From KCRW, I'm Kim Masters, and this is The Business.

Amidst industry-wide gloom over a week summer box office,

Chris Aronson is still determined to save the theatrical experience from extinction.

As Paramount's head of domestic distribution, he sees the challenges,

but he's relieved that the legacy studios now seem to agree

it's not a great idea to send movies straight to streaming. He got some help in that argument

from a certain paramount star. Tom was adamant that Top Gun Maverick was made for theaters, and I think

all you need to do is look at the worldwide theatrical box office

of $1.5 billion and say, yep, he was right. Chris Aronson explains why he still believes that

movie theaters will survive. But he argues that the lack of consensus about the length of the

theatrical window doesn't help that cause.

But first we banter, stick around. It's the business from KCRW.

I am joined by my partner in banter, Matt Bellany. Hello, Matt.

Hi there.

So there's a lot of news about Donald Trump and The Apprentice, the NBC series, not the movie

from Cannes that a lot of people want to see. One of the producers on the show, Bill Pruitt, has

written a piece in Slate. His NDA is expired now. And I think probably to the surprise of no one,

he does allege that Donald Trump used the N-word saying that nobody wanted

to see the N-word win, for example. There was a black contestant. And this is the show that

created the myth of Donald Trump as this capable businessman, even as he was fending off bankruptcy

in real time. And it certainly has focused a lot of attention on Mark Burnett,

the producer. And Mark Burnett is a very interesting character. A lot of people feel that he has

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