Taylor Swift and Paramount to a Presidential Pardon

Founder & CEO
Acceleration Community of Companies

Since leaving PMK-BNC in 2018, four-decade PR vet Nyman has been building Acceleration Community of Companies (ACC) acquisition by acquisition, assembling a group of complementary firms spanning marketing and advertising (MKG, Hangar Four, Pixly), design and fabrication (Pink Sparrow), data analytics (Stripe Theory) and publicity (DKC, Trailblaze). In November, he re-teamed with his former PMK-BNC co-chairman and CEO Cindi Berger to create PMK Entertainment under the ACC umbrella.

One-stop shop: Whether it’s a movie premiere, a launch event or a film festival, Nyman says, “We can bundle in additional opportunities or expertise,” including bringing in “creators to experience something and create content” and providing “earned media opportunities for journalists.”

Thomas Dey
CEO
Jason Rejebian
Managing director
Milos Perovic
Director
ACF Investment Bank

Over the past three decades, Dey and his ACF team have structured and led more than 130 transactions totaling more than $7 billion. In 2025, the deals the investment bank advised on ranged from See-Saw Films’ (producer of “Slow Horses,” “The King’s Speech”) sale of a 51% stake to Mediawan, to a private equity firm’s sale of an eight-figure film library to a leading distributor.

Crash diet: “In the last 30 years, I have seen that every five to seven years there’s a constricting of the belt and people have to get more for less,” says Dey. “Streaming platforms right now … they’re trying to say, we can’t just have one income stream. … In the early years, it’s easy. They just focus on one metric. But as you go through each of these constrictions, they look for more ways to make the content go further, which means it costs less.”

Christopher Spicer
Entertainment & sports practice head
Marissa Román Griffith, Alissa Miller, Vanessa Roman
Entertainment & sports partners
Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld

In 2025, the Akin Gump team’s combined transactions exceeded $4.5 billion. Working on multiple deals for the likes of MUFG Bank and Comerica Bank is only part of what they do. They also completed several deals for HarbourView Equity Partners, ranging from a $30 million investment in Lion Forge Entertainment to the acquisition of various music, film and television assets.

“K-Pop Demon Hunters” sing-alongs to the rescue: “So many people went to the theater to see a movie they could watch on Netflix,” Roman says. “They dressed up, they all picked a character. I think that really shows you that there’s something people are looking for still that can’t be found sitting at home, and whether that’s live events or just sort of rethinking what’s in the box office.”

Partners
Alter, Kendrick & Baron

In the past 12 months, Alter and Baron have closed approximately $1.5 billion in deals. The duo represented Reservoir Media Management in its pact to secure the publishing and recorded music rights of trailblazing horn player Miles Davis, then negotiated the purchase of the music catalog and name and likeness rights of pianist David Brubeck for Primary Wave. They also handled Iconic Artists Group’s acquisition of the Wu-Tang Clan’s music catalog and its RZA partnership and repped Influence Media in its purchase of the DJ Khaled, Future and Blake Shelton catalogs.

Growing importance of name, image and likeness in music catalog sales: “Some really fabulous projects are coming out of that, be they hologram performances or biopics or Broadway shows,” says Alter.

Brittany K. Barnett
Managing attorney
Law Office of Brittany K. Barnett
Vincent P. Phillips
Partner
Arlington & Phillips

It wasn’t the typical showbiz deal: In May, Barnett secured a presidential pardon for 26-year-old rapper Kentrell Gaulden (YoungBoy Never Broke Again) in the federal cases he was facing. For the first time since he was 17, he was not on probation, under house arrest or incarcerated. “That freedom just transformed the scope of what was possible for him as a man,” says Barnett. The possibilities realized included a major tour — his first — negotiated by Phillips, along with a slew of other deals including a distribution agreement with Capitol/UMG and a multimillion-dollar publishing pact with APG/Kobalt Music Group.

You’re still a young man, baby: “Some of the greatest in the hip-hop space, they didn’t achieve some of the things he’s achieved at this age,” says Phillips, who’s worked with Gaulden since he was 16. “So he’s got an opportunity, I believe, to go even further, much faster.”

President, business affairs & strategy
Artists Equity

Nearly a year ago, Gumpert became the first-ever president of business affairs and strategy for Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s Artists Equity studio. By summer, he closed a three-year overall theatrical feature film agreement with Sony Pictures to handle global theatrical distribution of Artists Equity films.

Consolidation’s upside: “[During mergers] they greenlight less development. I won’t say it stops, but it gets stuck in logjams,” he says. “That’s when independent entities like Artists Equity really have an opportunity to do what we do, which is remain productive, remain agile, remain a connection to the talent community. We’re building assets that, in the chaos, can be sold and licensed to these entities that will be the ultimate distributors for us.”

Partner
Bain Capital

The son of a police officer, New York native Rufino gets to indulge in his passion for the arts (he was involved in theater and a cappella groups in his youth) while crafting innovative deals, most notably Bain’s joint venture with Warner Music Group (WMG) to invest up to $1.2 billion in music catalogs.

Competitive edge: “When you have a player like Bain that has $225 billion globally with people all over the place, that starts to allow you to do many things,” he says. And with WMG as a partner, “I don’t need to go build the capabilities to help exploit these catalogs in a more advantageous way.”

Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson
Founder
Jeff Housenbold
President & CEO
Beast Industries

What started in 2012 as a YouTube channel for 13-year-old Donaldson to post gaming videos has grown into a multi-tentacled corporation known as Beast Industries, which, as of 2025, has a valuation of $5.3 billion. It now has three divisions: media (digital content, Amazon’s “Beast Games,” animated series “MrBeast Lab,”etc.), consumer products and services (action figures, Feastables candy and an upcoming phone service) and a global creator platform that matches advertisers with digital influencers.

Come for the MrBeast, stay for the quality: “Our goal is to build profitable, large businesses that stand on their own because the products are innovative, better than the competition, better for you and, in some way, have a philanthropic impact on society,” says Housenbold, who joined the company in mid-2024.

President
Bell Media

Under Cohan’s leadership, Bell Media has gotten into the distributor business, buying a majority stake in the U.K.’s Sphere Abacus and adding 5,500 hours of Bell Media programming to its library. That move — along with a strategic investment in Blink49, the studio home to “Beast Games” — is not only aggressively bolstering Canadian scripted and unscripted content on a global level, it’s also changing the culture of Bell Media. In the last year, Bell has struck development and production deals with homegrown Canadian talent including Seth Rogen, Elliot Page, Will Arnett and Tom Green.

Bell ambition: “We’re going to make more, we’re going to distribute more, we’re going to own more,” Cohan says.

Seth England
Partner & CEO
Joey Moi
Partner; CEO, Big Loud Rock
Craig Wiseman
Partner

It was a minority stake in their biggest artist’s catalog, but it was still a whopper: Nashville-based Big Loud, celebrating their 10th anniversary as an independent label, sold a minority stake in Morgan Wallen’s recording catalog to Chord Music Partners for $200 million, allowing the record company to further develop artists while securing future revenue from royalties. Its roster also includes singer-songwriters Hardy, Ernest, Owen Riegling, Stephen Wilson Jr., Miranda Lambert and 30 others. In October, it opened an office in Austin, Texas, adding to a list of Big Loud outposts that also includes Los Angeles, London, Brisbane and Toronto.

Sunken cost: “We all put in money, and nobody got a paycheck from this label for frigging years,” Wiseman told Variety in November. “If you want to do an independent label, you’re like any small business — you get paid last, and so you don’t get paid at all for a long time.”

Head of scripted
CAA

Under Cohen’s watch as head of scripted, CAA brokered big overall deals for talent in 2025, including
multi-year pacts for writer-producer- creators Taylor Sheridan with NBCUniversal and Matt and Ross Duffer with Paramount Skydance.

AI does not inspire existential dread: “Being a writer’s agent for three decades-plus, my feeling from being inside wildly idiosyncratic and talented artist lives is that the way that they think, the way that they work on their craft, the kinds of experiences they have and how they reflect them in every medium they write in is unique, and I believe that will continue to be a standard,” he says.

Editor-in-chief
CBS News
Founder and editor
The Free Press

Weiss may prove to be the jackpot winner of the Substack era. She parlayed her news and commentary
site the Free Press into a $150 million valuation in a sale to Paramount Skydance. With political winds shifting as Trump returned to the White House, the center-right Free Press seemed like a opportunistic buy. Weiss and her partners wrangled a whale of a deal, given the financial profile of the five-year-old venture. She also secured a whale of a job as editor-in-chief of CBS News, reporting directly to CEO David Ellison.

Ratings schmatings: The first CBS town hall Weiss hosted, with Turning Point CEO Erika Kirk, wasn’t a hit,
but she forged ahead anyway and turned it into a regular series, titled “The Things That Matter.”

Kent Hoskins
CFO
Concord Music Group
Sophia Dilley
Executive VP
Concord Originals

Concord continued to make big moves in the music world, notably a $1.76 billion ABS securitization engi­neered by Hoskins, which funded a $217 million deal to buy key elements of Puerto Rican reggaeton star Daddy Yankee’s publishing and master recording catalog. Concord also bought Broadway Licensing Group, which licenses musicals for schools, community and professional theater. For her part, Dilley scooped up RKO Pictures, which brought a catalog of 5,000 titles and their derivative rights, including such cinema classics as “King Kong” and “Citizen Kane,” to Concord Originals, the company’s film, television and narrative content production division.

Promising horizons: “I’m really excited about RKO specifically because I think we’ll look at that catalog and reinvent a lot of really special projects that have been dormant for a minute,” says Dilley.

Steve Blume
Co-founder, COO and CFO
Steve Kram
Co-founder and CEO
John Mass
President
Content Partners
Alphonse Lordo
Partner
Content Partner Capital, a division of Content Partners

After spending two decades acquiring a vast library of high-quality content, Content Partners recently added live production catalogs to its holdings with “13 Going on 30: The Musical.” Last year it launched a new division, Content Partners Capital, which Lordo says has already done notable debt deals, including one for Relativity and another for writer-producer-director Dean Devlin’s company, Electric Entertainment. But the team may be most excited by Content Partners’ acquisition of the “Saw” movie library in a deal where the rights were bifurcated with Blumhouse, which will make “Saw 11.”

Focus on what matters: “We look for high-quality content with the toptier distribution. That’s essentially
our strategy in a nutshell,” Blume says. “It’s worked very well for us, and it should continue, regardless of whether Netflix buys Warner Bros. or whoever does, because everybody’s incentivized to monetize the value of that content and we’re sharing it.”

Robyn Polashuk
Partner; co-chair, entertainment and media industry group
Adrian Perry
Partner co-chair, entertainment and media industry group; co-chair, music industry group
Mike Hill
Special counsel
Covington & Burling

Polashuk led Roku’s acquisition of Frndly TV, while Hill repped the NFL in a deal to sell the NFL Network, NFL RedZone and NFL Fantasy to ESPN in exchange for a 10% equity stake in the venerable sports network, which industry leaders estimate is worth $2 billion to $3 billion. Perry oversaw USTA’s new multi-year agreement with global sports agency IMG that also brings tennis into the sports betting world. Although Hill specializes in sports deals — many of Polashuk’s clients are in video programming — and Perry works at the intersection of tech and entertainment, teamwork still matters, since today’s entertainment deals span all those areas.

Ethical highwire act: “[Clients] can use AI to help enhance their creative processes, but they’re also balancing that with protecting human creativity,” Perry says. “On one hand, they may want to be free in how they use AI, but when the shoe’s on the other foot, you can’t take positions that are too strident because you’re on both sides of the issue.”

Brad Miller, Elizabeth Zee, Cheryl Wei
Partners
Ian Brereton
Counsel
Davis Wright Tremaine

This year, Zee represented ITV Studios America in 60-plus development deals for Tomorrow Studios and Bedrock Entertainment, as well as production deals for the NFL for Netflix’s first-ever airing of an NFL game. Wei oversaw talent deals for Amazon MGM’s “The Summer I Turned Pretty” and “Reacher,” and used her legal and negotiating skills when “Last Week Tonight With JohnOliver” sought permission from the MLB to rebrand the Erie SeaWolves as the Erie Moon Mammoths. Brereton did talent deals for Amazon’s “Road House 2” and represented MGA Entertainment in developing a live-action Bratz movie, also at Amazon. Meanwhile, Miller handled global distribution matters and tax incentive deals for Amazon’s “Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.”

Trendsetting: Miller says he expects the demand for short-form content to keep growing. “Just in the last 12 months, there has been a resurgence of deals and new independent companies launching short-form
programming that’s recorded vertically and produced to watch on platforms other than the traditional television and streaming services.”

Musician

It’s hard to be taken too seriously when your public persona is defined by a giant, lighted mouse helmet,
but anyone doubting that Canadian electronic music producer and deejay Deadmau5 (real name: Joel Zimmerman) is a serious showbiz player should take note of his $55 million sale of his catalog to Create Music Group in March, which also established a joint venture to release his future recordings.

Money doesn’t change everything: Deadmau5 told Billboard Canada “it was just time to reel everything back in, throw some money back into production for the next couple of years and then start over. So, nothing changes. I’m still writing new music and doing everything I do.”

