Archives for May 2022

In person, Ms. Afualo seemed a stark contrast from her energetic, sharp-tongued online persona. “I’m a lot more laid back than people think I am,” she said. “I’m only like that because that’s what I do — react to that terrible content.”

At Boris and Horton, a cafe for people and their dogs, a corgi started yapping after having lost a tussle with friends. A Labrador named Callie approached, and Ms. Afualo gave the dog a scratch.

“Right now, my mom has a little maltipoo, a little crusty white dog,” she said. “I love her. I’m obsessed with her. And then we have a pit bull.”

A man wearing a backward baseball cap suddenly loomed over the table.

“So, I’m going to jump in,” he announced. Then he asked Ms. Afualo to state her view of the Supreme Court’s potential overturning of Roe v. Wade. “It’s terrible,” she replied. “It’s horrifying.” Even offline, it seemed, she couldn’t avoid being called on to give her opinion on an issue pertaining to women.

Back outside, she talked about online vitriol, an all too common hazard for women in her line of work, especially women of color. “It’s a different level of hate that I get,” she said. “I’m not afforded the same courtesy that they give many men, and other women, too. If I was a small, white woman, would you feel this strongly about what I said? Would you laugh and be like, ‘Tough, but fair’?”

At Veniero’s Pasticceria Caffé Ms. Afualo got a berry tart. Nearby, on a stoop on East 10th Street, she mentioned that she believes in daily affirmations, which have apparently helped her keep her cool amid the barrage of online criticism. “Sometimes I say them to myself in the mirror, which feels silly,” she said, “but I feel like it’s important.”

And what are the affirmations?

“I say that I’m worthy,” she said. “That I’m valid. That I’m a good person. That I’m going to be successful because I’m a good person. And that I’m worthy of all the success that I’m having.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/style/drew-afualo-tiktok.html

Forbes was one of several media companies that had hoped to tap the SPAC market to help fuel growth. But not all went ahead with deals, and some that did have struggled.

Axios earlier reported that the prospects for Forbes’s SPAC deal looked bleak.

Shares in BuzzFeed, which went public through a SPAC deal in December, have tumbled more than 50 percent. Vice’s efforts to go public through a SPAC stumbled as investors turned on the market, and the media company instead looked to raise more money from private investors. There is also hand-wringing in the media industry over the state of the advertising market, especially after Snap, the owner of Snapchat, said last week that its revenue and profit would be lower than expected this quarter.

Some SPACs are still hunting for media deals. Executives from Group Nine Media, a publishing company that was recently sold to Vox Media, last year started their own blank-check company aimed at consolidating the digital media sector.

Forbes has posted positive financial results since it agreed to be taken public by Magnum Opus, a sign that the canceled deal could be a reflection of the souring market for SPACs. In February, Forbes said it generated $94 million of revenue in the fourth quarter of last year, a 51 percent increase from a year earlier. It made $18 million in profit for the quarter, an increase of 80 percent from the year before.

Founded as a magazine in 1917, Forbes is known for its rankings of wealthy businesspeople. Last year, Forbes said it reached more than 150 million people with its journalism, events and marketing programs. The Forbes family sold a majority stake in the company to Integrated Whale Media Investments in 2014.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/business/media/forbes-public-spac-deal.html

The Netflix Lobby Metric

Over a three-hour dinner, Mr. Sarandos was charming and upbeat, dressed down in Levi’s and sneakers. You would never know he had been through a Job-level run of bad fortune in the last few months. First, his father, with whom he was very close, died. Soon after, his mother-in-law, Jacqueline Avant, with whom he was also very close, was shot to death when she encountered a burglar in the middle of the night at her Beverly Hills home. Ms. Avant, renowned in Hollywood for her elegance, art collecting, philanthropy and community organizing in Watts, Calif., was the wife of Clarence Avant, a music mogul known as the “Black Godfather.”

Then, on top of Mr. Sarandos’s personal woes, Netflix skidded from rapid growth to grind-it-out. (Its stock peaked above $700 a share in November 2021 and has now fallen below $200.)

