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Newsom proposes $1 billion cap for film and TV tax incentive
Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to expand California's current Film and Television Tax Credit Program from $750 million to at least $1 billion annually. The proposal would include credits for above-the-line
Politics: The Final Weekend Before The Midterms
The final weekend of campaigning before Election Day has passed. President Donald Trump attended rallies in Kansas and Iowa on Sunday — despite initially announcing those rallies were cancelled. The president said they were back on the schedule on Friday.In more than two dozen campaign stops in October, the president’s influence among Republican voters has been tested — in a midterm election that is a referendum on his presidency so far.And while GOP campaigning continues to hinge on Trump — among Democrats, a fractured party in Michigan is becoming a problem of its own. In Michigan’s Senate Race, former Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens issued a late and shocking endorsement for the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers. Michigan’s Senate seat is a key piece to retaking control of the chamber for Democrats.More than 50 million votes have already been cast. What insight did this weekend’s campaigning give us to the state of the midterms?Find more of our programs online. Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ at plus.npr.org/the1a.
Rockingham gains $250M battery investment
Prospect Power Storage in Rockingham County boosts Dominion Energy's capacity with a $250 million battery facility, supporting Virginia's clean energy goals.
Paxton and Talarico tussle for Texas Senate seat as Trump campaigns virtually
The closing sprint in Texas comes as early voting nears its conclusion in several states. Early balloting totals were approaching 50 million heading into the weekend. About 112 million voted in total in the 2022 midterm elections.
Video: Opinion | Elon Musk’s $450 Million Political Gamble
Why did Musk donate about $450 million to the elections? On “The Ezra Klein Show,” a co-author of “Muskism,” Quinn Slobodian, argues that Musk is insulating himself by making his businesses too essential for any future administration, Democratic or Republican, to rein in.
Nestlé Moving Production From Ohio to Gaffney
Nestlé is moving production from its Ohio factory to Gaffney, building on a previous investment in its South Carolina operation. In 2024, the company announced a $150 million investment in its Cherokee County facility to add a production line and...
Essentia Health St. Joseph’s-Orthopedic Center opens in Baxter
The nearly $50 million project makes expert and personalized care more convenient for patients
Essentia Health Hosts Ribbon Cutting for New Orthopedic Center in Baxter
https://youtu.be/MjKTqutxJIg Essentia Health celebrated the opening of the new St. Joseph's-Orthopedic Center in Baxter with a ribbon-cutting event on Wednesday. The project, coming in at nearly $50 million, converted the former Camping World building into a more than 60,000-square-foot facility with almost 80 exam and procedure rooms. It combines musculoskeletal…
San Antonio officials pitch $850 million Convention Center expansion
The city is also proposing spending $125 million to maintain the Alamodome over the next decade as part of the downtown sports and entertainment district.
SLT Built Its Fitness Business on the Megaformer. Now It's Suing Its Maker for at Least $50 Million
Licensing agreements between the two companies date back to 2011. They're now at the center of a high-stakes legal battle.
Avondale, operating at capacity, to spend $50 million on warehouse, railway, dock expansion
A logistics hub in Jefferson Parish is investing $50 million into expanding its operation and constructing new warehouse space for a future tenant.
Animals Starves while the Kardashians Miss the Charts Again
(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.) Before we get going, I’d like to offer congratulations to Jonathan Funke, whose suggestion “midflicks” won the poll for what I should call straight-to-streaming films which aren’t big or cinematic enough to go to theaters but seem too expensive for a TV movie. It’s so useful a term, I just used it last week! Now I just need to add this term to my data dictionary! Okay, on to this week’s issue. We’re starting out looking at Netflix/Ben Affleck’s latest crime thriller, Animals. I’ll also look at Disclosure Day heading to Peacock (it did better than you’d remember in theaters...) and a new movie based on toys. Plus, a long-time streaming flop returns for its eighth season...will it finally chart? (No.) Will anyone at Disney care? Probably not. All that, plus another look at new shows landing on streaming on 1-Oct from Reelgood, what streamer hasn’t had a film make the Luminate charts since August, Reacher’s long run on the charts, M_onster: The Lizzie Borden Story’s_ short run, the top shows in 2026 according to Samba TV, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more. And I mean that last part: putting this week’s issue together, I assembled OVER 25 images, most of which are bespoke looks I made just for this report. Really, publishing articles like this takes the work of writing two articles: one is the narrative and the other is making charts/graphs. Let’s dive right in! (Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, JustWatch and Reelgood interest data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the week of October 5th to October 11th, 2026. You can find a link to my terminology here.) Subscribe Film - Netflix’s Latest Star-Studded Thriller Goes For Glory The tempting angle for anyone writing about streaming film this month, like yours truly, is to ask, “Is this why Dan Lin lost his job at Netflix?” Take Animals, the Ben Affleck-starring-and-directing, Artists Equity-produced crime thriller that opened on 9-Oct. (Kerry Washington and Gillian Anderson are also in it.) If it did really well, then one could argue that Lin has another success on his resume. If it underperformed, then it’s another example of a Netflix underperformance this year. So where did Animals fall? Kinda in the middle, but that means it’s more “not a hit” than “big hit”. On Nielsen, it opened to 12.0 million hours, and here’s how that stacks up for 2026 films so far this year: Obviously, that’s not great. It’s both under my 15 million opening bar for “fine” for a Netflix film and 20 million bar for “great” opening. It did a bit better on Samba TV, getting to first place. That’s very, very good, though again, looking at the Nielsen data, it probably means that it was a light week overall. Luminate’s data is a bit closer to Samba TV’s, tied for 17th all time for single weeks since May of 2024: To top it off, no one seemed to like it. It has a 33 on Metacritic and only a 5.7 on IMDb. Both of these numbers could have been impacted by the stories about Affleck’s comments about using AI to make the film. Given the controversy, the film might not have been as bad as the ratings suggest, but it’s also not a bullish sign. All to say…yeah, on net this film isn’t a point in Dan Lin’s favor. At this point, Netflix’s slide has been long enough—going on since February—that I’m almost tempted to lower the bar for what a “hit” is on streaming. Post-February of 2026 or so, it seems like straight-to-streaming films just haven’t hit the same heights as they did from 2022 to 2025. Before we head onto the “Quick Hits” for film, I want to shout out a fellow newsletter whose articles I’ve been loving this year, LA Material, a new LA-based news outlet. For just a highlight of my favorite articles since July... I loved this article on Ghost Town, a group on Venice that clears homeless encampments. As a Los Angeleno, obviously I adore their articles on