'Superman,' Marvel vs. DC, and the Studio Head Hot Seat

The Town with Matthew Belloni

The Ringer

Society & Culture

4.3 • 847 Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Matt is joined by Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw to discuss the strong opening weekend for 'Superman,' talk about whether this movie is enough to kick-start a DC reboot, and revisit Marvel’s post-'Avengers' strategy as they look ahead to ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’ and beyond. Later, they discuss the impressive and timely run of box office successes from the Warner Bros. movie studio and take a look at which studio heads are on the hot seat as we near the end of summer (02:15). Matt finishes the show with a prediction about AMC Theatres (23:10). For a 20 percent discount on Matt’s Hollywood insider newsletter, ‘What I’m Hearing ...,’ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.Email us your thoughts! ⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠ Host: Matt BelloniGuest: Lucas Shaw Producers: Craig Horlbeck and Jessie LopezTheme Song: Devon Renaldo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you care about Hollywood, and I assume you do if you're listening to the town, you should really be getting the whole story about Hollywood.
0:06.2	That's what you get with Puck.
0:07.5	I'm a founding partner at Puck, and I write a newsletter called What I'm Hearing.
0:10.6	It's got exclusive news for insiders and analysis of the biggest stories.
0:14.9	Puck has a bunch of great journalists.
0:16.5	We just hired Kim Masters, who also covers Hollywood from the inside, plus media, sports, fashion,
0:21.7	politics, and finance. It's a must have for plugged-in people. Fans of the town get a
0:26.6	discount on the description page of this episode or at puck.news slash the town. Go further into
0:32.1	Hollywood by becoming a puck member today. It is Monday, July 14th.
0:39.0	Most people look at the opening weekend of a big movie like Superman and ask,
0:42.8	did it do okay?
0:44.0	How were the numbers?
0:45.4	At the town, we look at the weekend numbers, 125 million domestic,
0:49.7	$220 million worldwide, a pretty good start, though a little below the energy tracking.
0:54.3	We look at him as a heat check for the studio and his executives.
0:58.0	The Warner Brothers leadership, our guy David Zasloff, the CEO, Mike Maluka, Pam Abdi, run the film studio,
1:03.7	Peter Safran and James Gunn at D.C.
1:05.6	They all sent out flowery statements yesterday, heralding Superman, as a new day at D.C.
1:12.1	There's still a long way to profitability for a movie that costs $225 million to make and another 100 or so to market. That's
1:17.3	okay. They could take the W for a movie that did resonate with fans and even the critics. And as we
1:22.2	know, it was crucial that Superman worked because the entire DC reboot is built around this restart.
1:28.0	Zasloff said, quote, Superman is just the first step.
	...

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