The rise of Mr. Sarandos, a community college night-school dropout, from a video store clerk in Arizona to the pinnacle of Hollywood, is legendary.

“He’s had more singular influence on movies and television shows than anyone ever had,” Barry Diller told me. “He has denuded the power of the old movie companies that had held for almost 100 years. They are now irrelevant to setting the play and rules of the day. If there is still a Hollywood, he is it.”

Only a few years ago, the Netflix lobby was the coolest place on earth. Now it’s suddenly gloomy. In her “Saturday Night Live” monologue last weekend, Natasha Lyonne, the star of Netflix’s “Russian Doll,” sarcastically cracked that the “two things you definitely want to be associated with right now are Russia and Netflix.”

After winning the pandemic, Netflix now finds itself in its own version of its survival drama “Squid Game.” The company hit a ceiling, for now, of some 220 million subscribers, after thinking it could get to a billion with its global empire, and that has thrown a wrench into the future of Netflix and streaming in general. Wall Street suddenly turned a cold shoulder on its former darling, telling Netflix, Guess what, guys, you’ve got to make money, not just grow subscriptions.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/28/style/ted-sarandos-netflix.html

Is 500,000 the new million?

As a shorthand for success selling albums in the streaming age, that may now be the case. The latest release to hit that adjusted milestone is Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House,” which had the equivalent of 521,500 sales in the United States over the last week, thanks to strong streaming numbers and the biggest vinyl take in three decades.

For years, moving a million copies of an album in one week was a coveted achievement for any blockbuster release. Since the 1990s it has been done at least 20 times, by acts like Adele, Whitney Houston, ’N Sync, Eminem and Taylor Swift.

But streaming has rejiggered the music industry’s math, and the prospect of selling a million copies of an album — or even getting a million “equivalent sales units,” a new yardstick that incorporates old-fashioned purchases and streaming clicks — has largely disappeared from the strategy book. No title has had a million sales in a single week since Swift’s “Reputation” nearly five years ago, and in the last 18 months, only four albums — including “Harry’s House” — have crossed 500,000.

“Harry’s House” had about as boffo an opening as any album can have now, with 247 million streams and 330,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. It had the best opening of any album since Adele’s “30,” which landed six months ago with 839,000. (Even Adele, whose previous album, “25,” started with nearly 3.4 million back in 2015, could no longer hit seven figures.)

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/arts/music/harry-styles-harrys-house-billboard-chart.html

“But I’ve never … I’m shy, I get embarrassed,” Mr. Moore, who wrote about the experience in Sports Illustrated, recalled telling Mr. Towne. “I became a writer so I wouldn’t have to talk.”

“You’re an athlete,” Mr. Towne said. “And the character is easily embarrassed.”

In his review, Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Moore was “the biggest surprise” — “relaxed, charming, low-keyed and self-assured.”

After leaving Sports Illustrated in 1995, Mr. Moore collaborated with Mr. Towne on the screenplay for “Without Limits” (1998), about the brash Oregon runner Steve Prefontaine, who held seven American distance records at his death in a car accident in 1975. He and Mr. Moore had been close friends.

In addition to his brother, Mr. Moore is survived by his wife, Connie Johnston Moore. His first marriage, to Roberta Conlan, ended in divorce.

Starting in the mid-1990s, Mr. Moore helped lead a human rights campaign to publicize the plight of Mr. Wolde, a former Army captain who was accused of killing a boy during the reign of terror in Ethiopia that followed the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974.

Mr. Wolde proclaimed his innocence in a case that was finally decided in 2002 when a judge convicted him of a lesser charge and sentenced him to six years in prison, then freed him because he had already served nine.

Mr. Moore recalled in a Runner’s World article in 2018 that he spoke by telephone with Mr. Wolde soon after his release.

“How’s your health?” Mr. Moore asked.