LA parking issues. Their article on illegal parking tickets got the City Council to address the issue! Also check out their article on people parking in medians. Check out their deep dive on what went wrong with the LA Jazz Festival and how it fell apart, or what’s wrong with USC’s finances. Finally, they wrote up a voter guide on voter guides for the LA General Election. So meta! In search of a city? L.A. Material is an independent news outlet covering the people, politics, culture and glorious chaos shaping Los Angeles. L.A. Material brings you intel on the city you can’t get anywhere else. From exploring how Reddit short stories became Hollywood’s hottest commodity to reporting on the survival jobs keeping entertainment workers afloat. And answering, once and for all, why the AMC Burbank escalator is always broken. Through their newsletters, podcast, videos, events, and member community, L.A. Material is designed to help Angelenos connect to Los Angeles and each other. Sign up now for the free weekday newsletter. Quick Notes on Film Steven Spielberg’s latest film, Disclosure Day, came to Peacock on 9-Oct, and I’ll admit that, after pulling its stats, I did a pinch of a double take. As I wrote throughout my deep, deep, deep dive on summer box office/Obsession/Backrooms/IP/superheroes, oftentimes the film media discusses films as “flops” or “misses” or “hits” without clarifying what they specifically mean. Since Disclosure Day didn’t make $250 million in the US or $500 million globally, it was definitely a disappointment by Spielbergian standards, who is the highest-grossing director of all time, and arguably even more ahead in adjusted grosses. But it did make $245 million globally on a $115 million budget, so it isn’t as big of a miss as I remember. That’s still probably not enough to break even in the theatrical window, when you factor in marketing costs…but it’s close. And it grossed a lot more even in the US than some titles with about ten times more coverage. Anyways, lots of preamble to say this one only did 4.5 million hours according to Nielsen, so it did make the charts, but on the low end. Here’s how it stacks up to other Peacock titles: Apple TV (née +) followed up their “success for them” Mayday with Matchbox The Movie. This one doesn’t look like a success even for them, but at least it’s not a miss. Apple/Skydance clearly tried to take advantage of the success of Barbie at the box office—let’s greenlight all the toy properties!!!—but of course, this didn’t make it to theaters. And it stars John Cena, who, as I argued earlier this summer, NEEDS to get his movies back in theaters. Anyways, this one has mixed-to-bad numbers. It missed the Samba TV and Nielsen charts in its first week, but did make Luminate with 7.1 million hours. That’s just enough to not be an outright miss, and about half what Mayday did earlier this summer. Speaking of Apple Studio’s Mayday, it ended up lasting five weeks on Luminate, which isn’t bad for Apple TV. On Nielsen, it had a three-week run, racking up 13.5 million hours total. Again, like Matchbox, the issue is the budget; I doubt that this viewership earned enough to justify that budget. Also, to be clear, neither of these films are “midflicks”; both should have gone to theaters. Toy Story 5 is not hanging around on the streaming charts on Disney+, so it’s not as leggy as either Zootopia 2 or Moana 2, and definitely not in the same class as Encanto. (It did make all the money at the box office, so Disney is going to be fine…) The Breadwinner on Netflix (from Sony) is down to 3.9 million hours in its third week. It only lasted for one week on the Samba TV charts. Netflix’s Doing Life had a smaller-than-normal binge release curve bounce, only going to 7.1 million hours from 6.0 to start, but it made Samba TV at fifth place in its second week. The Netflix documentary, The Widower: Til’ Death Do Us Part, also had a small binge release curve bounce to 6.5 million hours, but did make a second week on Samba TV. Meanwhile, Netflix’s Unabomber fell off after two weeks on Nielsen—which is not great at all—and Demon Slayer fell off after just one week. Over on Luminate, the two smaller titles The Swan: Behind the Mirror and Kill. Bury. Print both fell out of the Luminate top ten charts. The story of library film at the first of the month is the arrival of the Ice Age films on Netflix. Now, here’s a small example of optimizing your library that even Netflix could do better. Say you want to rent/license a new film series from Disney**.** A streamer could pay a big paycheck and then drop each Ice Age film on the exact same day of the month, the fourth of October. That’s one choice. In contrast, the streamer could have released each film one week apart, and make each one a mini-event for folks watching Ice Age films. Or even roll them out monthly. Netflix opted for the former strategy, and as a result, only three of the films made the Nielsen charts this week. The “Miss of the Week” goes to Tubi’s YA-ish horror film_, R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead 2_, which didn’t even make the Luminate charts like Tubi films usually do, or, should I say, “used to”? Tubi films, most of which are straight-to-streaming, used to reliably make the Luminate film charts (which only covers straight-to-streaming films), but a Tubi film hasn’t made it since August. The first Pumpkinhead got 1.4 million hours last year according to Luminate. As I wrote about this film before, it seems to be a bit muddled in terms of age: too scary for young kids but probably not scary enough for older kids. Speaking of Luminate, Netflix’s latest doc about a comic (expect more docs about comedians all month), Who Is Martin Mull?, flopped, getting just 200K and 700K hours according to Luminate. Three other film/special misses belonged to Hulu, including a standup special, Jamie Foxx: Take Care of Yourself, Neon’s latest horror film, Hokum, which made $17 million in the US, and a Family Guy Halloween special. (That last one was only 22 minutes, so it’s not a surprise it missed.) Finally, another Netflix standup special missed the charts, Mojo Brookzz: I Know You Lying missed too. I can confirm last week’s misses, most notably Paramount+’s Jackass: Best and Last, MUBI’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and HBO Max’s Evil Dead Burn. Television - I Can’t Visualize Nothing: The Kardashians Story Normally, in the mini-dive essays that open the Streaming Ratings Report, I focus on shows that do well or, at the very least, make the charts. Why? Because as I’ve said time and again, I can’t visualize nothing like, say, the Kardashians’ TV shows. Here’s the TV debuts chart for this week with a missing spot for The Kardashians, whose eighth season just landed on Hulu:
David's Bridal Plans to Separate Its $350 Million Business. It Doesn’t Sell Wedding Dresses
The entity could soon become a publicly traded company. An expert says it represents a space that large retailers are continuing to invest in.
Lawmakers propose $11M fix to restore school sports and activities funding
by Katie Klingsporn, WyoFile Wyoming’s new school funding model added more than $250 million in state education funding, including for widely supported
DOE expands tribal energy funding to $125M, selects 63 projects
The Department of Energy expanded a $50 million tribal energy funding opportunity to more than $125 million after tribal applications sought roughly 10 times the initial amount. The agency selected 63 tribe-led projects across 16 states for what it described as the largest single investment in the Office of Indian Energy’s history. The projects include […]
Marijuana legalization tied to rise in heart hospitalizations, study finds
A study of 50 million hospital records found heart-related admissions rose faster after recreational marijuana sales became legal in 13 Western states.
