There’s a pretty strong chance that the box office this weekend will be captured by an animated film about a band of misfit toys gripped by the fear of being rendered obsolete by digital devices. This is likely either the most ironically self-aware project in studio history or proof that the writers over at Pixar have recently been reading the trades.
If you want to feel like a kid again, then you should head to the theatres this weekend to relive a franchise that many of us actually grew up with, about three sequels, two kids, and a midlife crisis or so later. That is, if you manage to snag a ticket. Based on presales and projections, Toy Story 5 is tracking towards a record $145-$150 million in box office receipts, a debut that would mark the best opening frame of 2026 and for the venerable franchise, lapping the $120 million Toy Story 4 raked in its first weekend of wide release.
Also on Mediabistro
That film went on to clear the billion-dollar mark during its global run, meaning that if forecasts are accurate, Toy Story 5 will help drive what’s been a surprisingly lucrative year at the box office for studio releases – and mark the official opening of summer blockbuster season.
In case you haven’t read the reviews or seen the trailers (which, if you’ve turned on YouTube any time in the past few weeks, has been pretty much unavoidable), the plot centers around Woody and Buzz watching a now-grown Andy trade them in for a smart tablet.
Tim Allen voicing existential dread about being replaced by online content is arguably the most honest piece of cinema verite that Hollywood has released in quite some time (The Last Man Standing will probably be Jake Paul, if we’re being honest).
Basically, it’s a 90-minute parable examining the precarious state of the entertainment industry, backed by an original Taylor Swift song and supported by millions of upfront spend on marketing and merchandising, nailing the zeitgeist in a way that’s pretty unusual for animated features. What World Cup?
Toy Story 5’s predicted performance isn’t exactly a surprise for one of the most beloved (and top-grossing) franchises in film history. What is a bit surprising is that this isn’t an anomaly or outlier but rather part of a larger upward swing in domestic box office so far in 2026, with ticket sales up an estimated 13% year over year.
Pundits predict this pattern will continue, with analysts tracking the strongest summer movie theatres have seen since the halcyon days before the Pandemic sent the industry into free fall. With major releases like Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, and the latest Spiderman among the many buzzworthy titles scheduled for release in the next few weeks, the studios and exhibitors look like they’re officially back in business after a half-decade or so on the decline.
Of course, that business has fundamentally changed in the intervening years, too – and not always for the better (although the fact that we get a new Jackass movie in a couple weeks means there’s at least a little bit of stability in the shifting studio landscape).
Despite the anticipated box office boom, the headlines also announced more mass layoffs, studio execs openly embraced the predicted tens of millions in AI cost savings, and the Department of Justice yet again proved its name somewhat ironic by greenlighting a massive merger of two conglomerates that effectively transform Hollywood from a studio system into a duopoly (sorry, Sony).
The deal, which is expected to dramatically alter the media and entertainment industries, sailed through the regulatory approval process without much more than a perfunctory private hearing, giving new meaning to the term “anti-trust.”
That’s the state of the industry, captured and codified in a single news cycle; the content has never had higher revenues or a greater reach, but the creatives whose careers involve creating that content have never had less job stability, or shakier professional futures, than right now.
It’s looking like this is becoming business as usual for a business that’s historically been anything but. There might be no business like show business, but right now, show business is like every other business. Shareholders matter more than theatre goers; intellectual property is more valuable than individual vision, and the only on-screen performance execs really care about is financial.
And that’s the bottom line. Just like the future of scripted dramas, apparently. Which brings us to the stories every media and entertainment professional should be paying attention to this week: to infinity, and beyond the severance checks and exit packages, lies the truth about the state of the industry today.
1. As the Aisle Turns
Here’s a fact that sounds invented but isn’t: the soap opera is called the soap opera because Procter & Gamble, the people who make literal soap, bankrolled the first radio serials back in the 1930s to move more of it.
P&G more or less invented the genre, rode it through six decades of daytime TV, then quietly slipped out the side door when “As the World Turns” wrapped in 2010 (full story on theP&G Wikipedia page, which is a deeper rabbit hole than you’d expect).
So there’s a tidy little circle-of-life thing going on with the news that P&G is climbing back into scripted drama, except this time the network is your grocery store.
The show’s called “Rico’s Tacos,” and it’s a team-up with Albertsons’ retail media arm. It premieres June 23 as one- to two-minute episodes built for your phone, dropping weekly through August across Albertsons’ YouTube, its social feeds, and the screens hanging over the self-checkout, filmed in real stores with real store associates.
The premise is solid enough. The part that should put everyone a bit on edge is the method: the storyline got reverse-engineered from shopper data before anybody wrote a word, with the creative essentially modeling its narrative devices after loyalty card data.
We hate it here.