“Hey,” said Mr. Wolde, who died a few months later, “give me a couple of months to recuperate and I’ll race you anywhere you want, any distance you want!”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/30/sports/kenny-moore-dead.html

Euphoric reviews and strong word of mouth helped boost ticket sales, which easily surpassed prerelease analyst expectations. “Top Gun: Maverick” received a rare A-plus grade from ticket buyers in CinemaScore exit polls. Paramount also backed the release with a savvy marketing campaign that included a monumental premiere on an aircraft carrier; a video stunt with James Corden that went viral; promotion by hundreds of TikTok and Instagram influencers; a website allowing fans to generate customized call signs with augmented reality photos; and original songs by Lady Gaga. As ever, Cruise trotted the globe on a tightly controlled publicity tour.

In the United States, concerns about the coronavirus seem to have faded. About 85 percent of prepandemic ticket buyers (those attending at least four movies a year) currently feel safe going to theaters, according to polling by National Research Group, a film industry consultancy. In January, about 65 percent felt safe. N.R.G. data shows that consumers in general view movie theaters as safer than gyms, bars and restaurants.

“This is the real turnaround,” said Mooky Greidinger, the chief executive of Cineworld, which owns Regal Cinemas, the No. 2 multiplex chain in the United States. “We are very, very optimistic for the rest of the year.” He noted that a large percentage of “Top Gun: Maverick” ticket buyers opted for premium-priced screenings in large-format theaters such as IMAX. “Give us every weekend a movie like ‘Top Gun!’” he said.

For the first time since early 2020, Greidinger and other theater owners are going to get their wish. The box office has struggled to bounce back in part because of sporadic output by studios. “We would have a really big one and then nothing to follow that up,” Fithian said. “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” for instance, was a juggernaut in late December and January, taking in $1.9 billion worldwide. But it also had theaters largely to itself, with February almost devoid of big-budget offerings.

In the weeks ahead, Hollywood will serve up a murderers’ row of sequels and prequels, including “Jurassic World: Dominion,” “Lightyear,” “Minions: The Rise of Gru” and “Thor: Love and Thunder.” Other high-profile summer offerings include “Where the Crawdads Sing,” “Elvis” and Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Theater owners also have high hopes for “The Black Phone,” a Blumhouse thriller, and “Bullet Train,” starring Brad Pitt.

“There is finally a range of options for moviegoers of all types,” Fithian said. “Moviegoing begets moviegoing,” he added, with trailers shown in theaters one weekend fueling attendance the next.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/29/movies/top-gun-maverick-box-office.html

Rich Greenfield, a co-founder and analyst at LightShed Partners, a research firm, is skeptical that Paramount can survive on its own. Paramount’s streaming business is growing quickly, but it’s still not profitable, Mr. Greenfield said. And much of the audience for Paramount’s signature content — think MTV and Nickelodeon — has shifted to new-media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

“I don’t think there’s anybody who believes that in five years, this company won’t either have bought other things or become part of something larger,” Mr. Greenfield said. “It’s eat or be eaten time.”

In recent weeks, Wall Street has put a sharper focus on the profitability of streaming businesses. Netflix said in April that it lost streaming subscribers in the first quarter of the year, reversing a decade of growth and causing its stock to tumble. Mr. Bakish said that competitors like Netflix — which he cheekily calls “legacy streamers” — are only now coming around to the importance of the revenue strategies Paramount has embraced for years, including advertising.

The box office, another traditional business largely eschewed by Netflix, is another example, Mr. Bakish said. “Top Gun: Maverick,” is on pace to generate $150 million in ticket sales during its opening weekend, but, in an exception to most movies produced by the studio, it won’t appear on Paramount+ within the typical 45-day window.

Still, some experts think Paramount’s strategy is sound. Brett Feldman, an analyst for Goldman Sachs, said that the global market for streaming subscribers is far bigger than the audience for pay-TV subscribers. Paramount+ added 6.8 million subscribers in the first quarter of 2022. Mr. Feldman is in the minority of analysts who have a “buy” on Paramount.

“Not everybody pays for cable, especially outside the U.S.,” Mr. Feldman said. “Most people have an internet connection or cellphone to stream video.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/29/business/media/paramount-streaming.html