Intermountain Health Receives One of the Nation’s Largest Gifts in Pediatric Care
LAS VEGAS — Intermountain Foundation announced today that Nevada’s first stand-alone children’s hospital will be named Intermountain Health Felicia and Ben Horowitz Children’s Hospital in honor of a historic $150 million commitment. Felicia Horowitz, president of the Horowitz Family Foundation and co-founder and president of The Paid ...
There’s a Reason That Netflix’s Ad Business Has Underwhelmed
Somewhat lost in the company’s slew of firings and engagement warnings over the past few weeks was the fact that Netflix is scaling back its ad forecast for 2026 from $3 billion to $2.7 billion. That’s despite the fact that: CTV is growing by 14-15% this year This year saw a monster upfront Netflix is the biggest streamer out there this side of YouTube, and was the platform that for years brands were supposedly dying to be a part of In other words, that’s an alarming pull-back from Netflix. A Wall Street analyst I spoke with last week was blunt, calling Netflix’s ad business “disappointing.” To me, a red flag on the ad front is that Netflix has never revealed how many ad-supported subscribers it has. Because if I know anything about how big companies work, if they have a positive number that makes them look really good - they tend to share it. (How many subs does go90 have right now? We’re not saying just yet. How are ads going on ChatGPT? Oh, a billion run rate - I see). Yes, to date Netflix has shared some fuzzy ad numbers, such as the idea that the company’s ad tier ‘reaches’ 250 million users globally.’ Here’s why that figure gives me pause: a)they lead with global, and b) they don’t explain how they are calculated. (Are they based on average people in each room? Surveys of some kind?). Regardless, some insiders say that Netflix’s ad tier is scaling nicely - others not so much. Either way, one of Netflix’s biggest challenge on the ad front appears to have been its starting point. Remember, when Netflix launched ads in 2022, it had 73 million subs in the US and Canada. That’s 73 million people who were used to Netflix with zero ads. And when the ad product rolled out, the company clearly was going after new users - a limited pool of potential subscribers by default. That focus seems to have changed over time, as Netflix has tried to convert longtime subscribers to the ad tier. Historically Netflix subscribers are very sticky. But is the company’s low churn a problem? Not necessarily, according to Antenna data. Rather, Netflix’s consumer loyalty is a bit of a double-edged sword. “Netflix is the one streamer which actually has seen substantial “trade downs” but has much lower ‘win backs,’ said Antenna founder Jonathan Carson (win-backs being people who were on the ad-free plan, cancelled, then rejoined on the ad plan). “Netflix has lower churn and so has less opportunity to win back old subs with a lower cost plan option.” This all might explain why Netflix has been so slow to roll out all of these table stakes targeting options until just this week. It likely didn’t have enough users to carve up into various targets. etc. However, what really hit Netflix’s ad business was Amazon’s move a few years ago to turn on advertising for Prime Video by default. Suddenly the market was awash in premium inventory, and Netflix was playing catch-up on multiple fronts. Thus, the streaming giant appears to still be figuring out if if wants lead in ‘programmatic TV,’ or premium ‘upfront’ TV sales. “The CTV market now sorts into three businesses, and Netflix is not the leader of any of them,” wrote analyst Jack Myers. Ouch. So how does Netflix ratchet up its ads business? Get the next NFL package You’re gonna have to wait until 2030 unless one of the bigger media companies like Skydance opts out, but the easiest (not cheapest) way for Netflix to become a huge TV ads contender is to get one of the regular NFL packages, ideally Sunday afternoons. That way it can sell ads to its whole U.S. subs base overnight. Go FAST This one is risky, because to program a compelling FAST channel, you’d likely have to take some older Netflix exclusive shows and make them available for free to non-subscribers. But FASTs, for better or worse, are ad-inventory machines. Go full UGC I’m not sure I see this happening. There is something already off about Netflix carrying podcasts and shows for creators. The experience sticks out in what is such a produced, and generally non-communal environment. But Netflix could open up its platform by allowing creators to upload videos without having to be approved by the service. But that opens a whole other can of worms (policing brand safety, copyright infringement, overall quality). Make a huge RMN Deal I was going to suggest something crazy, such as ‘instead of buying Warner Brothers, Netflix should buy Target. But the company doesn’t want to be in the brick and mortar business. Yet for Netflix’s ad business to compete in an Amazon world, it needs to be able to connect ad exposures to shopping. What if, instead of letting Amazon target Netflix viewers with its DSP, Netflix inked a deal with Target, or even took control of Roundel, and created its version of the Amazon full-funnel for brands? Price us out. I hope they don’t do this, but Netflix’s price increases - while significant - haven’t been enough to push long-term customers out of the ad-free tier. But if they made those prices so prohibitive, it could push large swaths of consumers to trade down. Then again, that could also dent engagement - as binging becomes much less appealing once you bring ads into the equation. Or, they could just launch a bunch of hit shows and maybe everyone will quickly forget all this angst. More from Amazon unBoxed A few weeks ago, I recorded two podcasts live at Amazon’s unBoxed event in San Francisco. I was able to go really deep with several brand partners about how Amazon’s various data and ad products work - particularly the under appreciated Amazon Marketing Cloud. First, I talked with Laura Abadias Velilla, of the Amazon specialty agency Amerge, along with Amazon’s own Charlotte Maines, Vice President, Devices Content & Advertising, about how the two partners helped a very specific printer company Epson launch into a brand new category - high end projectors. It’s a great example of how brands connect audience data across platforms to make budget deployment decisions. Next, I chatted with Monks VP Head of Digital Investment for North America Tom Burchill about how the agency actually brought in data from Linkedin to help target B2B customers across various Amazon properties for the brand Quicken. Check it out: Check these out, or just listen:
New Virginia program could help residents save on health insurance
VIRGINIA (CBS19 NEWS) -- Thousands of Virginians could soon see significant savings on their health insurance premiums through a new $150 million state program.
Businessman Larry Gies to become U of I's largest donor after pledging $100 million towards business college
The new pledge is in addition to Gies’ $150 million donation to the business school in 2017 and a $100 million donation to the athletics department in 2025.
A Billionaire Wanted a Trump Pardon. His Family Gave Alina Habba a $50 Million Deal.
Julio Herrera Velutini, a prominent Venezuelan, was seeking clemency. He got it not long after his daughter gave Ms. Habba, a lawyer close to President Trump, an extraordinarily lucrative job.
Spotify pulled 50 million AI slop and spam tracks from its recommendations
Spotify still isn’t labeling AI tracks, though.
Texas Football Prediction Has Longhorns Making $50 Million Steve Sarkisian Decision
Texas has gone from No. 1 to two straight defeats, and one college football analyst believes another disappointing finish could be bad news for Steve Sarkisian. The post Texas Football Prediction Has Longhorns Making $50 Million Steve Sarkisian Decision appeared first on HEAVY.
