TOW
Movie of the Week
Dear Friends,
After four years of running Warner Bros. Discovery, and overseeing a 14% revenue decline over that span, CEO David Zaslav reportedly stands to personally gain in the neighborhood of $700,000,000 if the deal with Paramount Skydance goes through. So many amazing movies could be financed with 700 million dollars, and instead that’s going to a single person1. Even in capitalist terms, this is a grossly distorted, inefficient allocation of resources.
At the same time, the new company will be saddled with $79 billion in debt. It’s a massive leveraged buyout, and no one believes it will work out well for the company, its employees, or for cinema (note Paramount Skydance stock is down 25% since the merger announcement less than a month ago). Much of our economic system has been reduced to financial engineering schemes that benefit a miniscule number of people at the expense of everyone else.
Besides sending a hundred-year-old, and still successful, movie studio into debt-fueled oblivion, the deal further consolidates our media ecosystem. The Secretary of War has already been quoted as saying he looks forward to CNN being absorbed by CBS so the existing coverage and criticism of the government is quashed even further.
With all this on the table, the movement to BLOCK THE MERGER is substantive and well-organized, and even those without a foot in entertainment per se have a stake in the outcome given the disaster it is for consumers and the implications for society.
In contrast to the ongoing story of the rapacious private equity returns of the “Epstein Class”, this week’s movie pick is based on the true story of a woman fighting the company that towed her car–out of which she had been living. Called Tow, the movie is directed by Stephanie Laing and stars Rose Byrne in what I expect to be another compelling, believably-unhinged performance. It’s playing at the Angelika but we’ve seen too many movies there recently. Tow is getting a slightly wider release and thus is playing at a couple AMC theaters in the city. We’ll attend the AMC Kips Bay for the Tuesday (Mar 24) screening at 7:15pm.
How many examples of obscene inequality are we going to see before we rise up and demand justice, fairness, and consideration for all people?
To the pleasure of films and the discussions they spark,
Josh
He’s not the only one walking away with an obscene amount of money. Four other executives, all men, stand to split another $460,000,000 between them.