursday Night Football games on Amazon Prime. Among the non-sports options, the most popular co-viewed title was Happy Gilmore 2, as 20 percent of the fight’s audience also tuned into the Adam Sandler comedy. It was followed by Untamed (17 percent), Wednesday (16 percent), Madea’s Destination Wedding (11 percent), The Old Guard 2 (11 percent), KPop Demon Hunters (11 percent), and Squid Game (10 percent). 

Data from Streamline, which helps users find where and when to watch sports, film and TV, tells a similar story. The 10 narrative titles most added to the watchlists of sports fans over the last month include: Landman, The Pitt, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, His & Hers, The Rookie, Stranger Things, Shrinking, 1923, Paradise and Pluribus. (A friend of mine binged Season 5 of Hulu’s hockey comedy Shoresy after watching the U.S. Men’s Hockey team win Olympic gold!). 

Sports fans love other sports. That’s an obvious but costly programming strategy. Amazon is paying nearly $3 billion a year for the NFL and NBA alone, while Paramount pays more than $3 billion for the NFL and UFC. Elsewhere, mainstream genre-spanning hits (crime/thriller dramas, medical procedural, horror-comedy, sci-fi and fantasy, animation, dramedy) and broad-appeal movies scratch their itch. 

How streamers retain sports fans beyond game day

The years-long hype surrounding the sports docu-series genre does not match the viewership reality. But sports-doc viewer affinity can still help us understand the directional tastes of sports fans. Whip Media’s TV Time shows the user overlap of expressed viewership intent between titles—users who said they plan to watch title X also said they plan to watch title Y. 

For Michael Jordan’s The Last Dance, top overlaps by affinity include Quarterback, Untold, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, Hard Knocks, and Mr. McMahon.  Sports docs, behind-the-scenes series, sports-adjacent tell-alls and scripted dramatizations all belong to similar taste clusters. For Formula 1: Drive to Survive, the trend expands into Senna, The Grand Tour, Masters of the Air, Our Planet, and Tiger King, reflecting broader automotive fandom and premium scripted spectacle. Meanwhile, ESPN’s 30 for 30 pushes more into comedy and buzzy non-scripted programming like Tiger King, Veep, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Mythic Quest and the sports-centric Ballers. 

What did we learn? Sports fans respond to a mix of related scripted fare, relevant flashy originals and lean-back catalog programming. 

As more sports migrate to streaming, platforms should focus on building a chain of live sports programming; a sports-plus library that nudges viewers into adjacent content related to their favorite players, teams and leagues; and leverage mainstream scripted programming as bridges between major events. Come for UFC and Canelo vs. Crawford; stay for Wednesday and Landman. 

Sports remain the best acquisition drivers in these leaner sign-up times. But housing multiple sports in a single digital ecosystem is not the only final answer. Sports fans have predictable and programmable tastes and media habits. Grand-scheme ROI depends on designing the perfect post-game library funnel.

“What now?” It’s the first question that crops up between cause and effect. It’s the exact question Disney employees are asking from behind the hallowed walls of the Magic Kingdom. It’s the gaping unknown gnawing at the certainty-seeking minds of Hollywood observers. In a digital world, Disney’s dividends are driven by the steel and wood of its roller coasters. 

Bob Iger will hand the reins of The Walt Disney Company to Parks & Experiences head Josh D’Amaro next month. This we saw coming. In 2023, Disney announced a $60 billion investment into Parks & Experiences over 10 years. D’Amaro’s division recently topped $10 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time and accounts for 60 percent of Disney’s profit.

Content may no longer be the great equalizer in today’s fragmented media landscape. But content still drives Disney’s famous flywheel. Consumers love going to the parks because it is an extension of their favorite characters: Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind, Avatar Flight of Passage, etc. That’s why co-chairman of Disney Entertainment and TV head honcho Dana Walden’s elevation to Disney’s first president and chief creative officer is the real intrigue.  

Walden’s promotion falls directly in line with the rest of Hollywood’s recent anointment of veteran television executives to oversee all content. At a time when Kathleen Kennedy is vacating the top spot at Lucasfilm, Kevin Feige doesn’t feel quite as invincible as he once did, Pixar is attempting to get its groove back, and Walden will now be above Disney Studios Content Chairman and film unit maestro Alan Bergman, Disney’s future is as malleable as it has ever been in the 21st century. 

