July 26, 2026

THE MERGER ISN’T KILLING HOLLYWOOD. HOLLYWOOD ALREADY DID THAT:

Far from “thriving,” theaters sold roughly 770 million tickets last year — down 37% from 2019 and less than half the 1.57 billion sold at the 2002 peak. The share of adults who see a movie at least monthly has fallen by more than half. Receipts hold up only because the average ticket now runs north of $13. Charging ever more to ever fewer people is not a thriving business; it is a shrinking one, repriced. And moviegoers will tell you why they stopped coming: nearly 2 in 5 adults who attend less often say there is simply not a good enough variety of new films worth the trip.

Much of the rest of the case comes down to jobs. The Teamsters call the deal a “direct threat to film and television workers nationwide”; one producer predicted 10,000 job losses, without any data behind the figure. Yet the merger’s own critics have noted that Los Angeles County lost more than 42,000 motion picture jobs between 2022 and 2024 — years before this deal existed. Entertainment employment has fallen roughly 30% in four years, Los Angeles on-location filming is down more than 40% since 2022, and production employment sits at a 30-year low. Hollywood is not losing its audience to consolidation. It is losing its audience to itself.

Nor would blocking the deal freeze some healthy status quo in place. Warner Bros. Discovery was for sale because its trajectory was unsustainable. Its revenues slid from $41.3 billion in 2023 to $37.3 billion last year, after a $9.1 billion write-down in 2024 — the company’s own reappraisal of its worth. Stopping the deal does not change the market.

Opponents of the merger fail to consider the impact the deal could have on long-term employment across the wider creative economy, where the meaningful driver is production volume. Film and television support 2.01 million American jobs, pay $202 billion in wages, and sustain more than 162,000 businesses, 93% of which employ fewer than 10 people. A single-location shoot injects roughly $1.3 million a day into a local economy. The only question that matters is whether this merger means more movies or fewer.

The answer is on paper. Paramount has committed to maintaining both studios, releasing at least 30 theatrical films a year, and guaranteeing a 45-day theatrical window before video-on-demand. And since Skydance took over last August, Paramount has nearly doubled its slate from eight films to 15. These commitments mean more production days, more crews, more stages booked, more location spending — precisely what the unions say they want protected, and the only real medicine for what ails Hollywood: too few movies worth leaving the house for.

The success of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey might be a pyrrhic victory for Hollywood, cementing audiences’ post-Covid habit to go to the movies a couple of times a year to see the blockbuster that has the most hype, rather than going nearly every weekend:

Posted at 12:07 pm by Ed Driscoll

AND AGAIN: Terror Attack in Berlin.  “Fifteen people were injured, with one having died so far. German police are investigating whether the attack was terror-related, but I am not sure what there is to investigate. The perpetrator drove a car into a gay crowd at a high rate of speed, and then attacked people with a knife. There’s your investigation. I assume the terrorist was a Muslim, but it is possible he was some other kind of extremist. We will find out soon.”

UPDATE: Its origin and purpose, still a total mystery.

MORE: Suspect in Berlin Pride attack identified as ‘Islamist.’ “‘Based on the investigators’ initial findings, we have already identified a suspected perpetrator,’ Florian Nath, a spokesman for Berlin police, said, adding that the force’s search for the suspect was ‘proceeding at full speed’. ‘He is known to us as a member of Islamic circles here in Berlin … we still have no information whatsoever regarding his specific motives, the exact sequence of events, or his role in the crime itself.’”

UPDATE (11:14 am): Abdul Ballout: Berlin Pride suspect tried to join Islamic State. Around 2,000 police officers searching for 21-year-old German citizen who is of Lebanese descent.

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll

FUN:

Posted at 8:56 am by Glenn Reynolds

TRIGGERNOMETRY INTERVIEWS PETER HITCHENS: “We Live in the Age of Delusions.”

At the conclusion of the clip, Hitchens tells his interviewers:

Intelligence chiefs keep coming out and saying we have to prepare for war. Russia is a great threat.

Well, you can believe that if you want, though I find it a struggle.

I always remember going to Moscow—I think it was in 2008. It was the first big parade of the new Russian Army. They had decided they were going to restart the Red Square parades. I’d watched the last one back in November 1990.

My office said, “Why don’t you go out and watch it?” So I watched it with my old friend Igor, whose father had been a Soviet nuclear submarine commander who really knew his military stuff. We stood on the balcony of th hotel, watching it from as close as we could get.

I enjoyed the parade as much as the rest. But at the end of it, Igor turned to me and said, “What did you think of our great display of strategic scrap metal?” [laughter]

And he was quite right! The big new weapons—they probably only had two or three. Most of the stuff they were able able to put on display was probably old, much of it dating back to the Soviet era.

We knew—and we still know—that the Russian military is fantastically corrupt and incompetent, and the training of its soldiers is a disgrace. It’s a terrible army. After four years, they still haven’t managed to take Kharkiv, 20 miles from the border.

So to turn this into a great bogeyman which is supposedly about to arrive at Dunkirk with its tanks pointed at the British coast just doesn’t seem to me to be realistic.

But the intelligence people, retired generals, ex-defense ministers, and NATO chiefs are constantly trying to prepare us for war. The last thing I noticed was some suggestion that we should all start hoarding food and medicines in case there was a war.

There is a real attempt to get the British people to become war-minded, and I think that can only end sadly.

Obsessing over the Russians “about to arrive at Dunkirk” is a great to ignore who is crossing the Channel: Iran smuggling agents into UK as Channel migrants.

Posted at 8:44 am by Ed Driscoll

ATLAS SHRUGS:

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll

CLOWN SHOW:

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

UN-AMERICAN:

Posted at 7:51 am by Glenn Reynolds

ROGER SIMON: The Jews Should Leave New York.

It’s hard to admit this, but we are now at a similar juncture. Jews are not safe around the world, but particularly in New York, a city to which they made huge, one could almost say unparalleled, contributions in finance, architecture, city planning, medicine, education, theater, music, radio and television, museums and art, and virtually every field of science and culture you can think of.

That’s indisputable.

But, ironically, it is time for the Jews to go.

They must leave New York not only to save it but also to save themselves.

Not all will do so. Some are too frightened or too embedded in fusty left-wing politics that has repeatedly failed.

But those who do go, not just titans of Wall Street but regular middle-class folks, will take with them such a significant portion of the city’s tax base that Mamdani’s not-so-Democratic Socialist goals will be more unattainable than they already are.

New York will no longer be the country’s economic capital. Miami and/or Dallas will be, if they are not already.

Lessons might even be learned. Meanwhile, they can go be antisemites by themselves.

New York morphed into London so quickly that everyone noticed:

Posted at 7:44 am by Ed Driscoll

I MEAN, IT’S HARD TO ARGUE WITH THAT.

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

HE SEES THE EDGE OF THE PRECIPICE:

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

TROLL LEVEL: POTUS DJT.

Also, consider the media environment that Trump is trolling:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

I’LL TAKE IT:

Posted at 7:06 am by Glenn Reynolds

THE ENEMY WITHIN:

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

THIS WEEKEND IS A BIT INSANE: I’ll do my regular posting tomorrow, but I forgot to post the meme post here earlier, and I know a lot of you like it.  So:  Meme Days Of Summer.

Posted at 12:26 am by Sarah Hoyt

July 25, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Bloggin’ all over the world.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds