Disney+ reversed the Season 2 renewal it announced in March and axed Wonder Man, a Hollywood satire with a 91% Rotten Tomatoes score and an Emmy-nominated lead. It was one of the best things Marvel has made in years. It also barely rated, and that’s the number that ended up mattering.

So Marvel finally made a Disney+ show critics genuinely loved, gave the lead an Emmy nomination, renewed it for a second season, and then killed it four months later.

What happened

On July 30, Disney+ canceled Wonder Man, the showbiz satire with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as a struggling actor named Simon Williams and Ben Kingsley back as Trevor Slattery from Iron Man 3. Variety had it first, and the rest of the trades confirmed it inside an hour.

What makes it sting is the timing. Marvel announced a Season 2 renewal in March. Ten days ago, director Destin Daniel Cretton was out doing Spider-Man: Brand New Day press and casually mentioning he hoped to start shooting that second season this year.

Then showrunner Andrew Guest was posting “Marvel has cancelled Wonder Man” on Instagram. The guys who made the thing were apparently as blindsided as anyone.

The renewal was basically fake

And here’s where it gets weird. That renewal Marvel made a whole announcement about? There was nothing behind it.

Per Variety, the Season 2 writers’ room never opened. The writers got released to go find other jobs. Which means the one step you absolutely have to take to make a season of television, paying someone to write it, just never happened. Marvel put out a press release, attached two returning actors to it, and left the rest blank.

So they didn’t really reverse a decision. They cancelled a thing that was never much more than a headline in the first place. The renewal was the strange part. The cancellation just made Wonder Man look like every other Marvel show on the service.

The reviews were great. The audience wasn’t there.

This is the frustrating bit, because by every measure that isn’t ratings, the show worked.

It’s sitting at 91% on Rotten Tomatoes. Abdul-Mateen picked up an Emmy nod for lead comedy actor, which made him the only live-action guy ever nominated for both a Marvel and a DC thing, on top of his old Watchmen win. Critics kept calling it the freshest swing Marvel had taken in ages.

Then you look at the viewership and wince. Wonder Man dropped all eight episodes on January 27, pulled 618 million minutes its first week, hit No. 8 on Nielsen, and that was it. That was the high point.

Off the chart the next week, never seen again.

One week on the board, total. The crowd it did get skewed older too, 41% in the 35-to-49 range, and Disney never put out official numbers, which they tend not to do when the numbers aren’t a brag.

Watch what they did with it

The tell wasn’t the announcement. It was the handling.

Once the ratings sagged, Disney reportedly stuck the first episode up on YouTube for free, then loaned the whole show to Hulu for a bit to go fishing for the audience Disney+ hadn’t found. You don’t give a series away like that while you’re gearing up to order eight more episodes of it. That’s salvage. That’s a studio quietly deciding a thing is over while its own press release still says otherwise.

It’s an A-lister club now

Pull back and look at the graveyard. After this, the only live-action Marvel shows that ever got a second season are Loki and Daredevil: Born Again. That’s the whole list. WandaVision, Hawkeye, Moon Knight, Echo, Ironheart, one and done, all of them.

Now clock what the two survivors have in common. Loki’s a fan-favorite played by a movie star. Daredevil’s one of the most beloved characters Marvel owns. Big names, both. Wonder Man was a deep-cut nobody-character in a smart little comedy about Hollywood, which is exactly the kind of show that earns rave reviews and a modest, graying audience. Turns out that’s a death sentence on Disney+ right now.

So is this the “quality over quantity” pivot?

Kind of the opposite, honestly, and Wonder Man is the evidence.

Yes, Marvel’s making fewer shows. Kevin Feige has said as much, fewer and bigger after years of dumping content onto the service. But you can’t call this “quality over quantity” when the thing they just axed was the quality. It reviewed better than almost anything else they’ve got, and it’s the one that died, while flashier stuff with bigger names keeps landing movies and spinoffs.

What’s really going on is colder than that. Marvel’s done paying for well-reviewed experiments that don’t move the needle, and it’s circling the wagons around the handful of characters famous enough to guarantee a crowd. Good reviews are a nice thing to have. They don’t get you a second season. Numbers do, and the big names bring the numbers.

Abdul-Mateen still gets to go to the Emmys. He’ll sit there nominated for a show that doesn’t exist anymore, and that’s about the most Hollywood ending a Hollywood satire could’ve gotten.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• Variety — first reporting of the cancellation, the never-opened writers’ room, the March renewal reversal, and the one-week Nielsen run

• The Hollywood Reporter — the single-season Marvel TV pattern, the Loki and Daredevil: Born Again exceptions, and the production credits

• The Independent / AOL — the 91% Rotten Tomatoes score, Abdul-Mateen’s Emmy nomination, and the soft viewership

• ComicBookMovie / Hollywood Life — Andrew Guest’s and Abdul-Mateen’s statements and Cretton’s July 20 Season 2 comments

• Cosmic Book News — the older-skewing demographic and the reported free-episode and Hulu salvage moves

Ruffalo did zero press for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and a viral post says his politics got him benched. We can’t rule it out completely, since Marvel never explained. But there’s a much duller reason sitting in plain sight: he’s been shooting another show.

Mark Ruffalo plays the Hulk in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. He hasn’t said a single public word about it, and a viral post has decided it knows why: he got silenced for his politics.

Can we prove that’s false? Not completely. Can we say it’s probably not what happened? Pretty confidently, yeah.

Here’s how both of those are true at once.

The absence is real

Start with the part nobody’s arguing. Marvel ran the whole cast through the press circuit for weeks. Tom Holland did everything. Zendaya was everywhere. Jon Bernthal, Sadie Sink, director Destin Daniel Cretton, all out doing the rounds.

Ruffalo, playing Bruce Banner and a savage take on the Hulk, did none of it. No junkets, no talk shows, nothing. A post pointing that out cleared 7 million views. So the question people are asking is a fair one to ask.

Why we can’t slam the door on the theory

The honest hangup is that Marvel never said a word about it.

No statement, no reason given, nothing from Ruffalo or the studio explaining the no-show. And when a studio leaves a vacuum like that, people fill it with whatever theory they brought with them. Because there’s no official answer, nobody can stand up and prove, airtight, that politics played zero role. That’s just how proving a negative works.

So if you want to believe it, technically nothing here stops you. What the evidence does is make it a bad bet.

The boring, likely answer

Because Ruffalo had somewhere else to be, and it’s on the record.

Since around July 9, he’s been in Philadelphia shooting the second season of Task, the HBO Max crime drama where he’s the lead. It’s a confirmed, active production, and it ate the exact window the Spider-Man cast spent doing press. You cannot fly a junket tour for one project while anchoring the daily shoot of another in a different city.

That’s the whole thing. An actor was busy on another set, which is the most common reason on earth for missing a press tour and the least likely to ever trend.

The spoiler angle holds up too

If you want a second reason, there’s a real one, and it’s still not about politics.

Ruffalo is notorious inside Marvel for spoiling movies. He once accidentally livestreamed a chunk of an Avengers film. He’s given away plot beats more than once and joked about it. If a studio were going to keep any actor away from live, unscripted microphones right before opening weekend, he’d be the obvious candidate no matter what he tweets. That’s just protecting the movie.

Weighing the politics theory honestly

So where does that leave the original question. Unlikely, but not disprovable.

There’s no reporting, no statement, no leak suggesting Marvel or Sony pulled him over his activism. The theory rests entirely on the fact that he’s outspoken, and it has to climb over a filming schedule that already explains everything it’s trying to explain.

Fans are matching it to Rachel Zegler, whose Snow White press got trimmed last year during an active, real-time controversy. But that was a fire actually burning at that moment. Ruffalo’s absence just tracks a call sheet in Pennsylvania. From far away the two look alike. Up close they aren’t.

Could politics have been a quiet bonus reason someone at a studio was happy about? Sure, in the way you can never fully X-ray a corporate decision. As the actual explanation for why he wasn’t there, though, it’s the long shot, and the short job in Philadelphia is the favorite.

And it’s Sony’s movie anyway

One last thing that trips up the framing. Much of the theorizing casts this as Disney finally disciplining a problem star. But Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a Sony picture made with Marvel Studios, and Sony runs its promo. The “Disney is learning its lesson” version is pointing at the wrong studio entirely.

Ruffalo will turn back up soon, probably to spoil whatever he’s in next. Right now he’s a hundred miles away, on the clock for a different company. It’s the dullest answer available, and it’s the one holding all the evidence.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• AOL / Yahoo / SuperHeroHype — the reporting that Ruffalo is filming Task Season 2 in Philadelphia, started July 9, 2026 per CBS News, and the rundown of fan theories

• Sportskeeda / The Hollywood Reporter — confirmation of Ruffalo’s return as Bruce Banner and the Hulk

• Coverage of the July 2026 press cycle — the cast’s promotional appearances and the viral post highlighting Ruffalo’s absence

Supergirl landed on VOD July 28, just 32 days after opening to a $124 million global run against a $290 million budget. That’s fast, and it reads like a studio cutting its losses. The wrinkle: the quick window is normal now. Even Superman did the same.

Supergirl is available to rent at home. It has been in theaters for one month.

Those two facts, sitting next to each other, tell you how the summer went for Kara Zor-El.

When and where to watch it

Warner Bros. put Supergirl on premium video-on-demand on July 28, hitting Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home, and the rest. It’ll run you $24.99 to buy or $19.99 to rent.

The physical release, 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD, follows on September 8. An HBO Max streaming date hasn’t been announced yet, but it’s expected sometime this fall.

The box office, one more time

The reason it’s home this fast is no mystery. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, starring Milly Alcock, opened June 26 to $37 million domestically, immediately landing behind Toy Story 5, then fell off a cliff, a brutal 73% drop in weekend two.

It has since limped to roughly $124 million worldwide. Against a reported $170 million-plus budget and another $120 million in marketing, call it $290 million all-in, that’s a genuine bomb. DC Studios co-CEO Peter Safran has already gone on record about the disappointment. When the co-chief is giving interviews to explain the numbers, the numbers explained themselves.

Is 32 days actually a dump?

Thirty-two days from theater to rental sounds like a studio shoving a failure out the side door, and in spirit, it is.

James Gunn‘s Superman, the DC hit from summer 2025, went to VOD at 35 days. Supergirl beat it to digital by three days. If a beloved success and a notorious flop hit home video at nearly the same clip, the clip isn’t the story.

What the speed actually confirms is quieter and worse. Warner Bros. rushed nothing, because there was nothing left to rush. After that second-weekend collapse, Supergirl had no theatrical run left to protect, no legs to nurse, no reason to hold screens.

The fast window doesn’t mean the studio buried it. It means the studio checked, found the theatrical life already over, and moved on.

The burial happened in June. July was just the paperwork.

Even its digital debut has bad timing

The film can’t catch a break on the calendar, either.

Supergirl arrived on VOD the same stretch that The Odyssey was tearing up theaters and Spider-Man: Brand New Day was opening. Both are among the biggest films of the year, and both are exactly where the audience’s attention and rental dollars are going right now. A movie that needs people to choose it at home launched into a week where everyone’s looking at two other things. Even its second life started in someone else’s shadow.

Not a bad movie, just a bomb

Worth saying, because the two get confused constantly: bombing and being bad aren’t the same thing.

Audiences who saw Supergirl liked it, giving it a 74% audience score against a rotten 53% from critics. Alcock’s performance drew real praise even from mixed reviews. The film adapts Tom King‘s acclaimed Woman of Tomorrow comic and swings for a stranger, sadder, more sci-fi Supergirl than the usual. Its problem wasn’t obviously quality. It was a soft marketing push, franchise fatigue, and a summer that had already picked its winners.

