Culture Gabfest - "Is the Warner Bros. Deal the End Of Cinema?" Edition
Slate Culture Feed
Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 10 December 2025
⏱️ 71 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week’s episode, Gabfest old friends Steve, Julia, and June Thomas convene on two showbiz works of midlife retrospection and regret: the new film Jay Kelly and Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along. The former, directed by Noah Baumbach, stars George Clooney as the titular movie star looking back on his life while on a European train picaresque. The latter was a legendary flop for Sondheim, had a triumphant Broadway revival starring Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez, and now has arrived at movie theaters.
In our third segment, the panel turns to another showbiz saga full of bitter regret: the fight to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery. Joined by writer and Hollywood watcher Mark Harris, they untangle the fight between Netflix and Paramount to outbid each other for the legacy film studio—and what it all has to do with Trump and the future of movie-going itself.
In an exclusive bonus episode for Slate Plus subscribers, it’s back to join the Joined in our recap discussion of Pluribus episode 7 “The Gap.”
Act now, there’s still time to leave us a voicemail with your burning cultural queries for our annual call-in show by calling us at 347-201-2397.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Stephen McHaff, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest. |
| 0:13.3 | Is the Warner Brothers Deal the end of cinema edition? |
| 0:17.3 | It's Wednesday, December 10th, 2025. |
| 0:20.4 | On today's show, Jay Kelly is the new movie from |
| 0:22.8 | Noah Bamback, the writer-director, he of marriage story, and Francis Ha, and on and on, and on. |
| 0:28.7 | This one stars George Clooney as a movie star approaching the twilight of a legendary career and |
| 0:33.5 | wondering if it, i.e. starred him, movie stardom and its attendant bullshit, was worth it. |
| 0:40.5 | It co-stars Laura Dern and Adam Sandler, who's widely regarded as being terrific in the movie, |
| 0:46.5 | perhaps getting an Oscar nod and Grace Edwards and Riley Keow, a bunch of others. |
| 0:50.1 | And then we discussed Steven Sondheim had only one truly epic bomb over the course of his career. |
| 0:57.0 | A meaningful epic bomb. |
| 0:59.2 | In 1981, in the face of withering reviews, merrily, we were a long shutdown after a less than two-week run. |
| 1:05.6 | Then in 2022, it was revived off Broadway, moved to Broadway, and became The Triumph its partisans always believed it was. |
| 1:12.8 | That production, starring Jonathan Groff and Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez, |
| 1:17.8 | was filmed and is now in theaters, we will discuss. |
| 1:21.2 | And finally, the battle over the future of Warner Brothers gets only hotter by the day |
| 1:25.7 | and more geopolitical. |
| 1:27.2 | With every passing day, it gets |
| 1:28.8 | weirder and weirder, in fact, now that names like Jared Kushner and Muhammad bin Salman are |
| 1:34.6 | being thrown around in relation to it. We discuss all of this with the wonderful Mark Harris, |
| 1:40.5 | writer, critic, extraordinary, and tweet or extraordinary, one should say. Before we start the show, |
| 1:46.3 | we have a call-on show upcoming. We have many, many, many wonderful calls already. We do need some |
... |
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