Partners
Del Shaw Moonves Tanaka Finkelstein Lezcano Bobb & Dang

The Del Shaw Moonves quartet han­dles everything from unscripted projects and contracts for high-level executive execs to major projects for actors, writers, directors and produc­ers. In recent months, Shaw closed deals for Gina Prince-Bythewood (to helm Paramount’s “Children of the Blood & Bone”), Jurnee Smollett (to star in Apple TV series “Smoke”), Nick Cannon (to host “Lego Masters”) and Ayo Edebiri (to star in and exec produce “Prodigies” for Sister/Apple U.K., write A24’s live-action “Barney” movie and make her Broadway debut in “Proof”). Lezcano and Finkelstein handle many execs, producers and showrunners, including Carnival Television chairman Gareth Neame.

Industry contraction: “We’ve all got to evolve and adapt,” says Finkelstein. “That means expand into other peripheral areas, which will gradu­ally become mainstays of the enter­tainment business, as well,” such as podcasts, micro dramas, social media content and brand deals.”

Partners
Debevoise & Plimpton

The quartet led the Debevoise & Plimpton team that (along with the firm Wachtell Lipton, Rosen & Katz) served as outside legal counsel to Warner Bros. Discovery on its agree­ment to sell Netflix its film and TV studios and gaming business, along with HBO, in an $82.7 billion trans­action. It’s not their only big show­biz deal this year: members of the team also repped Ariel Emanuel in Endeavor’s $13 billion take-private sale to Silver Lake (Levitsky, Taylor) and Warner Music Group in its joint venture with Bain Capital to invest up to $1.2 billion in music catalogs (Andrén, Taylor).

Closing the big one: “We’re able to do [the Warner Bros. Discovery-Netflix deal] because our partners, in a way that is increasingly distinctive in the legal market, are in it for the long haul,” said the team in a joint state­ment. “We share deep relationships and a cohesion that comes from years — and typically entire careers — spent working closely together.”

Eric Schrier
President of Disney Television Studios & global original television strategy for Disney Entertainment
Josh Sussman
Head of business affairs, Disney Entertainment Television
Disney Entertainment Television, TWDC

Schrier says aligning all Disney Enter­tainment Television’s business affairs under Sussman’s care benefits deal­making. The team solidified deals for scripted and unscripted series, includ­ing “Abbott Elementary,” “Chad Pow­ers” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” They also brokered reboots of the classic series “Scrubs” and “Malcolm in the Middle,” but it’s their audacious four X four deal, ordering four seasons each of four of Fox’s long-running animated series (“The Simpsons,” “Family Guy,” “Bob’s Burgers” and “American Dad”), that solidifies their position among TV’s top dealmakers.

To reboot or not to reboot: “[The decision] to mine the library comes down to if there’s a reason to reboot this show, the creative idea behind it and how it will ultimately benefit our audiences,” Schrier says.

Robert J. Sherman
Partner; co-chair, entertainment finance practice
Claire L. Hall
Partner; co-head, structured finance
DLA Piper

In just one of their transactions over the past year, the duo secured $200 million in new debt financing for independent music rights purchas­ers Duetti, but that’s small potatoes compared to the $3 billion worth of asset-backed music-securitization notes they brokered in fiscal 2025 for such clients as Concord Music, HarbourView Equity Partners and others. In fact, $1.77 billion of that went to Concord, secured by a cat­alog of 1.3 million copyrights that includes songs by the Beatles, Taylor Swift, Michael Jackson, Bruno Mars and others.

What’s drawing the dollars: “Insti­tutional investors like insurance companies and pension funds look­ing for long-term assets that throw off a predictable income stream over long periods of time,” explains Sherman.

Partners
Eisner

This powerhouse team works in all corners of the entertainment industry. Izower reps Drake, model/ entrepreneur Ashley Graham, and the global girl group Katseye. Mor­row counts multi-hyphenate Tyler Perry among his clients and also rep­resented conservative-leaning Red Seat Ventures podcasting company in its acquisition by Fox Corp. While Sherman’s recent work is largely con­fidential, he can say he recently did a heavy-duty corporate restructuring and sale of backend participation for one of his well-known talent cli­ents. Among Simonds’ many deals, he represented the Hideaway Entertain­ment with development financing for the $50 million Ron Howard-helmed film “Alone at Dawn” for Imagine Entertainment and Amazon MGM.

Non-traditional media: “A ton of com­panies are starting vertical video or podcasts, and some of those deals are starting to get pretty large,” Morrow says. “That shift is starting to come. We’ll still have normal television and TV, but this whole vertical video, doom-scrolling, micro-drama thing is the other one that seems to be really moving a lot.”

Darrell Miller
Partner, founding chair of entertainment & sports law department
Marc Simon
Partner, chair of entertainment & sports law department
Cynthia Katz, Heidy Vaquerano, John Rose
Partners
Leron Rogers
Associate
Fox Rothschild

Fox Rothschild prides itself on having a strong talent practice, along with a robust corporate production, financ­ing and licensing practice, spanning film, TV, music, publishing and the live stage. Katz and Vaquerano worked on 30-plus music catalog acquisitions for HarbourView Equity Partners worth in excess of $1 billion and, in June, helped close its first commin­gled fund at over $630 million. Miller has cut big deals for Da’Vine Joy Ran­dolph (roles in big screen thriller “The Gallerist” and the UCP miniseries “The Trees”), Courtney B. Vance (Sea­son 2 of Apple TV’s “Presumed Inno­cent”) and Taylor Tomlinson (fourth Netflix standup special). Simon han­dles matters for clients ranging from Bloomberg Media and the Obama Family Office/Higher Ground Prods. to writer-director Jennifer Peedom (“Tenzing”), while Rose and Rogers negotiated a modification to rap­per Rick Ross’ agreement with Sony Music Publishing.

Preserving the traditional content system: “If we don’t focus on keep­ing the audio-visual medium strong and front of mind with our culture, then that market share is being sig­nificantly eaten by the creator econ­omy,” says Simon. “And I do not think that it’s in our national interest or our industry’s interest for that to happen.”

Andrew Hurwitz
Partner; co-chair, entertainment group
Christopher Chase, Marcie Cleary, Hayden Goldblatt
Partners, sports industry group
Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz

No kryptonite here: Hurwitz cut high-profile writer/director/producer deals for James Gunn (“Superman” sequel) and Aaron Sorkin (“The Facebook Files”). On the sports side, Chase has been advising the Inter­national Olympic Committee on U.S. intellectual property strategy and enforcement for the upcom­ing Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter and LA 2028 Summer Olympics (with firm partner Kimberly Maynard) and managing the LIV Golf global trademark portfolio of 600 current registrations and applications. He also brokered a multi-year, mul­timillion-dollar partnership with Adidas for the first pro season of women’s League One Volleyball, while Goldblatt took the lead with Peyton Manning’s Omaha Prods., providing ongoing advice on pro­duction and distribution matters, including its multi-platform media rights deal with ESPN.