See progress of West Palm's Cox Science Center $150 million expansion
The Cox Science Center and Aquarium is undergoing a $150 million expansion in West Palm Beach on September 14, 2026. See photos of progress.
Elon Musk donates over $150 million to Senate GOP group, assisting Ken Paxton
Reno commission OKs plan for $350-million entertainment district
The Reno Planning Commission voted in favor of a master plan, zoning change and conditional use permit for $350 million project, The Boulevard.
What Dolly Parton’s estate fight reveals about family business succession
Parton, the legendary American singer, actress, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, left an estate estimated at $450 million.
Blazers' Tom Dundon Meets the Man Betting Big on Portland
As Tom Dundon navigates high-stakes arena negotiations, the Blazers owner finds an optimistic ally in a real estate mogul wagering $250 million on downtown Portland’s recovery.
Universal Music Group cuts several executives during its restructure
Executives at Def Jam, Republic Records and Interscope are leaving Universal Music Group as it completes a plan to save €250 million (about $270 million) a year.
Belton approves finance incentives for Uptown Entertainment District, home to B&B Theatre
A major entertainment district in the heart of Belton will move forward after the city council approved two financing tools, including $250 million in Chapter 100 bonds, in a 7-2 vote Tuesday night.
New $100 Million Initiative To Halve Stillbirth Deaths Launched By Gates And Wellcome Leap
Each organization is contributing $50 million during an initial three-year validation phase to deploy the point-of-care technologies in high-burden settings.
Opinion: CT’s federal cuts response fund must be used for this crisis
Connecticut’s Governor must immediately use some of the over $250 million sitting in the Federal Cuts Response Fund for the purpose it was created, to protect the poor, disabled, and elderly from the harms of H.R. 1.
Warner Bros. could face loss of at least $150 million on 'Digger' after tepid box office
Tom Cruise’s “Digger” fell 60% in its second weekend to $3.2 million, leaving Warner Bros. facing a loss that could top $150 million.
UMHB meets fundraising challenge for $50 million science lab facility
BELTON — A $5 million fundraising challenge was reached as construction of a $50 million science lab facility at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor (UMHB) is underway.
UMHB meets fundraising challenge for $50 million science lab facility
BELTON — A $5 million fundraising challenge was reached as construction of a $50 million science lab facility at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor (UMHB) is underway.
War Department’s $350 Million Quantum Push
The Department of War announced approximately $350 million in quantum computing initiatives, including a conditional $150 million loan to PsiQuantum, alongside broader efforts to modernize American defense research and strengthen domestic technological leadership.
Anthropic Commits $150M To AI Science Mission
Anthropic is committing $150 million over three years to the federal government’s Genesis Mission, expanding access to its Claude AI models.
Department of War Announces $350 Million in Quantum Computing Initiati
The Office of the Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering announced new initiatives and programmatic updates totaling approximately $350 million to strengthen U.S. leadership in quantum
Who Won August and September: Original Films or Franchises?
(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.) I just heard someone say that if you’re reading a pundit or data analyst, and they don’t tell you that they got anything wrong, they’re not a pundit but an “influencer”. I agree with that. You have to tell your audience when you get things wrong, or they won’t (or shouldn’t) trust you as much. Today, we’ve got another edition of “What I Got Right, What I Got Wrong”. In general, I’m patting myself on the back (and patting very hard) about a few things like IP at the box office, LIV golf, horror films, crowdfunding movies, superheroes, and old people going to the theaters. That said, I also made a couple of data mistakes on the streaming bubble popping and HBO’s datecdotes, so I’m not perfect. But first, I need your feedback... Subscribe Follow-Ups: What Should We Call Mid-Budget Movies Which Aren’t Cinematic Enough for Theaters But Are Too Expensive to Make Money on Streaming? After I asked for feedback on what we should call straight-to-streaming films that are too big to pencil out on streaming but not really big enough to resonate in theaters, I got some great suggestions from you all, including... “Moldilocks” from John Aboud “Little Big Indie” from Travis Frick1 “Midflicks” from Jonathan Funke. “Extra-Medium” from Jona Nwuke. (Read the explanation in the footnote.) Between these and Brandon Katz—who suggested “Bermuda Budget Triangle”, “The Platform Gap” and “The Distribution Deadzone”—we’ve got some excellent suggestions. And they’re better than my suggestion, the “Streaming Budget Dead Zone”, so let’s take a poll! The winning entry becomes the new term. Loading... RIGHT: LIV Golf is Fully Bankrupt…Is Anyone Else Next? A few years ago, I was always a bit perplexed at all the articles I’d read praising LIV Golf and their strategy to disrupt the PGA. LIV Golf, a brand new professional golf league, offered PGA stars ten times what they made on the PGA Tour to join their new league. And folks praised this strategy for its initial “success” in that a lot of big names did indeed leave the PGA. Yeah, of course the players came over. LIV Golf paid them so, so, so much more! But LIV Golf hadn’t discovered a way to increase potential revenue. So think about this in basic business terms… They paid much more in costs… …but had no real way to increase revenue. That’s not a strategy! That’s deficit financing. It won’t work unless you bankrupt the competition (and then turn around and pay those same golfers much, much less). It’s not a sustainable strategy and only lasts as long as the company/person/nation backing it decides they’re cool with losing money. For LIV Golf, that meant Middle East oil wealth, in particular Saudi Arabian money. Clearly, the current Iran War has hurt Middle East finances, so they need to trim their more exorbitant spending. And LIV Golf was part of that trimming. This should be a major warning for others. TGL’s parent company, TMRW Sports, just got a $1 billion valuation, despite TGL’s (the indoor golf league) horrible TV viewership of less than half a million viewers per match. Unrivaled, the women’s basketball league, just secured a $650 valuation, despite its horrible TV viewership and a new rival (Project B) entering the scene next year. To relate this to streaming, Hollywood should ask which streamers may have wealthy patrons funding their losses. (Let’s be clear: Google, Amazon and Apple.) Could those patrons lose their appetite? For Amazon, probably not. But Apple has a new boss, so maybe! WRONG: My Analysis of the Streaming Bubble Was Missing a Week I’m going to be congratulating myself a lot today, but I make mistakes too, like this data goof. When I last compiled the data on the decline in TV shows, I was missing one week at the end of June. If you look at the first image, you can see that one week was mislabelled as “July”. Mainly, this image got updated to show a 27% decline, not 29%: This change doesn’t really impact the overall analysis, but it is two percent better. By the way, through the third quarter, the decline increased and it’s now a 30% decrease since 2022. (I’ll write/visualize this in an upcoming article.) But I want you to trust me and my data. Especially these days, when many people are using LLMs that I know are inserting faulty data into their charts, I want to keep earning my audience’s faith. So that’s the accurate data. RIGHT: IP Remains Very, Very Popular In July, I wrote a giant (and I mean giant) article on Backrooms, Obsession, and the box office, going over what we know, what we