Intro for June 5, 2025

Dear Gossips,  

Succession is a show about an aging CEO weeding out rivals, sycophants, and lieutenants to find his successor, all while maneuvering to stay in power. In their new cover feature, The Hollywood Reporter paints the current Hollywood executive class as Logan Roy, engaged in their own process of finding their successors, even as they struggle to hang onto power. 

They’re calling it “Hollywood’s modern Game of Thrones”, but really it’s just Hollywood looking for its best boy.

The article, titled Inside Hollywood’s Succession Wars, is a neat companion piece to last year’s feature, The Big Squeeze, which details a corporate culture of stagnation as the older generation in the C suite refuses to retire, creating a “gray ceiling” keeping younger generations out of power. Honestly, the most unrealistic thing in The Studio is that someone under 60 would be appointed head of a movie studio in today’s Hollywood.

The “gray ceiling” is an issue across many industries, but in 2024, over 2,200 CEOs stepped down in the US, the most since 2002. This has, finally, budged the gray ceiling, creating opportunity for new, younger blood to take the reins at companies across the nation. In Hollywood, this means multiple major studios, several large production companies, and CAA, the most powerful talent agency in the land, are all in the middle of succession planning, preparing to hand over the reins in the next few years.

Disney’s Bob Iger, for instance, has already been announced as stepping down in 2026. His successor is supposed to be named in early 2026, in advance of Iger’s (second) retirement at the end of the year. Bob Iger is currently 74, his potential successors are in the 50-60 range. So, younger than Bob, but not young, in general. For reference, Robert Evans was 37 when he took over production at Paramount and pulled it out of the toilet by greenlighting a run of now-classic films, including The Godfather, Chinatown, The Odd Couple, Love Story, Harold and Maude, and The Conversation. 

But Sarah, Hollywood is completely different now! Yes, it is, in no small part due to ongoing challenges posed by rapidly developing technology like AI, and the continued disruption of streaming to the economic model that fueled the industry for a century. Now maybe isn’t the time to anoint a thirty-something wildcard to run a movie studio. Maybe you do want someone with decades of experience and a steady hand (no one ever accused Bob Evans of being steady. He was once implicated in a murder trial, though). 

The THR article takes a weird stance on the generational divide in Hollywood, though, positing the younger generations are too soft for the tough business of running a movie studio. A few of the hits: “…the generation that has run Hollywood for decades was hungrier and more aggressive than the one that followed”; “Many of the much-caricatured qualities that used to be hallmarks of Hollywood power are now recognized as toxic”; and “some wonder if a softer style can work in a cutthroat industry”.

It is my experience that regardless of industry, people do better under bosses that aren’t stapler-hurling psychopaths. It’s not the worst thing for a new generation of less egomaniacal bosses to be empowered, or for employees to be treated like human beings and not serfs toiling for their feudal lord at work.

What the article doesn’t really dig into is that most of the contenders for top jobs across Hollywood are white dudes. There are a few exceptions, notably Dana Walden at Disney and Carrie Beck at LucasFilm, who could co-lead with Dave Filoni when Kathleen Kennedy retires. If appointed, Dana Walden would be Disney’s first female CEO, but the fact that she’s friends with Kamala Harris is an actual concern because the president is so unhinged and sensitive and takes everything so personally that Walden could be a liability for the company by way of this friendship.

Which is the unspoken subtext of the succession struggle in Hollywood. The people who run the studios have always been more conservative than the people who actually make the movies—with rare exceptions like Robert Evans—but now more than ever, it’s probably best not to expect anything historic or even notable to happen with the various succession plans in action. No one wants to draw Trump’s eye—the Paramount-Skydance is already endangered by his lawsuit against CBS—and doing something so outrageous as naming a female CEO is enough to become enemy #1 to the White House. The levers of power in Hollywood will shift over the next few years, but I bet the landscape will look much the same.

Live long and gossip,

Sarah