The Hollywood Reporter

As Josh D’Amaro prepares to step into the Disney CEO shoes, succeeding Bob Iger, he’s now opening up about his vision for the media and entertainment empire’s future.

Inside the Capitol Building on Tuesday during Ted Sarandos’ appearance before the U.S. Senate’s antitrust subcommittee sat the Monopoly man, complete with a white mustache, top hat and red bowtie. The message, shared by some consumers and large swaths of Hollywood, to lawmakers was unmistakable: Netflix is poised to become an entertainment behemoth if it’s allowed to complete a $82.7 billion deal for Warner Bros. and HBO.

SmartLess is getting online backlash after an awkward exchange between co-host Jason Bateman and guest Charli XCX about her decision not to have children.

The final Grammy Awards on CBS took a small ratings hit compared to the previous year. https://lnkd.in/gmCvTZZf

Mamma Mia! played its final Broadway performance Feb. 1, after opening at the Winter Garden Theatre on Aug. 14. The musical revival, which was often one of the top grossing shows in the industry, brought in $1.8 million in its final week (one of its higher grosses but below holiday totals) and played to 99 percent capacity.

BBC Studios has promoted Eve Frederick to executive vp production for its unscripted team based in Los Angeles.

At the beginning of the Disney CEO succession process, the company had over 100 people on the list, including both internal and external candidates.

After an early Feb. 2 earnings disclosure, as if to orchestrate some breathing room for CEO Bob Iger to give the in-the-weeds financial updates on its studio division and experiences unit, Disney formally unveiled his successor, Josh D’Amaro, on Tuesday morning.

Disney's chairman of the board of directors, James Gorman, speaks with The Hollywood Reporter on CEO succession. "You want somebody who has the ability to grow, and is on a nice inflection point in their life where there’s they’re growing and growing rapidly.”

In 1984, less than a year after Warner Bros. bought back his stake in the studio, Rupert Murdoch made a run at 20th Century Fox. The studio was then owned by wildcatter Marvin Davis, a six-foot-four, three-hundred-pound man of Falstaffian appetites. At one board meeting, Davis catered a nine-course lunch and had his secretary place Pepto-Bismol bottles at each seat. Davis and his wife lived in a forty-five-thousand-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion named the Knoll, where they threw Christmas parties featuring the Radio City Rockettes and violinists from the Los Angeles Philharmonic. But running a successful studio proved to be more than Davis could stomach. In 1984, Fox lost $36 million and was teetering on bankruptcy. Making matters worse, Davis was locked in a power struggle with his forty-three-year-old studio chief, Barry Diller, whom Davis recruited from Paramount only months earlier. Davis wanted out of Hollywood. He had followed Rupert’s pursuit of Warner in the press, so he called Rupert and proposed he invest in Fox.