2026-03-16 20:20:41
One studio to rule them all last night...
Warner Bros, the studio currently in the final stages of talks over a buyout by rivals Paramount, has taken a record 11 prizes from the 98th Academy Awards.
It ties the record for most wins by a studio at the Academy Awards with MGM, who took that number in 1959 with Ben-Hur, Paramount for 1997’s Titanic and New Line Cinema with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2003. That outfit was later absorbed into Warner Bros.
Implied, but not explicit here: Warner Bros' tally was arguably more impressive because it wasn't just riding the coattails of one movie that dominated as those other studios did in their historic nights. Yes, One Battle After Another was the big winner – and rightfully so, IMO – with six wins, but Sinners came in with four big wins. And, of course, Weapons had its own big win in acting.
It points to just how dominant of a run Warner Bros had in 2025 – including at the box office, where they were incredibly beating even the mighty Disney until a last-minute surge at the end of the year. And the fact that they pulled it off while in the midst of a contentious battle to be bought is even more impressive!
Speaking of, this Oscar tally immediately turns Paramount from the biggest loser of the night with zero Oscars – though technically you can't lose if you weren't even nominated for any Oscars, I guess! – to a huge winner. Sure, at the end of the day the Oscars are still just sort of a silly awards show. But without question, it's the one with the most clout and with that, comes cultural relevancy and cachet. Paramount is the studio that had less of that than any other studio in 2025 and is buying the studio that had the most of it.
Of course, none of that equates to the actual and literal bottom line. Here's Kyle Buchanan writing about the night for The New York Times:
Unlike last year’s big winner “Anora,” one of the lowest-grossing films to ever take best picture, “One Battle After Another” grossed a hefty $209 million worldwide. That’s significantly more than Anderson’s past efforts like “There Will Be Blood” and “Phantom Thread,” but because of its reported $130 million budget and huge marketing costs, the film did not make its money back at the box office.
While Paramount is getting good prestige value here, it doesn't exactly equate into actual value thanks to Hollywood's often upside-down finances. See also: Apple's Oscar win of the night: F1. Great movie, and important for Apple in many ways. But not when it comes to that bottom line. On the other hand, both Sinners and Weapons were wildly profitable at the box office, so there's that.
Netflix, meanwhile, walked away with seven wins, the only other studio to take home multiple Oscars; tied for their best showing ever at the awards. In a different world, they just racked up an unprecedented 18 Oscars thanks to their agreed-to-be-acquired new studio. Instead, Paramount Skydance vaulted them as the only entity with more wins. For the low, low price of $111B.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
2026-03-16 18:42:01
Well, it's not the full-on live-action reboot that many of us have been dreaming about for years, but it's something that perhaps is far more feasible at this point:
Firefly fans are in for a treat.
Nathan Fillion has just revealed at Awesome Con that an animated Firefly series is in advanced development based on the beloved cult sci-fi franchise—and Deadline has the details.
Fillion spoke on a panel at the Washington, D.C. event and live taping of his “Once We Were Spacemen” podcast alongside co-stars Alan Tudyk, Gina Torres, Jewel Staite, Morena Baccarin, Sean Maher, and Summer Glau, all of whom are expected to reprise their roles. Adam Baldwin, who played Jayne Cobb, will also lend his voice to the project.
Yes, they're getting the whole band back together.1 Well, aside from creator Joss Whedon, for obvious and unfortunate reasons. Though he apparently did give his "blessing" to the project.
Sounds like the script is done and the stage set thusly:
The proposed series is set in the timeline between the original 2002 television run and its 2005 feature film continuation, Serenity, expanding the universe while preserving continuity with the established lore. Early concept art has been developed in collaboration with the Oscar and Emmy-award-winning animation studio ShadowMachine, which can be found below. The fully assembled package is expected to be taken out to buyers shortly.
This seems smart. If you're not going to do a live-action reboot, perhaps lean in to something that would be impossible (well, without some major de-aging tech and/or full-on AI, which would just piss everyone off). With animation, it obviously doesn't matter if you're using the same cast for a story set 20+ years ago. Otherwise you'd be more or less forced to do a story set 20+ years after the events of the movie. And it allows them to bring back at least one key character who was killed in Serenity...
As for where this will play/stream, that's unclear. Fillion production banner is driving it with 20th Television – from what used to be 20th Century Fox. That entity is obviously owned by Disney now, so presumably Disney+ would be the front-runner to stream this just given the rights, but they could sell it, I suppose. And it's slightly more complicated given that Universal actually owns the film rights, though given this is a series set before the film, they should be in the clear?
