Paramount's California Exit Looks Unstoppable to Me, Plus Greta Gerwig's Risky Narnia First Look and Kojima's Physint Cast

I think Paramount's moving and I don't think there's anything that California or anyone else can do about it. The real question to me is whether Warner Brothers is going to move too, and that's the only part of this I think can still be saved. I don't necessarily think Paramount leaving is a bad idea. It's probably not great for the people currently in the industry, but I think it could be very good for the industry itself and for people who haven't been able to get into it.

Paramount's Move Looks Like a Done Deal to Me, and California May Not Be Able to Stop It

David and Larry Ellison were so determined to beat Netflix to this merger, after Netflix had already locked up its own deal, that they built a fee structure that was too good to pass up, including what's known as a ticking clock fee of $7 million a day. They were so confident, because of their friendship with Donald Trump, that the deal would clear approvals by October 1st. Everyone else fell in line, including overseas governments, but a group of attorneys general led by California's Rob Bonta did not.

Bonta is in a tough spot because a number of people understandably feel that if this merger goes through it would hurt Hollywood anyway, so some ask why it matters where the company is based. Gavin Newsom is reportedly pushing to approve the deal because he wants to run for president, and it seems like everyone else has turned a blind eye except Bonta, who I think "seems so far to have a spine of steel." He and eleven other blue states have filed a lawsuit to stop the merger, and the judge appears to be siding with them, having set a court date for March. If the fee started accruing October 1st and runs until then, that's over a billion dollars in penalties.

The Ellisons have proposed that the states suing them should have to post a bond covering that fee through the court date, and pay the penalty themselves if they lose the case, since they'd have caused the delay for nothing. It's a bit like making the other side cover your legal fees. The Trump Justice Department has reportedly backed the idea of a bond but apparently cannot force the states to pay it, which is a real problem for that plan. This week, word is that closed door talks between Paramount and Bonta's group of attorneys general did not go well, so Paramount has reportedly told the governor of California and the mayor of Los Angeles that it's moving, seemingly to pressure Bonta with the threat of lost jobs and revenue. I think you'll get an official announcement around October 1st, if not sooner.

Where Would Paramount Go? Tennessee Looks Like the Front Runner

Texas and Georgia have both built up huge production hubs with plenty of facilities and are conservative friendly, which fits the direction the Ellisons seem to want to take the company, even though their first foray into that lane with 60 Minutes hasn't gone especially well.

The rumor, though, is Tennessee. Larry Ellison's company Oracle is building a sprawling campus in Nashville that was announced back in 2021, hit a huge delay, and is now under construction. My guess is the thinking is to put Paramount there or nearby to strengthen ties with the state, which I'm sure is offering plenty of incentives in return.

Nashville is a red state city with a strong country music identity, but it's also more of a metropolis than people might expect, somewhere in the middle geographically and culturally. Taylor Swift is there all the time, and Nicole Kidman lived there while married to Keith Urban. A move there would be huge for both the city and the state.

The Bad Aspects: Losing a Piece of Movie History and a Return to the Studio System

Paramount used to be the Hollywood player. The show The Offer, about Bob Evans, takes place largely on the Paramount lot, which distributed The Godfather and many other industry defining movies of the 1970s. I'd argue it's probably the most famous lot there is. Warner Brothers is similarly historic and hasn't been destroyed yet, but Fox was a historic lot too, and I was there before it was sold. Watching it go was very sad.

This would also be bad for the industry more broadly. Hollywood is a company town, and right now everybody can essentially be a free agent because all the jobs are concentrated in one place, which is why it's so much about who you know. If studios scatter to different cities, it becomes much harder to piece together a year's worth of work, and I think you'd see a return to something like the old studio system.

The studio system went away in the first place because people wanted profit participation instead of being salaried employees making money for someone else, a bit like how video game workers typically don't share in the revenue their work generates. Right now in Hollywood everybody gets a piece of the pie, which is one of the reasons people want to work in the movie business at all, and that could change too. If more actors end up on the East Coast, it might also mean more members paying dues into SAG.