Read more: Proctor & Gamble Scripted Dramas are Coming To A Supermarket Near You (WSJ)
Why This Matters for Your Career
This is what it looks like when the fastest-growing pile of money in the ad business goes hunting for somewhere new to sit. Retail media is on track to reach roughly $70 billion in US spend in 2026, up almost 18% in a single year, pereMarketer, and the whole sales pitch is first-party purchase data plus “closed-loop” attribution, which is industry-speak for “we can prove the ad sold the taco.”
The takeaway for you isn’t that storytelling is dead; it’s still very much alive, but sticks to spreadsheets more closely than scripts, and the people who succeed do so because they can straddle the often disparate worlds of quantitative evidence and qualitative entertainment. It’s a calculus problem wrapped up in a three-act structure, and every bit as interesting to watch.
Here’s the thing: data can tell you what people buy. It still can’t tell you what’ll make somebody feel something on the walk to the register, and that gap, more often than not, is the difference between art and, well, whatever the hell this is supposed to be.
2. The World Tonight, Gone Tomorrow
The BBC announced this week that it’s cutting 550 jobs in news and content, and that’s just the opening bid. It’s the first slice of a plan to save £500m and shed somewhere between 1,800 and 2,000 roles over two years, roughly one in ten people at the place.
The casualty list runs long: Radio 4’s “The World Tonight” gets retired after 56 years, “Today” drops from five presenters to four, Sunday “Breakfast” disappears, and a clutch of shows you may never have heard of but somebody clearly loved (Money Box Live, AntiSocial, The Law Show) were pulled off the air.
The official reasoning is that “The World Tonight” and the World Service’s “Newshour” come out of the same newsroom anyway, so why run two when one will do? That, they’ll tell you, is efficiency.
If you’ve watched legacy media bleed out for fifteen years, you’ll appreciate the irony that the man steering all this, new director-general Matt Brittin, came over from Google, the company that did more than almost anyone to hoover up (as they say on the Beeb) the ad revenue that used to actually keep newsrooms staffed. The call, turns out, is coming from inside the house.
He’s promised “tough choices,” a 10% trim to the senior ranks, and another 700-odd corporate roles closing down the line. The unions are reaching for words like “devastating” and flagging burnout, which is the entirely predictable result of asking fewer people to do more work for the same pay. You’ve got to admit, they’ve got a pretty good point.
Read more: BBC Announces 550 Job Cuts As First Step in £500 Million Savings Plan (BBC)
Why This Matters for Your Career
If you work anywhere near media, don’t file this under “British problem.” It’s the same trend that’s effectively decimated the entire news industry.
US newsroom employment has dropped about 26% since 2008, according to Pew Research data, and the detail that should rattle the mid-career crowd in particular is which group of workers has been hit the hardest. Turns out, the heaviest job cuts fell on workers aged 35 to 54. You know, the folks who are too senior to be cheap and too junior to be untouchable.
That’s a perfect example of the larger trend of eliminating corporate hierarchies and flattening org charts by dissecting workforces directly in the middle; “efficiency” is almost always the word that shows up right before those jobs vanish into the ether.
It’s scary, sure, but don’t panic; instead, make sure you’re not the interchangeable part in somebody’s consolidation math. Be the voice people follow out the door, the judgment that doesn’t survive getting split across two shows, the thing nobody can quietly fold into a simulcast, because the spreadsheet the suits are reading says headcount is negotiable.
What no spreadsheet shows, though, is that headcount doesn’t just disappear – it just makes everyone who wasn’t RIFed a little bit busier, and a whole lot closer to burnout than before. It’s a problem that’s compounding – and one that might well prove more expensive in the long term than simply freezing hiring, keeping headcounts flat, and letting workers keep some vestige of a work-life balance and/or sanity.
Crazy idea, right?
3. May the Margins Be Ever in Your Favor
Here’s a sequence of events so tidily ironic I read it twice to make sure nobody was messing with me. Earlier this month, SAG-AFTRA members ratified a four-year contract in a 91% landslide, locking in pay bumps, a long-overdue pension merger, and a rule that lets a studio swap in a synthetic performer only if it delivers “significant additional value” over an actual human. After the bruises of 2023, the creatives took the win, and rightfully so.
Then, with the ink on the deal barely dry, Lionsgate vice chairman Michael Burns (because, of course, this rich, evil douche really is named Mr. Burns) walked onto an investor stage and said the quiet part straight into the mic, that AI would save his studio “tens and tens of millions of dollars a year,” at a pace he cheerfully called “Moore’s law on crack” (note: Moore’s Law is already in effect if there’s crack involved).
The analysts in the room ate it up (Excellent…); the talent that Mr. Burns is referencing, though, probably feels a bit differently.
And if you wrote that off as earnings season and IR hubris, note that within days, Lionsgate had suddenly announced an equity stake in the AI company Runway and had lined up plans to spin its library into AI-generated shorts.
