This week, Kim Masters is joined by Matt Belloni and Lucas Shaw for a year-end Megabanter, looking back at a messy 2025. From the devastating Los Angeles fires to the shadow cast by the Trump administration over Hollywood, the trio digs into the Skydance-Paramount deal, a surprise Warners-Netflix upset, and Disney’s move to partner with OpenAI.

This week, Eric Deggans speaks with Vince Gilligan about his new series, Pluribus. The creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul explains how he felt being at the center of his first-ever bidding war, and how a long-standing partnership with Sony ultimately brought the project to Apple. Gilligan also reflects on why the days of writing episodic television on The X-Files shaped his love of serialized storytelling. And after years of explaining his work to fans and critics alike, Gilligan shares why he’s learning to let audiences decide what his shows mean for themselves.

Plus, with the Academy set to bring the Oscars to YouTube in 2029, Hollywood’s biggest night is moving to a very different kind of stage. Kim Masters and Matt Belloni unpack why the Academy made the deal—and what it reveals about how the industry is rethinking where, and how, audiences show up.

With Netflix’s bombshell move to acquire Warner Bros. still reverberating through the town, Paramount has gone fully hostile–bypassing Warner leadership and taking its case straight to shareholders. Matt Belloni and Lucas Shaw break down the latest maneuvering in a saga that seems to sprout new twists by the day.

Also, with Kim Masters sidelined by a bug this week, Belloni presents a few bonus stories from Masters's recent conversations: Wake Up Dead Man writer-director Rian Johnson and producer Ram Bergman talk about the green room they devised for the first Knives Out–a space that became so essential to the ensemble’s chemistry that trailers sat mostly empty. And Stranger Things executive producer Shawn Levy explains why, despite the runaway success of Deadpool & Wolverine, he’s not sprinting toward a sequel just yet.