Should Netflix Stop Trying to Be YouTube?

This episode of The Town is presented by FX's Adults. Called TV's Best Comedy by Forbes, the ensemble comedy series about a group of 20-somethings crashing in their friend's childhood house is back for season two. In what The Cut calls eight of the most hysterically funny episodes of the year, the five friends invent elaborate workarounds for problems they're too afraid to face head on. For your awards consideration in all comedy categories, all episodes of FX's Adults are now streaming on Hulu and Disney Plus for bundle subscribers. And RogerDibert.com declares, it's one of the best films of the year. Possible Love. Directed by Lee Chang-gong. For your consideration. Now playing in select theaters and on Netflix. Rated R. Under 17. Not admitted without adult. It is Wednesday, November 4th. So much of what we talk about on The Town feels like a Star Wars analogy. We've got the Hollywood people, the Rebel Alliance making cool movies and TV shows and trying to find an audience for them around the world against increasingly long odds. And then we've got the tech companies, specifically YouTube, the Empire, the Death Star, whatever you want to call it, shadowing over us all and systematically sucking up all the attention. Almost 16% of it on TVs alone, according to Nielsen's latest Gage report. That's more than double Netflix and more than Disney, HBO Max, Paramount Plus, and Peacock combined. That's just in the US, but the YouTube trajectory keeps going up. And of course, the platform generally doesn't pay up front for content, shouldering none of the risks that the traditional studios and other platforms take on, like, Prime Video and Netflix and Apple TV. Some say the streaming wars are over and it's YouTube, not Netflix, that won. But last week, Alphabet, the parent of both Google and YouTube, it revealed disappointing earnings and YouTube's ad revenue increased by only 9% in the quarter. That's still great, $11.2 billion in a single quarter, but down from the growth in the double digits for most of its existence. Google itself is being impacted by AI search results, delivering less money, I know, boo-hoo, but it caused my colleague, Julie Alexander at Puck, to write a column about YouTube and Netflix and whether the war for attention is even the race Netflix should be running. Remember, Netflix welcomed this competition when it changed its metric of success from subscribers to engagement. And now the stock market is looking at these numbers and they aren't impressed. So, what should Hollywood be doing about YouTube? What can Hollywood do? Julie is here and we're going to discuss. Today, it's YouTube, Netflix, the evil empire, and possibly a new hope. From the ringer in Puck, I'm Matt Bellany, and this is The Town. Okay, we are here with Julia Alexander, a colleague of mine at Puck and the author of an interesting column this week on YouTube and Netflix. Welcome, Julia. Hey, Matt. How are you? I am great. I am in New York, hence the very shady looking background if you're watching on video. But, all right. So, I wanted to talk about the whole YouTube, Netflix conundrum because I floated this last week on the show and, you know, so much of YouTube's history, it was this other thing. Nobody in Hollywood cared. It was cat videos, unprofessional, ad buyers didn't really know what they were getting when they put their ads there. Then, Nielsen and Netflix, I feel like, just opened the door, here. Nielsen, obviously, starting the Gage report in 2022, I believe, 22 or 23. And, Netflix, changing their metric that they asked us to judge them by from subscriber numbers to this engagement metric, which, obviously, they cared about because of the ad tier. They want more eyeballs to sell more ads. But, it changed the whole perception of how we think about these platforms. So, you know, I think that's one of the things that's really interesting and I think that's one of the things that's really interesting in many people's eyes. It put YouTube in direct competition with streaming services that are very, very different. And now, it's sort of subsumed everything. All we talk about is, can these platforms take on Netflix and win? So, my question for you is, like, should we stop comparing YouTube to Netflix? I thought we should stop comparing YouTube to Netflix when we started comparing YouTube to Netflix. Okay, so you were early on this. Well, here's why. But you agree with me that it's all people talk about. Oh, yes. Absolutely. And the reason for that is clear because at the same time that Netflix and Nielsen started talking about share of attention on television sets, we're talking about Netflix getting into advertising. Nielsen really only matters to advertisers and so that's why there's this concern that as premium connected TV ad dollars were potentially moving to YouTube, Netflix, let alone anyone else, was going to be kind of left adrift. Here's my issue with it. If you look at the timing of when this all started, it also coincides with when YouTube incentivized longer form content on TV sets in general and that came off the back of a severe moment in YouTube's history that we refer to as the apocalypse where advertisers were so freaked out by what YouTube was offering that they were fleeing the platform. Right. Suicide videos, Hitler stuff, you know, bad stuff. Exactly. So, YouTube basically looks at what its creators were already doing which was creating long form podcasts, kind of creating this long form content, incentivize more of it. When you say incentivize, what