Which makes the digital release the movie’s actual shot. The people who skipped it in theaters, the ones who might’ve liked the thing the crowd that saw it did, can finally find it for twenty bucks.

That’s a strange place for a $290 million movie to go looking for its audience. But after June, it’s the only place left.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• Forbes / Gizmodo — the July 28 VOD date, the rent-and-buy pricing, the September 8 physical release, and the HBO Max window

• ScreenRant — the 32-days-in-theaters figure and the direct comparison to Superman’s 35-day VOD window

• Forbes (Tim Lammers) / Variety — the $37M opening, the 73% second-weekend drop, the ~$124M worldwide total, and the $170M-plus budget and $120M marketing spend

• SlashFilm — Peter Safran’s comments on the box office and the film’s audience-versus-critic reception

• TechRadar — the digital release colliding with The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day

A WARN notice cutting 108 Pixar jobs went out on the studio’s Elastigirl letterhead, from a movie that opens with a man getting fired. It’s almost certainly just standard stationery. It also landed as Toy Story 5 closes in on $1 billion, which is the part that actually stings.

Pixar is laying off 108 people. The notice telling the state of California went out on letterhead featuring Elastigirl.

Elastigirl is from The Incredibles.

The Incredibles opens with a man getting fired from his office job.

What the filing says

The document is a WARN notice, the filing big employers have to submit before mass layoffs, obtained by SFGate. It lists 108 positions cut at Pixar’s Emeryville headquarters, most of them gone by September 26.

The roles are the ones that actually make the movies. Twenty-three technical directors. Nine story artists. Software engineers, editors, the people whose names scroll past in the credits you don’t read. Seventy-one of the 108 fall under “arts, entertainment and recreation,” which is the government’s dry way of saying: the artists.

The movie opens with a layoff

Here’s why the internet stopped on this one.

At the top of the filing, where a company logo goes, sits Pixar’s branding with Mrs. Incredible — Elastigirl — replacing the “i,” hands on her hips. It comes from Pixar’s 2004 hit, a movie whose entire plot is kicked off by Bob Parr getting canned from his insurance job and spiraling into a midlife crisis before clawing his way back.

So the paperwork ending 108 careers is decorated with a character from a film about losing your career. Someone online noted the studio was “at least honoring its commitment to women in the workplace.” Someone else went with the obvious one: they’re cutting jobs while Disney and Pixar rake in billions.

It’s probably just the letterhead

To be fair, and this matters, nobody sat in a room and picked Elastigirl for the occasion.

It’s Pixar’s standard stationery. The Incredibles branding is almost certainly just what the studio’s letterhead looks like, dropped onto a WARN filing by whoever had to file it, the same way it’d go on a catering memo. There’s no evidence of a cruel little joke here.

Which is somehow worse. A deliberate choice would at least mean someone was paying attention. This was a company so on autopilot that it laid off a hundred artists on cartoon letterhead and nobody in the chain thought to swap it for something that didn’t read like a punchline. The tone-deafness wasn’t malicious. It was automatic.

$1 billion, and 108 people

The timing is the part that lands hardest, and it’s not a coincidence of the calendar, it’s the whole story.

Pixar’s Toy Story 5 is days from crossing $1 billion worldwide. The studio is, right now, in the middle of one of the biggest hits it has ever had. And it’s shedding 108 of the people who make hits like that possible in the same week.

That’s the math that’s got people angry, and it’s fair math. A studio printing a billion dollars off one movie is telling story artists and technical directors there’s no room for them. The success and the cuts are landing in the same news cycle, from the same company, and one of them is paying for a lot of yachts while the other one is packing a desk.

The bigger cut

None of this is really about the letterhead, and Pixar isn’t being singled out.

The 108 are part of Disney‘s third round of layoffs in 2026, more than 1,000 jobs across ESPN, Disney Entertainment Television, and National Geographic, under CEO Josh D’Amaro‘s “One Disney” restructuring.

A source told TheWrap the Pixar cuts may trace to the soft box office of the studio’s recent original films, the Elio-shaped hole in a lineup that leans harder on sequels every year.

So the studio that keeps missing with new ideas is cutting the people it’d need to have new ideas, on the strength of a fifth Toy Story. That’s a strategy. It’s just not a comforting one if your job is making the parts that aren’t sequels.

The 108 will be gone by late September. Toy Story 5 crosses a billion before then. The studio will be fine. It usually is.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• SFGate (Matt Brown) — the WARN filing, the 108-job figure, the Emeryville location, the September 26 date, and the copy of the Elastigirl letterhead

• The Independent / Yahoo — the role breakdown, the Incredibles plot irony, and the social media reaction

• The Hollywood Reporter — Disney’s 1,000-plus 2026 cuts, the ESPN, DET, and Nat Geo divisions, and D’Amaro’s “One Disney” strategy

• TheWrap — the source tying the Pixar cuts to weaker original-film performance, against Toy Story 5’s box office run

He carried Frodo up a volcano and won the trilogy a shelf of Oscars’ worth of goodwill. He made about $250,000 total, no residuals, and lost the house. Twenty-two years later the paycheck still hasn’t grown.

Sean Astin got $250,000 for The Lord of the Rings.

Not per movie. Total. Three films, eighteen months in New Zealand, the emotional spine of a trilogy that pulled $2.9 billion, and he walked with a quarter million and no piece of anything.

Then the house went too.

He brought it up again this week to the Guardian, the same story he’s been telling for years, and it hasn’t gotten less weird with age. “There was a disconnect between the attention I was getting and how much money we had,” he said. “I had to sell my house because I negotiated such a small amount on the trilogy.”

Roughly seventy-five grand a film. No residuals. Not then, not once since.

The mortgage math

Here’s where it tips from underpaid into almost funny.

Before the films, Astin bought a house. The mortgage ran $250,000 a year. Then the offer landed — Lord of the Rings, $250,000, for a year and a half of work.

Look at those two numbers sitting next to each other. His bill for twelve months was his whole fee for eighteen. He’d signed one piece of paper swearing he’d pay a quarter million a year, and was about to sign another guaranteeing he couldn’t.

So he sold the house. Not because Sam Gamgee was cheap. Because two contracts hit the same desk with the same number on them, pointing opposite ways.

The rest of the cast got the same deal

He wasn’t singled out, though. That’s the part people miss.

New Line shot all three at once, one long gamble on a fantasy epic nobody was sure would land. The cast signed for modest money with no gap between films — and you can’t hold out for a raise on the sequel when there’s no pause before the sequel. Smart, if you’re the studio. Rough, if you’re the hobbit.

Orlando Bloom says he made $175,000 for all three. Elijah Wood was reportedly offered something similar up front, though he’s waved the figure off since as inaccurate and, anyway, not the point. Cate Blanchett has a running joke about how little the whole thing paid.

Everybody took the haircut. Astin’s just the one whose mortgage matched his fee to the dollar.

The residuals never came

Fine, you’d say. Movie’s a risk, studio hedges its bet, actors gamble on themselves. Standard stuff.

Except it stopped being a risk about twenty-three years ago.

Return of the King won eleven Oscars. The trilogy’s been resold on every format invented since — DVD, Blu-ray, the extended cuts, 4K, streaming. There’s a 25th anniversary this year. A Hobbit trilogy. A Gollum movie inbound. Amazon dropped north of a billion on Rings of Power. Middle-earth is about as close to a money-printing machine as film owns.

Astin sees none of it. Flat fee, 2001, thanks for coming.

He’s doing fine, and he’ll be the first to say so — Stranger Things, the Turtles, the convention tables, a book. “Very financially comfortable,” is how he puts it now. Nobody’s passing a hat.

But strip it to the numbers and it just sits there. Nearly three billion made. A quarter million paid. Zero in residuals across twenty-two years and eleven Academy Awards, to the guy whose entire job was making you believe the small, decent one could carry the hero up the mountain when the hero couldn’t walk.

He carried it. He never got a cut of what it hauled.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• The Guardian — Astin’s July 2026 interview and his quotes on the pay gap and selling the house

• Jim & Sam Show (2017, via The Independent) — the original $250,000 / $75,000-per-film account, the matching mortgage, and no residuals

• The Howard Stern Show (2019, via AOL) — Orlando Bloom’s $175,000 for all three

• Business Insider / Variety — the back-to-back production structure and Elijah Wood’s response to the figure

• Parade / Independent — Astin’s current “very financially comfortable” status and the trilogy’s $2.9B gross and 11 Oscars

New owner Byron Allen cut roughly 180 people, about 35% of BuzzFeed, weeks after buying the near-bankrupt company for $120 million. He wants to pivot it to free streaming and AI. So where does a text site like HuffPost land in that?

BuzzFeed taught the whole internet how to go viral. The quiz about which sandwich you are. The listicle you sent the group chat at 2 a.m. For about a decade, everybody was copying BuzzFeed.

This week it cut a third of itself.

What got cut

A filing on July 27 laid it out. Around 180 jobs gone, roughly 35% of what was left. The cuts run across everything — the main site, the news outlet HuffPost, the recipe brand Tasty, the film and TV studio.

BuzzFeed was already down to about 510 people. Call it 330 when the dust settles.

The memo said what these always say. Important changes, path to sustainable growth, worked through every scenario to save as many jobs as they could. You’ve read it before. The one hard number underneath it: about $30 million a year in savings.

The company was nearly gone

Nobody guts a company by a third over one bad quarter. This was closer to the edge than that.

In March, BuzzFeed told its own investors there was “substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.” That’s the accounting world’s polite way of saying the business might not make it to Christmas. It was $58.4 million in debt and losing something like $15 million every three months.

Enter Byron Allen. The comedian who built himself into a media mogul bought control for $120 million in May and put cash in fast to stop the bleeding. Jonah Peretti, who’d run the place for two decades, stepped aside as CEO. He’s President of BuzzFeed AI now, which is a sentence worth sitting with.

Allen runs it now. The layoff is the first thing he’s done with it.

Allen doesn’t want a magazine

When he bought in, Allen said the quiet part out loud — BuzzFeed should be “chasing YouTube and the other big tech platforms.” Free streaming. User-made video. The stuff his empire already does, over at Allen Media Group, with The Weather Channel and a stack of local stations and ad-supported streaming channels.

He’s a TV-and-streaming operator. Always has been. A guy like that doesn’t look at a website full of writers and see the future.

And the rescue doesn’t close the gap anyway. The cut saves about $30 million a year. The losses were running near $60 million a year. Trim thirty off a sixty-million hole and you’ve still got a hole. Whatever this is, it’s not the last round.

The pipe that fed BuzzFeed got shut off

There’s a bleak logic to BuzzFeed of all companies going down this way.

It went public in 2021 worth $1.5 billion, the golden child of digital media, living proof that viral content could be a real business. Then it started falling. Shut down its Pulitzer-winning news division in 2023. Sold Complex. Shed staff, over and over, for years.

What made BuzzFeed was traffic, and specifically Facebook firing millions of people at a quiz about sandwiches.

That firehose got turned off.

Social platforms quit sending readers anywhere, Google started answering questions on its own results page, and now AI reads you the article so you never open it. The referral economy BuzzFeed was built on got dismantled by the exact platforms that built it.

It’s not alone in the wreckage, either. The BBC’s cutting 2,000 jobs. The Washington Post cut a third of its business earlier this year. Same broken pipe, one newsroom after another. BuzzFeed’s just the most fitting corpse, because it was the purest version of the thing that stopped working.