don’t know about what works in theaters, looking at YouTubers, IP, the horror genre, comic book movies, and a whole lot more. The month of August really tested a lot of my theses and, being honest, mostly supported my arguments. Let’s start with IP. Looking at 8-Aug (the weekend after Spider-Man: Brand New Day came out) to 18-Sep (the weekend that Resident Evil came out, which I think provides a nice bookend to this time period), there were seven films based on pre-existing IP: Resident Evil (2026) ($126 million) Practical Magic 2 ($65 million) _Insidious: Out of the Furthe_r ($65 million) Coyote Vs. Acme ($59 million) Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie ($53 million) Tony ($15 million) Super Troopers 3 ($7 million) Compare those to the notable original films from the past month—I actually could have included more movies, but here are just thirteen, bringing us to an even twenty films—including.... The End of Oak Street ($54 million) Buddy ($26 million) Mutiny ($15 million) By Any Means ($15 million) The Dog Stars ($14 million) Runner ($14 million) One Night Only ($11 million) Hope ($8 million) Spa Weekend ($7 million) The Uprising ($6 million) Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma ($6 million) Onslaught ($3 million) Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man ($2.8 million) Here’s that in chart form: Five of the top six films in this time period were all based on IP. I made a big chart of films that grossed over $200 million at the box office before Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey hit theaters. Let’s update that chart! By the way, if you want to see how I categorized each film—so another bar chart—here it is: I know that many of my fellow critics/pundits/analysts dislike films based on IP and how Hollywood is making so many of them. And I’m sympathetic to this point of view. As I’ve written many, many times before, you need a balance between existing franchises, new IP, and original films. And Hollywood clearly needs to make more films like Resident Evil (a well-made film from a visionary director) and fewer Practical Magic 2’s (which didn’t get critical or customer buzz). But at some point, critics and pundits need to contend with what audiences are telling them: Movie-goers aren’t showing up to original films. Audiences are speaking with their dollars, telling you they want more IP and franchises. You can try to convince studio heads to make fewer IP-based films and franchises, but the data and numbers aren’t there. Instead, critics need to work harder to convince audiences to show up for original films. Aim your ire/concern at the average person, not studio heads.2 Because they’re just making the films that audiences are telling them to make. WRONG: Original Horror Films Didn’t Break Out I’ll be honest, even though I wrote an article casting some skepticism on the horror genre in July, if you asked me to make a prediction, I would have predicted that, in August, a new, original horror film would have blown up. No, seriously, I just assumed that Obsession and Backrooms presaged a change in audience behavior. But none of the buzzy new original horror films from August—Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Onslaught (not an action film in spite of the ads), The End of Oak Street, Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man, or _Buddy—_broke out. To be clear, exactly one of those films (Buddy) had good “ROI”, but again—I try to be specific in my language—none were “popular” in any broad sense of the word. None of them will be “saving” movies theaters like Backrooms or _Obsession_helped save the summer. The new Insidious film and Resident Evil, both based on IP, were far and away the biggest horror films since July. (We’ll see if this changes in October/Halloween season.) RIGHT: Stay Skeptical about Crowdfunding... I’ve long been skeptical about crowd-investing platforms as one of Hollywood’s saviors, mainly because there’s so much hype/buzz. People need to stay more skeptical about more things, explaining both the potential upside but also the downsides. In particular, the media often hypes crowdfunding at the start and never checks in on the actual results after they’ve come in later. And August gave us our first update! _Ice Cream Man—_directed by Eli Roth—grossed $6 million off of a $5.5 million budget. This is a production of The Horror Section, which was one of the first “crowd investing” studios with 2,400 investors, which means that 2,400 investors probably lost money. They certainly aren’t getting as great of returns as if they had just invested their dollars in the stock market. Hopefully Stiletto (Tagline: “Someone’s Going to Make it Rain Blood!”) does better next month. WRONG: Another Data Goof Here’s another data error. When the first episode of House of the Dragon came out, HBO put out that it had 21.5 million viewers in the first three days, and I read that to mean in the US…but no, it was global. So my US-only datecdotes charts shouldn’t have included it. We never got US-only numbers for the first episode, but for the final episode, HBO put out that it had 11 million US viewers. (And that global dropped to 21 million viewers.) Here’s the updated chart (which I’ve since used in the Streaming Ratings Report): Still, this show is absolutely huge. RIGHT: Superhero Films Remain Very, Very Popular After Supergirl flopped, I read a few takes that “comic book movies are going the way of the Western”. Post-Spider-Man: Brand New Day, that take didn’t age well. To be fair, I have a very nuanced take on the superhero genre right now; it’s down right now, for a lot of reasons. But it’s not “dead”. Maybe _Spider-_Man is just a really popular character? I saw that take, and it’s a fair counter-argument. (But pundits arguing that superhero movies were dead should have mentioned this $1.5 billion counter-argument…) But is it just Spider-Man? The next Avengers film already has $50 million in pre-sales (and I was skeptical that that film would do well) and the Avengers: End Game re-release topped the box office two weekends ago (over three original films). And I wouldn’t bet against Batman or Superman. So maybe it’s just Spider-Man, Batman, Superman and the Avengers. Oh, and Deadpool, of course. And Black Panther. And Wolverine. And probably the X-Men. Plus a well-made Wonder Woman or the Hulk film could break out. But that’s it! It’s just those ten characters/teams. Oh, what’s that? Lanterns is also doing well on HBO? (See previous section…) To be fair, I’m actually pretty sympathetic to the argument that more popular characters—like Spider-Man and Batman—anchor more popular films. In fact, I made that exact argument three years ago when I first wrote about the “Marvel-cession”. In many ways, you can blame The Guardians of the Galaxy for fooling Marvel Studios (and the rest of us) into believing that any character could pop. It turns out, the list of iconic characters is probably smaller than most people think. But it’s probably too early to say that superhero films and comic book movies are dead unless “death” means a slight decline over a longtime. RIGHT: Who Killed Theaters? Old People I get frustrated whenever I see headlines or analysis about how young people are “returning” to theaters. As I’ve detailed(for years), young people have always powered the US box office, despite narratives about “kids these days” and their “phones”. Really, what’s changed post-2020/pandemic is that old people aren’t going to the movies nearly as much. This summer, I saw a movie (from an older director) in a theater near a retirement community, and multiple older people at the theater were talking about how this was their first time seeing a movie in years. I dislike personal anecdotes, so YouGov can fill in the data, best summarized by this headline: “Who killed movie theaters? Not the youths”. According to them, 64% of people aged 18-29 have seen a movie in the last year, but only 30% of 65-and-older. 