does that mean? Meaning it was better monetized? The way that YouTube works and I think this is the advantage YouTube has over any of the major streamers is although YouTube does not commission content, we know that it pays creators out. So, it does in fact pay for content in some way. In some ways, it pays more than any of these other platforms in the aggregate. It just, it just doesn't pay up front. It takes no risk. Absolutely. But what YouTube has always done extremely well has let creators create formats that work on YouTube and then incentivize, meaning they have changed algorithmic recommendations, they have changed the way that content appears, they have changed the way that they work with advertisers to create better deals for creators to then basically go in the direction that content was already headed. Great example of this. Creators started doing unboxing videos, you know, a shop, a get-ready-for-me get-ready-with-me videos and advertisers love that content because they can just throw their stuff on top of it. So, YouTube then created an entire world in which this content was incentivized to appear on more feeds and therefore it's a trickle-down effect. Creators now make more of this content. The same thing happened with podcasts around 2020, 2021. You can kind of go back to why they were doing it and the quick answer is that creators were spending more time collaborating with each other. These were getting better views. They realized that if they were going to be filming content anyways, they could film podcast-type shows and then they could create secondary channels which targeted a plethora of different topics so they would appear on more people's feeds through this kind of spiderweb effect that YouTube does exceptionally well. Well, YouTube realized that there's an opportunity here to not just have strong programmatic advertising on those subsequent 10-minute, 11-minute videos that creators are breaking out but they could bring in really strong premium CTV ad dollars if they kind of leaned into the lean-back TV experience. So, that happens at the same time the gauge starts coming out and people go, oh my God, people are spending more time with YouTube without diving into what they were spending time with. Yeah, and that is a key element here and I've said this before because if you talk to the traditional streamers, I'll call them, they really want YouTube to be more transparent about where this engagement is coming from. And you cited a research firm, Omdia, that found that music videos account for about a third of YouTube viewing time. News is 10% and podcasts about 5%. So, that is nearly half of the time on YouTube for content that Netflix doesn't even offer. Now, they're getting into podcasts but Netflix doesn't do news and Netflix definitely doesn't do music videos and YouTube obviously has a huge brand in music and people use it as a jukebox to listen to music but seems relevant, right? It seems relevant including, by the way, when you look at the story that came out of the UK earlier this year which was where Barb, which is a third-party measurement system akin to Nielsen in the UK, had partnered with a third-party research firm to look at exactly what type of content people in the UK were watching on YouTube as the share increased. And this got into a messy fight with Google. Google eventually stopping a customer of people like Barb at the time. I believe they still aren't because a big thing was they don't want that information out there and that's a big reason because people watch a lot of crap on YouTube still. Now, there are concerning things that Omdi and other partners have found. The rise in professional content people are spending more time with but the rise in professional content also coincides with legacy content. It's, you know, it's funny, I was thinking about this just last night when we were recording this episode. I, like many people, were watching a lot of the midterm stuff via YouTube. I had a bunch of YouTube streams up. And all the YouTube creators that were watching were just laughing. streaming NBC and they're reacting to NBC. And so if you're NBC, you know, the same thing is how many people are watching Jimmy Fallon videos or clips, right? How many people are watching movies? Yeah, well, they monetize that. Exactly. But if we look at the YouTube share component of it, that conversation gets lost. And as does the type of content that to your point, Matt, Netflix and Disney don't want. They don't necessarily want YouTube videos. They certainly don't want to open the pipeline to random creators coming in and putting how to get ready with me videos on the feed. Well, at least not yet. I mean, we'll we'll talk about what Netflix is doing in that area. But first, I do want to talk about this notion that YouTube and Netflix are complementary because you ran this interesting chart about how even though the numbers for YouTube engagement keep going up, the churn number, the number of people who cancel Netflix has not gone down accordingly. So it suggests that people are sort of using YouTube and Netflix complementarily, if that's a word. And it's not one has not totally injured the other. If you're looking at the number of people who subscribe to Netflix, it's not even just Netflix. If you look at the kind of top complementary premium streaming services to YouTube, that would be your Disney pluses, your HBO Max. Your Paramount pluses churn is hovered around five point six percent. Like that's not that's actually much less than it was two years ago. Churn