The Good Aspects: Breaking Open Hollywood's Insiders Club

I think breaking the movie business wide open is what Ellison wants to do, and it would go over better with a lot of people if he weren't so political about it. It's one thing to want to break Hollywood open, it's another to potentially put it in the pocket of MAGA, which is what concerns me most. I don't think Hollywood should be political in any direction. I think it should try to speak to the most people possible.

Hollywood is very much behind a red velvet rope at this point, and I think nepotism is greater than it's ever been, with everything closed off around who you know. Moving a major studio outside that bubble could let in different types of people and different viewpoints, and if that studio put out product that found an audience, I think the rest of Hollywood would take notice, since the goal at the end of the day is to make money and drive the stock price.

I think what's happening here is similar to what happened to Detroit: they still make cars, just not all in Detroit. Movies and television will get made everywhere, but it will be harder to network and keep relationships going. That's where it gets tricky, and it's a little scary to imagine Hollywood shifting back toward an employee system where people don't participate in the value they create, the way it's played out in other industries where profits mostly flow to upper management.

What I'd actually like to see is Paramount move while Warner Brothers stays put, which I think would be an excellent tactic letting Ellison effectively run two operational studios, a traditional model at Warner Brothers and an experimental one at Paramount, assuming the merger goes through at all. If he took both studios to Nashville, I think that would be horrible and would speed up the collapse of the old system too fast. I'd rather see a steadier, slower pivot.

To be clear, when I say conservative I mean moderate conservative, not MAGA, which I see as the extremist wing of that movement. Old school Hollywood actually had a fair number of Republicans, including Jimmy Stewart and Ronald Reagan, and there are conservatives today who wouldn't consider going into entertainment as it currently exists. I do think the Republican party is out of control right now, and that extremism plays best on social media, which is a real problem. I'm hopeful that in the next election or so the country pulls some of that power back toward a system of checks and balances. On a related note, James Gunn possibly relocating for Tennessee meetings came up, and all I'll say is that nobody seems entirely sure where James Gunn lives, beyond that it's somewhere in the United States and reportedly on the East Coast.

Greta Gerwig's Narnia First Look: A White Witch in Go Go Boots and 1960s Rock and Roll

New images from Greta Gerwig's Narnia: The Magician's Nephew are starting to roll out as the marketing ramps up. The film was originally planned for Thanksgiving but has moved to Super Bowl weekend, which this year also falls on Valentine's Day, and it will apparently be the only movie willing to go up against the Super Bowl. It's set for an IMAX release with a 45 day theatrical window before it hits streaming, which is a huge deal for Netflix as a genuine theatrical release.

One image really surprised a lot of people: Emma Mackey's White Witch wearing go go boots in a 1960s rock and roll style dress. Gerwig has said in an interview that it's not a musical, but that 1960s British rock and roll, artists like David Bowie and Paul McCartney, changed her life, which suggests that influence is shaping the film.

That music came out of a specific postwar context. My theory is that during World War II, with the men away fighting, women and other groups found freedoms they hadn't had before, and after the war those same people were pushed back into a box as society tried to reward returning soldiers with a return to normalcy. Because people had tasted that freedom, I think that's part of why so many major movements, the women's movement, civil rights, gay rights, all exploded in the decades right after the war. I find myself wondering whether Gerwig is drawing on that history, and whether the White Witch in this telling is really a witch or something closer to a feminist figure.

Gerwig has also said she was very religious growing up and feels a kinship to this book for that reason, but she's not especially religious now. I'm curious what the interpretation of someone who has stepped back from religion looks like in this story, and how much that might frustrate readers who love the book specifically for its faith. I think the conversation around this movie could end up being as interesting, or more interesting, than the movie itself.