So is HuffPost toast?

Straight answer first: no, not right now. HuffPost got hammered in this round, but nothing in the filing says it’s closing. Cut hard, still standing.

The longer answer is where it gets uncomfortable.

HuffPost is a text newsroom. Its new owner talks about streaming and AI and basically nothing else. It sits inside a company that just told its writers, with a third of the layoffs, that writing isn’t the plan — and that’s still $30 million short of breaking even, so there’s likely more coming.

Run down that list and a news site is the thing that fits worst and costs the most.

Nobody’s switched off the lights on HuffPost. But if you worked there, you wouldn’t sleep great this week.

BuzzFeed spent ten years teaching the internet a trick. It’s being handed to someone who wants to do that trick with video and machines, and the people who invented it are carrying boxes to their cars.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• Variety / The Hollywood Reporter — the 180 layoffs, the 35% figure, the 510-employee base, the $29–32M savings, and the leadership memo

• Deadline — Allen’s “chasing YouTube” comments, the free-streaming pivot, and Peretti’s move to President of BuzzFeed AI

• The New York Times (via GV Wire) — the $58.4M debt, the going-concern warning, and the acquisition terms

• Press Gazette — the broader 2026 journalism layoff tally, including the BBC and Washington Post cuts

• HotAir / layoffhedge — the $15M quarterly loss against the $30M projected savings, and BuzzFeed’s 2021 IPO valuation

Months before this week’s BBC documentary detailed sexual misconduct allegations against Jared Leto, Amazon had already scrubbed him from Masters of the Universe’s marketing — no premiere, no press, his face buried in CGI. Reporting says the studio did it on purpose. The allegations are unproven, and Leto denied earlier versions.

This week the BBC released a documentary accusing Jared Leto of sexual misconduct.

Amazon had already written him out of his own movie two months earlier.

The documentary

The BBC documentary Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret features 10 women describing encounters with Leto between 2002 and 2016. Four allege criminal sexual conduct, and according to the BBC, all four say they were teenagers at the time.

The BBC has said it has not proven a crime; it gathered testimony and says it corroborated parts of it with contemporaneous messages and interviews. Leto did not respond to the broadcaster’s requests for comment.

Last year, when the outlet Air Mail published a similar set of allegations, his representatives expressly denied them.

That’s the appropriate amount to say about unproven allegations. They’re serious, they’re contested, and they’re a matter for a court, not a gaming-and-pop-culture site. What isn’t unproven is what Amazon did.

The erasure

Leto plays Skeletor in Amazon MGM’s Masters of the Universe, which opened June 5. He was the biggest name attached to the film. You would never have known it from the campaign.

He wasn’t at the world premiere on May 18. He skipped CinemaCon, Comic-Con, and the entire press tour. He didn’t do a single talk show or junket.

He never posted about the movie once on an Instagram account with more than 11 million followers. Every other lead worked the circuit. Leto simply wasn’t there.

And his face never appears. Skeletor is buried under so much CGI that, as several outlets noted, a viewer could watch the whole film and not realize Leto was in it until his name scrolled by in the credits.

It was deliberate

This wasn’t Leto being reclusive. According to Puck, the absence was at Amazon’s request.

Puck reported the studio was “downplaying” his involvement, that Leto had effectively been kept quiet since production wrapped, and that he wasn’t happy about it.

He’d been paid a reported $5 million for the role, a fee that contractually included promotion he then didn’t do. The studio paid for a promoting movie star and chose, on purpose, not to use him.

For a film carrying a reported $175 million budget, sidelining your biggest name is not a casual decision. Somebody ran the numbers and decided Leto was worth more hidden than seen.

Why they did it

Two reasons, and the reporting names both.

One was the allegations. The Air Mail report had been public since summer 2025, so by the time Masters rolled out, Amazon already knew it had a star with sexual misconduct claims attached. Distancing the brand from that is a straightforward, if cold, corporate reflex.

The other was money. Leto’s recent record as a leading man is genuinely bad. Morbius became a punchline and flopped twice after Sony misread its own meme.

Tron: Ares underperformed last year.

Masters of the Universe itself went on to bomb, pulling in around $100 million against that $175 million budget. Whatever star power Leto once carried into a genre film, the box office had stopped agreeing.

So Amazon had a lead who was both a reputational risk and a commercial one, wearing a mask that made him invisible anyway. Hiding him cost the studio nothing and removed two problems at once.

No, they didn’t need to see the future

It’s tempting to read the timing as foresight, that Amazon buried Leto because it knew the BBC documentary was coming. The reporting doesn’t support that, and it doesn’t need to.

Everything the studio acted on was already public. The 2025 allegations were out. The flops were on the record. Amazon didn’t have to predict this week’s documentary to conclude, back in the spring, that Leto was a liability worth minimizing. The warning signs weren’t secret. They were just being ignored by everyone except the studio holding a $175 million receipt.

Leto did promote Tron: Ares after those 2025 allegations surfaced. He wasn’t erased from that one. Which suggests the Masters silence wasn’t purely about the claims, and that his sinking box office value and a role that reduced him to an unrecognizable voice were doing real work too.

The part that should stick

Strip out the specifics and this is a story about how the machine handles a problem star now.

It doesn’t recast. It doesn’t eat the cost or make a statement. It quietly turns down the volume, leaves the name in the credits to honor the contract, and lets the character do the selling while the actor stays home. Leto got his $5 million. Amazon got its movie without the face attached. Everyone’s lawyers stayed happy.

The documentary aired this week. The studio had already made its decision in the spring, on the evidence it had, and moved on. By the time the rest of the industry was reacting, Amazon had been done for months.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• BBC — the documentary Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret, the number of accusers, and the corroboration and no-response details

• Deadline / Variety / The Hollywood Reporter — the specifics of the allegations, Leto’s non-response, and his reps’ prior denial of the 2025 Air Mail report

• Puck (via SlashFilm, Den of Geek, Gizmodo) — the reporting that Leto’s absence was at Amazon’s request, the gag order, the $5M fee, and the studio “downplaying” his involvement

• The A.V. Club / ComicBookMovie — Leto’s absence from the premiere, CinemaCon, Comic-Con, and the press tour, and the CGI-obscured performance

• Den of Geek — the timeline point that the allegations predated casting and that Leto still promoted Tron: Ares, indicating box office was also a factor

Sony dropped the first full trailer for Jumanji: Open World on July 28, and it flips the whole premise. This time the game doesn’t pull people in. It breaks out.

The threequel hits theaters Christmas Day, December 25, 2026.

Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Karen Gillan are all back. So is the chaos, except now it’s loose in the real world instead of trapped in a jungle.

What happens in the Jumanji: Open World trailer

The setup picks up right where The Next Level left off. At the end of that movie, a repairman accidentally switched the game back on. Now the jungle is pouring out of it.

The trailer opens with that repairman finding an old game console. Then the camera pulls back to a house with storm clouds boiling overhead, and a pack of ostriches stampeding down a real street.

The hook this time is the flip. The avatars, Dr. Bravestone and the rest, end up in the real world, face-to-face with the people who played as them in the previous films. To fix the collapsing line between the two worlds, everyone has to go back into the game one more time.

The official synopsis calls it the “hilarious final installment.” This is the end of the modern trilogy, and the marketing isn’t hiding it.

The team behind Jumanji: Open World

The core group that made the reboots work is intact.

Jake Kasdan is back directing, his third Jumanji in a row after 2017’s Welcome to the Jungle and 2019’s The Next Level. He co-wrote the script with franchise regulars Jeff Pinkner and Scott Rosenberg.

Johnson produces through his Seven Bucks Productions banner alongside Dany Garcia, Hiram Garcia, Matt Tolmach, and Kasdan. Composer Henry Jackman returns to score.

The cast list runs deep past the main four. Nick Jonas, Awkwafina, Alex Wolff, Morgan Turner, Madison Iseman, Rhys Darby, and Danny DeVito all come back, with Dan Hildebrand and Jack Jewkes joining as newcomers.

The modern Jumanji movies have made over $1.7 billion

There’s a reason Sony keeps sending people back to the jungle.

Welcome to the Jungle pulled in more than $962 million worldwide. The Next Level followed with over $801 million. Together the two modern films cleared $1.7 billion.

The reboots turned Chris Van Allsburg’s story into a video game premise: players get sucked in and pilot avatars with specific powers and very specific weaknesses. That body-swap comedy, Johnson playing a nervous teenager, Black playing a self-absorbed one, carried both movies.

Open World keeps that engine and changes the setting. Instead of the humans going into the game, the game comes to them.

When and where to see Jumanji: Open World

The film opens in theaters on December 25, 2026, in IMAX and premium large formats.

That Christmas date is a change. Sony originally set the movie for December 11, then moved it back two weeks to avoid opening right before “Dunesday,” the fan nickname for the December 18 double release of Dune: Part Three and Avengers: Doomsday.

So Jumanji cedes early December to the heavy hitters and takes the holiday slot instead, the same late-December window that worked for the first two films.

The game’s been in the console for seven years. Christmas morning, it gets out.

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This article was brought to you in part by The Reefers of more.clownfishtv.com. Free subscribers get articles like this one in their inbox. Paid subscribers get the full Clownfish TV podcast feed, livestreams, and members-only episodes that never hit YouTube.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture, watch @ClownfishTV on YouTube and find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and iHeart.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

Hat Tips:

• Sony Pictures via the official Jumanji trailer and synopsis (July 28, 2026), verified for the trailer release, the real-world premise, the “hilarious final installment” synopsis, and the December 25 date reiteration

• Deadline (July 28, 2026), verified for the trailer details, the repairman-and-console opening, the ostriches, the modern trilogy box office figures, and the Chris Van Allsburg source credit

• Variety (July 28, 2026), verified for the full returning cast, the newcomers, the combined $1.7 billion gross, and the “third and final movie” framing

• Screen Rant (July 28, 2026), verified for Jake Kasdan directing, the Pinkner and Rosenberg co-writing credit, the pickup from The Next Level’s ending, and the Dunesday-avoidance date move

• GamesRadar and The Wrap (April 2026), verified for the shift from December 11 to Christmas Day and the reasoning behind it

John Hight is out as WotC president a week after Hasbro wrote down $56 million in canceled video games he oversaw. Magic and D&D are printing money. The exit terms — advisor, onboard your own replacement, terminable — don’t read like a clean resignation.

Wizards of the Coast is losing its president. Again. After two years. Again.

John Hight is stepping down effective September 1, and the official word is the usual warm nothing about gratitude and a strong business. Then you read how the exit is structured and when it landed, and a different story shows up.

What the filing says

The news came out the way these things do now: a Hasbro SEC filing on July 27, caught by GamesIndustry.biz. Nobody announces this from a stage.

Hight and Hasbro signed a “Transitional Advisory Services Agreement.” He vacates the president role September 1, then sticks around up to a year as an advisor reporting straight to Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks. His job in that year, per the reporting, is to help onboard whoever replaces him. There is no replacement yet. The search, internal and external, is only just starting.

One more clause worth its weight: that advisory year runs unless he’s terminated first.

So the arrangement is: give up the title now, train the person who takes it, and stay on a leash that Hasbro can cut whenever it likes. Companies have a word for this, and it isn’t “resignation.”

The video games he oversaw just got torched

Here’s the timing that makes it click.

One week before this filing, Hasbro took a $56 million impairment charge against its video game portfolio and canceled every game slated for 2028 and beyond. Those canceled projects were, almost all of them, under Hight’s purview.