across premium SVOD or streaming services has kind of stagnated in a great way. It's calmed down. Well, and that's, I think, due to bundling and they're getting better at identifying people that may be on the verge of churning out. And there's a number of ways there. So this essentially becomes just an engagement or advertising problem, not insignificant, Netflix is looking at advertising as its big growth area, and they're struggling because there's so much inventory because of all these other services and they have trouble getting the prices they want. And if the engagement isn't there, they won't have pricing power. So continue. Well, it's significant for exactly what you were just saying. As of right now, the perceived value of the cost of a Netflix or Disney plus or a bundled tier point Disney plus HBO Max is on par with what customers feel they're spending adequate time watching. So they may open the app less, but they still think, OK, there's a new season of The Diplomat. There's a new season of Vision Quest or whatever it might be. And that's good enough for me. It effectively acts as having HBO for your one hit every five, six, seven weeks that people feel OK about paying the 15, 16, 17 dollars for. The question is, if you aren't getting the engagement, if you're losing engagement, so advertising revenue then becomes a concern because you're losing the engagement. And you're not producing the same level of hits and people are opening it up less and then you're increasing prices. That's the only way to increase your margins. Well, then it becomes, OK, well, how what percentage of your audience are at high risk of churning out completely? What is the percentage of them that go? Actually, you know what? I don't really need this as much as I thought. And gas is expensive and everything's happening. And so I'm just not going to keep with it right now. We're not there. If you can't increase your advertising revenue at the same time that you're worried about offsetting the loss you might have with every price increase. Now you've got a Wall Street conundrum that they're going to run into, which is what we have, which is the stock is down nearly 50 percent year over year. It's interesting that there's some numbers out there that I found interesting. The entertainment strategy guy, the anonymous guy who does chart breakdowns and stuff on Substack. He put out a chart showing that in 2021, Netflix had 74 percent of the new Nielsen top 30 shows. OK, this year so far, it's 36 percent. So less than half. The competition is just so much greater now than it was. And that's excluding YouTube. That is just Netflix is under fire from so many different places. And they that's why you see them putting this focus on the quality and the popularity of these shows. And they changed out their executives because they are afraid they're losing share. They're losing share on engagement and they're losing share of hit shows. I think the question I always have, and I outline this in the piece, is what behavior are you losing? And so the behavior that Netflix lost and a bunch of them lost because they were so hyper focused on becoming HBO, which was always a relatively small niche audience. You know, if you wanted to be CBS, that's a completely different goal, more aligned with what YouTube is. Well, but they were since they hired Bella Bajaria to be their content chief. They were trying to be everything to everyone. And that's been seven years now. Right. But they've trained the audience from the get go to be like, you're going to come here and you're going to have a Stranger Things. And I think the fact that, by the way, we're still bringing up Stranger Things is a big sign of the problem in Netflix where we haven't said like, you know, nobody brings up Wednesday in the same regard. It's like, where's your next Stranger Things as in potential franchise builder and obviously massive hit? And they just want to put something on. That was never or it's become too late of a question for a lot of these platforms. And it's a concern if you're a Disney or an NBC uni because you have the broadcast networks, you have this type of programming, you understood the kind of lean back, but this desire to move into premium content and make that the sole basis as opposed to being like we are going to have premium scripted content. Plus, we're going to have sports. Plus, we're going to have the type of lean back daytime talk shows that people can watch. And I think the fact that people have always gravitated toward and figure it out for new generation, I think is where they're now sitting and going, well, are we too late to this? And YouTube will have an easier time of saying, let's just incentivize creators to make more premium style content and put the advertisers on that, create a new select here for advertising and encourage more lean back viewing and encourage short form viewing via shorts, whatever it might be. Instagram now with its long form and its reels, then I think it is for the scripted guys to go in and say we have to allocate significant amount of time to this. Instagram now with its long form and its reels, then I think it is for the scripted guys to go in and say we have to allocate significant portion of this budget to reclaiming some of that behavior outside of primetime. Now, they seem to be trying to do both. And the YouTube light model with all these creators and that you call it the lean back programming, the podcast, all of that, is it working? And are they taking share away from YouTube during the day? And when they do that, do they sacrifice part of the brand that makes them a destination other times during the day? Oh, we know. Craig watches all three hours every day. Me too, Craig. But all three hours stream on YouTube. You can't get enough Pat McAfee. Every day more McAfee. I need it. I'm standing up right now in a tank top as I listen to this. Exactly. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first but didn't live up to the hype? Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great, impressions, reach, and reacts. But when they don't show revenue, well, that's a not-so-great conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that, bullspend. Instead, why not invest in what looks good to your CFO? LinkedIn ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. Reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. You can target by company, industry, job title, and more. So cut the bullspend. 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But I think if you look at that, you talk to people like Jimmy Pataro, the argument is not that ESPN is going to claw back that YouTube audience to its owned and operated platforms. The argument is that McAfee now becomes integrated into other parts of the value programming ESPN offers. Oh yeah, he's in the sausage at ESPN. Like, he pops up everywhere. They were talking about him replacing Troy Aikman on Monday Night Football. I don't know if that's going to happen, but they want more McAfee. He's going to have an alt feed at the Super Bowl. And you can. People can argue about whether or not that has hindered the quality of what people perceive ESPN to be. But ESPN is now front and center on YouTube in a way that they are not necessarily going to be in their own platform between 12 and 2. And I think if you look at Netflix, people that I floated as an example of how to do this would be someone like Logan Paul, only because he's got the podcast. He's all over. He's on WWE. Like, he clearly wants to do more stuff. If you're trying to figure out a way to make Netflix front and center on platforms where you know you're not going to have the audience, but in doing so, ensuring that you have the value to bring people back. I mean, Jimmy Pataro can only do this with McAfee because he has Monday Night Football and he's got sports throughout the week. So people have to come back to ESPN for college football or for NFL content or for NBA content. They have to come over. So it's really, well, how do we maintain our brand affinity outside of those hours? I think Netflix needs to lean heavily on investing, as you've talked about on your show, in that type of premium content of the hits and of the sports that they're losing out on. Well, finding ways off platform to still ensure that people are building up this kind of Netflix universe. But what does that mean? Like, license a Logan Paul YouTube show, like, and then put them on WWE when it's on Netflix? Like, what does that actually mean? Something along those lines. It's finding ways into which you're already kind of working with creators. And there are other aspects. I mean, Logan Paul is on WWE. So those viewers already know who kind of Logan is and he kind of plays into this heel component. And if you're trying to, if you're trying to get into a podcast and he's live-streaming for two hours a day, can you bring that over to your platform? Understanding you may not bring that audience back, but you're building up these characters of what this universe is outside of the premium programming you're offering, which is going to be increasingly. But that's essentially what they're doing, right? They're doing a Mark Rober show. They're doing a Drewski show. These are popular YouTube creators that are just making shows for Netflix. Is that what you're talking about or is it something bigger? No, it's more so the hours of the day. Mark Rober collection episodes over our new TV shows. You're trying to find ways into that audience, but you're still creating a destination. Someone still has to choose to open Netflix to watch this thing or this person. So what are you talking about? I'm saying if you look at what ESPN does with McAfee, the goal isn't to bring McAfee's audience back to ESPN during that 12 and two hour. The goal is to find ways to make McAfee more enamored with the ESPN audience on college game day, on Monday Night Football, and then fill that space with, with McAfee, even if the audience is watching on YouTube. The fact that he is so associated with the ESPN brand, even if people are watching on YouTube, does bring up this image of ESPN that I think works for that brand long-term. So I think there needs to be an understanding. You are not going to win back. Okay, but that's a brand play. That's not an engagement play necessarily, unless you believe that brand translates to engagement. And I think you can, if you look at college game day hours viewed, not just the games, but the way that McAfee hosts that. But McAfee's, on YouTube, like Netflix can't do that. What's the version? They wouldn't have Logan Paul do something on YouTube with a Netflix logo next to it. No, that, that Julie is saying they would. Well, that's what you're saying they should do. It should be the Logan Paul show with a big Netflix N, but it's on YouTube. I think there's part of, if we go back to what we were originally talking about, this idea that like Netflix and YouTube have to compete one-to-one for the same eyeballs at the same time, doesn't make a ton of sense. If what you're trying to prove to your subscribers