Whetted appetites: “There’s a real hunger for valuable IP,” says Hurwitz. “In a contracting marketplace, these IP deals remain really frothy.”

Head of business and legal affairs
Gamma

The Larry Jackson-Ike Youssef-owned media company Gamma turned heads in June when Rogers helped secure a multi-album deal with Mariah Carey commencing with the September release of her album “Here for It All.” She rolled the dice again when she brokered a pact for Rick Ross to be global ambassador for crypto casino BitFortune.com that gives the rapper an equity stake in the company. It comes on the heels of Gamma’s deal for Snoop Dogg’s Lovechild jewelry line, which is sepa­rate from Gamma’s joint venture with his label, Death Row Records.

Growing the brand: “Snoop is just like Mariah,” she observes. “Some of these legendary artists have such huge followings that we’re able to create different verticals for them.”

J. Eugene (Gene) Salomon Jr.
Managing partner
Ethan Schiffres, Annie H. Lee, Bianca J. Levin, Daniel S. Passman, Cheryl M. Snow
Partners
Gang, Tyre, Ramer, Brown & Passman

The Gang, Tyre team was very active on the Billie Eilish front in 2025, handling legal arrangements for her upcom­ing “Hit Me Hard and Soft” 3D concert film co-directed by James Cameron, due in March, as well as the tail end of her 2024-2025 tour that wrapped in November. All told, it brokered $1 billion worth of music-related deals, advising on touring, merchandising, endorsements, record and publishing agreements and catalog sales by Randy Newman, Cher and Crowded House. On the film and TV side, it cut deals for actors Thuso Mbedu and Regina King to co-star in Paramount’s feature adaptation of the Tomi Adeyemi novel “Children of Blood and Bone,” set for a 2027 release, and Robert Zemeckis to direct Jennifer Lopez in Netflix’s “The Last Mrs. Parrish.”

Always something new: “I love to see what things people are doing tomor­row that haven’t been done yester­day,” says Salomon. “And being able to sort of have not just a front-row seat, but to be able to help people shape their dreams, is really gratifying.”

Kevin Masuda
Partner and co-chair, media, entertainment and technology practice group
Benyamin (Ben) Ross
Partner and co-chair, media, entertainment and technology practice group
Steve Tsoneff, Sarah Graham
Partners
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher

This quartet’s recent major deals include repping the SpringHill Com­pany in its merger with Fulwell 73 (Masuda and Ross), Global Music Rights and the Azoff Company in the sale of a stake in the former to Hell­man & Friedman (Ross), Paramount in a film slate co-financing deal (Tsoneff) and Range Media Partners in joint venture and strategic trans­actions (Graham). They’ve also han­dled brand partnerships for LeBron James (Lobos 1707 tequila), Arnold Schwarzenegger (Zimmer Biomet) and Timothée Chalamet (equity deal with a luxury watchmaker).

Celebrity value proposition for brands: “If people aren’t watching advertise­ments on television and you’re get­ting limited [exposure] on YouTube, there’s no better way to go than social media,” says Masuda. “Just having somebody wearing certain jewelry or talking about something is huge.”

Partners
Granderson Des Rochers

For Granderson Des Rochers, every­thing seems to be coming up Zen­daya. Des Rochers negotiated deals for her return as M.J. in “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” to star in the upcom­ing feature “The Drama” for A24 and to serve as brand ambassador for activewear On. Not to be outdone, Granderson, whose clients include Lauryn Hill and Shaggy, brokered the A$AP Rocky partnership with Ray- Ban as its first-ever creative director. He also arranged Balvin’s Futura x Marc Jacobs capsule collaboration.

Winning attitude: “The philosophy behind the firm was always to be a service to people who have ambi­tions beyond just one subset of the larger entertainment industry,” says Des Rochers.

Partners
Greenberg Glusker

Instead of working in a silo system like some firms, Galsor, James, Muir, Savranskaia, Moore and Webb take a team approach, whether working as a group or in pairs. They individually tailor their approaches to every case and every client, even though it some­times means added challenges that feel like “reinventing the wheel in real time,” according to Galsor. He believes the team’s structuring of client Activ­ision’s deal with Paramount for the film adaptation of their iconic video game “Call of Duty” exemplifies their bespoke approach to dealmaking.

Size still matters: “Last time I saw ‘Titanic’ on an Apple watch, it wasn’t as good. I mean, it’s ridiculous,” Gal­sor says, noting the trend of younger people watching movies on their own devices instead of in theaters may be reversing. “Trends now with younger people seem like they’re finding watching movies in a theater experience to be cool again.”

Dan Black
Vice chairman, global entertainment & media practice
Bobby Rosenbloum
Chairman, global entertainment & media practice
Charles J. Biederman
Shareholder, entertainment & media practice
Jess Rosen
Co-chairman, Atlanta entertainment & media practice
Greenberg Traurig

The Greenberg Traurig team has executed a string of big IP sales, a process that is “a bit like [being] a short order cook,” according to Black, who was the lead outside counsel for Pokémon on the 10-fig­ure Niantic sale to Scopely. “There’s a number of things on the back burner, all of which, when you get to the finish line, have to be closed concurrently.” Music-focused, Atlan­ta-based Rosenbloum has closed deals worth over $4 billion in the past year alone for clients such as the Recording Academy, AEG Pres­ents, the Coca-Cola Company, Mattel, Meta Platforms, MUFG Bank, Spotify and various AI companies. Bieder­man and Rosen are also big machers in the music world, with the former handling $3.5 billion in music catalog deals, as well as clients like Amblin Partners, and the latter repping a long list of country artists including Kenny Chesney, Kane Brown and Miranda Lambert.

Good deal all around: “The value of these [music] catalogs over time will exceed most likely what people are paying for them,” says Rosenbloum. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad deal for the artist, because the artist is potentially looking to get the money out of it now and during their lifetime.”

CEO
Guggenheim Partners

Walter became the undisputed king of Los Angeles sports this year when he bought a majority stake in the Lakers from the Buss family in a deal that gave the team a $10 billion valu­ation. Lakers fans were quick to note that the Dodgers have thrived since the group led by Walter acquired the team in 2012, winning three World Series. They’ve also inspired envy throughout the league with savvy talent deals like their 10-year, $700 million contract with Shohei Ohtani, all but $2 million a year of which is deferred until after the contract expires.

