Welcome to the show folks...
1. LAYOFFS ENDING AND STARTING
The new fangled, and slightly mangled, William Morris-Endeavor Agency has announced that they are done with laying off workers, and will begin "integrating" their clients and agents.
It's about time, all that was left of WME was Ari Emmanuel and Dwayne the janitor. Dwayne will now handle international co-production deals.
Meanwhile, those Whacky Weinsteins are reportedly going to start laying off employees at their beleaguered company, again, and their restructuring consultant is telling the Brothers Weinstein to stick with making movies. Perhaps releasing them might help too.
2. NBC-U IPO PDQ?
Jeff Zucker, honcho of NBC-Universal is telling everyone to get ready for Vivendi's IPO of their 20% stake in the battered TV network/studio. There were some rumours of media behemoth Time-Warner buying NBC-U from General Electric, but I doubt they're true.
While the Universal film/TV library is pretty valuable, Time Warner already has too much on their plate already, and are only now just starting to get their own house in order. They can't afford to spend billions to buy not only NBC-U, but all the problems inherent in the company itself.
So I'm not expecting any major mergers emerging from this 20% sale.
1. LAYOFFS ENDING AND STARTING
The new fangled, and slightly mangled, William Morris-Endeavor Agency has announced that they are done with laying off workers, and will begin "integrating" their clients and agents.
It's about time, all that was left of WME was Ari Emmanuel and Dwayne the janitor. Dwayne will now handle international co-production deals.
Meanwhile, those Whacky Weinsteins are reportedly going to start laying off employees at their beleaguered company, again, and their restructuring consultant is telling the Brothers Weinstein to stick with making movies. Perhaps releasing them might help too.
2. NBC-U IPO PDQ?
Jeff Zucker, honcho of NBC-Universal is telling everyone to get ready for Vivendi's IPO of their 20% stake in the battered TV network/studio. There were some rumours of media behemoth Time-Warner buying NBC-U from General Electric, but I doubt they're true.
While the Universal film/TV library is pretty valuable, Time Warner already has too much on their plate already, and are only now just starting to get their own house in order. They can't afford to spend billions to buy not only NBC-U, but all the problems inherent in the company itself.
So I'm not expecting any major mergers emerging from this 20% sale.
Since the "We don't want to overly critise Obama" quote from the GE CEO, GE has been teetering on the edge of becoming half the public's corporate enemy number one. That, in itself, might be why GE would divest itself of the network. If the next congress and President are Republicans, GE may well be looking at being frozen out of a lot of potential government money.
ReplyDeleteJust sayin.