Hello everyone. Welcome to Slash Film Weekly. It's Wednesday, July 30th, 2025. And on today's episode of the show, we're going to be talking about the latest film and TV news. We'll talk about the fantastic four first steps. And we'll also talk about Happy Gilmore 2 and we'll present an interview with the director of that movie. My name is Ben Pearson. I'm an editor at Slashfilm.com. And it's just me in the news segment today. Before we get to that, though,

I did want to just tell listeners that next week's episode will almost certainly come out a day

later than usual. I wanted to apologize in advance about that. There's some travel stuff,

some scheduling stuff. It just can't be helped. So that is probably what's going to happen.

So stay tuned for next Thursday to get an episode of the show instead of on Wednesday. Okay.

So let's jump into the news. I think the biggest industry related news is that the merger between

Skydance and Paramount has finally cleared the FCC. There are probably going to be

a bunch of knockdown effects from that that we can talk about when that actually happens,

but this deal has been in the works for a long time. David Ellison, who is the now chairman

and CEO of Skydance media and is going to be the effectively number one at Paramount, is a producer who is the son of one of the world's richest men, and David Ellison has been producing movies for Paramount for a long time.

But we're talking about like Star Trek movies and Terminator movies and Mission

Impossible movies like a lot of big time franchise films.

And now he is taking over the entire studio basically.

So we'll see what this actually looks like in practice.

But this is something that's been talked about a lot.

There's been a lot of back and forth about whether or not this deal would actually go through. There have been

capitulations made to the current presidential administration to make sure that the deal goes

through. Stephen Colbert and the late show have been canceled in a fashion that seems pretty politically motivated.

And yeah, there are just a lot of irons in this particular fire.

But now it seems like the final obstacle has been overcome in terms of this merger.

So we'll see if this signals brighter days ahead for Paramount. One of the things that got

caught up in this is South Park and the deal between Trey Parker and Matt Stone and Paramount and

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