Florida man: Walter’s personal investments include White Oak Con­servation, a 17,000-acre animal ref­uge in Florida, and wildlife preserves in Africa.

Founder and CEO
HarbourView Equity Partner

Clarke kept busy in 2025 brokering the acquisition of Kelly Clarkson’s cata­log, an investment in Issa Rae’s Color­Creative studio and two $500 million deals with global investment firm KKR, while overseeing $2.7 billion in enter­tainment assets. She also closed a $630 million commingled fund for enter­tainment investments, injected $30 million into Lion Forge Entertainment and $85 million into the coffers of Ani­maj. On top of that, she’s financing the upcoming Queen Latifah biopic, with Will Smith and Jesse Collins Entertain­ment on board as partners. She previ­ously invested in Usher’s 2024 concert film “Rendezvous in Paris.”

Smells like team spirit: “Creators to the table as partners rather than as talent only is an innovation that we enjoy,” says Clarke.

Lylette Pizarro
Founder; co-managing partner/investor
Rene McLean
Co-managing partner; founding Advisor
Influence Media Partners

After Influence Media Partners secured $360 million in debt financ­ing, collateralized by music royalties from its preexisting portfolio of music rights in January, Pizarro and McLean turned around and built out that cata­log further, setting up a joint venture with DJ Khaled. As part of the deal, Influence and the Grammy-winning DJ are executive producing the movie “Killing Castro,” starring Al Pacino. The duo also signed Will Smith to their Slang label.

Harnessing the zeitgeist: “We really operate from a culture-first stand­point,” says Pizarro. “We look for things that are actually tied to some type of cultural movement mindset, specifically with assets and artists.”

Co-founder
Iconic Artists Group

Start spreading the news: Azoff ’s Iconic Artists struck a deal with Frank Sinatra Enterprises for a joint venture for Ol’ Blue Eyes’ name, image and likeness rights, with plans to open a Rat Pack-themed venue in Las Vegas. He joins an Iconic Artist roster that includes the Beach Boys, Cher, Dean Martin, Linda Ronstadt and Rod Stewart. Azoff also orga­nized the FireAid concert that raised over $100 million for communities devastated by the L.A. wildfires.

The quote he can’t live down: “He may be Satan, but he’s our Satan,” Eagles singer-drummer Don Hen­ley famously said of Azoff during the 1998 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction for the band, which Azoff has managed since 1974.

Host and founder
“The Megyn Kelly Show,” Devil May Care Media

Kelly signed a multi-year renewal of her contract with SiriusXM in Octo­ber that gave her a new, personalized channel — the Megyn Kelly Chan­nel — to serve as the home for her flagship daily show, a new exclusive after-show program and additional original content. The year also saw the former Fox News host on her first national live tour, “Megyn Kelly Live,” and her YouTube channel surpass 4 million subscribers.

Meet the new boss: “Linear televi­sion news is dead. People can’t stand those stilted, censored conversations anymore, which is exactly why this medium is thriving,” Kelly declared in announcing the SiriusXM expansion. “I’m thrilled to deliver our bold brand of no-B.S. news live on SiriusXM.”

Rick Offsay
Global co-chair, entertainment, sports & media practice
Nancy Bruington, Kendall Johnson, Liliana Ranger, Jonathan West
Partners
Latham & Watkins

The Latham & Watkins team had an impressive year. For starters, it led the firm’s work on all of Skydance Media’s entertainment-related mat­ters in its merger with Paramount Global to form Paramount Skydance Corp., valued at approximately $28 billion, and subsequently advised on the combined entity’s acquisition of the Free Press. It was also primary counsel to Silver Lake and co-coun­sel to the investor consortium on IP and gaming matters in the Elec­tronic Arts deal, the largest all-cash sponsor take-private investment in history, which gives the company an enterprise value of approximately $55 billion. It was also the lead advi­sors to New Regency on its partner­ship with Shamrock Capital and the Carlyle Group on its strategic invest­ment in Entertainment 360.

Downsizing the contraction: “I think we’re going to see [consolidation] among the mid-level players next year and even some of the smaller, talent-backed production compa­nies,” says Offsay. “They’re all going to kind of figure out their place in the new world order.”

President
LBI Entertainment

No talent deal made a bigger a splash than Taylor Sheridan’s shocking defect from Paramount to a plum film and television overall pact at NBCUniversal. As Sheridan’s long­time manager, Greenberg was an architect of that coup. He also bro­kered a Netflix overall feature deal for Jaume Collet-Serra (“Carry On”), set creator/showrunner Brad Ingelsby for a second season of the HBO drama “Task” and helped Danny Strong break into Broadway with his reworking of the book for the 1986 musical “Chess” for its hit revival.

Greek history: Greenberg and fellow LBI principal Rick Yorn were Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity brothers at the University of Maryland.

Partners
Lichter, Grossman, Nichols, Feldman, Rogal, Shikora & Clark

The quartet’s ability to make big deals in the studio space with one foot firmly planted in the indepen­dent film world is born out by the awards season calendar, which is dotted with high-profile projects it set for clients including Chloé Zhao (“Hamnet”), Josh Safdie (“Marty Supreme”) and Benny Safdie (“The Smashing Machine”). This year, it brokered pacts for Taraji P. Henson (starring role in “’Tis So Sweet” and “Why Did I Get Married Again?”), Juno Temple (lead in Apple TV series “The Husbands”), Lily-Rose Depp (to star in Robert Eggers’ “Werwulf”), Dev Patel (co-write, direct and star in action-thriller “The Peasant”) and Bill Prady (write and exec produce HBO’s “Stu­art Saves the Universe”).

The odds on SAG-AFTRA or WGA strikes next year?: “I can’t imagine either side wants that at a moment when both sides are just trying to keep their heads above water,” says Feldman.

David Steward II
Founder, CEO
Stephanie Sperber
President, chief content officer
Lion Forge Entertainment

That mighty roar you hear is Lion Forge — buoyed by a $30 million minor investment stake from Har­bourView Equity Partners, the Stew­ard Family and Polarity (Steward’s holding company) — about to real­ize a number of firsts. The Academy Award-winning (“Hair Love”), Black-owned animation and live action studio known for authentic, diverse stories is entering the adult ani­mated feature arena with “Game of Thrones” guru George R.R. Martin’s Herculean novella “A Dozen Tough Jobs.” Lion Forge also entered into unscripted territory with a Rebel Girls Sports project, as well as a TaleVision partnership expanding its YouTube series “Lostlings” and a first-look deal with Oware.

Brisk sales in Toon Town: “The mar­ketplace for adult animation fea­tures and series has really opened in the last year,” says Sperber.