Film is the foundational launching pad for multimedia franchises bred to be milked for every last drop. Disney is responsible for four of the 10 highest-ranking films on Greenlight Analytics’ “Theatrical Intent” list over the last five years. It may be an unfamiliar stage for Walden. But she knows storytelling, and streaming is the needle mover with more long-term economic upside, even if it will never be considered grand and prestigious. 

Here is where the “what now?” question begins to sprout tendrils. Disney’s future won’t depend solely on who makes the opening remarks on quarterly earnings calls. Instead, its prospects will rise and fall with the types of stories it chooses to tell and how it builds value from them beyond the screen. 

Warner Bros. Discovery tried and failed to be a one-stop shop for Netflix competitors. Now here’s Disney—the cleanest and most easily understood brand in Hollywood history—struggling with general entertainment after investing tens of billions into it. Walden’s content track record across her Fox and Disney tenures is wildly enviable. 24, Modern Family, American Horror Story, Family Guy, Bob’s Burgers, 9-1-1, This Is Us, Only Murders in the Building, Paradise, The Bear, etc. These hits sell ad time and chew up engagement. But, as many have already pointed out, they don’t inspire theme park rides and merchandise sales (though now I can’t stop imagining a Carmy Berzatto attraction where park guests share cigarettes and panic attacks in a dirty kitchen). Hulu is great at surfacing long-running sitcoms and procedurals from broadcast television, but hasn’t yet mastered making its own versions at scale. Its absorption into Disney+ speaks volumes about its scalable strategic value. 

Disney is in a difficult position as a franchise-forward media company that has arguably invested too much in non-core generalist fare to turn back now. Fox, Hulu and sports have been essential loss leaders, debt-ridden albatrosses, or something in the middle, depending on who you ask. 

If D’Amaro revisits Iger 2.0’s early Sun Valley comments entertaining the idea of selling off brands that don’t brighten Disney’s halo effect, where does that leave Disney’s content engines? The same question is just as compelling if he doesn’t. As sports media rights trampoline into even more expensive territory, scripted content will continue to lose airtime. 

That speaks to an ongoing streaming dilemma. Can Walden juice time spent on Disney’s streaming platforms, which have remained flat for roughly two years? Back in the heyday of cable, the Disney Channel would deliver a handful of modestly budgeted hit original movies each year that became reliable assets. Why and how this model has been abandoned in favor of much more expensive streaming exclusive films is a mystery to me. (Though the Descendants and Zombies movies seem to be doing well).  

Disney announced a $1.5 billion investment in Fortnite maker Epic Games back in 2024, though no substantial film/TV projects have come from it. D’Amaro oversees video games, and Walden has the creative chops to spin something new out of something old. Video games have replaced superheroes as Hollywood’s shiny new funnel of blockbuster IP, necessitating a bold step into this arena sooner rather than later. 

Paramount has Sonic (and soon Call of Duty), Warner Bros. has A Minecraft Movie and The Last of Us, Universal has a fledgling Nintendo universe, Sony has Zach Cregger’s new Resident Evil movie, and Netflix has been dabbling in video game properties for a while. Despite rampant rumors over the years, a Kingdom Hearts video game adaptation has never reached Disney’s screens. That game already boasts a successful roadmap, built-in fan base, and irresistible wish fulfillment. It’s the type of splashy, Disney universe-reinforcing project that splits the difference between modernity and recycling. Not for nothing, it’s also a worthy attempt at stretching beyond superheroes. (The same thinking goes for anime, albeit with lower floors and ceilings for now.)  

We know it’s always more valuable to fully own IP in-house. But it’s not always realistic. Disney+’s hit Bluey is licensed (with a film adaptation in the works), and Disney recently acquired the Impossible Creatures book series. Continuing to eye the market for strategically aligned opportunities to add new toys to the sandbox is a likely (and needed) path. It sets a new tone for a new era. 

And this wouldn’t be Disney without returning to the well of success at least once. Encanto is the most popular streaming movie ever in the U.S., according to Nielsen data. Its muted box office was the result of a COVID-depressed theatrical marketplace, not an indictment on its quality. The overall audience response has made that clear. 

Greenlighting a sequel wouldn’t just be a brand-safe, house-style move. It would be a signal flare that Walden and her team understand the value of original storytelling, discovery and franchise expansion. For a company stuck in a tug-of-war with the past, Encanto sits at the intersection of fully owned in-house IP, streaming-era audience reach, multimedia franchise potential and risk vs safety. 

Disney’s next era is already underway. What will result depends on its ability to move beyond its standard way of doing things in order to cultivate new and existing stories while recognizing when—and how—they actually hit.