Streaming
Month: December 2025
Distribution
The 2025 Film Markets Reality Check: Cannes, Sundance, TIFF, and AFM Under a Tighter Rulebook
The 2025 film markets delivered a consistent message across continents and calendars. Sundance tested demand. Cannes refined presales. TIFF amplified select winners. AFM clarified the new floor. Together, they confirmed that the industry is not rebounding to its old shape. It is stabilizing at a smaller, more disciplined scale. Fewer films will move. Fewer territories will matter. Fewer buyers will decide outcomes.
Distribution
Film Distribution in 2025: Consolidation, Content Austerity, and Shrinking Leverage
Hollywood spent 2025 pretending it was in a cyclical downturn. It is not. The business is reorganizing under a harsher premise: fewer buyers, fewer viable windows, and less tolerance for anything that doesn’t behave like a franchise asset. The result is an ineluctable narrowing of the market—one that punishes independents, rewards scale, and converts distribution into a political and financial instrument as much as a commercial one.
Distribution
The Fight to Control Warner: Ellison’s Power Project vs. Netflix’s Strategic Ambition
Hollywood is no longer shaped by audience demand but by competing political blocs and foreign capital. Netflix’s $82.7 billion bid for Warner Bros. triggered immediate scrutiny, with President Trump signaling he would “be involved” as regulators examine the streamer’s expanding market power. Within hours, Paramount, backed by Larry Ellison, RedBird, Gulf sovereign funds, and Jared Kushner, countered with a hostile $77.9 billion all-cash bid.