20% of 18-29 have seen a movie in theaters in the last week and 42% in the last month. Here’s the polling data: Most concerning? Many Americans (17%) think theaters are a worse or much worse experience than watching films at home. Slight WRONG: Hadestown Opens Big A live theater capture of the Broadway musical, Hadestown, made $20 million at the US box office, which begs the question: was I wrong to be skeptical about musicals a few years ago? Yes and no. On the one hand, $20 million is a far cry from being “popular”, so yeah, the genre isn’t that popular overall and Hadestown is one of the more popular musicals from recent years (i.e. the “Taylor Swift Data Fallacy” in action). On the other, I doubt filming this cost all that much, and I don’t think that they spent much on marketing, so this is a good source of ancillary revenue. Smaller Updates WRONG: As I mentioned in a Streaming Ratings Report, I underestimated the budget for Enola Holmes 3. It probably cost more like $50 million, if not more. But... I’m not sure that it really matters? At sub-10 million hours, prices have to come down to make this work. WRONG: Netflix is giving Ink a 27-day in theaters! To quote the kids/YouTubers these days, let’s go! Now I might actually have a chance to see Danny Boyle’s latest in theaters. I’d complained about this in a “Coming Soon” section, but I was heartened to read that Netflix is giving multiple films longer theatrical windows this year. RIGHT: Netflix is sending 4-5 films per year to theaters. Netflix is slowly but surely sending more and more films to theaters, as I cautiously predicted earlier this year. For now, it’s just three big films and a number of awards contenders, but still, this is great news. And they’ll be releasing box office grosses! Just this week, Ted Sarandos confirmed that KPop Demon Hunters 2 will come to theaters (and my guess is it performs in the box office top ten at a minimum). WRONG: Angel has 3 million subscribers! How do I know this? Well, they told Deadline, who reported it. I marked this as “wrong”, since they’ve doubled their subscribers in one year but, you know, they don’t really have a hit film to speak of and they’re still losing money. WRONG: Furious was only renewed for one more season. I accidentally wrote “two more seasons” in my latest “Renewals, Cancellations, Un-Orders and Removals Update”. RIGHT: House of David is ending with its third season. In July, Prime Video renewed House of David for a third season, as I just wrote in my latest “Renewals and Cancellations” report. Well, now it’s ending after that third season. Why? As I’ve been writing, its viewership wasn’t great. I got feedback that this show didn’t cost very much, but it cost enough that its limited viewership didn’t save it. WRONG: Adults was a Hulu original! So I missed Adults when it first came out last year; I saw that it aired on FX and just assumed that it was a linear-first program. Turns out, it aired three episodes on FX, but binge-released the rest of its episodes the next day on Hulu. Huh. So I should have covered it last year! But I just wrote about it. 1 “When I was a kid in the 90s, if you wore a t-shirt to school that wasn’t too big and also wasn’t too small, but somehow didn’t quite fit, we’d say you were wearing an “extra-medium” shirt.” 2 As always, a huge exception is Disney, which barely makes anything original anymore.
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Why I Don’t Think Ride Or Die Should Have Been Cancelled (And What Company Should Save It...)
(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.) So…I recently came across a Reddit thread, talking about films on streaming, wondering why there are no reliable sources out there for streaming ratings data. Sigh. Honestly, as annoyed as I am that so many still don’t realize that we have streaming ratings, I somewhat get it. Until now, there was such a long delay between when a show or film came to streaming and when we got its viewership data; I understand why people were confused. (But, as you know, this just changed.) Also, even back in the day, how many people knew how well films did on television? Luckily, as a reader, you’re in the know. Okay, on to this week’s issue. I want to take a look at Prime Video cancelling Ride or Die and whether I agree with that decision. Overall, we didn’t have any breakout hits (no TV shows landed over 20 million hours according to Nielsen) but we have a lot of steady performers on the streaming charts. Plus, we’ll look at where $50 million in missing box office dollars went. (Spoiler: straight-to-streaming.) All that, plus new episodes of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, Supergirl heads to streaming, a new YA show does well on Netflix, the viewership for the Daily Wire’s $50 million fantasy show, what TV show hit-maker can’t make streaming hits, CD sales, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more. Let’s dive right in! (Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, JustWatch and Reelgood interest data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of September 7th to September 13th, 2026. You can find a link to my terminology here.) Subscribe Television - Ride or Die Is a Hit…But It Got Cancelled? What The Data “Says” I hate the phrase “here’s what the data says”, even though sometimes I find myself using it. If data just told us everything, we data folks would be out of a job! Data is often messy, complicated and nuanced. When it comes to strategy, many of the best decisions can’t actually use “data”, since it’s vastly too complicated to model. Anyways, I’ve been singing the praises of Prime Video’s Ride Or Die this summer, a show that did very well for them. And yet…it got cancelled. Now, usually when a show gets cancelled, a bunch of websites say “a hit show got cancelled”... Here’s the thing, though: in this case, they’re right! The data “says” that this show was a hit. Specifically, out of 522 first seasons to make a week on the Nielsen charts since 2020, it’s the 75th biggest. On Amazon, Ride or Die is eighth out of 41 first seasons: That’s top 15th percentile all time, almost exactly, which is my definition of a “hit”! I mean, outside of Reacher, Amazon needed a hit this summer! (Admittedly, Off Campus did well for Amazon in the spring, but Ride or Die performed even better.) So what happened? Why did Amazon cancel one of their rare 2026 bright spots? Well, Deadline reported a reason—which I’ll get to—but I’d break it down into three relevant questions: What is a given streamer’s reasoning? Is that reasoning sound? Could the stated reason not be the real reason? According to Deadline, Amazon felt the show “over-indexed” in middle-aged women. (This was based on leaks from within Amazon.) The logic is this: Amazon already reaches this demographic because of unlimited two-day shipping bundled with Prime, so they don’t really need more shows like this. Now, it’s my job to ask if that’s a good reason, and I’ll be honest, in this case, I don’t think it is. Sure, this show may “over-index” in middle-aged women—I’ll just assume that’s the case here—but I think folks often oversell how important over-indexing actually is. When a show is a “hit”, it isn’t a bit bigger than its rivals; it’s usually multiples bigger. For example, Elle only made the charts for two weeks at 8.3 million hours each. So Ride or Die was 80% bigger in its first two weeks, and likely had a much stronger hold, with its terrific 13 million hours in week three. Ride or Die was nearly three times bigger than Sterling Point through three weeks too. And that means that _Elle, Sterling Point a_nd other Amazon YA shows need to not just over-index a little with younger women (assuming that’s who Amazon prefers over middle-aged women), but massively over-index. Otherwise, more people in that demo (and a bunch more besides) likely watched Ride or Die. (I’ll try to explore this concept more in a future article.) And don’t get me started on how Ride or Die did compared to a certain (very, very popular, possibly the world’s most popular) YouTuber’s reality show…which didn’t make the charts after its first week and likely cost much, much more than Ride or Die. All to say, Amazon-MGM