This is the exact kind of move that turns a stated cost containment strategy into an operating model, so the union nailed down its guardrails to guard against the eventuality of a major studio putting real money into artificial intelligence.
The contract dictates how a studio may use AI, not how badly it wants to, and the math (as we like to say around here) ultimately still maths, at least to line producers, production accountants and institutional investors.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, filmmakers started advertising movies as containing zero AI, which reads less like a fun fact than a positioning play, sitting on the shelf right next to “farm to table” and “no artificial preservatives.” Or Rico’s Tacos.
Did we mention we hate it here?
Read more: Lionsgate’s Michael Burns Says AI Will Save Company Tens and Tens of Millions of Dollars a Year (Deadline)
Why This Matters for Your Career
Contracts are inherently designed to provide a floor, not a ceiling, and definitely not a force field. What the deal delivers is real, since it sets a boundary and forces consent, much like Bryan Singer at a frat party. But it can’t reach inside the skull of a CFO who just saw “tens and tens of millions” in projected savings and felt something close to rapture.
The guardrail governs how the tool gets used, never the wanting. And those numbers aren’t hypothetical: an industry study commissioned by The Animation Guild (nerdiest union name ever) estimated AI could disrupt roughly a fifth of US film, TV, and animation jobs, about 118,500 of them, by the end of 2026.
Your best bet? If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em – and pivot professionally to embrace this new AI reality. Become fluent in these tools and technologies, know when they work and where they fall apart (constantly, and generally when anyone attempts even the slightest hint of subtext or nuance).
Know that, as lucrative as AI can be, IP is still worth more; maintain ownership over your own intellectual property and hold onto your unique perspective and voice – those things that drive creativity and provide a direct connection to audiences that no spreadsheet could ever capture.
The most successful media and entertainment professionals won’t be trying to make a volume play in a futile attempt to produce more slop than the algorithms; they’ll be the ones doing what no LLM or AI tool is capable of faking: creating a real, meaningful connection rooted in emotions, not Excel.
Let me verify the numbers and links before reworking this one.FilmLA numbers check out. Let me confirm the exodus link and grab a Georgia-specific figure to anchor the career section. Here’s the reworked version, same format and voice.
4. Lights, Camera, Tax Credit
For two years straight, or maybe even longer, the going narrative about Los Angeles has been a doom spiral wrapped in a eulogy, but those rumors of the death of locally based productions might, in fact, be premature (and looking for the craft services trailer).
In the first quarter of 2026, on-location production across the Southland hit 5,121 shoot days, up almost 11% over the previous year, a number which had Mayor Karen Bass announcing that Hollywood is “finally turning a corner” (unlike Spencer Pratt’s mayoral campaign).
This isn’t purely PR or politics, either. A good chunk of the economic impact of those productions is directly reinvested to subsidize California’s film and TV tax credit, which ballooned from $330 million in 2023 to $750 million just two years later, with a cool 147 projects approved in the pipeline.
It’s always good to see Hollywood back in Hollywood (or somewhere in the Valley, more likely). It’s just not back to where it was before the Pandemic, when LA was still the production capital of the world (and still relatively affordable, too).
It’s not all good news for the City of Angels, however.. Reality-TV shooting cratered more than 50% year over year, and the steady decampment toward Atlanta, Vancouver, the UK, and anywhere else capable of waving a fatter subsidy continues unabated. LA’s share of scripted content just hit a historic low of around 18%, pointing to structural issues rather than cyclical ones.
The work isn’t dying so much as relocating to wherever happens to be offering the highest tax rebates. The good news for entertainment professionals is that it’s probably cheaper, safer, and cleaner than LA – even if their baseball team kind of sucks by comparison (NYC productions are down, too).
Read more: Can California’s Improved, $750 Million Incentive Really Revive Production in the Golden State?(Variety)
Why This Matters for Your Career
The job map is getting redrawn by accountants and state legislators; productions chase incentives instead of scout locations, so LA’s position as an industry town is tenuous, at best – and professionals have more geographic flexibility than ever before.
If you’re wondering where you should live to give your career the biggest advantage possible, the smart move is simply to track policy decisions the same way you’re already tracking casting announcements and greenlights.
Since 2021, roughly 19 states have created new film tax credit programs or expanded existing incentives; every time another state sweetens the pot, there’s almost always a hiring frenzy in that locale six to twelve months after an incentive is formally announced; that’s because qualifying productions usually get around 180 days to start principal photography.
When The Walking Dead was quietly transforming suburban Atlanta into a studio backlot, the crews who clocked the Georgia production boom early have built successful, stable careers on simply showing up before the rest of the competition – in this market, early adopters usually end up winning (except if it’s a sequel).
No matter which market you end up in, it’s essentially the same industry, and professional playbook, as if you’d remained in LA – and assuming you’re OK with moving where the work is, these incentives don’t just subsidize production companies; their impact on individual paychecks is often more significant, given the job creation benchmarks productions must hit to qualify for incentives..