as Netflix is you have not lost your premium value, and you're investing more into sports overall and live overall on that platform during special events. I think if you still want to say, well, we need to be front of mind and for people outside of the hours that they're spending with us in prime time, how can we actually work a strategy on YouTube that benefits us long-term? Again, it's the type of content that Netflix is, people are not inherently going to open up Netflix to watch day after day. It's just weird. You're suggesting that Netflix encourage viewership, but I guess you could argue that any of these creator deals you do is essentially that. You're hoping that Drewski will do his videos on YouTube and then promote the fact that he's on Netflix as well. Well, because it's like people watch McAfee on YouTube and then because of that, they will then go watch Game Day. Yes, exactly. And that's incorporating McAfee into the larger ESPN universe. I feel like what Julia is saying is that, it's really hard at a certain point to change audience behavior when a platform tries to shift. And rather than try to jam that square peg into a round hole, you just go with the flow of where audiences are going and make it work that way, rather than like Spotify trying to air a TV show or YouTube making adult dramas or Netflix trying to do podcasts. It's easier to just go where the people are rather than try to change their behavior. Well, just think about how YouTube's product functions. You go and watch something, let's say Drewski, Netflix may have a few episodes of this thing and you go, "That's been fun. I'm going to binge watch and I'm done." When you're on YouTube, it may recommend more Drewski stuff or it's going to recommend other creators he's collaborating with that aren't on Netflix. It's going to recommend music videos. So you just spend more time on YouTube, which takes up time on the gauge of go back to the original conversation, but that does not necessarily impact the way that like Netflix's own business is going to operate. And I think there's a Reed Hastings quote he gave to Kara Swisher earlier this week or maybe last week at this point, where he said, "It's really, really hard to out-YouTube YouTube." They are exceptionally good at what they do. They have built an incredible attention machine and they produce, what, 20,000 videos to one for every episode of content Netflix has. You've got 20,000 teenagers uploading videos. And so I just think if you're complimentary to YouTube already, because you're creating content, you're buying sports rights that YouTube is not necessarily going after, how can you use the biggest attention platform in the world to actually create brand that makes people more enamored with Netflix, even when they're not watching it, that makes them want to open the app throughout the week. I think trying to beat YouTube at its own game, as opposed to saying we're going to be a much more premium destination with higher CPM rates for our ad, on our ads, because of what we're offering, and we're going to do so in using YouTube as a conversion funnel for that attention, is arguably the best way to go. No one's going to beat YouTube at YouTube. - Well, but increasingly, YouTube, is starting to look at ingesting different streaming content to arguably compete with Netflix. They did this Peacock deal, where if you're a subscriber to YouTube Premium, you can now get the Peacock content, including Sunday Night Football, which is pretty significant, in my opinion. It's part of this whole push where Netflix did this deal in France to bring in the TF1 channel, Disney just replicated that, where they are putting a BBC channel on Disney+ in the UK, and I know from sources that Netflix is trying to do a deal with Fox, where they would bring Fox One, or their linear channels, into Netflix for a price where you could potentially watch Sunday Football on Netflix. So, it's not just that YouTube is good at being YouTube. They are so big and powerful now. They are the evil empire, you sort of have to, you know, they are the evil empire, you sort of have to, you know, deal with them if you want to maximize your audience, and Peacock, via that deal, essentially threw up their hands and said, "We gotta play ball with them." - Yeah, I think you've got, it's funny, you look at Netflix or Disney, and we're having two different conversations, but at the same company, right? You're saying, can you disrupt the content format, the supply, can we do podcasts, can we do whatever that is, sports, and then you've got the distribution question. Well, who's gonna recreate the content? - Well, I think it's gonna be the, the Comcast bundle, right? Like, is, and is it going to be YouTube? Because they've got YouTube, YouTube TV, they've got this huge component of pipelines that they can effectively use to distribute other content, and because they have so much attention on both short-form and long-form content on the, on the regular side, they become, to your point, this evil empire that people have to work with. - Is YouTube going to host HBO Max, Paramount+, although they'll be combined, other services, soon they've been doing it for years they have youtube primetime channels they have have a company have that business but you have to but that's just a vehicle to sell other subscriptions but as of right now you know i i uh had have conversations with people on youtube all the time out of my own personal frustration when i'm like when will i be able to ingest a youtube live stream channel into youtube tv