Hight ran WotC’s video game efforts. He came from Blizzard, where he spent 13 years and ran the Warcraft franchise, and he was hired in 2024 partly to build Hasbro’s video game ambitions out. He talked up a Dungeons & Dragons MMORPG that never materialized. Cocks has since said Hasbro is cutting its digital spending by at least 25% and pulling back from big internal game development.

You hire a video game executive to grow the video games. Then you cancel the video games and write off the cost. The video game executive leaving a week later is not a mystery that requires a detective.

Magic is fine. The video games weren’t.

And this is the part that sharpens it, because WotC is not a company in trouble. Not remotely.

Magic: The Gathering just posted another monster quarter, up more than 30%. Dungeons & Dragons is healthy. The tabletop side of Wizards is the single most valuable engine Hasbro owns, and Hasbro’s own statement leans on exactly that: “There is no change to the strength of the Wizards business.”

Which is true, and also a tell. The strength of the business was never the cards. It was the video games, the expensive bet Hasbro just walked away from. WotC is a spectacular tabletop company that keeps trying to become a video game company and keeps flinching. Hight was hired for the part that flinched.

The Exodus and Warlock games still on the board for 2027 are described as on track. Everything past that got the axe, and so, functionally, did the man in charge of it.

A two-year revolving door

Step back and the pattern is hard to miss.

Cynthia Williams ran WotC and Hasbro Gaming from 2022 until April 2024. She came from Microsoft and the Xbox side. She lasted about two years, then left. Hight took over in August 2024, came from the video game world, and is gone at two years almost to the month. A predecessor before them lasted about the same.

Two years, out. Two years, out. For the crown jewel of a public company, that’s not a leadership pipeline, it’s a turnstile. And the two most recent hires to spin through it were both video game people brought in to make Wizards more than a card company, who both departed as the video game plans came apart.

What “stepping down” actually means

To be fair to the official version, Wizards did not say Hight was fired. It said he’s transitioning, thanked him, and moved on. He may well have wanted out. People leave good jobs.

But look at what’s actually on paper.

A sudden exit revealed in a legal filing, not a farewell post. An advisory role built around training his own successor. A termination clause hanging over that role. All of it landing one week after a $56 million write-down on his division, and two days before Wizards takes the stage at Gen Con to sell the future of Dungeons & Dragons.

Read that structure and “stepping down” starts to look like the polite label on a managed exit. Hasbro gets to keep the number strong, the keynote clean, and the story quiet. Hight gets a year of advisory pay and a soft place to land.

The cards are still printing money. The video game dream cost fifty-six million dollars and a president, and Wizards is now looking for the next one to run through the door.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• Hasbro SEC 8-K filing (July 27, 2026, via GamesIndustry.biz) — the Transitional Advisory Services Agreement, the September 1 transition, and the advisory-role terms

• PC Gamer — the reading of the advisory year as terminable and the connection to Cocks’ digital-spending pullback

• TheGamer / dungeonsanddragonsfan.com — the $56 million write-down landing a week earlier, the games under Hight’s purview, and the two-days-before-Gen-Con timing

• VG Times / Shacknews — Hight’s background, the Exodus and Warlock 2027 slate, and Wizards’ “no change to the strength” statement

• Retail Dive / TipRanks — Cynthia Williams’ 2022–2024 tenure and her Microsoft and Xbox background, establishing the two-year pattern

Cracker Barrel announced on July 27 that CEO Julie Masino is stepping down August 10, roughly a year after a logo redesign triggered a national backlash, a stock drop, and a Trump post.

Cracker Barrel announced on July 27 that CEO Julie Masino is stepping down. She exits as CEO and board member on August 10 and stays on in an advisory role through October 9.

Her replacement is David Deno, former CEO of Bloomin’ Brands, the parent company of Outback Steakhouse.

The press release credits “a comprehensive succession planning and search process.” It does not mention the logo. Everyone else does.

Why Cracker Barrel’s logo rebrand caused a backlash

Masino took over Cracker Barrel in 2023 and set out to modernize a chain founded in 1969.

That meant a $700 million overhaul across the company’s 660-plus stores: refreshed menus, decluttered dining rooms, and less of the mismatched, tchotchke-covered wall décor the chain was known for.

Then came the logo. On August 19, 2025, Cracker Barrel unveiled a text-only design that dropped the “Old Timer,” the man leaning on a barrel who’d been on the sign since 1977.

The company later said the goal was practical, to read better on highway billboards for passing drivers. That’s not how it landed.

The logo fight went national fast

Social media trashed the redesign within hours, calling it generic and, in one widely shared phrase, “brand suicide.”

It didn’t stay a design argument. Prominent conservative figures framed the change as the company going “woke,” and President Trump publicly called on Cracker Barrel to bring the old logo back.

The money moved with the mood. The stock slid, dropping around 12% as the fight escalated, and comment sections filled with calls for Masino to be fired.

Somebody put up a “Fire the CEO” billboard along Interstate 40 in Nashville, styled to look like the rebranded logo. It turned out to be the work of Sardar Biglari, the Steak ‘n Shake owner and a longtime Cracker Barrel shareholder with his own history against the board.

Cracker Barrel reversed the rebrand in a week

The retreat was fast. Less than a week after the backlash began, Cracker Barrel announced it was keeping the Old Timer.

“We said we would listen, and we have,” the company posted on August 26.

Masino later admitted the miss directly. “We messed up,” she said in a November interview, adding that the intent was never ideological and that the data hadn’t shown the team how much people saw themselves in that logo.

There was an odd wrinkle, too. Masino told an investor summit that the original uproar may have been amplified by bots, meaning some of the fire that reshaped a 55-year-old company’s plans might not have come from actual customers.

Cracker Barrel says the turnaround is working

Here’s the part that complicates the tidy “backlash claims CEO” story.

The exit comes one week after Cracker Barrel raised its profitability outlook for fiscal 2026 and pointed to signs the turnaround is taking hold. The company reverted the logo, refroze the makeover plans, leaned back into nostalgia, and started clawing back customers.

The damage was still real. The chain reported a 7% revenue drop and a 10% decline in customer visits in fiscal Q2 2026, fallout the company tied to the rebrand.

So the timeline reads two ways. Either Masino steadied the ship and left on a high note, or she rebranded the company into a ditch and got shown the door once the worst had passed. The release, naturally, goes with the first one.

Who is David Deno, the new Cracker Barrel CEO

Deno takes over August 10 with four decades in restaurants and retail behind him.

He ran Bloomin’ Brands from 2019 to 2024, was its CFO before that, and held senior finance and operations jobs at Yum! Brands, Pizza Hut, and Best Buy. He currently sits on the boards of Krispy Kreme and Panera Brands.

That’s a resume built on operations and balance sheets, not brand reinvention. After the year Cracker Barrel just had, that’s almost certainly the point.

The Old Timer keeps his spot on the sign. The CEO who tried to move him does not.

Want More Clownfish TV?

This article was brought to you in part by The Reefers of more.clownfishtv.com. Free subscribers get articles like this one in their inbox. Paid subscribers get the full Clownfish TV podcast feed, livestreams, and members-only episodes that never hit YouTube.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture, watch @ClownfishTV on YouTube and find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and iHeart.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

Hat Tips:

• Cracker Barrel via PR Newswire (July 27, 2026), verified for the succession announcement, the August 10 effective date, Masino’s advisory role through October 9, David Deno’s appointment and full career history, and the board chairman’s statement

• Fox Business (July 27, 2026), verified for the departure timing one week after the raised outlook, the $700 million overhaul across 660-plus restaurants, and Masino’s December earnings comments

• Fox News (July 27, 2026), verified for the raised fiscal 2026 profitability outlook and the framing of the exit against the rebrand fallout

• Associated Press via Yahoo (July 27, 2026), verified for the conservative backlash, the “woke” accusations, Rep. Byron Donalds’ comment, and the August 26 revert to the old logo

• The Hill (October 2025), verified for the stock beginning to fall within days, Trump’s call to revert the logo, and the logo being the brand’s “fifth evolution”

• Yahoo Finance (June 2026), verified for the “Fire the CEO” billboard on Interstate 40, Sardar Biglari’s involvement, and the calls for Masino’s resignation

• NRN and OutKick (October–November 2025), verified for Masino’s “we messed up” comments, the bot-amplification claim, and the 1977 introduction of the Old Timer

• The Mirror via AOL (2026), verified for the 7% revenue drop and 10% decline in customer visits in fiscal Q2 2026

Sony Electronics posted an ad for a turntable on July 25 promoting the “ritual of vinyl,” just three weeks after PlayStation announced the end of physical game discs. Same parent company, giving two different messages.

On July 25, Sony Electronics posted an ad for its LX3BT turntable. The pitch: “Rediscover the warmth, detail, and ritual of vinyl.” Drop the needle, press play, hear music the way it was meant to be heard, implying physical records offered the best listening experience.

Twenty-four days earlier, on July 1, PlayStation announced it was ending physical game discs, ending decades of tangible copies.

Both accounts belong to Sony.

Why people are angry at Sony over physical media

The short version: one arm of Sony is telling you physical media is a warm, tactile ritual worth owning, while another arm is telling you it’s obsolete.

PlayStation said on July 1 that new games will stop shipping on discs starting in 2028. Everything goes digital. The reaction was immediate and it hasn’t cooled off.

Players point out the obvious things you lose. You can’t resell a digital game. You can’t lend it, trade it, or leave it to anyone. You don’t really own it — you own a license Sony can revoke, and the game vanishes if the storefront ever goes dark.

Then Sony Electronics shows up selling the exact thing gamers just got told they can’t have. A physical format. Something you hold, keep, and actually own. All while claiming that is the superior way to experience music.

The backlash has been swarming Sony’s other accounts for weeks

The vinyl ad didn’t land in a vacuum. Sony-branded accounts have been under siege since the disc news broke, and not just the PlayStation ones.

Techdirt reported that when the main Sony account tweeted a single spider emoji to tease the next Spider-Man movie, a post that normally draws a few hundred replies pulled in over 3,000 — most of them people yelling about the discs.

PlayStation itself went quiet for nearly a week after the announcement, then came back on July 7 to promote a wireless flight stick. That video reportedly took 12,000 angry comments in under an hour.

So a turntable ad from another Sony division, three weeks into all that, was never going to be read as a coincidence. It read as the punchline.

Sony literally manufactures the physical media it says is dead

Here’s the part that makes the whole thing worse.

Sony Music presses its own vinyl. It reopened an in-house record plant in Shizuoka, Japan in 2018, its first vinyl production in nearly thirty years, specifically to cash in on the vinyl boom.

That boom is real. Vinyl outsold CDs in the US in 2025 for the fourth year running.

So inside the same company: the music division builds a factory to make more physical media, the electronics division sells you the machine to play it, and the games division decides physical media is a relic and phases it out.

Physical is a premium ritual when Sony sells the record. Physical is obsolete when Sony sells the game. The difference isn’t the format. It’s which quarter’s revenue it lands in.

Sony’s different divisions, one very mixed message

To be fair to the org chart, these are genuinely separate businesses. Sony Interactive Entertainment runs PlayStation. Sony Electronics sells the turntables. Sony Music presses the records. They have different bosses and different bottom lines, and no single executive necessarily signed off on both messages.

That’s the actual explanation. It’s also not much of a defense.

A customer doesn’t see three divisions. They see one logo telling them vinyl is worth savoring and discs are worth scrapping, in the same month, on the same platform. The corporate structure explains how it happened. It doesn’t make it read any less ridiculous.