The Aslan Controversy: Meryl Streep's Voice and a Lion Described as Every Animal in One Identity

It's been known for a while that Meryl Streep will voice Aslan, which set off a debate about a female Aslan, since Aslan is meant to represent Jesus Christ in this story. Then more recently people noticed the character in images clearly reads as a male lion, with a visible mane, and reports say Aslan will still use male pronouns.

My read, based on the fact that Aslan appears to be built from mixed media, with what look like feathers and scale like textures around the eyes, is that Gerwig is presenting this Christ figure as everything in one entity: male and female, human, and every animal at once. I think that's a genuinely interesting idea, that everything and everyone might see itself in God, but I also think a lot of people are going to push back and ask if that's really meant to represent Jesus. It's also unclear whether Streep's performance will be run through some kind of processing to change how her voice sounds.

I said on this that I'm an entertainment channel and don't really want to be having conversations about religion, but that's clearly where Gerwig is heading with, as I put it, reckless abandon. It's her career, and if this is how she wants to approach it, that's her call, but I think it's going to be a lot for people to process.

Worries This Could Repeat A Wrinkle in Time's Box Office Stumble

When the poster for A Wrinkle in Time came out, I tweeted that it was beautiful but that it seemed to lean toward a female and LGBTQ audience and would limit who felt invited to see it, even though the film starred a young woman. Ava DuVernay responded to that criticism at the time and later blocked me over it. That film underperformed and, in my opinion, wasn't a particularly good movie despite a strong performance from Storm Reid, which was part of why it struggled.

As soon as I saw the poster for Narnia: The Magician's Nephew, I got a sense of deja vu and worried about a similar pattern playing out, even though I expect this to be a much better film. I think Narnia should be a four quadrant movie, and I'm not sure the marketing so far is positioning it that way.

To Gerwig's credit, she has always leaned feminist, and Little Women, which I watch every Christmas and consider one of the most feminist movies I've seen, made $220 million, which is excellent for its budget and earned plenty of award nominations. I think this new film could perform like Wicked if handled correctly. For comparison, the original The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe made $745 million more than twenty years ago, using a much more broadly appealing blue and orange poster style than what's being used now.

Noah Baumbach co-wrote Barbie with Gerwig, to whom he's married, but he isn't involved in this project, and he has reportedly just signed a deal with Warner Brothers, which some wondered might connect back to Barbie somehow given that deal still has only a couple of months left to close.

Hideo Kojima's Physint Cast Revealed: Bill Skarsgard Leads, Not Robert Pattinson

Hideo Kojima released a photo with a female Xbox executive standing right under a message from Geoff Keighley, a nod to what I'd call a fake fight or a real fight between Kojima and Keighley that the internet loved and that's now permanently part of both their online identities. I like seeing a female creator handling herself so well in this space without leaning on womanhood or feminism as the point of the moment, just excelling.

The cast for Kojima's new game Physint, described as an espionage action game, was announced, and it is not Robert Pattinson as some had guessed, but Bill Skarsgard in the lead role. The rest of the announced cast includes Don Lee, along with other actors who performed the roles through motion capture. Separately, Hunter Schafer is reportedly attached to a different Kojima game, not this one.

Kojima clearly loves working with Hollywood actors, which fits with his upcoming deal with A24 to adapt one of his games. Elle Fanning's prominent role in one of his previous games seems to have helped her career and brought her more forgiving fans in other spaces. When I first saw the Skarsgard headline I briefly thought of his brother Alexander, but then I remembered how good Bill Skarsgard was as Pennywise, showing real depth and nuance, and I'm curious to see more of what he can do here.

I've called Kojima the Nolan of video games, and I think he's actually more progressive than Christopher Nolan, though Nolan seems to be moving in that direction too, at least with The Odyssey. All of this raises a bigger question for me about whether video games need movie stars to succeed these days, and whether talent agents are increasingly steering their clients toward games as a career move.

Do you think video games need Hollywood stars to succeed, or is that just the direction the industry is heading regardless?