The Townies: Hollywood’s Best and Worst of 2025
The Town with Matthew Belloni
The Ringer
4.3 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 22 December 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
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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. That's what you get with Puck. I'm a founding partner at Puck, and I write a newsletter called What I'm Hearing. It's got exclusive news for insiders and analysis of the biggest stories. Puck has a bunch of great journalists. 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, December 22nd. |
| 0:38.9 | It's the townies. |
| 0:40.2 | What a year in Hollywood. |
| 0:41.4 | Two studios were sold. |
| 0:43.3 | One, Paramount, is still trying to acquire the other, Warner Brothers. |
| 0:47.0 | And Netflix did something almost nobody thought it would do. |
| 0:49.5 | It bought its way to grow. |
| 0:51.2 | So it hopes we'll see how the Warner sale turns out. |
| 0:53.8 | All the major |
| 0:54.4 | streaming services became profitable except one, sorry Peacock. Amazon finally bought the James Bond |
| 0:59.9 | franchise that had thought it was buying three years ago. And Apple finally had a hit movie in |
| 1:04.7 | theaters thanks to F1. Diddy went to jail and a couple filmmakers we won't name went to |
| 1:09.6 | director jail. |
| 1:16.5 | Donald Trump wreaked havoc on both Disney and Paramount, and most of all, a cloud of funk seemed to have descended over the entertainment industry and parked there, starting with the fires |
| 1:20.9 | in January and the exodus of productions and all the layoffs associated with the Paramount |
| 1:25.0 | sale and the general slowdown in production. |
| 1:28.0 | The fear of what's to come is AI really established itself as the defining challenge for the |
| 1:32.5 | professionally made movies and TV industry. Miriam Webster declared the word of the year is |
| 1:37.6 | slop, which thanks in part to Disney's landmark deal with Open AI could be a sign of things to come |
... |
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