Consumer backlash

Sony Entertainment’s post has received a lot of backlash.

“Somebody tell the guys at PlayStation. Apparently, physical media is worth supporting even if it is a small niche. PS games are much bigger than vinyl. Yet for some reason, they feel the need to kill gaming culture for profit. Shame!” - Does It Play?

“You see how vinyl has made a comeback and is selling like hotcakes, and you go and wipe out the physical format of video games. ¡Hypocrites!”- MiX Mistery

“I thought physical media was obsolete so why promote it? This is proof that Sony is throwing players under the bus for the sake of shareholders.” - Eybo

“The complete lack of co-ordination at Sony is breathtaking”- Jamie ZX

“wow a physical turntable how amazing. This just got me to follow every branch of Sony social media to let my feelings known across EVERY division” -AjH

“Wow physical media??????? So music is fine but a game isn’t???? Cool” - Jake Ryan

“oh so NOW you care about physical media”- star wyse

“Oh, so y’all do understand the importance of physical so media and the way things are “meant to be” used. Records are way older than video games, but for some reason you want to kill them anyway. Absurd.” - The Danliest

The needle drops. The disc gets deleted. Same company, same week, and only one of those is a “ritual.”

Want More Clownfish TV?

This article was brought to you in part by The Reefers of more.clownfishtv.com. Free subscribers get articles like this one in their inbox. Paid subscribers get the full Clownfish TV podcast feed, livestreams, and members-only episodes that never hit YouTube.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture, watch @ClownfishTV on YouTube and find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and iHeart.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

Hat Tips:

• Sony Electronics via @SonyElectronics on X (July 25, 2026), verified for the LX3BT turntable ad and its “warmth, detail, and ritual of vinyl” copy

• PlayStation Blog (July 1, 2026), verified for the announcement ending physical game disc production for new releases starting in 2028

• Techdirt (July 8, 2026), verified for the backlash swarming unrelated Sony accounts, the Spider-Man spider-emoji tweet drawing over 3,000 replies, PlayStation’s week of silence, and the flight-stick video drawing roughly 12,000 angry comments in under an hour

• The Vinyl Factory and Official Charts (2017), verified for Sony Music reopening in-house vinyl pressing in Shizuoka, Japan in 2018 after nearly thirty years

• Record Store Directory (June 2026), verified for vinyl outselling CDs in the US in 2025 for the fourth consecutive year

Hasbro spent years alienating D&D fans and creators, from the OGL disaster to layoffs and a failed virtual tabletop. Critical Role built its own hit system and a media empire in the gap. Now Hasbro is reportedly spending big on an official show to win back a crowd it drove away.

Dungeons & Dragons is the biggest tabletop role-playing game on the planet. It is also, somehow, the one playing catch-up.

That’s the weird spot Hasbro has talked itself into. The company that owns D&D is now hustling to look relevant in a corner of the hobby it basically invented, chasing an audience it spent the last few years pushing away. How it got here is a straight line of self-inflicted wounds.

How D&D burned its goodwill

Start with the big one. In 2023, a leaked draft of a new Open Game License showed Wizards of the Coast planning to gut the deal that let creators build off D&D. Royalties. The right to use fan creations without paying. Language that read like a landlord raising the rent on a house other people built.

Fans revolted. They canceled D&D Beyond subscriptions in droves, the hashtag campaigns lit up, and Wizards retreated, publicly admitting it “rolled a 1.”

It walked the license back. It didn’t walk the damage back. That was the moment a big chunk of the community stopped giving the company the benefit of the doubt, and they haven’t handed it back since.

Critical Role stopped needing Hasbro

Here’s the part that should scare Hasbro. While it was busy alienating people, the single biggest ambassador D&D ever had quietly built its own exit.

Critical Role, the voice-actor crew whose weekly D&D game turned into a media empire, launched its own tabletop system, Daggerheart, in May 2025 through its Darrington Press label. It wasn’t a side project. It was a real, polished rival that reviewers said fixed some of D&D’s oldest problems, and it sold like crazy out of the gate.

Now, credit where it’s due. Critical Role’s flagship Campaign 4 actually still runs on D&D, not Daggerheart. They didn’t torch the bridge.

They just made sure they’d never need it. Between Daggerheart, two animated shows on Amazon, and their own subscription streaming platform, Critical Role became a full entertainment company that happens to play D&D, not a D&D show. And they weren’t the only ones drifting. Acquisitions Incorporated, once a semi-official D&D showcase, packed up and moved to Daggerheart too.

When the people who sell your game to the world start building their own game, that’s a problem no earnings report fully captures.

Hasbro is now playing catch-up

Which brings us to Dungeon Masters, Wizards’ first official actual-play show, launched this spring with a cast stacked with Baldur’s Gate 3 voices and a clear target painted on the format Critical Role popularized.

The tell is the spending. Wizards is putting real marketing money behind Dungeon Masters, buying the promotion to shove it in front of as many eyeballs as possible.

That’s normal for a launch. It’s also a confession. You don’t spend like that from a position of strength. You spend like that when you’re behind and you know it, trying to buy your way into a room you used to own the keys to.

Nintendo abandoned this space years ago, let it grow up without them, and now has to rent its way back in.

(Wait, wrong company. Easy mistake to make lately.)

The alienation didn’t stop in 2023

The frustrating part for fans is that the goodwill-burning never really let up.

Wizards killed Sigil, its big virtual tabletop, in March 2025 and laid off most of the team, folding a once-hyped feature into D&D Beyond. It ran more layoffs across 2025 even as the company posted 45% revenue growth that year, which is a hard thing to explain to a fanbase watching the people who make their game get cut while the game prints money.

By April 2026, Wizards staff were moving to unionize, citing those layoffs and fears about generative AI creeping into the work. AI has been its own running trust sore, with fans repeatedly accusing the company of sneaking machine-made art into products.

Wizards keeps insisting it doesn’t use AI for D&D art or text, and honestly the denials might be true, but “we swear we’re not doing the thing you don’t trust us about” is a rough place for a brand to live.

Every one of these is defensible on a spreadsheet. Stacked together, they read as a company that treats D&D as a revenue stream to squeeze, not a community to keep.

Still the biggest game in the world

Let’s be fair, though, because “Hasbro fumbled” isn’t the same as “D&D is dying.” It isn’t. D&D is still enormous and still wildly profitable, one of the most valuable things Hasbro owns.

So the catch-up isn’t about sales. It’s about trust and culture and the entertainment lead, the stuff that made D&D cool again in the first place, and that stuff Hasbro handed to Critical Role and never got back.

Money can buy a stacked cast and a slot in your recommended feed. It can’t buy back the trust Hasbro spent, and until the company sorts that out, it’ll keep paying to chase a lead it used to hold for free.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• Axios / Sportskeeda — the 2023 OGL 1.1 leak, the fan revolt, the D&D Beyond cancellations, and Wizards’ “rolled a 1” retreat

• Wargamer / dungeonsanddragonsfan.com — Critical Role Campaign 4 staying on D&D 5E, and Daggerheart’s launch and reception

• AOL / Polygon — Daggerheart’s May 2025 release, pricing, and reviews, plus Critical Role’s media empire

• Variety / The Toy Book — Dungeon Masters’ launch and its positioning against Critical Role and Dimension 20

• KIRO 7 / Gizmodo / The Seattle Times — the Sigil VTT shutdown and layoffs, the 45% revenue growth, and the 2026 unionization over layoffs and AI

• Wargamer / PrintMTG — Wizards’ AI-art controversies and its stated no-AI policy

Scopely gave an exclusive Mewtwo to about 2,000 people who attended Pokemon Go’s 10th anniversary event. Some listed it on eBay. Bids hit $10,100. A creator ran a sting on one seller, who posted a four-minute apology begging not to be banned. The scarcity here is a choice.

A Pokemon Go Mewtwo hit $10,100 on eBay after 45 bids.

That’s a database entry.

What’s selling

Pokemon Go celebrated its 10th anniversary by inviting nearly 2,000 players to Times Square to recreate the giant Mewtwo raid from the game’s original 2016 reveal trailer.

Attendees got an exclusive Mewtwo with a Times Square background and guaranteed perfect IVs. Nobody else can get one. Ever.

Then they started showing up on eBay.

One standard version was marked sold for $5,000 or best offer on July 14. A shiny version showed as sold for $4,000 the day before. eBay doesn’t publish the final number when a best offer gets accepted, so the actual take is unknown.

Creator Mike, better known as RaspberryWeiner, flagged a listing that reached $10,100 after 45 bids. Another hit $3,250 on 16 bids. It’s unclear whether either closed.

Selling accounts, currency, or items through third-party platforms violates Pokemon Go’s Player Guidelines. Has for years.

The sting

RaspberryWeiner says he tricked a seller into handing over their Pokemon Go friend code, which identified them as LegoMasterBuild, a player and former content creator.

“Tricked one of these Times Square Background Mewtwo sellers to send me their friend code,” he posted, with a laughing emoji. “EXPOSED!”

The apology

LegoMasterBuild pulled the listing and posted a four-minute video.

“I’m really sorry about the whole YouTube, eBay listing thing,” he said. “I didn’t realize it was against rules and regulations. Obviously, I wouldn’t have done that if I knew.”

He said he’d seen Pokemon Go listings while shopping eBay for other Pokemon products and assumed it was allowed. He admitted he “just wanted to see what would happen” after watching other attendees list theirs.

“I fell for a trap. I was tricked. I am dumb. I’ll admit it. And honestly, I’m really sorry.”

Then he continues: “Please don’t take it out on my account. I worked really hard over these 10 years.”

Both of these can be true

He broke a rule. It’s a real rule and it’s been there forever, and “I saw other people doing it” isn’t a defense.

He’s also a guy who went to a party, got a prize, listed it, and got hunted by a bigger creator running a sting for content, and is now publicly apologizing and asking a corporation not to delete ten years of his life.

RaspberryWeiner doesn’t work for Scopely. Nobody deputized him. He enforced a rule he has no authority over, and posted the receipts with an emoji.

The part nobody’s saying

Here’s what makes this different from every other scalping story.

A Pokemon card has a print run. Concert tickets have seats. The Lorcana drop that broke a Disney Store this week had physical boxes on physical shelves.

The Times Square Mewtwo has none of that. It costs nothing to make. Scopely could hand one to every player on earth tomorrow, at a marginal cost of approximately zero, and the only thing stopping it is a decision somebody made.

That $10,100 bid doesn’t exist because Mewtwo is rare. It exists because a company decided 2,000 people out of millions would get one, and let the rest watch.

That’s not scarcity. That’s a settings toggle.

What’s actually broken

The original backlash wasn’t about eBay. It was that a marquee reward went to invited creators and selected community members, and the resale prices just put a dollar figure on how much everyone else didn’t get.

Scopely and Niantic manufactured a chokepoint out of nothing, gave the keys to 2,000 people, and then the community started hunting each other over it.

The scalpers didn’t decide 2,000. Neither did LegoMasterBuild.