Almost exactly 15 years ago, Firefly was my jumping off point for an idea I had for Netflix: saving cancelled cult hits. This was just as Netflix was kicking off their own content production and it seemed to me like it could be an easy way to attract natural viewers. Netflix and others ended up doing just that – I also mentioned the notion of bringing back Arrested Development, which is exactly what Netflix did – but Firefly was left adrift... Until now!
Personally, I'm still going to entertain the possibility of a live-action revamp and perhaps this animated attempt helps that along... We're a long way from the days of a cancelled TV show using surprising popularity on DVD to make a movie.
MG Siegler
1 Sadly without Ron Glass, who played Shepherd Book, but passed away a decade ago. ↩
2026-03-14 20:43:11
Last July I wrote a post entitled "We're Seemingly Still in the 'Throw Money At It' AI Era..." The crux was that given Elon Musk's ability to get xAI's Grok models up to technical speed and the fact that Mark Zuckerberg was completely rebooting Meta's AI efforts seemingly showed that all it took to catch up in AI maybe the ability to spend massive amounts of money, fast.
Well, as it turns out, that may not be all it takes...
2026-03-13 18:41:08
The biggest question I had about the forthcoming 'iPhone Fold' is which OS it would run. Given that it's still an iPhone, you'd assume iOS. But that would presumably require some new flavor of iOS given the whole foldable screen element. That mixed with the fact that it sure looked like the interior screen, when unfolded, would be similar to an iPad mini led me to wonder if we might get a true hybrid: iOS on the outside, iPadOS on the inside. A sort of mullet device.
Not so, says Mark Gurman in his latest report about the device for Bloomberg:
Apple is developing new iOS app layouts and revamping its core iPhone programs to add sidebars along the left edge of the screen, similar to many of its iPad apps. Developers will also be able to adapt their iPhone software for the new interface, which will use proportions similar to an iPad in landscape mode.
Despite offering an iPad-like app experience, the foldable iPhone will run the standard iOS — not iPadOS, the company’s tablet operating system. This means it will retain a simpler multitasking system, rather than adopting the more desktop-like interface introduced in iPadOS 26. It also won’t run existing iPad apps out of the box.
While the foldable iPhone won’t run several windows at once like an iPad mini, it will be able to show two apps side by side. That matches a key feature of the foldable phones offered by Samsung, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and others.
So the experience will be "iPad-like" but not actually iPadOS. Instead, we get a version of iOS that looks more like iPadOS, but without the true windowed multitasking (though we can argue about how "true" that system is, even now). This sounds potentially confusing for iPad owners – in particular if the inner screen truly is iPad mini-like in size – if it looks like an iPad, but can't do iPad things. But it undoubtedly would have been more confusing to run two different OSes with different functionalities, simply depending on if the device was folded or not. And there's no real point in running standard iOS (just scaled to a new screen size) without taking advantage of the new screen real estate in some way. So this sounds like the compromise: iPadOS-looking iOS.
I'm just as curious about the actual form-factor here, because it continues to sound – and look, via CAD leaks! – like it will be quite different from other foldables to date. I've had a few versions of the Pixel Fold now, which I like and has gotten better with each iteration, but it's really just exactly what it sounds like: a fairly standard smartphone that can unfold into a bigger-screen smartphone. Yes, it's interesting that it's a more square-like experience inside – and yes, it can do the app side-by-side thing – but it still just feels like a smartphone. I think there's a pretty good chance that the 'iPhone Fold' (if Apple even calls it that – all bets are off after the wildcard 'MacBook Neo' naming scheme) will actually feel like something a bit different than just a "foldable iPhone" given the form factor.
In my mind at least, it almost seems more like a 'iPhone mini' on the outside, while yes, an 'iPad mini' on the inside. But this new iOS will be key to the experience, of course. Does Apple tailor it to leverage those new screens in ways that differentiate it from a "regular" iPhone? I suspect they might! Maybe that front screen becomes your sort of "vital" apps/widgets screen. Things you always open and/or apps for fast actions. While inside, that's where you do your real "work" (or play, I suppose!).
I obviously won't even pretend that I'm torn on getting one. I'll certainly have to to see what it's like. I am a bit torn on leaving the old, trusty "standard" iPhone form-factor behind, but would I really "dual-wield" like I'm Ahsoka or something? That's a pretty expensive proposition!
Speaking of, there's also some new leaks around potential pricing for the device. Are you ready? Take a deep breath...