Scott Edel
Chair, entertainment
Arash Khalili
Firmwide co-chair; co-chair, capital markets and corporate; co-founder, sports practice
Brandon Cherry, John Kulback
Partners
John Frankenheimer
Chairman emeritus
Derek Crownover
Co-office administrative partner, Nashville; vice chair, music industry
Loeb & Loeb

Edel, Cherry and Kulback advised Alcon Media Group on their head­line-making $440 million acquisition of three Village Roadshow Entertain­ment Group properties, including a $417.5 million feature film library that includes “The Matrix” and “Ocean’s Eleven” franchises. It wasn’t the only feather in their cap: Crownover and Khalili helped broker Nashville’s Big Loud Records deal to sell a $200 mil­lion minority stake in country music superstar Morgan Wallen’s catalog to Chord Music Partners. The team also repped Nexon on their strategic minority investment of $400 million in AGBO, the production company of “Avengers: Endgame” filmmakers Anthony and Joe Russo.

Major minority: “When strategic investors come in for a minority investment, it’s an entree to a larger share or other strategic partnership possibilities,” notes Edel.

Jordan Bromley
Partner; leader, Manatt Entertainment
Eric Bergner
Leader, digital and technology transactions
Christopher Chatham, Binta Niambi Brown, Gary Gilbert, Sophia Yen
Partners
Manatt, Phelps & Phillips

The Manatt team handled over $1 billion in music catalog transac­tions alone in 2025. The firm also oversaw KKR’s $240 million sale of Chord Music Partners to Univer­sal Music Group (25.8 % share) and Dundee Partners (majority owner). It also reps a long list of music artists, including the Eagles, Diplo, Black­pink’s Rosé, Joni Mitchell, Jack White and Neil Young.

C’s or desist: “With labels partnering with Zuno, Udio and other AI music platforms, you need the three Cs — consent, clarity and compensation — [for] creators before any of these deals should be allowed to come to fruition,” says Bromley.

President and founder
Milk & Honey Music + Sports

Keller already claimed a niche on the management side of things, handling everyone from songwriters-produc­ers (including Y2K, Hoskins, Jenna Andrews and Stephen Kirk), DJs and mixers to pro footballers. But the Milwaukee native recently upped his entrepreneurial game with the launch of Milk & Honey Records in October, and he’ll be unveiling a nine-figure fund to acquire producer royalty music rights in February.

Slow expansion: “I’d love to do a proper TV film arm at some point,” states Keller.

CEO
Miramax

Glickman is proud of Miramax’s abil­ity to balance exciting new content like “The Beekeeper” and “Roofman” with fresh iterations of iconic IP including “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” and the upcoming “Scary Movie.” He notes the latter deal took a little creative effort to close, lead­ing to an agreement that financially incentivizes creators along with pro­ducers and distributors so they’re all working toward the same goals.

Talent economy: “I think we’re headed to a world where we’re going to start seeing more success-based dealmaking for producers and for talent,” he says. “I don’t know if that’s where the business is headed, but that’s where Miramax is headed.”

Partner
Mitchell, Silberberg & Knupp

After spending much of 2025 facil­itating over $100 million worth of catalog sales and reuniting for­merly disgruntled bands such as Mudvayne, Flyleaf and Biohazard, German (who “lives, breathes and eats rock music”) is jazzed about projects that blend the world of film and music, such as the music video his client Ice Nine Kills made for the indie horror film “Terrifier 3” that binds detached storylines.

Keeping fans connected: “I’m excited about building universes, experi­ences and bringing fans into immer­sive worlds that have continuing storylines as you might see in a graphic novel,” he says

Navid Mahmoodzadegan
CEO and co-founder
Carlos Jimenez
Managing director; global head of media, sports and entertainment
Moelis & Company

The duo has their fingers in a lot of pies with Moelis, and sometimes it can get a bit messy. After advising on Skydance’s $28.1 billion investment and merger with Paramount, which closed in August, Moelis was engaged by Netflix to do the same for its pro­posed purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery. The streamer scored the winning $82.7 billion bid in Decem­ber, beating out Paramount, which responded with a hostile offer. Other big deals in 2025 include advising on TKO Group’s $3.3 billion acquisition of Professional Bull Riders and IMG from Endeavor Group and Prize­Picks’ pending 62.3% majority stake sale to Allwyn for up to $4.15 billion.

Hooray for Hollywood: Moelis covers “a bunch of different categories and sectors like oil and gas and health care and, no offense to those part­ners, but I live in the fun part of the ecosystem, which is media, sports and entertainment,” says Jimenez..

Partners
Myman Greenspan Fox Rosenberg Mobasser Younger & Light

The trio has negotiated a series of major music industry deals. Light handled a confidential nine-figure sale and an upper-eight-figure deal, as well as successful tours for Deftones, Disturbed and Queens of the Stone Age. Minzner negotiated publishing and merchandise deals for Role Model and oversaw legal details for his acting debut. Milagros-Butler oversaw Khru­angbin’s successful world tour while advising numerous other clients.

Taxing tariffs: The current adminis­tration’s ever-changing tariffs are rough for touring acts. “All of a sud­den, when you want to move a truck­load of T-shirts from your North American manufacturing spot to a Canadian tour or Europe, you’re getting hit with significant bills,” Light says. “Like all other tariffs, the ques­tion becomes, do you absorb the cost or do you pass along the cost to the consumer so that the $40 T-shirt is now $45 T-shirt, or is it some com­bination of the two?”

Co-CEO
Netflix

The Mayor of Hollywood is about to be promoted to king. If Netflix’s long-serving co-CEO can pull off the acquisition of Warner Bros. Dis­covery, which includes HBO, he’ll ascend to new heights of power and influence. To do so, he’ll need to steer the deal through the choppy waters of Washington, D.C., and he’ll need to have the stamina to maintain momentum and morale at Netflix while championing the transaction. But the chance to take possession of HBO and Warner Bros. is too enticing for its potential to expand Netflix’s horizons like few other acquisitions could (especially the studio and its IP-rich vault). We’re likely to see the fighter come out in Sarandos, who is well known as the affable and most successful media executive to emerge on the world stage.

Be kind, rewind: Sarandos launched his media career in 1983, when he was hired as a clerk at Arizona Video Cassettes West in Phoenix.