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D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture, watch @ClownfishTV on YouTube and find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and iHeart.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

Hat Tips:

• Dexerto (July 17, 2026), the originating report, verified Pokemon Go’s 10th anniversary event inviting nearly 2,000 players to Times Square to recreate the Mewtwo raid from the game’s original reveal trailer, attendees receiving an exclusive Mewtwo featuring a Times Square background and guaranteed perfect IVs, the resulting backlash that creators and selected community members were favored over the wider player base, one standard Times Square Mewtwo marked sold for $5,000 or best offer on July 14 and a shiny version marked sold for $4,000 the previous day with final prices undisclosed under eBay’s best-offer system, content creator RaspberryWeiner sharing a listing that reached $10,100 after 45 bids and another that reached $3,250 after 16, that it remains unclear whether either transaction completed, and that selling Pokemon Go accounts, currency, or items through third-party platforms is prohibited by the game’s Player Guidelines

• Dexerto and the creators’ public posts on X (July 15-16, 2026), verified RaspberryWeiner’s claim that he tricked a seller into sending their Pokemon Go friend code and his “EXPOSED!” post identifying the seller as player and former content creator LegoMasterBuild, LegoMasterBuild subsequently removing the listing and posting a four-minute apology in which he said “I didn’t realize it was against rules and regulations,” that he had seen Pokemon Go listings while browsing eBay for other Pokemon products, that he “just wanted to see what would happen” after seeing other attendees list theirs, that “I fell for a trap. I was tricked. I am dumb. I’ll admit it,” and his request that Scopely and Niantic not penalize his account after ten years of play

Japan’s Fair Trade Commission inspected Meiji, Lotte, Glico, and three others over suspicions they coordinated ice cream price hikes for years, 10 yen at a time, right as peak summer arrives.

Japan has an alleged ice cream cartel on its hands, and it is exactly as ridiculous and as serious as that sounds.

On June 16, the country’s Fair Trade Commission carried out on-site inspections at six of Japan’s biggest ice cream and confectionery companies, suspecting them of teaming up to fix prices. Officials say it’s the first time Japan has ever investigated a suspected cartel in the frozen dessert business.

What the Fair Trade Commission is investigating

The suspicion is coordination, not just expensive ice cream.

According to Kyodo News and NHK, senior executives at the companies allegedly spent several years holding meetings and trading emails to line up the timing and the size of their price increases. The recommended retail prices reportedly went up in tidy ¥10 steps, about six U.S. cents at a time.

The sharper accusation is the why. Investigators think the hikes were aimed at protecting profits rather than covering real cost increases, and the commission is looking into whether the companies used the cover of general inflation to push prices higher than rising ingredient costs actually justified.

The six ice cream giants that got raided

This isn’t a couple of corner creameries. It’s most of the freezer aisle.

The six are Meiji, Morinaga Milk Industry, Morinaga & Co., Lotte, Ezaki Glico, and Akagi Nyugyo, names that turn up on pudding, chocolate bars, and chewing gum in basically every supermarket and convenience store in the country. Meiji confirmed the raid and said the company would cooperate fully, stating it would “accept with sincerity the fact that our company was raided.” The other five put out similar notes.

Nobody has been found guilty of anything yet. If the commission decides a cartel existed, it can order the firms to clean up their practices and hand over a fine.

How 10 yen at a time adds up

Six cents a tub sounds like nothing. The scale is the point.

Ice cream is huge in Japan, and getting huger. Sales hit a record of more than ¥660 billion in the fiscal year ending in March, fueled by the hottest summer the country has logged since records began in 1989. Multiply a coordinated few-cent bump across that kind of volume, every brand moving in lockstep so no one undercuts anybody, and the small numbers stop being small.

The timing stings too. The raids landed right as summer, the busiest ice cream stretch of the year, gets going.

The company that once apologized for a 10-yen hike

Here’s the detail that makes this one sing.

One of the six, Akagi Nyugyo, makes Garigari-kun, the wildly popular cheap soda-flavored ice pop. Back in 2016, the company raised its price for the first time in 25 years, by a single 10 yen, from ¥60 to ¥70. The reaction became a legend: Akagi ran a TV ad in which its executives lined up and bowed in formal apology to the nation for the increase.

Ten years later, the same company is being investigated for allegedly coordinating 10-yen hikes with its rivals. The apology bow has aged into something a lot less wholesome.

The investigation is just getting started, so it’s worth remembering nobody’s proven a thing. But Japan’s regulators picked a memorable target, and they picked the exact moment everyone reaches for a cold one to do it.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• The Associated Press, via ABC News (June 17, 2026), verified for the six companies, Meiji’s statement, the ¥10 coordination detail, and the products involved

• The Japan Times and Kyodo News (June 16, 2026), verified for the JFTC on-site inspections, the suspicion that the hikes targeted profits rather than ingredient costs, and the executive meetings and emails

• AFP, via Malay Mail (June 17, 2026), verified for the record ¥660 billion in ice cream sales, the hottest-summer-since-1989 context, and Akagi Nyugyo’s confirmation of cooperation

• News On Japan (June 16, 2026), verified that this is the first suspected price cartel investigated in Japan’s ice cream and frozen dessert sector

A federal judge extended the freeze another two weeks. The strange part: Paramount, the company desperate to close, is the one volunteering to stay blocked longer — and the states trying to stop the deal are the ones arguing against more court time.

The Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger cannot close until August 17 at the earliest.

Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín extended her temporary restraining order by another 14 days on Thursday, using the full extension the law allows her.

Now look at who asked for what.

The judge’s reasoning

Martínez-Olguín wrote that she found good cause on several grounds: two pending preliminary injunction motions to resolve, unsettled disputes over the schedule and format of the injunction hearing, and — this is the part worth noticing — the defendants’ “stated willingness to abide by the terms of the TRO for some weeks into the future.”

The defendants are Paramount. Paramount told the court it’s fine staying frozen a while longer.

She also urged both sides to go work out a schedule between themselves rather than have her impose one.

The inversion

Here’s the shape of this that nobody’s saying out loud.

Paramount wants a three-day evidentiary hearing in late August, arguing it needs to cross-examine the states’ witnesses. It has offered to extend the restraining order to make that hearing possible. The company racing a clock is volunteering for more delay.

The states want the judge to rule on the injunction without a multi-day hearing at all. Their attorney James Weingarten argued last week that Paramount was effectively trying to short-circuit the trial process — running an evidentiary hearing before the states have had adequate time to prepare.

So the side that needs speed is buying time, and the side that benefits from delay is pushing for a faster ruling.

Both positions make sense once you look at what’s actually at stake in that hearing. A preliminary injunction wouldn’t pause this deal for two weeks. It would freeze it for however long the full case takes, which is measured in months. Paramount will trade almost any amount of short-term delay for a real shot at defeating it, and it thinks live cross-examination is how it wins. The states, meanwhile, have a strong paper record and no interest in a mini-trial they haven’t prepared for.

The clock that actually matters

None of this is free for Paramount, and the number is calculable.

After September 30, Paramount owes Warner Bros. Discovery a “ticking fee” reported at roughly $7 million a day for every day the deal stays unclosed — a sweetener it offered to win the bidding.

From the new August 17 floor to that deadline is 44 days. If the injunction lands and the deal freezes into October, the meter runs at about $210 million a month, before anyone argues a single point of antitrust law.

Paramount is currently volunteering for delay while that number sits on the horizon. Which tells you how badly it wants to avoid the injunction.

The Writers Guild is now slowing it down

One detail connects to a story from earlier this month.

The judge listed “two preliminary injunction motions” among her reasons for extending. Two, not one. The states filed the first. The Writers Guild of America filed the second, arguing the combined company would become the largest single buyer of film and television writing in the country.

The union’s filing didn’t just add a plaintiff. It added a motion the court has to resolve before anything moves, and the judge said so in her order. Whatever happens on the merits, the WGA has already cost this deal calendar time.

Nearly everyone else has approved it

The structural oddity of the case is how isolated the opposition is.

The Department of Justice cleared the merger in June. The European Union has granted conditional approval. Paramount says it has approvals from Australia and China. The United Kingdom is still reviewing.

So a deal now valued around $111 billion has cleared the U.S. federal antitrust authority and most of the world, and is being held up by twelve state attorneys general and a writers’ union in a courtroom in Oakland.

Paramount’s position is that the whole case is built on bad market definitions. Its spokesperson said the company is confident the evidence will show the states’ “alleged markets and claims of anticompetitive effects are without any basis in modern market realities.”

What happens next

The parties go negotiate a schedule. If they can’t agree, Martínez-Olguín sets one.

Paramount wants three days in late August with witnesses on the stand. The states want a ruling on the papers. The judge has already extended the freeze as far as a temporary restraining order can go, which means the next order she signs on this is the one that decides whether the merger sits still for two more weeks or the rest of the year.

August 17. Then September 30.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• Deadline — the extension to August 17 and Judge Martínez-Olguín’s quoted reasoning on the two injunction motions and Paramount’s willingness to abide by the order

• Variety — Paramount’s push for a three-day evidentiary hearing in late August, the states’ opposition to a multi-day hearing, and James Weingarten’s short-circuit argument

• The Desk — the scheduling detail, the parties’ need to confer, and the E.U. conditional approval and continuing U.K. scrutiny

• NBC News / CNBC — Paramount’s statement on the states’ market definitions, and the Australia and China approvals

• Earlier Deadline reporting — the roughly $7 million per day ticking fee owed after September 30

Michael Eisner ran Disney for two decades and signed off on the Square Enix crossover that became a 24-year franchise. Asked recently why he said yes, he couldn’t recall. Neither, it turns out, can the man who directed it.

Somebody at Disney looked at a pitch for a game where an anime teenager with a key-shaped sword fights alongside Donald Duck, and said yes.

That somebody was Michael Eisner. He does not remember doing it.

The exchange

Reporter Stephen Totilo, writing at Game File, got Eisner at a press conference for Delphi Interactive, a games-industry talent firm the former Disney chief has invested in. Eisner ran Disney from 1984 to 2005, which puts Kingdom Hearts squarely on his watch.

Totilo asked whether he recalled approving a game called Kingdom Hearts.

No.

Totilo prompted him. He’d been pitched it in Tokyo. Final Fantasy plus Disney characters.

“Oh, I remember now,” Eisner said.

And did he remember why he said yes?

“I don’t.”

In fairness, the man greenlit an enormous number of things across two decades running a media empire, and this was 26 years ago. But it’s still a strange gap in the record, because that yes produced a franchise that’s been running for 24 years and is currently building toward Kingdom Hearts IV.

The elevator

The origin story is one of the most repeated legends in games.

Square and Disney’s Japanese operations shared an office building — Arco Towers, in Tokyo. Producer Shinji Hashimoto and Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi had been talking about wanting to make something in the vein of Super Mario 64, and concluded that the only characters on earth with the pull to rival Mario belonged to Disney.

Then Hashimoto ended up in an elevator with a Disney executive.

Development began in February 2000. The game shipped in 2002. Sora, Donald, and Goofy have been at it ever since.

Nomura can’t remember either

Here’s the part nobody’s put next to Eisner’s answer.

Tetsuya Nomura, who directed the thing, got involved because he overheard Hashimoto and Sakaguchi discussing the Disney idea and volunteered on the spot to lead it. He’s told the story many times.

He has also said this: “Now I can’t even remember why I was there when Sakaguchi-san and Hashimoto-san were talking in the first place.”

So the executive who approved Kingdom Hearts can’t remember why he approved it, and the director who created it can’t remember why he was in the room where it happened.

The legend is itself a bad memory

It gets better, because the famous version of the story has been quietly wrong for years, and Nomura keeps having to correct it.

He wasn’t in the elevator. That detail gets attached to him constantly, and he’s said plainly he wasn’t there.

And the elevator conversation wasn’t the pitch. Per Nomura, it ran closer to “it would be great to do something together some time” — not a formal proposal at all. The single most famous moment in this franchise’s history is a casual bit of small talk that got upgraded into a founding myth through two decades of retelling.