Studios/Prime Video can tell reporters that this show didn’t reach the right audience, but that excuse feels weak to me. So this leads to the third question: could other reasons have come into play? Yes! Renewal or cancellation decisions rarely (I’m tempted to say “never”) boil down to one variable. At its simplest, it’s two things: budget versus viewership. But often factors like critical acclaim, ownership and, yes, personal opinion come into play. In this case, Amazon has a new executive running things, and this show isn’t owned by Amazon-MGM Studios (unlike Elle). And yes, it may not have indexed with the right target viewers, too. Likely all of those factors came into play.1 My guess is ownership ended up mattering most. Amazon doesn’t own Ride or Die. It’s actually produced by another major studio. Fortunately/allegedly, this show is being shopped around. I can think of one brand new CEO who should consider it for one of his two major streamers…especially if he wants to rebuild goodwill in Hollywood. His name is on this list of exec producers of Ride or Die… If David Ellison needs some goodwill—and he does—rescue this female-led show tomorrow and grab some good headlines for a day. The data justifies it. Quick Notes on TV We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out… How The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives latest season did on Hulu, post-controversy... Whether Supergirl soared on HBO Max... Why the box office is losing money due to the streamers... The viewership for the Daily Wire’s $50 million fantasy show... Updates on The Gentlemen, Lanterns, Outer Banks, King of the Hill and more... What former hit-maker has three streaming flops in a row... Whether The Mandalorian and Grogu popped in week two... All the flops, bombs and misses... And a whole lot more... ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support. If you want an idea of just how much content you’d get in a full issue, check out this older issue. Coming Soon! Oh man, we’re almost caught up! We just have two more issues, then the streaming Ratings Report will be coming out just two weeks after a TV show premieres! Next issue, I’ll be looking at the first two weeks of the NFL Thursday night games on streaming, a huge new spinoff, Reacher’s Neagly on Prime Video, and the latest edition of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story on Netflix, the return of Slow Horses on Apple and MobLand (quietly one of their biggest shows) on Paramount+, and Dancing with the Stars on both ABC and Disney+. Plus I’ll take a look at animation for adults in 2026. The week after, a ton of movies are coming to streaming: Toy Story 5 on Disney+, Backrooms on HBO Max, Jackass: Best and Last on Paramount+ and The Breadwinner on Netflix, plus a Unabomber film on Netflix and a romcom on Prime Video. Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey have a show on Apple, along with a game show inspired by Willy Wonka that everyone seems to hate. Long term, some crazy (but hopefully crazy like a fox) IP news. FX ordered a new Sons of Anarchy show from Charlie Hunnam, but it’s not about the biker gang. No, it features the show’s cast playing themselves in a new “meta-thriller”. Huh. And a lot of the cast is coming back. Next, Ryan Gosling is producing a Flintstones movie about a “grown-up Bamm-Bamm Rubble”. Also, huh. This one is in “early development” so we’ll see what happens. Both projects are based on IP, but also seem to have crazy takes on the IP, which I like.
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Bobby Kotick’s lawyers sent me a bad email (and later apologized)
The message I had received was unsettling—for a moment. Then it was just really confusing. Back on January 20 of this year, at 5:15pm ET, I received an email with the subject line “Legal Correspondence re Bobby Kotick.” It was from the law firm Clare Locke, a firm I’d heard had been emailing reporters in recent years about their coverage of Kotick, the former, longtime CEO of Activision Blizzard. The letter was threatening. A lawyer from the firm introduced themselves as “defamation counsel to Bobby Kotick.” They issued a “demand” that I “correct” a Game File article I’d published a week prior. The article that had irked them had been a scoop of sorts. I’d written about a a 2022 lawsuit brought by a Swedish pension fund, AP7, over Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard. The suit wasn’t news, but I was first to review and report about Kotick’s extensive pushback to the fund’s claims. The pension fund’s core contention was that the sale had been rushed by Kotick to avoid the consequences of sexual misconduct scandals swirling around the company in 2021. (He’d not been accused of misconduct himself in those suits, to be clear.) As I wrote at the time, Kotick had denied the allegations of the rushed sale. Beyond that, Kotick used a December 2025 reply to the Swedish fund’s lawsuit to assign blame for those workplace scandals, the bad press and even for the AP7 lawsuit. I’d found Kotick’s arguments novel and newsworthy. Across nearly 3,000 words, I explained Kotick’s take: that a Swedish gaming company was behind the Swedish fund’s lawsuit (the Embracer group; they denied it); that the Microsoft-Activision deal was not rushed and was secured at what Kotick felt history had proven to be an optimal price for shareholders; that he believed a conspiracy of people at unions government agencies, PR firms and the media had spun up claims of widespread workplace misconduct at Activision Blizzard in 2021. The article gave context for all of this, letting readers assess the claims and weigh their credibility. As I’d later write to Kotick’s lawyers: I would be surprised if you could point to any news article about Bobby Kotick in the last five years that has spent more of its wordcount articulating his point of view. He is welcome to do an interview with Game File any time. Nonetheless, there they were in my inbox that Tuesday evening: Clare Locke, the law firm that secured a $787.5 million settlement from Fox News over false statements about voting machines. They were emailing me, threatening that failure to comply with their demand could support a claim of “actual malice,” a legal standard for libel. Unless… Unless, they said, I added a key paragraph to my article. This was a paragraph that I already knew Kotick’s lawyers had been emailing reporters about for at least a year, and it was a paragraph that was already in my article. The paragraph they wanted is from a 2023 settlement that California’s Civil Rights Department struck with Activision Blizzard. The settlement had closed a two-year-old lawsuit over alleged sexual discrimination at the game maker. The paragraph basically said that claims of systemic or widespread sexual harassment—or of execs like Kotick tolerating such behavior—had never been proven. I’d already seen proof that Kotick’s lawyers had pushed for the settlement’s language to be added to reports about 2021 sexual discrimination and misconduct lawsuits brought against Activision Blizzard by California and, separately, by the U.S. federal government (both suits were since settled). I knew that Kotick and his lawyers felt that the California settlement language should be mentioned in the same breath as references to an article he hated and denied, a November 2021 Wall Street Journal article claiming Kotick knew “for years” of sexual misconduct at Activision Blizzard. So, in the Game File article that Clare Locke emailed me about, in the interest of ensuring I was being fair and balanced regarding the person I was covering, I had already included the following excerpt from the California settlement [emphasis added in bold]: (Kotick has repeatedly pushed back against that November article in the Wall Street Journal, citing among other things, language from a court-approved consent decree as part of Activision’s 2023 $54 million settlement over the California suit. It states: “no court or any independent investigation has substantiated any allegations that: there has been systemic or