right and there's the answer is always like okay we have other things to worry about please let us get to that but there's that world in which you say okay can you combine actual cable linear television with ugc channels because you're operating on the same architecture and that is a capability that youtube has that none of the other ones do and so i think is the question is are they going to host that they would love to do the other uh executives at these companies want to hand over full distribution control add inventory credit card numbers and and data over um customers to google i mean that's the bigger question i mean probably not and by the way all of that engagement would continue to happen and i think that's a big question and i think that's a big question towards the nielsen gauge because as we know even when you host other services as amazon does and gets a lot of engagement there that counts for your number on the gauge yes it just seems like youtube is very well positioned to do what a lot of consumers want which is to re-bundle everything and they have youtube tv which is the traditional cable bundle and they are doing skinny bundles and different packages of certain channels they potentially could have access to other services and all of a sudden in five years 100 bucks a month gets you everything via youtube one thing facing youtube that i think is either going to be very uh regardless to be interesting for anyone to watch but we're at this weird moment in the way that google is cannibalizing a lot of its businesses as it tries to move forward with an ai yeah those numbers were very scary for you for google they admitted for the first time on their earnings that ai search is not as lucrative as traditional web search yes and youtube i think on that same call we now know that tv advertising makes up one-third of all of youtube ad revenue and even though the growth in in ad revenue is slowing at youtube and this kind of ties into the the the slowdown in growth we've seen across advertising across youtube in general over the last two years part of that has to do with the way that uh google's system works i think there is this increased pressure inside google for youtube to make up a lot of the advertising dollars they're concerned about losing in this switch over from search so i think if you're in hollywood it's important to watch what's happening because there is increased pressure from the top down on youtube to become this massive ad machine you know shorts are monetized at a much lower rate so that's concerning if you've got more attention on shorts you want the long-form content to to be really strong for advertisers you're introducing better select tiers because you want that those cpm dollars to rise and at the same time you're trying to deal with ai slop so youtube has the ability to do much much much more in the tv space over the next few years and find different ways to monetize but who knows the way that google system is going still though the economics are not there yes for a professionally produced television show to debut on youtube and i've talked about this issue with big producers you just can't make a real television show for less than a few million dollars an episode three four million dollars an episode and the numbers don't bear out on youtube you can't make your money back just putting it on youtube and maybe that will change as the cost of content comes down or the economics of youtube go up but it's not quite there yet and that's just going back to what we were just saying that's the complementary aspect of it netflix does not need to be youtube that gauge is increasing for a bunch of different reasons including content that including by the way shorts being watched on youtube on tvs that's a huge segment people are watching more short content on uh on um tv sets and the content is not great and so if you're netflix it's okay to say hey we're going this route and yes we understand that youtube is doing formats that we want to figure out and yes we understand that youtube has lean back tv in the way that we want to figure out but it's okay to say we're complementary our business is good our subscribers are happy at the same time that youtube is never going to come out and be like well or i shouldn't say never youtube is unlikely to come out and go by the way we're going to make more premium content we tried it we don't need it having complementary assets is not the worst thing to do and i think it's a good thing to do and i think in to in this situation i think the idea that netflix felt like it was had a monopoly on premium attention and youtube felt like a monopoly on uh other attention and now those are competing creates this weird fierce storm when in fact they're doing two complementary things with complementary audiences all right well it's all interesting it's one big soup uh craig has already lost interest he's back to watching mcafee so we gotta go thank you julia thanks matt you we are back with the call sheet craig where are you on the dr seuss movies i've been kind of hit and miss although i've noticed my kid has been watching the grinch movie the one where donald glover is the narrator okay he's been watching that like on repeat it's kind of crazy but where are you on on the dr seuss movies i would say just grinch the both grinches the jim carrey grinch and the other grinch from back in the day when i was a kid but i've never seen the like the lorax or any of the newer things and i i don't even know if i ever saw the mike myers cat in the hat the