Amy Siegel
Partner; co-chair, entertainment, sports and media group
Matthew Syrkin
Partner; co-chair, MediaTech group
Silvia Vannini, Leif Cervantes de Reinstein
Partners
O’Melveny & Myers

Each member of the O’Melveny & Myers team handled newsworthy deals. Cervantes de Reinstein repre­sented Ares Capital in conjunction with the merger of Shout! Studios and FilmRise and the formation of Radial Entertainment. Siegel worked on behalf of the NY/NJ 2026 World Cup Host Committee to negotiate with Live Nation and Diversified Production Services to produce next summer’s FIFA Fan Festival. Syrkin consulted on content and ad-tech matters involved in expanding Comcast and Paramount Skydance’s SkyShowtime streaming service. But Vannini says the team’s ongoing work with Leg­endary Entertainment — which they guided through a transformative deal when buying out Wanda Group’s stake in Legendary — is representative of their collective power.

Post-consolidation: “One thing I expect is going to be more prom­inent in coming months is a wave of dispositions of non-core assets,” Vannini says. “All these big compa­nies that have merged are likely to eventually sell out some portions of the businesses that are not core to their philosophy going forward.”

Co-founder, CEO
OpenAI

The OpenAI chief has done a master­ful job of fundraising and dealmaking this year on behalf of his world-chang­ing generative AI ventures. And he did it in the face of mounting concerns among investors that the AI boom ushered in by Chat GPT may have not lived up to the hype. Altman closed out 2025 with a headline-making, precedent-setting deal with Disney that will lay down guardrails for gen-AI use of copyrighted material and came with a $1 billion investment.

Up next?: Altman has been on the hunt to land a megabucks invest­ment from Amazon and a deal to use the e-commerce giant’s AWS Train­ium chips to power OpenAI services.

CEO
Paramount Skydance

Ellison has transformed himself over the past 12 months from the scion of a mega-billionaire (Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison) to a Hollywood mogul in his own right. Ellison methodically fought his way through a nearly two-year quest to acquire Paramount Communications. He finally clinched the $8.4 billion deal in August with backing from Gerry Cardinale’s Red­Bird Capital Partners. Even those who followed the Paramount saga beat by beat were surprised when Ellison quickly began sending out unsolic­ited bids for Warner Bros. Discovery.

No fear of flying: Ellison (who played WWI aviator Eddie Beagle in the 2006 movie “Flyboys”) is a licensed pilot with instrument ratings for helicopter aviation, aerobatics, com­mercial aviation, fixed-wing aircraft and multi-engine aircraft.

Chief operating officer, chief strategy officer and director
Paramount Skydance

As the leader of RedBird Capital Part­ners’ Los Angeles office, Gordon was a key player in Skydance’s $8.4 billion merger with Paramount. In August, he transitioned to a top post at the newly created entity, Paramount Skydance, where he’s focused on operational efficiencies, tech infra­structure upgrades and streaming enhancements for Paramount+ and Pluto TV.

Why movie lovers should root for them: “Paramount is committed to growing the film and TV output of both businesses, including a the­atrical slate of 30-plus theatrical releases per year,” he said on a call to discuss the launch of their all-cash tender offer to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. “We’re going to satisfy the needs of the moviegoing public.”

Partners, entertainment and media
Paul Hastings

The addition of Fohrman in Febru­ary as chair of Paul Hastings’ music industry practice quickly paid dividends, with the team closing Create Music Group’s strategic $55 million-plus acquisition of the 4,000-song EDM catalog and Mau­5trap label of Deadmau5, along with their purchase of indie electronic label Monstercat. They also repped Lenders Mortgage Insurance as an equity investor with Northleaf Capital Partners in GoldState’s $500 million fund to acquire music rights. Outside of music, the firm advised Content Partners on their acquisi­tion of a stake in the “Saw” franchise film library, alongside producer Mark Burg and production com­pany Blumhouse.

Not the hippest guys in the room: “I never thought I’d represent insur­ance companies on music deals,” marveled Fohrman.

Managing partner & head of investments
Pophouse Entertainment

After successfully turning back the hands of time with the digital ava­tar-driven “Abba Voyage” concert experience over the past three years, the Björn Ulvaeus-founded Pophouse closed its private equity Pophouse Fund at a value of $1.4 billion and used approximately 30% of that reserve to scoop up catalogs by Kiss, Cyndi Lauper, the Avicii estate and Swedish House Mafia. Lagerlöf says he’s looking for eight to 10 more artists in which to invest and create unforgettable expe­riences for fans.

Virtual ambition: “Our mission is to bring these legacies to new gener­ations,” he says. “There’s so much to do. But it all starts with having the right artist to work with and being in bed with them.”

Ben Silverman
Chairman and co-CEO
Howard T. Owens
Founder and co-CEO
Drew Buckley
Group president and COO
Noah Nusinow
CFO
Propagate Content

The Propagate Content team is bet­ting on the continued growth of dig­ital talent management by creating opportunities for clients through strategic deals like increasing Prop­agate’s stake in Select Management Group and acquiring Parker Man­agement. Adding those to its existing portfolio — which includes Artists First and Authentic Talent and Liter­ary Management — made Propagate the industry’s largest digital talent management company. They also expanded the company’s presence in the sports world, partnering with the PGA Tour and Pro Shop to relaunch the Skins Game golf tournament.

Consolidating opportunities: “I’m really excited for 2026,” says Buckley. “I know a lot of people may be con­cerned about some of the big move­ments in mergers and acquisitions, but we see a pathway here and are excited to attack it in a big way. Hope­fully, next year we’ll be talking about a number of initiatives, in terms of acquisitions and investments, that we’ve made.”

Co-head, technology, media & telecommunications group; member, sports group
Proskauer Rose

When not advising Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy’s tech-infused TGL Golf League, which launched in January and recently added a seventh team, Freeman represents Seven Seven Six Management in notable invest­ments in women’s sports, includ­ing the Chelsea FC Women soccer team and Athlos women’s track and field events. He’s currently advising X Games on forming the X Games League, launching in 2026.

Wildcard Trump: When Freeman’s clients expressed concerns about the current administration’s impact on merger clearance process, he orga­nized internal sessions on the topic for various media clients. “They get continuing legal education credits, but it’s been a really successful roll­out for clients to hear from our anti­trust folks about what’s happening in Washington.”

Partner
The Raine Group

Hodge has advised on landscape-al­tering deals at merchant bank Raine this year, most notably Skydance’s merger with Paramount, creating Paramount Skydance, and Endeav­or’s sale of various entities to Ari Emanuel’s MARI, including the Madrid and Miami Open tennis tournaments.

Three-city thinking: “You have to understand New York and the world of finance and what investors expect and how they look at the world and the language that they speak and what they do,” explains Hodge. “You have to understand Silicon Valley and what drives them, how they look at their platforms … and then you have to understand L.A. and how the stuff actually gets made and the incentive structures and what finds success and failure.”

