Industry Weekly — Mar 13, 2026

This was a week where power got tested everywhere and held almost nowhere cleanly. Live Nation settled with the federal government for pocket change — then had its own employees' Slack messages read aloud in court like a villain monologue. Hollywood's unions are building a shared defensive line around AI that's more coordinated than anything we saw in 2023. And the biggest corporate decision in entertainment — who gets to buy Warner Bros. Discovery — comes down to a shareholder vote in seven days that will reshape what you watch and where you watch it for the next decade.

You know how every concert ticket somehow costs $40 more than advertised, with fees for "facility" and "order processing" and, apparently, parking at $250? This week, we got the internal memo explaining why.

On March 9, the U.S. Department of Justice reached a surprise settlement with Live Nation and Ticketmaster in its antitrust case — a case that had spent a week in trial and threatened to break the two companies apart. Under the terms, Ticketmaster stays a subsidiary of Live Nation. The company pays roughly $280 million to states, caps amphitheater service fees at about 15% of the ticket price, and opens access for competing promoters at certain venues, per the Los Angeles Times.

Then the courtroom lights turned back on. Newly released documents revealed a 2022 conversation between Ben Baker and Jeff Weinhold, two regional directors of ticketing for Live Nation venues, bragging about "price gouging" customers, "robbing them blind, baby," and calling fans "so stupid" for paying inflated costs on ancillary fees like parking and lawn chair rentals. The messages have gone viral on Reddit and amplified fan outrage that could become a lever for regulators — or prompt artists to rethink venue and ticketing agreements.

Here's the wrinkle nobody's talking about enough: Judge Arun Subramanian wasn't told about the settlement while the trial was actively underway. He called the head of the DOJ's antitrust division and Live Nation's CEO into court to answer questions. A judge being blindsided like that is highly unusual — and he hasn't signed off yet. If he rejects the deal, this entire week's drama resets from zero. Meanwhile, 27 states — including New York, California, and Colorado — are continuing their own legal actions, and Live Nation's hiring of Trump allies as settlement lobbyists hasn't exactly helped the optics. The company got the deal it wanted and the receipts it didn't.

Get ready for the weirdest company party in Hollywood history. The 98th Academy Awards air this Sunday, and the Best Picture race has boiled down to a civil war inside a single studio. The two frontrunners are Paul Thomas Anderson's comedic thriller One Battle After Another and Ryan Coogler's horror film Sinners, which broke records with 16 nominations. Both are Warner Bros. pictures.

One Battle After Another has been the guild darling all season. Sinners has massive popular momentum and a historic nomination haul. The race feels like a genuine toss-up — and the spectacle is amplified by the corporate context: Warner Bros. Discovery faces a takeover vote on March 20, meaning the studio at the center of Oscar night is simultaneously the studio at the center of Hollywood's biggest M&A drama.

Worth noting: the ceremony will stream live on Disney+ in addition to airing on ABC — a move designed to prove that awards shows can still pull live audiences to streaming platforms. No matter which film wins, the night will be as much about the studio's shifting power as about the films themselves.

Spinoffs have a famously grim track record. For every Better Call Saul, there are a dozen forgotten Joeys collecting dust. So when Fox announced a new Family Guy spinoff, skepticism would be entirely reasonable — except the business logic here is genuinely airtight.

Fox has ordered Stewie, a Family Guy spinoff from creator Seth MacFarlane and longtime writer-producer Kirker Butler, with a two-season pickup for the 2027–2028 season. Next-day streaming goes to Hulu, international streaming to Disney+. Unlike Cleveland Brown, who was written off Family Guy for the duration of The Cleveland Show, Stewie will continue appearing on the main show.

Here's what makes this more than nostalgia: last year, MacFarlane's catalog generated more than 60 billion streaming minutes across platforms — about 116,000 years of watch time. Fox isn't guessing that audiences want more Stewie. They have the data. Both Family Guy and American Dad! received four-season pickups last year, meaning Fox will have all five animated shows running through 2029 — right when its current in-season streaming pact with Hulu expires. Fox is building an animated fortress it can leverage in its next Hulu negotiation. If the streamer wants MacFarlane's universe — and it clearly does — it'll have to pay for it.

The industry's biggest structural move comes down to a single date: March 20. Warner Bros. Discovery — home of HBO, DC, and CNN — still has a merger agreement with Netflix valued around $82–83 billion, with a shareholder vote locked in for next Thursday. At the same time, Paramount Skydance has been dangling a richer all-cash offer: roughly $31 per share plus a massive $7 billion regulatory breakup fee and promises that would reshape theatrical windows and output deals.

Regulators are already sniffing antitrust issues. Capitol Hill is watching. The winner doesn't just change the logo on your streaming app — it decides which company controls a huge chunk of global content, distribution, and advertising relationships. If Netflix's deal clears, it accelerates mega-aggregation. If shareholders prefer Paramount Skydance's theatrical-first promises, the industry tilts toward protecting theatrical windows. Watch this vote like a season finale.

If you thought the 2023 strikes settled the AI question, this week was your reminder that nothing in Hollywood stays settled for long. Three separate labor fronts are converging simultaneously.

SAG-AFTRA and the major studios have quietly extended contract negotiations into this week, with AI protections explicitly on the table — digital doubles, synthesized performances, and reuse of scans are the central sticking points. The Writers Guild of America is gearing up for its own talks and has floated a new red line: explicit compensation when studios use scripts to train AI systems. It's the first time a Hollywood union has so bluntly said "the training set is the product." And on March 6, the American Federation of Musicians held a rally in Los Angeles focused on AI protections and fair pay, joined by SAG-AFTRA, WGA, IATSE, and the Teamsters.

What's new isn't another picket sign — it's coordination. Multiple Hollywood unions are treating AI clauses as a shared front instead of siloed side issues. If any one of them lands strong language — on training data royalties, synthetic performance vetoes, or mandatory human oversight — it becomes the template for everyone else. Meanwhile, Disney has inked a landmark deal with OpenAI worth roughly $1 billion, and Netflix just bought Ben Affleck's AI film-tech company InterPositive. The outcome of these talks will shape who owns the upside when AI generates more of what's on screen — the people whose likenesses and performances train the models, or the companies that build and deploy them.

Disney's AI-powered advertising tools debuted at its Tech & Data Showcase this week, including an AI "ad agent" and planning tools designed to make Disney+ and ESPN ad inventory easier to buy. The play is less about content and more about quietly shifting billions in brand dollars toward platforms that can fine-target audiences — a scale advantage smaller streamers can't match.

ByteDance's Seedance 2.0, the near-cinematic AI video generation tool from TikTok's parent company, has been generating headlines and legal threats in equal measure. In response to pressure from companies like Disney, ByteDance has restricted access to existing users of its Chinese apps only — for now. The tech exists, it works, and once comparable tools proliferate, enforcing IP rights becomes a global game of whack-a-mole.

OpenAI acquired Promptfoo, an AI security platform trusted by over 25% of Fortune 500 companies, and plans to integrate it into OpenAI Frontier. The company that builds the model now also owns the leading tool for auditing it — either very reassuring or slightly concerning, depending on your feelings about vertical integration.

A Live Nation executive paying $250 for VIP parking at his own amphitheater and calling the customer stupid; Warner Bros. competing against itself for Best Picture while simultaneously being bid on by two rival mega-corporations; and the world's largest consulting firm having to threaten its executives' promotions to get them to use the AI tools they're selling to everyone else.

Somewhere, a Ticketmaster fee is being applied to the act of reading this sentence — and 27 state attorneys general are drafting a response.

Until next week. —The Lyceum

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