The Inside Track: People, Ideas, & Stories shaping how we work, live, and build the future.

Good morning - Michael here, writing from the frontlines of Massif & Kroo: Here's what you need to pay attention to in media today:

That's how many companies now control what used to be two of the biggest employers of writers in Hollywood. Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery — separate studios, separate streamers, separate negotiating positions — are merging into a single entity controlled by the Ellison family.

WGA contract negotiations with the studios start Monday, March 16. The guild's pattern of demands was written for a table that no longer exists.

This is the leverage story that the awards coverage is burying under red carpet photos.

The LA ceremony was cancelled because the WGA West's own employees went on strike against guild management. The staff union accused the guild of union-busting and bad-faith bargaining. The writers' union — the institution that shut down all of Hollywood for 148 days in 2023 to protect creative labor — could not reach a fair deal with its own 110 employees.

That's not irony. It's a structural tell.

The institution responsible for protecting creative labor is breaking from the inside at the exact moment consolidation is reducing its leverage from the outside. Those two forces are compounding, and the timing couldn't be worse.

Without intervention, United's reckless scheduling will lead to challenging conditions. Those conditions don't just impact our customers — they put enormous strain on our frontline teams. — American Airlines, in a statement about O'Hare. But read it again as a description of what's happening in Hollywood.

Here's the leverage math.

Before the Paramount-WBD merger, writers negotiated across a table that included Warner Bros., Paramount, Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and a handful of smaller buyers. Each studio competed for talent. That competition created leverage — if one studio lowballed you, another might pay market rate because they needed the talent to compete.

The combined entity controls HBO, Paramount+, CBS, CNN, two film studios, and the largest combined content library in history. When two buyers become one, the remaining buyer doesn't have to compete with itself. That's basic economics. Fewer buyers means less leverage for sellers — and writers are sellers.

The WGA's pattern of demands, released last week, addresses AI protections, minimum staffing, and streaming residuals. Those are legitimate issues. But the demands were calibrated for a market with a certain number of employers. That number just shrank. And the guild walking into negotiations with its own staff on a picket line gives the studios a rhetorical weapon: "You're asking us to respect labor rights while your own employees say you don't."

Fair or not, that framing weakens the guild's moral authority at the exact moment it needs it most.

Talent deals across the industry are being judged harder against direct revenue contribution. The era of paying a premium for prestige talent who doesn't measurably move a subscription needle is ending. It's not ending because executives are cruel. It's ending because the business model is shifting from subscriber acquisition (where prestige creates buzz) to ad monetization (where engagement creates impressions). A writer whose show generates 50 million hours of viewing is more valuable in an ad model than a writer whose show wins an Emmy but gets watched by 2 million people.

That changes who has leverage.

Showrunners and writers with proven audience data — the ones who can demonstrate that their work drives measurable viewership — have more negotiating power than ever. They can point to numbers. They can prove ROI. Those writers are being pursued aggressively.

Everyone else is facing a market with fewer shows, fewer buyers, and AI putting downward pressure on development costs. Studios are quietly testing AI-assisted writing rooms — not replacing writers entirely, but using AI to generate outlines, draft dialogue options, and compress the development timeline. Nobody's announcing this. But it's happening.

Creator-writers who own their own distribution — who publish directly to an audience through a podcast, a newsletter, a YouTube channel — have leverage that traditional TV writers don't. They don't need the studio to reach their audience. The studio needs them to reach it. That structural advantage is why the most valuable writing talent in the next decade may not come from the traditional guild pipeline at all. It may come from creators who built an audience first and learned to write for it — the reverse of how Hollywood has always worked.

Ryan Coogler won the WGA Award for Original Screenplay for "Sinners" on Sunday night. Paul Thomas Anderson won Adapted for "One Battle After Another." Both films are Warner Bros. Both will compete at the Oscars on Sunday. And both were greenlit by a studio that is now owned by a different company than the one that made the deal. The work was commissioned in one power structure. It will be celebrated in another. The writers who created it will negotiate their next deal against a table that has one fewer chair.

Two of America's biggest automakers entered Formula 1 not primarily for motorsport but for what F1's licensing infrastructure offers — branded content, experiential activations, licensed merchandise, global distribution partnerships, and a built-in content calendar that runs 24 races across 20+ countries.

F1 has become a content and licensing machine that happens to have racing attached. For a creator or SMB: what's your version of a "season"? A recurring event, a content calendar, a release schedule that brands can plug into? The value isn't the individual piece — it's the infrastructure that lets sponsors show up repeatedly.

D&D turned its IP into a ticketed, location-based experience. Same trend driving F1's global exhibition tour, Netflix's Grand Central tarot installation, and the Peppa Pig theme parks. The licensing world calls these "location-based entertainment" (LBEs) and they're one of the fastest-growing segments because Gen Z and Gen Alpha want to be part of the story, not just watch it. For a creator or SMB: if you have a loyal community, a live event — even a small one — is a product line. A meetup. A workshop. A screening. A pop-up. The format doesn't have to be a theme park. It just has to be an experience people can't get from their screen.

YOUR NEXT MOVE: If you negotiate talent deals — as a writer, a creator, an agent, or a studio — update your leverage model for a post-merger table. The number of buyers has shrunk. The premium for proven audience impact has increased. And the downward pressure from AI on development costs is real, even if nobody's saying it out loud yet. Price your talent accordingly.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you on tomorrow.

Feedback, thoughts, suggestions? Hit the reply!

Michael Wildes is the founder and CEO of Drive Phase Holding Company, a permanent-capital firm focused on building category-defining companies across business, media (owner of Massif & Kroo), aviation, and impact. After leaving a career as a professional pilot, he spent a year as Business Editor at FLYING Magazine writing 330+ articles on aviation's transformation. Now he builds permanent-capital companies focused on long-term trends that compound over decades. Based in Arlington, Virginia.

Connect: mikewildes.com | [email protected]

Massif & Kroo: We go beyond the ‘what’—nuance matters.