The Hollywood Reporter June 15, 2022

Lady Gaga The pop star is in early talks to nab a coveted role in Todd Phillips’ sequel — a musical — to Warner Bros.’ Joker, with Joaquin Phoenix still in final negotiations. Anthony Wood Wall Street skepticism about Roku, led by the CEO, wasn’t helped by an Insider report floating that Netflix could buy the firm. Roku stock spiked, then sank to a low for 2022. Jeremy Zimmer While the CAA deal for ICM is held up in DOJ review, the UTA chief is on a buying streak, snapping up U.K. lit agency Curtis Brown Group and data firm MediaHound in June. Jeff Frost The long-time Sony Pictures TV chief is the latest exec to exit as the indie studio gets squeezed by buyers turning to in-house producers to fuel their streaming platforms. Showbiz Stocks $167.54 (-15.4%) NETFLIX (NFLX) Not…

Hollywood is a place where no matter how fired you are, you’re not fired. At Disney alone, studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg wasn’t fired when then-chairman and CEO Michael Eisner tossed him out a window in 1994. Michael Ovitz wasn’t fired when Eisner did the same in 1996. Tom Staggs wasn’t fired when Bob Iger pushed him out as COO in 2016. Even Steve McPherson, who was ousted as head of ABC in 2010 amid a sexual harassment investigation, wasn’t fired. All were allowed to resign. In the Bob Chapek era, Geoff Morrell, the chief corporate affairs officer who was dispatched at the end of April after three disastrous months, was allowed to resign, saying the new role was “not the right fit.” But Peter Rice, a respected executive with a career…

The June 10-12 weekend was a significant moment for the domestic box office reset as Jurassic World Dominion stomped to a better-than-expected $145.1 million, while Top Gun: Maverick flew to $51.9 million in its third outing. Until now, the biggest weekends of the pandemic era have been propelled by one title, prompting concern that the concept of having multiple films work on the marquee — especially during the summer season — is an endangered one. When Sony and Marvel’s Spider-Man: No Way Home opened to a massive $260.1 million in December, it accounted for 92.3 percent of the overall weekend revenue of $281.8 million, according to Comscore. Flash forward to Universal and Amblin’s Jurassic World Dominion, which accounted for 67.4 percent of overall weekend revenue, while Paramount and Skydance’s Top Gun…

Since Spotify went public in 2018, the music streamer has grown its subscribers, active users and revenue. But questions about its profitability outlook often have been seen as keeping a lid on its stock. CEO Daniel Ek acknowledged as much June 8 during its first investor day in years. Some might think that “we’re a bad business, or at least a business with bad margins for the foreseeable future,” Ek said, calling gross margin the “lone outlier” among key performance metrics that have otherwise delivered gains since 2018. Gross margin is a profitability measure expressed in a percentage, which is calculated by deducting the cost of goods or services sold from the revenue they generate, divided by that revenue, with that result multiplied by 100. In Spotify’s traditional core music business,…

Spotify has acquired AI voice startup Sonantic, co-founded by Zeena Qureshi and John Flynn. The firm specializes in creating hyperrealistic artificial voices, including an AI Val Kilmer voice model. Clubhouse, run by Paul Davison, is facing an exodus of talent as execs Nina Gregory, Sean Brown, Stephanie Simon, Aarthi Ramamurthy and Anu Atluru leave the social audio company. TED, the company behind TED Talks, is launching an Apple Podcast subscription for its network of nine podcasts for $4.99 a month. Subscribers get ad-free early access to new shows and seasons.…

Amazon was among the early players in the streaming landscape, with its first original series debuting in 2013, a couple of months after Netflix’s House of Cards. In the intervening nine years, however, it would not be easy to discern a cohesive strategy behind the programming on the tech giant’s Prime Video streaming service. Prime Video doesn’t have near the volume of programming that Netflix does, nor is it as franchise-driven as streamers attached to legacy studios (and their troves of IP) are. But where it doesn’t have a decades-long string of movie and TV titles it owns on which to draw, the company has turned to its roots as an online bookseller to adapt a number of best-selling novels as series. In fact, Prime Video’s three biggest original series in…