Benifer is back. Brad and Jen are friends again, and Paris Hilton is somehow still making headlines.

Twenty years later, we're living in the world that the 2000s tabloids created. On this series,

I'm going to tell you the story of a decade of American life through the trash we love to consume.

From Spotify and the Ringer podcast network, I'm Claire Malone, and this

is just like us, the tabloids that changed America. Listen on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello, everyone. My name is Matt Bellany, and this is the premiere episode of The Town, a podcast

that is not about the Ben Affleck movie, but about Hollywood or the town, as we call it.

I'm a former entertainment lawyer and I was the editor of The Hollywood Reporter and now I'm a founding partner of a media company called Puck and I write a newsletter twice a week called What I'm Hearing, which details everything going on behind the scenes in the

industry. So I wanted this podcast to act as an extension of that newsletter, me and a rotating

stable of experts discussing the biggest issues most talked about stories in Hollywood.

To start off for our launch episode, I'm going to review what happened over the weekend with my

colleague Ben Landy. And later, we're going to get to our guest, Jeff Bach, to talk about the Batman and everything's going on with the box office.

All right, Ben.

So this news just came across the wire that Discovery, which is taking over Warner Brothers in the next couple of months, they are going to merge the HBO Max streaming service with Discovery Plus,

the CFO announced today. Now, that had been expected, but they officially announced it.

And to me, this really shows that we are headed towards a world where there are going to be

three or four global streaming services owned by major international media conglomerates.

And they're all going to offer a bundle of different programs and brands in one place.

And it looks like Warner Brothers Discovery is going to have a massive HBO Max slash Discovery product,

maybe eventually roll in CNN Plus, which is also owned by them.

What do you think about that?

I don't know. Ice Road Truckers next to the Sopranos. I guess it makes a certain kind of

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