Which is, frankly, on brand

The second game in this series is Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, in which Sora climbs a castle and loses his memories one floor at a time while a girl in a white dress quietly rewrites what he thinks happened to him.

Twenty-two years later, the CEO who signed off can’t recall his reasoning, the director can’t recall why he was in the room, and the elevator everyone remembers wasn’t the meeting anyone thought it was.

In this place, to find is to lose, and to lose is to find. Castle Oblivion apparently extends to the executive floor.

Someone might still remember

There’s a chance of getting a straighter answer soon. Disney’s D23 event next month includes a Kingdom Hearts retrospective panel, which is exactly the venue for somebody to walk through how a Final Fantasy studio talked the most protective brand in entertainment into handing over Mickey Mouse.

Whether anyone up there remembers the reasoning is a separate question.

Article compiled with the help of the Pirates & Princesses newsroom.

Pirates and Princesses is your destination for Disney news, theme park updates, and the pop culture you love. From Disney cruises and travel tips to Disney fashion, food, collectibles, and movie news, PNP covers it all. Visit us at piratesandprincesses.net for daily coverage. Follow PNP on Facebook and Instagram, and listen to the Pirates & Princesses podcast on Apple Podcasts and YouTube.

Hat Tips:

• Game File (Stephen Totilo) — the Delphi Interactive press conference and the full exchange with Michael Eisner about greenlighting Kingdom Hearts

• Kotaku (Kenneth Shepard) — surfacing the Game File report and the D23 retrospective panel context

• Famitsu (via TheGamer and Game Rant) — Tetsuya Nomura’s account of how he joined the project and his comment about not remembering why he was in the room

• GamesRadar — Nomura’s correction that the elevator conversation was informal rather than a formal pitch

• Den of Geek / Disney Wiki — the Arco Towers shared-office detail, Hashimoto and Sakaguchi’s Super Mario 64 conversation, and the February 2000 development start

Sega president Shuji Utsumi told Famitsu the company won’t walk away from physical releases, three weeks into the backlash over Sony’s plan to stop making discs in 2028. Utsumi is also the man who wrote the business plan for the first PlayStation.

Sony is ending physical discs for new PlayStation games in January 2028. Sega would like everyone to know it isn’t doing that.

Speaking to Famitsu in an interview published Thursday, Sega president and COO Shuji Utsumi was asked directly about physical software, in the context of Sony’s decision and the noise that has followed it.

What he said

Utsumi’s answer, via machine translation from the Japanese:

“Since we started out as a platform provider, we naturally still value the culture of physical retail. Rather than completely abandoning that, we’re currently working to make the shift so that we can operate while simultaneously taking into account the important aspects of the digital realm.”

Two caveats. It’s a translation, and the English renderings floating around differ — one has him saying “physical culture,” another “the culture of physical retail,” which are not quite the same sentiment. And it was one answer in a long interview that also covered Sonic movies and Sega’s legacy-revival projects, not a policy announcement.

What’s clear enough through the translation: no plan to abandon physical, and an intention to run both.

The backdrop

This lands in the middle of the worst consumer-relations stretch PlayStation has had in years.

Sony confirmed earlier this month that new PlayStation games stop shipping on discs from January 2028. Existing discs still work and retail boxes will carry download codes, but new releases go digital-only.

Players have not moved on. There’s a Dutch legal action representing roughly 1.7 million users, a petition well past 170,000 signatures, and former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden publicly breaking with his old employer. Every PlayStation social post since has been swarmed with disc complaints regardless of subject.

Sony has said essentially nothing. Into that silence walks a competitor with a friendly quote.

Utsumi built the thing he’s declining to copy

Here’s the part that makes this more than corporate positioning.

Before Sega, Utsumi spent time at Sony Computer Entertainment America. Over a 30-year career he produced the business plan for the first PlayStation, oversaw first-party development on the Dreamcast — Sonic Adventure, Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Space Channel 5 — and, at Disney, helped assemble the deal with Square Enix that became Kingdom Hearts.

So the executive publicly declining to follow PlayStation off physical media is a man who helped invent PlayStation. He’s been president and COO of Sega since April 2024, and also runs Sega of America and Sega Europe.

What Sega can actually deliver

Now the limit, because a pledge is only worth what the pledger controls.

Sega doesn’t press its own discs. Sony does. If Sony stops manufacturing PlayStation discs for new titles in 2028, Sega cannot ship a physical PlayStation game after that date no matter how much it values physical retail. Third-party publishers don’t get an exemption from the platform holder’s manufacturing decisions.

In practice, Sega’s commitment means Nintendo cartridges, PC releases, and whatever Xbox decides — Microsoft is drifting the same direction — plus its own Japanese retail business, where physical remains far healthier than in the West.

That’s a real commitment. It’s also a narrower one than the headline suggests.

Why this is easy for Sega to say

The honest read is that Sega’s position costs Sega very little.

Sony has a structural reason to want digital: it takes roughly 30% of every sale through the PlayStation Store. Every disc sold at a retailer is a sale Sony doesn’t fully monetise, and every used disc resold is a sale it gets nothing from.

Killing physical isn’t just cost-cutting, it’s routing all transactions through a storefront Sony owns.

Sega owns no storefront. It sells its games through everyone else’s. For a third-party publisher, physical retail is a distribution channel, not a threat to a platform margin.

Sega gets to be the good guy here partly because it lost the hardware war 25 years ago and never got back in.

Which doesn’t make the statement worthless. Publishers with no obligation to say anything have mostly said nothing, and Sega’s is the first clear commitment from a major Japanese publisher since the Sony announcement. Utsumi didn’t have to answer the question at all.

He answered it in the same interview where he talked about reviving Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio, which is a fairly on-brand week for a company currently selling its own history back to the people who bought it the first time.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• Famitsu — the original interview with Shuji Utsumi covering physical media, Sega’s legacy revivals, and the Sonic film franchise

• Gamereactor / My Nintendo News — the translated Utsumi quotes and the framing against Sony’s 2028 decision

• The Game Business — Utsumi’s career background, including his role in the first PlayStation business plan, Dreamcast first-party development, and the Kingdom Hearts deal

• Earlier reporting — Sony’s January 2028 disc cutoff, the download-codes-in-boxes detail, the Dutch legal action, the petition, and Shawn Layden’s criticism

There’s a lot of chatter lately about tech oligarchs buying up Hollywood. Fair enough. But Warner Bros. has been owned by an internet company, a phone company, and a parking lot conglomerate that also ran funeral parlors. Most of Hollywood has been somebody’s side business since 1966.

The Ellisons are closing in on Warner Bros. Discovery, and the reaction has been loud. Tech money is buying Hollywood. Silicon Valley oligarchs are taking the studios. The barbarians are at the Burbank gate.

Sure. Here’s the ownership history nobody’s bringing up.

AOL, an internet company, owned Warner Bros. for eight years

In January 2001, AOL completed its purchase of Time Warner. That’s America Online, the dial-up company, the free-CD-in-your-mailbox company, the you’ve-got-mail company.

It was the biggest tech company on earth at the time, riding 30 million subscribers and an internet bubble that felt permanent. Under the terms, AOL shareholders owned 55% of the combined company. Time Warner shareholders got 45%, despite bringing most of the actual assets and revenue.

So a tech company didn’t just buy Warner Bros. A tech company bought Warner Bros. and got majority control of the whole thing.

It went catastrophically. The dot-com bubble popped, broadband killed dial-up, and in 2002 the company posted a $98.7 billion annual loss, which remains the worst in American corporate history. Ted Turner personally lost around $8 billion, roughly 80% of his net worth.

“AOL” came off the name in 2003. They spun it off entirely in 2009.

AT&T, a phone company, owned Warner Bros. from 2018 to 2022

AT&T bought Time Warner for $85 billion in 2018 and renamed it WarnerMedia. That’s the telephone company. Founded by Alexander Graham Bell’s people. Owned Bugs Bunny.

It lasted four years. AT&T spun the whole thing off in 2022 and merged it with Discovery, which is how we got the current Warner Bros. Discovery in the first place.

Nobody called AT&T a telecom oligarch buying Hollywood. They just did it, badly, and left.

In 1969, Warner Bros. was bought by a parking lot and funeral home company

This is the one.

Kinney National Company bought Warner Bros.-Seven Arts in 1969 for $64 million. Kinney’s business, at the time, was parking garages, funeral homes, rental cars, and office cleaning.

It was assembled from a four-way merger of a parking system, a memorial chapel chain, a car rental outfit, and a janitorial firm. Its CEO, Steve Ross, had spent the 1960s stapling those together.

That company bought Warner Bros. Then it bought DC Comics the same year. So Superman and Batman were, briefly and literally, owned by a funeral parlor operator with a sideline in valet parking.

And here’s the part that should stop you cold. Kinney was forced to sell off its talent agency to complete the deal, because antitrust law at the time prohibited a single company from owning both a film studio and a talent agency.

Anyway. Kinney eventually dumped the parking and funeral businesses and renamed itself after its most famous holding. That’s where “Warner Communications” comes from. The parking lot company took the studio’s name, not the other way around.

Coca-Cola owned Columbia. Gulf+Western owned Paramount.

Warner isn’t special here, which is sort of the point.

Coca-Cola bought Columbia Pictures in 1982 and ran it until 1989, when it sold to Sony, a Japanese electronics manufacturer. A soda company owned a major studio for seven years.

Gulf+Western took Paramount in 1966 for $125 million. G+W was a sprawling conglomerate with interests in sugar, zinc, auto parts, and mattresses. It was so notorious for swallowing companies that Mel Brooks parodied it in Silent Movie as “Engulf and Devour.”

Transamerica, an insurance and financial services company, bought United Artists in 1967. MGM went to Taft Broadcasting in 1966, then to financier Kirk Kerkorian in 1969.

Universal’s had the wildest ride of all. Over the years it’s been owned by a Japanese electronics firm, a Canadian liquor company, a French water utility, General Electric, and now Comcast, a cable provider.

A French water utility owned Universal Pictures. That happened.

Hollywood hasn’t been independent since roughly 1966

Add it up and a pattern falls out that has nothing to do with tech.

Every major studio except Disney lost its independence in a wave of conglomerate takeovers that started in the mid-1960s and never stopped. Since then the studios have been passed between soda companies, insurance companies, phone companies, liquor companies, utilities, electronics manufacturers, cable operators, and one memorable parking lot magnate.

The through-line isn’t Silicon Valley. It’s that the movie business, on its own, doesn’t throw off enough reliable cash to stand up by itself. It’s glamorous, it’s volatile, and it’s small. So it lives inside something bigger and duller that can absorb a bad year.

Studios have been somebody’s subsidized prestige division for sixty years. The Ellisons are just the current somebody.

What’s actually different about the Ellison era

That said, “nothing new under the sun” can be its own kind of lazy, so here’s the honest case that this time isn’t identical.

Scale is real. Gulf+Western was enormous for 1966, but it wasn’t Oracle money, and today’s tech balance sheets dwarf anything the old conglomerates could bring.

The bigger difference is what the owner wants. Coca-Cola wanted Columbia to make money, full stop. It was a financial holding. But a tech parent may want the content as fuel for something else entirely, subscriptions, engagement, an ads business, a device ecosystem, which changes what gets greenlit and why in ways a soda company never contemplated.

And vertical integration cuts deeper now. Kinney owned the studio. Amazon owns the studio, the storefront, the delivery pipe, the ad network, and the hardware in your living room. That’s a genuinely different shape of power, and the antitrust rules that once forced Kinney to sell a talent agency aren’t being applied the same way.

So the panic isn’t baseless. It’s just aimed at the wrong century.