Of course, not having to fly out of LAX is as big an incentive as the money itself. Trust us.
Let me verify the merger details and links before reworking this. Merger clearance confirmed. Now the Netflix bid and its Q4 numbers. The bidding-war facts are more tangled than the draft implies (the all-cash structure was actually Paramount’s, per the SEC filings), so let me pin down Netflix’s numbers and the current state of play. Netflix’s numbers and the all-cash conversion check out (Netflix went all-cash alongside its Q4 report, so the draft’s framing holds). One more search for a hard “synergies equals layoffs” figure to anchor the career section. Here’s the reworked version, same format and voice. Good news on the fact-check: the draft holds up, including the “all cash” line (Netflix converted its bid to all-cash alongside its Q4 earnings, so that detail is solid).
5. Merger Math, Where One Plus One Equals Layoffs
And finally, the consolidation machine clunked into a higher gear this week, and the regulators waved it through with something between a rubber stamp and a yawn. The DOJ cleared the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, with senior officials closing out the probe before the career staff lawyers, who’d been leaning toward an antitrust suit, could get a recommendation out the door.
This “decision” caps a genuinely epic, almost operatic corporate saga, with Paramount Skydance and Netflix locked in a high-stakes poker game, winner takes Warner Bros.
Before withdrawing its bid, Netflix even converted its roughly $83 billion offer to all-cash to fend off its rival, a move it announced right alongside earnings showing it had blown past 325 million subscribers and was steering content spend toward $20 billion, with ad revenue it expects to roughly double.
The irony is that the DOJ greenlit the very bid that Warner’s own board had spent months calling inferior, because The Art of the Deal is, at best, abstract.
However, the dust settles, the direction is impossible to misread. The pool of independent buyers at the top keeps shrinking while the survivors balloon to slightly terrifying scale, and the reason everybody’s this hungry to own everything is that the streaming money turned out to be both real and ferociously concentrated.
That’s why Paramount keeps gutting its linear channels to feed streaming, and why the BBC keeps chasing iPlayer and YouTube like its life depends on it (because, more or less, it does).
Consolidation isn’t really a sign of weakness here. It’s a land grab, and land grabs, as a rule, leave a body count that corporations love to call “operational efficiencies.”We called them jobs. Pour one out?.
Read more: Top DOJ Officials Cleared Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger (Variety)
Why This Matters for Your Career
A merger this size always ends up with a pile of redundancies that get sorted out the way they always do, with a reorg, a tall stack of severance envelopes and a bunch of brochures for COBRA or, if you’re lucky, some mediocre outplacement provider.
The first question to ask in the wake of an M&A event is, coldly, whether you work for the acquirer or the target, because those are radically different chairs to be sitting in when the music stops. The numbers here make this clear: Paramount has told investors it expects to wring more than $6 billion in “cost synergies” out of the combination. That means a ton of jobs are going to be eliminated – and there’s no way to sugar coat that hard news.
The slightly more hopeful read is that the shrinking buyer pool is concentrating into a few platforms that actually command real budgets, and that’s exactly where the durable jobs are migrating, since the growth was never coming from defending linear TV but from streaming, ad-tech, and the product and data roles that didn’t exist on an org chart fifteen years ago.
Of course, neither did streaming. But Toy Story already had a sequel.
The Moral of the Toy Story
Here’s the reality, absurd as it might be; while the content industrial complex continues to boom, the careers inside it are largely drying up. It’s not that the work is entirely disappearing; instead, it’s moving. It’s migrating from linear to streaming; it’s shifting from human creativity to algorithmic output; it’s leaving SoCal, choosing stability over proximity; and it’s consolidating into the hands of a few super-villain tech bros.
The professionals struggling the most right now are waiting for the industry to “bounce back,” but the truth is, it’s never going to be 2010 again. Streamers and social won’t disappear; production budgets and crew sizes won’t suddenly rebound, and the only thing that’s professionally predictable is chaos.
The media and entertainment pros finding success, conversely, aren’t waiting for the industry to magically jump back a decade or so in time; they’ve accepted that the only certainty is the unknown, and keep their skills up to date, their network activated, and their moving company on speed dial.
Toy Story 5 is about to make a billion dollars, proving that having love or a legacy will save your ass from obsolescence. Sure, that’s a bit depressing, but it’s true, too. Staying relevant in entertainment and media today requires constant evolution; the professionals who can’t evolve are the ones who are likely to be retired to a box somewhere in an attic (or, more frighteningly, an efficiency in Koreatown or South LA).
Those that can? Well, they’re the ones who get a sequel. Or 5.
Hate the player,
Matt Charney
Executive Editor, Mediabistro
Topics:
Weekly Drop Media Newsletter