jim carrey grinch is pretty bad ron howard directed it's like really hokey i i did not age well for sure but they do pretty well like the interesting thing is those movies were all universal they had to deal with the theater guys old dr seuss estate and this movie the new cat in the hat is warner brothers and it's not just warners it's the start of the quote-unquote new warner's animation group bill damaschke who was a dreamworks executive for a long time is running that group this is their first big swing bill hater cat in the hat i saw it it's fun it's it definitely hits the mark i'm wondering if they've marketed this movie enough though because it doesn't feel like it's got that like big holiday movie that everyone needs to see and the tracking is at about 30 for the weekend and you think it's a marketing issue kind of yeah i don't know if it got lost in the skydance shuffle or if it just maybe i'm missing huge campaigns that they're out there with but like i've heard this from other people too it doesn't quite feel like the full force of warner brothers is behind this and you think that's just because this is like a new revamped studio and perhaps they're still getting their footing i have no idea you think that they would want to put the best foot forward for this new division of warner animation um and maybe they are i just missed it but it doesn't feel that way i don't know i don't to me so what say you on 30 million for the cat in the hat i still think i'm going to take the over this is like a big family movie and there's not a lot of competition in that space i feel like this is a a movie that is known ip that looks fun and there's not a lot of competition for kids right now around the holidays true although wildwood is holding pretty well and is getting great reviews a lot of people the visuals of wildwood are getting rave reviews that's true and cat and hat reviews are sort of kind of different to me but yeah uh i'll take the 30 i don't know why it just feels like the marketing is not quite there i think that they you know they just i don't know they just get a get a weird feeling on the market but it's not the only movie that's big this weekend godzilla minus zero is back sequel to godzilla minus one which was a big hit not big but decent sized hit in 2023 and people love that movie and this is tracking to 25 which would more than double the opening weekend of godzilla minus one godzilla minus one yes that movie came out of nowhere and i mean it only opened to like 11 million in 2023 and then it got to like 60 um what's the tracking for this 25 according to nrg i'd take the over on that over on 25 yeah wow i'm gonna take the under on that one too that seems aggressive for the lesser of the two godzilla franchise movies that is out there the this is different from the legendary godzilla movies that cost way more and are big spectacles this one is you know the the secondary toho godzilla movie franchise and even with the goodwill from the last one i think that 25 is tough to get to i just think i just think the fandom is strong and 2023 was like still we're getting back into things with theaters it has imax exclusively pretty much this weekend i believe i don't know i i think people are going to show up they really i think fans really like these movies and they're really good all right we'll see by the way we didn't talk about this but i have a correction from last week with chuck laurie remember when i asked chuck laurie if he had a command center vehicle that drove him around la and he looked at me like i was crazy and said what are you talking about i misremembered which showrunner that was that was dick wolf that had the command center that makes sense because he had like 28 shows going on at once it's true well yes a lot of them shoot in new york most of them shoot in new york and a lot of the writers rooms were all in la during the heyday and uh and he did have a command vehicle that he was driven around and chuck laurie did not jason blum had a can a command vehicle as well i believe we photographed it for hollywood reporter at one point i don't know if he still does today but um yeah gotta get a command vehicle well especially depends where you live right if you live in the palisades or malibu and you have to work across town i mean you're in traffic for two three hours a day probably if you're if you're leaving at the wrong time i believe at the time dick wolf lived primarily in montecito so he was coming far to the writers rooms and yeah he needed to sit there and approve scripts and approve cuts while he's got five tvs going in his van on the way to the studio honestly very necessary absolutely all right we endorse it that's the show for today i want to thank my guest julie alexander producer craig horlbeck our editor stefano sanchez and jesse lopez and i want to thank you we will see you one more time this week shop black friday appliance savings and get up to an extra 1250 off select appliance purchases like ge profile plus free delivery on appliance purchases of 398 or more make life easier with the fridge that doubles as your personal kitchen assistant or upgrade your laundry room with the ultra fresh vent system plus front load washer so your clothes stay fresh after every single wash shop black friday appliance savings with fast free delivery at the home depot offer valid november 4th through december 2nd at participating stores and at homedepot.com us only c store online for details progressives accident response can 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