The Ellisons are buying a studio that’s been sold a dozen times

None of this is a defense of the Paramount-Skydance deal, which shareholders approved in April and which California’s attorney general is reportedly preparing to fight.

It’s just context. The people worried that Warner Bros. is about to be owned by someone who doesn’t fundamentally care about movies should know that Warner Bros. was owned by a funeral home operator, a dial-up ISP, and a phone company, in that order.

The studio outlived all three. It’ll probably outlive this one.

Somewhere in Burbank there’s a lot with a hundred years of that on it, and the sign out front has changed more times than anybody remembers.

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D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture, watch @ClownfishTV on YouTube and find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and iHeart.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

Hat Tips:

• Britannica, The Hollywood Reporter, and Wikipedia (2020-2026), verified the Warner ownership chain — AOL completing its Time Warner purchase in January 2001 with AOL shareholders holding 55% to Time Warner’s 45% despite Time Warner’s larger asset base, AOL’s roughly 30 million dial-up subscribers, the deal’s designation as “the worst merger in history,” the record $98.7 billion annual loss posted in 2002 and Ted Turner’s estimated $8 billion personal loss, the AOL name being dropped in 2003 and spun off in 2009, AT&T’s $85 billion acquisition in 2018 forming WarnerMedia and its 2022 spin-off and merger with Discovery, and the February 2026 Paramount Skydance agreement approved by shareholders in April 2026 pending regulatory review

• Wikipedia, Encyclopedia.com, and Britannica (2026), verified the Kinney history — Kinney National Company acquiring Warner Bros.-Seven Arts in 1969 for more than $64 million under CEO Steve Ross, Kinney’s origins as a four-way merger of a parking system, Riverside Memorial Chapel funeral homes, a rental car company, and a cleaning contractor, its acquisition of National Periodical Publications (DC Comics) in 1969, its forced divestiture of the Ashley-Famous talent agency because antitrust law then prohibited owning both a studio and an agency, and its subsequent renaming to Warner Communications after abandoning the parking and funeral businesses

• Wikipedia and industry histories (2026), verified the broader conglomerate era — Gulf+Western’s 1966 purchase of Paramount for $125 million, Transamerica’s 1967 acquisition of United Artists, Taft Broadcasting’s 1966 purchase of MGM and Kirk Kerkorian’s 1969 acquisition, Coca-Cola’s ownership of Columbia Pictures from 1982 until its 1989 sale to Sony, News Corp’s purchase of 20th Century Fox, and Universal’s successive owners including Matsushita, Seagram, Vivendi, General Electric, and Comcast

In a candid new interview, the Marvel Studios boss owned the collapse of the Mahershala Ali Blade reboot, calling himself “a gigantic loser and failure,” and laid out plans to streamline the sprawling MCU into a single, simpler universe after 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars.

The most powerful man in superhero movies just called himself a loser. Out loud. On a podcast.

And then, in the same breath, Kevin Feige explained how he plans to clean up the mess his own universe has become. Two admissions in one interview. Both overdue.

“A gigantic loser and failure”

The quote everyone’s talking about came on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, when Feige was asked about the Blade reboot that Marvel has been failing to make for the better part of a decade.

His answer was unusually raw for a studio head. He said he’s “feeling very excited that we got Wesley [Snipes] back for a time in Deadpool & Wolverine, and like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala [Ali].”

Studio bosses don’t usually talk like that. They spin. They tease. They say “stay tuned.” Feige just took the L on the record.

What happened to Blade

For anyone who tuned out of the saga, here’s the short version. Mahershala Ali, a two-time Oscar winner, was announced as the MCU’s new Blade all the way back in 2019. It should have been the easiest layup in the building. Beloved character, perfect actor, a franchise Wesley Snipes already proved could work.

Then it just... didn’t happen. Directors came and went. Writers came and went. The story got rewritten from a period piece to a present-day tale and back again. Years passed. No movie.

The one thing Marvel salvaged was bringing Wesley Snipes back for a nostalgic cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine. Which is nice, and also not the point. Feige talking about the Ali version in the past tense now is the clearest sign yet that this particular Blade is dead.

The simpler MCU Feige is promising

The bigger news is what Feige said about where Marvel goes next, because he’s finally saying out loud what fans have grumbled for years: the MCU got too complicated.

His fix arrives with Avengers: Secret Wars in 2027. Feige said Avengers: Endgame was “truly an end,” and that everything since has been Marvel experimenting. Secret Wars, he says, is “a beginning.”

His words: “It will establish a streamlined, simplified, single universe that’s easier for audiences to follow. Some aspects will feel familiar. But many, many things will be entirely new.”

Streamlined. Simplified. Easier to follow. That’s Feige describing his own franchise’s biggest problem and pitching the solution in the same sentence.

Not a reboot, a reset

One thing Feige was careful to shoot down: this isn’t a hard reboot. He isn’t wiping out two decades of movies and starting from zero.

Asked directly if Secret Wars would erase everything, he said “No.” Instead, he’s using Jonathan Hickman‘s 2015 Secret Wars comic as the blueprint, the story that took a shattered multiverse and folded it back into one coherent world. So think of it as a consolidation, not a factory reset.

The stuff you already watched still counts. It just gets tidied up into one timeline going forward, with the X-Men set to anchor the next era.

Feige even claims Marvel has plans mapped out to 2042, which is either impressive or slightly terrifying.

Why the change

Both admissions point at the same underlying problem, and it’s worth naming plainly. Marvel got too big and too tangled.

After Endgame, the studio flooded Disney+ with series, piled on multiverse variants, and asked casual viewers to do homework before every release. Some of it was great. A lot of it diluted the brand, and several projects flat-out missed. Feige himself got stretched thin across dozens of films and shows.

The Blade graveyard is a piece of that same story. When you can’t just make a cool vampire-hunter movie because it has to slot into a giant interconnected tapestry first, you end up with a decade of rewrites and no film.

The candor is genuinely refreshing, and the plan sounds correct on paper. But Marvel’s problem was never a shortage of ambition. It was follow-through.

A simpler universe only helps if the studio actually finishes the movies meant to fill it, and the pile of dead Blade scripts is a reminder of how often it hasn’t.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• Variety (via the Happy Sad Confused podcast) — Feige’s “gigantic loser and failure” quote about the Mahershala Ali Blade reboot

• Gizmodo / ScreenRant — the Blade development history, the Deadpool & Wolverine Snipes cameo, and the past-tense framing

• ComicBook.com / ComicBookMovie — Feige’s “streamlined, simplified, single universe” quote and the through-2042 planning

• Dark Horizons / AOL — Feige confirming Secret Wars is not a hard reboot, the Hickman comic roadmap, and the X-Men-led next era

A developer-only ability wiped an enemy at 89.3% health, letting a group beat a Mythic+23 dungeon with 14 seconds left. The ability’s tooltip reads: “Kills all enemies in a 30 yard radius. Cheater.” Blizzard says it’s reviewing.

Somewhere in Blizzard’s internal toolset there is a spell called Area Death (TEST). It kills everything within thirty yards instantly. Its tooltip, written by a developer at some point for other developers, ends with a single word.

“Cheater.”

On July 21, that ability showed up in a live World of Warcraft competitive dungeon run.

What the logs showed

The dungeon was Nexus-Point Xenas, one of eight in the current Season 1 Mythic+ rotation. The group was running it at key level 23 — high enough that clearing it in time is a genuine achievement, and one that carries a seasonal title.

They were not going to make it. Then an enemy sitting at 89.3% health simply died, and the group finished with 14 seconds on the clock.

The log shows the kill came from Area Death (TEST), cast by a character named Daijosai. Daijosai was not one of the five players in the group. A second developer ability, Death Touch, hit a boss near the end of the same run.

Game masters are Blizzard employees with elevated in-game permissions, normally used to resolve support tickets and stuck characters. Not to finish keys.

They brought a stranger

Here’s the part that decided everything, and it’s the detail most of the coverage skipped.

The group’s fifth was a pickup tank. A random. And that random was running combat logging, which uploads the entire fight — every ability, every cast, every source — to Warcraft Logs automatically.

So the run got published. A Reddit user going by Acrobatic_Pianist688 pulled it apart and posted what they found on July 21, and the thread moved fast.

Wowhead’s Peyton “Tettles” Tettleton then cross-referenced the log timestamps against third-party tracking data and confirmed the run matched a real completed dungeon, which killed the obvious defense that somebody had doctored a log for attention.

Four people knew. The fifth had a tape recorder.

The confession

The logs were damning but circumstantial. What ended the argument was one of the players going on stream and explaining it.

Appearing on YumyTV‘s Twitch channel, a group member — the streamer known as Yiesus — said the group finished the final boss and realized they were short on the required enemy count. So he asked a friend who works at Blizzard, in voice chat, for help.

His words: “I’m like, ‘bro, please, can you do me a solid.’”

He said he meant no harm, that he hates “homework keys,” and that he didn’t actually expect his friend to do it. He allowed that in hindsight his friend shouldn’t have. He also said he doesn’t much care if Blizzard strips the run and the title, because he considers the whole thing harmless.

PC Gamer‘s account of the incident: the GM did this without realizing it was being recorded.

Blizzard’s answer, and what’s missing from it

Community manager Randy “Kaivax” Jordan replied late Tuesday, both on the official forums and in the Reddit thread that started it.

“Thank you to those who flagged this. We are reviewing and will take action as appropriate. A fair and competitive playing field is essential to our games, and we won’t tolerate cheating.”

Read it again and notice what isn’t in it. No mention of an employee. No mention of a game master. No mention of the account, the run, the title, or whether anyone still works there. Thirty-eight words about cheating in general, from a company whose own staff member is the accused.

That’s a statement written by people who know exactly how bad this is and have not yet decided what to say about it.

Why a +23 key is worth cheating for

For anyone outside WoW wondering why a five-person dungeon triggered a corporate statement: Mythic+ is the game’s competitive treadmill. Keys scale in difficulty, each level is timed, and the top brackets are where a small slice of the playerbase measures itself.

The titles are the point. They’re seasonal, they’re visible to everyone, and the ranking sites that track them are a public record of who cleared what.

Which is what makes “it was harmless” a difficult position. A title that fewer than one in a thousand players earn is worth precisely what it costs to get, and this one cost a favor.

What happens next

Blizzard has a track record here. It banned boosting organizations outright, and it is currently in court against private server operators over what its filing calls large-scale and ongoing infringement. The company does not typically let competitive-integrity stories fade.

The run can be wiped. The title can be revoked. Both are trivial for Blizzard to do.

The harder question is the one Kaivax’s thirty-eight words carefully stepped around, and Blizzard hasn’t answered it yet.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• Warcraft Logs (July 21, 2026) — the primary combat log showing Area Death (TEST) and Death Touch, the casting account, and the fight timing

• Blizzard official forums and Reddit — community manager Randy “Kaivax” Jordan’s full statement, and the origin thread from user Acrobatic_Pianist688

• YumyTV (Twitch) — the stream on which a member of the group described asking a Blizzard employee for the kill

• Kotaku — the Area Death (TEST) tooltip text and the identification of group members

• PCGamesN — the Nexus-Point Xenas dungeon context, the 89.3% health figure, and the 14-second finish

• PC Gamer / GamesRadar — the Mythic+23 details, the GM permissions explanation, and Blizzard’s competitive-integrity history

• GamesHub — the detail that the log was uploaded by a pickup tank who had been logging the key

• Dexerto (Cande Maldonado) — Wowhead’s Tettles verifying the log against third-party tracking data