The guy who made the Barbie movie is about to run CNN
A Mattel executive takes over the merged Paramount-Warner, a French-animated apocalypse hits the new Avatar series, and CBS airs three NCIS shows in one night.
In this piece · 3 sections+
The $110 billion deal that fuses Paramount and Warner Bros into one company called Skydance closes Tuesday. And to actually run the thing — the hallways, the greenlights, CNN, CBS News, HBO, the Warner lot where they shot Casablanca — David Ellison went out and hired the CEO of Mattel. Ynon Kreiz. The toy guy. His crowning achievement is backing Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie and turning a plastic doll into Barbie, 2023's highest-grossing movie at $1.4 billion and, this is the part that kills me, still the biggest film Warner Bros ever released. The man's signature move was a Warner movie. Now he runs Warner. The snake found its own tail and swallowed.
They sold $44.4 billion in bonds to pay for it, and part of the deal they cut to get it waved through is a five-year consent decree installing an independent board to protect the "editorial integrity" of CNN and CBS News. You need a court order and a watchdog committee to keep the Barbie company out of the evening news. Sleep well. Netflix looked at the number, did the arithmetic, and walked away. When the company that paid five billion dollars to air WWE Raw thinks your deal is too rich, maybe pump the brakes.
Oh, and last month Prime Video cancelled Spider-Noir, as reported September 4, after one season. The one with Nicolas Cage as a 1930s detective Spider-Man in a trench coat. They had that. They had Nicolas Cage playing a black-and-white Depression-era Spider-Man, and they looked at it and said no thank you. The minutes from that meeting belong in a museum.
The Drops
Avatar: Seven Havens (Paramount+). Mike DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, the Last Airbender guys, are back Friday, October 9, with a sequel to Legend of Korra. A young Earthbender wakes up as the new Avatar and immediately learns the prophecy pegs her as humanity's destroyer, not its savior — which is a bleaker cold open than most prestige dramas manage. Animated by a French studio, with art direction cribbed from Mœbius and nineties anime. Either the most beautiful thing Paramount ships all year or the thing Kreiz quietly turns into a Happy Meal by Christmas. Probably both.
NCIS: New York (CBS, next day on Paramount+). Tuesday the sixth, CBS runs three NCIS shows nose to tail — season 24 of the original at eight, the New York premiere at nine, Origins season three at ten. They're calling it "Super Tuesday," which is how you know marketing has given up and started naming things after elections. LL Cool J is in the New York one, playing the guy he already played on NCIS: Los Angeles, because this is a cinematic universe now and no living person requested that. Three straight hours of naval cops. Somewhere a retiree is weeping into a DVR remote.
Blue Box, season 2 (Netflix). The badminton romance anime returns Sunday, October 4. New director, new animation studio — Electric Circus takes over for Telecom — which among anime people is the kind of swap that ends friendships. If season one got you, you already know. If it didn't, it's an unbearably earnest show about a teenager in love with the girl who trains in the same gym, and there are worse ways to lose a weekend.
Ranma ½, season 3 (Netflix). The remake of the Rumiko Takahashi thing about the kid who turns into a girl when you splash him with cold water rolls on. A remake of a cartoon from the eighties, which tells you exactly where we've landed. Even the cartoons are reboots.
Pick of the Week
Avatar: Seven Havens. When the franchise people and the merger accountants are about to become the same people, you grab the good thing while it's still good. A gorgeously drawn end-of-the-world about a kid who might be the one who ends it beats a fourth spinoff of a cop show by a country mile. Watch it before the toy division reads the ratings and gets ideas.
The Closer
The week in one breath: a company borrowed forty-four billion dollars to buy the news, handed the keys to the man who makes Barbie, and promised a judge in writing it won't touch CBS News for five years. Meanwhile the best thing dropping is a French cartoon about the extinction of humanity, and CBS is airing three versions of the same naval-cop show in a single night like it's rationing bread in wartime. Nobody at the top knows what they're doing. They just know the machine has to keep eating, and lately it's started eating the furniture. See you next week.