Disney Archive

The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) union announced that over 80 percent of the 18 in-house Visual Effects (VFX) crewmembers at Walt Disney Pictures expressed a desire to unionize. Their organizing follows a push at Marvel that started earlier this month and is in the midst of ongoing strikes by the actors’ and writers’ guilds.

The two may work together on the in-development streaming version of the popular sports channel, according to The Information. Amazon may take a minority stake in the network, the report says.

The Information reports that Disney, seeking a “strategic partner” for ESPN, has had talks with Verizon. This is a bad idea: mobile carriers are historically terrible at distributing content and software, because their only distribution idea is installing bloatware on midrange Android phones. You will recall that the entire thesis of the AT&T / Time Warner merger was distributing bloatware on midrange Android phones, a “vision deal” which produced a grayscale 4:3 Snyder Cut before collapsing into the arms of David Zaslav.

TSG, a major movie financier, is suing Disney for alleged breach of contract. TSG has helped finance a lot of movies in Hollywood over the years, including films at Sony and Warner Bros., and Fox, and claims that the folks at Disney “have tried to use nearly every trick in the Hollywood accounting book” to hold onto cash that TSG feels its owed.

Yesterday Bloomberg reported on what might be some of the most fascinating news around the contract negotiations in Hollywood right now: the names of the 12 studio execs meeting weekly to work out the AMPTP’s bargaining positions.

and wondered how an unlicensed two hour film could exist when even Disney had to negotiate with Sony to use the character in films. Sony, Disney, and Marvel are all very protective of the character so it’s a surprise to see this film still live. It’s also super unusual to see a fan film of this scope outside of the Star Trek fan film community, especially as the last time a Star Trek fan film attempted a project of this high a production quality level Paramount sued the creator.

And at the very least can we make the prices less confusing? We discuss why the numbers keep going up, plus why Apple should and shouldn’t buy Disney. Then we make sense of the backlash to Zoom’s AI policies, dig into Slack’s redesign, and spend a lot of time talking about fart apps. Because to get to the future, you gotta start with fart apps.

An analyst asked on yesterday’s earnings call, and Iger swore, “It’s just, it’s not something that we obsess about.”