According to the Weibo-based leaker Instant Digital – who had a strong track-record on such things – the range will be from $2,320 to $2,900, depending on storage options (from 256GB up to 1TB). That's, um, quite a bit above my early (and obvious) $1,999 starting point guess I made a year ago.
Of course, those numbers are extrapolated from the more rounded prices in Chinese Yuan by the leaker. When I asked AI to extrapolate how those implied numbers might translate into USD, sure enough, the $1,999 starting price point seems quite likely. Then again, given everything going on with chip shortages and pricing issues around memory... who knows. Perhaps not even Apple just yet.
Would anyone buy a $1,999 iPhone? I mean, yes, it's Apple.
And some already do, as Apple hit that mark with the 2TB iPhone 17 Pro Max option. What about a fully-loaded 'iPhone Fold' at, say, $2,999? It wasn't that long ago that we were debating the viability of a $1,000 iPhone. That seems quaint now. The iPhone Pro models are huge hits for Apple. There's undoubtedly still room to grow – and importantly for Apple, grow that ASP.
One more thing: As I wondered in my prediction post for the year, what if any sort of newfangled experience for the 'iPhone Fold' also included a new type of accessory? Maybe an 'Apple Pencil Mini' – heaven forbid, the actual 'Apple Stylus'?!
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
2026-03-13 07:21:38
One obvious side effect of Netflix's (ultimately failed) bid to buy Warner Bros? A revisiting of the discussion about theatrical windows. Given that Netflix was promising 45-days for Warner's movie slate going forward, well, if you give a mouse a cookie... they're going to want a cow. As Brooks Barnes writes in The New York Times:
Universal said on Thursday that it would immediately begin guaranteeing theaters a minimum of five weekends of exclusive play for new movies, ending a pandemic-era policy that guaranteed only three. Starting in January, Universal will move to a minimum of seven weekends of guaranteed exclusivity.
Yes, that's a move from 3 weekends to 5 weekends immediately. With a move all the way to 7 weekends – roughly the 45 days guarantee Netflix was making – early next year. We are so back... to where we started.
Hollywood will say – and is saying – this is just a correction for the mistake made during the pandemic. Almost exactly six years ago, with the world in lock-down mode, it was none other than Universal that took a hammer to the theatrical window. They announced that Trolls World Tour would be released for rent at home the same day it launched in theaters – if theaters were even open by then. Other studios followed suit, perhaps most famously Warner Bros, which went Full Monty, much to the chagrin of many filmmakers. This seemingly destroyed Christopher Nolan's relationship with the studio, over Tenet – a movie which was just as audibly indecipherable at home as it would have been in a movie theater. Even Disney was forced to follow suit and as such, faced a suit from Scarlett Johansson, which helped end the brief Bob Chapek-era at the studio. It was a rocky time, to say the least.
This also put Universal at war with AMC. Once the head of the largest theater chain, Adam Aron, read what then-NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell – now, incidentally the president at Paramount Skydance (at least for now) – said about the success of Trolls on on PVOD after their decision, he went nuclear:
"It is disappointing to us, but Jeff’s comments as to Universal’s unilateral actions and intentions have left us with no choice. Therefore, effective immediately AMC will no longer play any Universal movies in any of our theaters in the United States, Europe or the Middle East."
People may have been a bit on edge... But eventually, even AMC had to recognize the reality of the situation, and suddenly we had a de-facto 17-day window.
Anyway, reading AMC's comments today, and you wouldn't know any of that happened:
AMC Entertainment, the country’s largest theater operator, called Universal’s shift in strategy “extraordinarily beneficial” in a statement, adding that it “strengthens the entire theatrical ecosystem.”
Here's the thing, it did happen. And while it may have been a bit of an overreaction in hindsight, it also should have served as a good wake up call for Hollywood. The theatrical model had been slowly dying for years, but it was masked by inflation. The industry kept touting ever-growing box office numbers without any actual context. Had they simply reported numbers of butts in seats, the numbers would have looked bad (and worse if you cut it by per-capita moviegoing). COVID, as it did in so many industries, simply accelerated a trend that was already in process.
And now we're back. Having learned seemingly nothing!
The main problem for Hollywood is that the box office still isn't nearly back to those pre-pandemic numbers, even when masked by inflation. And again, they'd argue the windows are the issue. To be clear, it will undoubtedly help a bit – obviously, they're creating a faux supply/demand situation, propping up a marketplace.1 But it's not addressing the underlying issue: seeing movies in a movie theater doesn't have the hold over the general public as it once did. And it never will again. Windows or not.
