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The Town with Matthew Belloni

The Townies: Hollywood’s Best and Worst of 2025

The Town with Matthew Belloni

The Ringer

Society & Culture

4.31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 22 December 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It’s podcasting’s most exclusive event of the year: the fourth annual Townies! Join Matt and Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw as they recap the year in Hollywood with exciting and hilarious categories like Biggest Flex, Most Destructive Behind-the-Scenes Drama, Most Baffling Success, Most Annoying Media Narrative, Deal of the Year, and much more in Part 1 of this year's Townies. For a 20 percent discount on Matt’s Hollywood insider newsletter, ‘What I’m Hearing ...,’ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Email us your thoughts! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠thetown@spotify.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Host: Matt Belloni Guest: Lucas Shaw Producers: Craig Horlbeck and Jessie Lopez Theme 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. 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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