Weekly Drop Media Newsletter

Hollywood Did Not Take The Week Off

Key headlines, trends, and opportunities for your next move

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By Matt Charney
@mattcharney
Matt Charney is a talent acquisition analyst, journalist, and marketing leader with nearly two decades of experience at the intersection of recruiting, HR technology, and media. He has held editorial and content leadership roles at ERE Media, Recruiting Daily, and Recruiter.com, and served as Chief Content Officer at Allegis Global Solutions. As Principal Analyst at Kyle & Co, he covers HR tech funding, M&A, and market strategy. Matt currently serves as Executive Editor at Mediabistro, where he leads editorial, partnerships, and multimedia content for the creative professionals who power the media industry. He holds a degree in Writing for Screen and Television from the University of Southern California.
6 min read • Published March 24, 2026
Miles icon
By Matt Charney
@mattcharney
Matt Charney is a talent acquisition analyst, journalist, and marketing leader with nearly two decades of experience at the intersection of recruiting, HR technology, and media. He has held editorial and content leadership roles at ERE Media, Recruiting Daily, and Recruiter.com, and served as Chief Content Officer at Allegis Global Solutions. As Principal Analyst at Kyle & Co, he covers HR tech funding, M&A, and market strategy. Matt currently serves as Executive Editor at Mediabistro, where he leads editorial, partnerships, and multimedia content for the creative professionals who power the media industry. He holds a degree in Writing for Screen and Television from the University of Southern California.
6 min read • Published March 24, 2026

FADE IN:

Every Thanksgiving, Hollywood pretends to slow down.

Executives “step away,” inboxes auto-reply, and everyone likes to believe they’re about to spend four uninterrupted days thinking very deeply about gratitude instead of the year’s remaining greenlights and headcount targets.

Then the trades drop a Friday afternoon bombshell, a streamer leaks a sizzle reel, or a studio quietly updates its FYC page, and suddenly the entire industry is doomscrolling from their grandmother’s couch.

If there’s a theme to this week, it’s that nothing in entertainment ever really pauses. Not the rights battles.

Not the tax incentives. Not the slow-burn anxiety that generative AI is about to rebuild the business at a structural level. Probably not even the box office for Wicked: For Good, despite tepid reviews and proof you can’t spell “junket” without junk.

You can put the turkey in the oven, but the future doesn’t take holidays.

So here’s what actually matters right now. Consider it your Thanksgiving briefing. No sentimentality. No corny metaphors about harvests or feasts.

Just the stories shaping the business while everyone else is pretending to be offline. If you can, enjoy that turkey and binge-watch the final season of Stranger Things – and if you’ve got a gig, be thankful. If you’re looking, well, we’ve got your back.

Happy Thanksgiving,

Matt Charney

Executive Editor, Mediabistro

 

LEAD STORY

Platform Wars Go Prime Time: Netflix and NBC Smash Baseball’s Old Guard

Yes, we know. Thanksgiving is all about football, but when it comes to media, America’s most popular sport might no longer be its most lucrative.

The streaming wars finally reached America’s pastime (Go Dodgers), and the fallout is bigger than a blown call in October or the Guardians’ betting scandal. If you thought Thursday Night Football was as big as the streamers would spend on broadcast rights, think again.

Major League Baseball has finalized explosive media deals through 2028 that redraw the entire map of live sports distribution. Yes, baseball.

Of course, with one of the best World Series ever watched by an estimated 51M viewers – the most since 1992, when the existential threat to the networks was basic cable and the launch of Fox – this seems like an obvious home run for the networks.

Netflix enters live sports with Opening Day exclusives and the Home Run Derby.

  • NBC rips Sunday Night Baseball from ESPN after 35 years.
  • ESPN, in a surprising twist, lands what may be the most valuable asset: exclusive rights to distribute MLB.TV, the out-of-market streaming service that clocked 19.4 billion minutes watched in 2025.

It’s the clearest signal yet that if entertainment wants reliable, global, live audiences, they’re going to have to buy them the old-fashioned way. With a fat check for the rights to event viewing.

Read more: Sportico’s breakdown

INDUSTRY REVIVAL

Back To Cali: $750M in Tax Credits Fuels a Production Repatriation Wave

While everyone else is arguing about stuffing versus dressing, California is busy launching the most aggressive production incentive play in its history. Last week, we discussed the decline in production that has cost tens of thousands of jobs and one of its primary economic engines – consider that in 2024, Ukraine actually had more major productions filmed there than the Valley (speaking of war zones).

But there’s good Newsom: the state’s new $750 million annual tax credit program is already triggering a gold rush.

It’s still early, but it already looks like the kind of tentpole project that studios dream about. Since the incentive went into effect July 1, the numbers so far show that this is one development we’re happy to see stuck in turnaround (a little screenwriter humor).

Consider:

  • Fifty-two film projects were announced in October alone
  • More than $1.4 billion in economic activity has been generated.
  • 133,000 entertainment industry jobs have been created or saved.
  • Most importantly, the Baywatch reboot announced it was moving from Maui back to Malibu. Nice.

It’s the most assertive statement Sacramento has made in a decade: the runaway production era is over, and the state wants its industry back. West Coast for life.

Read more: Deadline

TECHNOLOGY SHIFT

Fix It In Post: AI Moves from Hype to Infrastructure in VFX

A new McKinsey report quietly dropped a truth that’s been obvious to anyone walking through a studio lot recently. Generative AI isn’t something that’s “coming.” It’s something that’s already baked into the foundation of the business, and as ubiquitous in the entertainment industry today as craft services or call sheets.

The report, which is totally worth reading, projects 80 to 90 percent efficiency gains in VFX and 3D asset creation. That’s not incremental. That’s a collapse of production timelines. It’s directors A/B-testing shots before a single crew call. It’s indie producers hitting studio-level polish without studio-level budgets.

The question now isn’t whether AI transforms content creation. It’s whether the industry can absorb the shock without cracking. Guilds are drawing lines in the sand, and studios are staring down lawsuits over dataset origins.

Read more: Generative AI in Entertainment: The Future of Storytelling (McKinsey & Associates)

CAREERS

New Jobs This Week

Fresh opportunities across entertainment, media, and production. Even during a holiday week, hiring doesn’t hit pause. And neither do the job postings on Mediabistro. Here are some hot jobs worth checking out:

Weird job of the week: Bluegrass Player – Knott’s Berry Farm (Buena Park, CA)

Browse thousands more open roles, only at Mediabistro Jobs

QUICK HITS

THE WEEK AHEAD

FADE OUT:

What gives me something like optimism, even in a business that treats optimism like a scheduling conflict, is that moments like this force the industry to stop coasting.

Hollywood has always done its best work when it’s slightly uncomfortable. Streaming didn’t happen because studios felt inspired. It happened because DVDs collapsed. Peak TV didn’t emerge from a vision deck. It came from networks realizing they were losing cultural relevance.

If you strip away the noise, what’s happening right now feels less like decline and more like recalibration. Production is coming back home because the state finally stopped pretending runaway shoots were temporary.

Streamers are rediscovering the value of broad audiences instead of chasing niche subscription spikes. And AI, for all its legal and ethical headaches, is putting craft back into the hands of people who’ve spent years racing impossible deadlines. It doesn’t replace creativity. It buys time for it.

That’s not naive optimism. It’s pattern recognition. Every time the industry resets, new voices get in. New formats break through. New careers start. Thanksgiving is supposed to be a moment to acknowledge what’s working, and for all the chaos, a surprising amount actually is.

And that’s something we can all be thankful for.

Matt Charney, Executive Editor

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