That's not to say movies – or Hollywood itself – is dead. In many ways, movies are more alive than ever. But that's thanks to streaming – and yes, smartphones (sorry, Mr. Nolan). We used to have to watch a movie in a movie theater in order to see it. Now we can watch it basically anywhere. To pretty much anyone that would look like progress. But not to Hollywood. And certainly not to theater owners.
But actually, buried a bit in this news is an element that suggests Hollywoods' heads might not be as buried in the sand as it seems...
One important wrinkle: Universal’s corporate sibling, Focus Features, which makes smaller-budget specialty films like “Hamnet” and “Bugonia,” will not change its theatrical exclusivity policy. Three weekends, or about 17 days, is all that Focus will continue to promise.
NBCUniversal said specialty films — one of the most challenged genres at the box office — required special handling. For some of these movies, a theatrical release has become valuable mostly as a marketing tool for what Hollywood calls “premium video on demand,” the sales window that immediately follows theatrical exclusivity. Focus’s movies also tend to open in a handful of theaters at first, expanding gradually to more markets as word-of-mouth demand builds.
“Universal remains a theatrical-first studio,” Ms. Langley said. “That’s proven by the breadth of our slate, our commitment to our filmmakers and the ongoing investments we make in the creative community.”
In other words, they're acknowledging that all movies are not created equal. Actually, that's not fair. The movies themselves may be, but the natural audiences for those movies is not. That's not harsh, that's reality. And again, it has been reality for years and years and years. In the olden days, people would go to the movies to see basically anything because they had little else in terms of choice. These days, we all have the opposite problem. As a result, only a handful of movies really warrant a long theatrical run. It's not a comment on quality or anything else, it's just reality.
It's like the age-old epistemological question: if a studio put a movie in theaters and no one goes to see it, did it actually play? These days, we can ensure that the movie plays in a place and in a way that people will actually see it. We have the technology.
Well, technically, Netflix has the best of that technology. But Hollywood didn't want to leverage it to the fullest extent – including, notably, helping with theatrical. In hindsight, I believe this will look incredibly stupid. But I get it. The key now is the acknowledgment that this new/old seven-week window isn't some sort of commandment handed down from the old gods of Hollywood, it's simply one path for a certain type of movie.
That's how I choose to read Donna Langley's statement. That she knows every movie can't do seven weeks in theaters. Obviously. What if it bombs opening weekend? Do you let the stink linger for six more weeks? Of course not. This is simply a guidance. And a game plan for the "tentpole" movies which will launch under the Universal banner. Other, smaller films will likely go through sub-studios, like Focus. This is a good first step for every studio.
And, by the way, Netflix should still come at this from the opposite end: if a movie is likely to do well in theaters, Netflix should push it wide (though yes, they'll have to partner to do that now without acquiring Warner's business). I've been saying this long before they tried to buy into theatrical. Now that they aren't, it's still the same rationale. I mean, maybe not seven week theatrical runs now that Ted Sarandos doesn't have to be held to such standards. But still, something. Where it makes sense!
And where it doesn't, for all studios, they should go to PVOD right away! Or streaming! It can even salvage clunkers!
This is all so obvious, and yet Hollywood fights it. Because it's not the way of the past, it's the way of the future. Netflix could have shown them the way more clearly, now they'll have to do it themselves. But it's the same path.
Fine, fix the window. Just fix the house too!
1 I also do think that 2026 is primed to be a good year at the box office just by nature of the slate. Hollywood will do a victory lap around this as if it wasn't mostly about timing of some blockbusters aligning of course... ↩
2026-03-12 21:00:19
"I'm here in case you succeed."
That's what Colonel Jack O'Neill (Kurt Russell) tells Dr. Catherine Langford (Viveca Lindfors) when she asks why he's a part of the 'Stargate' mission in the 1994 film of the same name. The implication, of course, is that in the unlikely event that the Stargate works, and opens a portal to another world, he's the fall-back option in case something goes wrong.
Well, the stakes are lower, but the tech project named after the movie – the massive AI data center build-out spearheaded by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank – is no less complicated. Case in point: the many fits and starts of the real life initiative. And the latest twist and turn perhaps points to a very fundamental challenge of the project – and the broader data center build-outs in general.
The latest news dropped last week. Last Thursday, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was backing out of a planned expansion of a data center project in Abilene, Texas. If you've heard of Abilene in recent months it's likely one of two things: either you've been listening to a lot of Ella Langley, or you've been following the aforementioned 'Stargate' project – that's the location of the first such site...