widespread sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard [or] that Activision Blizzard senior executives ignored, condoned, or tolerated a culture of systemic harassment, retaliation, or discrimination.”) On the evening of January 20, I was incredulous. How do you write a four page legal threat about a week-old article and miss this? While scrambling to also make my kids dinner, I wrote a lengthy reply to Clare Locke’s lawyers, basically asking them to cool it with the threats and to start making sense. In part, I wrote: I hope you can understand why I am having trouble understanding what you’re asking for, when the statement you’re demanding to see in Game File’s article already appears in Game File’s article. Actual malice, as you know, refers to a reckless disregard for the truth. I’m not sure what your argument is when my article already states your client’s position. Here is where I should remind you, the reader, that I am an independent journalist. I publish on Substack, and have availed myself of the Substack Defender program that provides writers on the platform with legal support. But I’m no Wall Street Journal or New York Times, nor even IGN or GameSpot when it comes to such things as, well, having a legal department. There are more fun things for me to do as an independent journalist than writing back to a powerful law firm representing a very rich person. On the evening of January 20th, I was just trying to cook some pasta, broccoli and chicken nuggets for hungry twins. Nevertheless, I wrote back to them. Two hours later, I got a reply. Summarizing: A lawyer for Clare Locke said they’d “reviewed an incomplete version” of my article and they “apologize for the confusion.” (My guess: Someone didn’t read past the piece’s paywall, even though they’d had a full week to scrounge up the funds to do so. What I’d published above the paywall was balanced, as was what came after.)1 That was almost that, but something about the situation bothered me. The letter had been marked “confidential.” I hadn’t agreed to that, and I disliked the idea that powerful people on the beat that I cover would act like they could unilaterally control what I might tell my readers about. On the morning of the 21st, having already gotten the powerful law firm to back off, I oh-so-wisely re-approached them with just one more thing. I thanked them for clearing things up the night before but noted that I’d never agreed to keep their letter confidential. I’m all for agreeing with a source to keep things off the record, but that’s the thing. We have to agree. You can’t just declare it. I’m not bound by that. I wrote to Clare Locke’s lawyer and said, in part: I trust the matter is resolved. It was disappointing to have to spend less time with my kids last night in order to address your legal letter. Family time’s precious. I will add, for clarity’s sake, that, while your letter stipulated that it was confidential, I did not agree to those terms. In the future, should you wish to communicate with me confidentially, I am happy to agree to classifying our communication as “off the record” prior to the actual communication—as is standard with any professional journalist. The firm’s lawyer replied, not directly addressing the confidentiality issue but asserting that the matter was resolved. Why I didn’t write about this until now In May, I told this story on an episode of Simon Parkin’s podcast My Perfect Console, but I held off on sharing it directly with Game File readers. I held off to avoid stepping on the toes of another reporter, the journalist Mikhail Klimentov. He’d interviewed me in the spring of 2025 about an investigation he was working on regarding Bobby Kotick lawyers pressing the media to add the California settlement language to stories referencing the 2021 lawsuits. And about how some outlets had changed their stories and how some simply deleted them. Initially, I was a third-party source for Klimentov’s reporting, providing on-the-record context about the state of the games media. I’d heard about the letters but hadn’t put the time into pursuing the story. I thought it was interesting, and I was glad he was covering it. When the outlet that Klimentov was going to run his reporting in dropped the story, I began talking to him about potentially publishing his reporting on Game File. This was tentative. Then, in January, when I got my own Clare Locke letter, I told Klimentov that I didn’t think it would make sense for me to publish him, not with me now being part of the story. I had my own version of this situation to tell. But I wished him well and said I’d refrain from telling my tale until he could get his reporting out there. Last Friday, Klimentov finally ran his investigation, in a nearly 48-minute video report for People Make Games. It covers various Clare Locke letters, how media outlets reacted to them and what to make of all this. His video weighs the merits of Kotick’s request and looks at some of the articles that were changed (one of which had a glaring error). I highly recommend watching it: (Note, I did some editorial consulting for a People Make Games video last year but nothing to do with this report.) While many outlets haven’t left any public evidence that they updated their Kotick coverage at Kotick’s counsel’s request, at least one has. Back in October 2025, the mainstream outlet Reuters applied the most transparent article update I’ve seen. On the 3rd of the month, they published an article about the state of the Swedish pension fund’s lawsuit. Days later, they added this: In an October 7 letter sent after publication of this article, Kotick’s defamation counsel disputed claims of widespread harassment at Activision. “Not a single investigation, court finding, verdict, or ruling ever concluded that there was any merit” to the allegations of widespread harassment at Activision, Tom Clare and Nick Brechbill of Clare Locke wrote. I’ve never added a statement to my article on Game File, because none was needed. Not for fairness’ sake, nor to meet any demands of Kotick’s lawyers. I’ve nevertheless wanted to be transparent with Game File readers. If someone powerful is questioning my reporting, is threatening a lawsuit over it… if that threat is part of a pattern involving other games media outlets and if, in my case, the whole thing ran into a ridiculous ditch, I want you to know about it. I also share this as a real example of how I handle threats to Game File. I stand up for my own reporting, even when it’s not comfortable to do so. (In that same category of standing up for the work I do, I’ll point to an incident in late August. Asocial media post I published to X/Twitter regarding reporting I did about Take Two and GTA VI was hit by bogus copyright claim by a firm working for the publisher. I pushed back and got it reversed; even while a bigger games media outlet let themselves be censored. This is the other reason I’m sharing this story: To emphasize that dealing with threats from powerful people is one of the costs of covering the video game industry independently and as fearlessly as possible. This is where you come in. Your support, through free and paid subscriptions (sign up here!), can help me keep doing that. It can ensure that I’ve got the back-up I need. And it can help make fiascoes like this even less of a worry, so I can spend my evenings dealing with more important things, such as making sure I steam the kids’ broccoli just right. 1 That pension fund lawsuit I wrote about in January has all but gone away. In May, the fund and Activision Blizzard owner Microsoft agreed to settle. Lawyers for the fund brokered a $250 million settlement for former Activision Blizzard shareholders. In the settlement, the fund’s lawyers changed their rhetoric. Where once they’d questioned the meaning of the California settlement language, they adopted a version of it for themselves. Several weeks ago, while seeking to get a court to sign off on the terms of the settlement, they proposed their fee for their work in the case: $60 million.
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