Founder, managing partner and chief investment officer
RedBird Capital

Cardinale’s investment firm RedBird has been involved in many large, high-profile transactions, includ­ing the $1.2 billion acquisition of AC Milan in 2022 and its $100 million commitment to Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s Artists Equity, but nothing has garnered as much press as its investment in Skydance Media’s $8.4 billion merger with Paramount Global, which gives RedBird 22.5% of the voting power in the newly created Paramount Skydance and Cardinale a seat on the board of directors.

Committed relationship: “To a cer­tain extent, less is more for me, which means that I’m willing to sort of back up the truck and really lean into Paramount Skydance and keep looking for opportunities to feed that investment as opposed to go find other investments,” he says.

Stephen E. Sessa
Co-chair, entertainment & media industry group
Joshua Love, Eric Marder, Ed Shapiro
Partners, entertainment & media industry group
Reed Smith

Reed Smith advised on over $3 bil­lion worth of music transactions in 2025, with Shapiro handling sports and music transactions, start-ups and brands; Love focusing on dig­ital media and emerging technol­ogies; Marder working recording, music publishing and live perfor­mance agreements (including Bad Bunny’s upcoming Super Bowl halftime show); and Sessa handling catalog acquisitions. Shapiro also represented an unnamed seller in the sale of Jason Aldean’s recording catalog and a share of other catalogs to BMG. Their roster also includes other music-related clients ranging from artists Rihanna, Jay Z, Chris­tina Aguilera, Bon Jovi, the Smashing Pumpkins and Korn to companies such as Concord, Sony, Lyric, Kobalt, Chord and Litmus.

Mid-level tour pain: “Guys like Kas­kade or Bon Jovi can fill any room,” says Shapiro. “We’re seeing a lot of mid-tier and lower-tier artists suf­fering that haven’t broken through. It’s too expensive to be on the road less than five days a week.”

Partner
Shamrock Capital

Russo got an intimate look at the rap­idly evolving dynamics around talent, content ownership and monetiza­tion when Shamrock did a deal with none other than Taylor Swift. Swift famously erupted when music mogul Scooter Braun acquired the master rights to her first six albums from Big Machine Records in 2019. Shamrock bought them from Braun the follow­ing year. In May, Shamrock agreed to sell the masters back to Swift in a nine-figure deal that her camp char­acterized as “fair and reasonable.”

VIP view of the marketplace: “We have a front-row seat to the sectors we transact in,” says Russo, who focuses on acquiring content libraries and related rights around movies, TV, music, games and sports.

Robert A. Darwell, Aaron Campbell, Ramela Ohanian, Nicolas Urdinola, Aerin A. Snow
Partners
Segun Aluko
Associate, entertainment, technology, advertising, corporate practice
Sheppard Mullin

Darwell and the Sheppard Mullin team negotiated a number of head­line-making deals, including pacts for John Krasinski to produce and write for his untitled “Jack Ryan” project and Michael B. Jordan to produce and direct the upcoming “The Thomas Crown Affair” reboot. Darwell also served as production counsel for the second season of Netflix hit “Wednesday” and “The Testaments,” Hulu’s upcoming sequel to the “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and advised on the second and third seasons of the Amazon reality-competition series “Beast Games.” The team’s other clients include Amazon, Meta, Skydance Sports, Lululemon and Toyota Motor North America.

Priority shift: Darwell says there’s been a dramatic shift from the old days, when “there was advantage in holding out, taking your time, rethinking and structuring the deal.” Today, “some client motivation is speed and efficiency in closing deals. Companies are prepared to take on more financial risk if it moves things along quicker.”

Co-CEO, managing partner
Silver Lake

Six months after Silver Lake com­pleted its $25 billion take-private of Endeavor in March, Durban led the technology investment firm in its $55 billion take-private of gaming giant Electronic Arts as part of a consortium that also included Saudi Arabia’s PIF and Affinity Partners.

A player in the sports world: Egon, who joined Silver Lake in 1999 as a founding principal and became co-CEO in 2019, personally owns a minority stake in the Las Vegas Raid­ers and majority ownership of the Austin Gamblers PBR team.

David Eisman
Partner, head, media and entertainment group
Glen Mastroberte
Partner
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom

The Skadden duo’s highlight reel kicks off with the work it did for Downtown Music Holdings on its pending $775 million sale to Virgin Music, which is currently under a European Com­mission investigation, but is expected to be finalized in February. The firm also advised Hailey Bieber’s skincare company Rhode in its $1 billion acqui­sition by Elf Beauty in May, and S10 Publishing and Brandon Silverstein in connection with the sale of the S10 Music Publishing song catalog and additional stakes in S10 Management (a joint venture with Roc Nation) to Japanese entertainment giant Avex.

Production bounceback?: “Some production companies have had trouble raising capital because the markets weren’t good,” notes Eis­man. “But now people are putting money back into these entities, and these equity raises for production companies is a good sign that the market is coming back.”

Luke Ashworth, Eric Geffner
Partners
Matthew Thompson
Co-leader & partner, entertainment, sports and media practice
Russell Weiss, Evie Whiting, Emily Zipperstein
Partners
Sidley Austin

Sidley Austin’s deep bench of deal­making pros functions as true part­ners to their clients. This year, they represented a consortium com­prised of DWS Group and Cutting Edge Group in a joint venture with Warner Bros. Discovery on an expan­sive music rights deal with many moving parts. They also advised Shamrock Capital on a strategic investment in New Regency that allowed the latter company to aug­ment its film and television library.

AI’s Impact: “Throughout the last 125 years, the modern entertainment industry has done a remarkable job of adapting and finding ways to uti­lize new tools and technologies,” says Thompson. “If AI makes it possible to create a feature-length film from whole cloth without meaningful human input, that will have a pro­found impact on the industry and the value of intellectual property and copyrights. I don’t know that we’ll ever get there. I’m hoping we end up in the supplementary camp as opposed to the replacement camp.”

Sports commentator, host

In March, Smith closed a five-year deal with ESPN reportedly worth at least $100 million. The new pact has him continuing to host and execu­tive produce the sports talk show “First Take,” while scaling back his other duties for the network, such as his commentator role on “NBA Countdown.” It also gives him the freedom to explore non-sports ven­tures through his company, Straight Shooter Media, including podcasts and political commentary, with ESPN parent Disney getting a first look at his projects.

Betting on himself: Smith personally invested upwards of $1.5 million in his own podcast studio in New Jer­sey, where he records “The Stephen A. Smith Show.”

Chairman
Sony Music Entertainment

Stringer announced in June that Sony Music had deployed over $2.5 billion across more than 60 acqui­sitions and investments over the past year, including the purchase of Hipgnosis Songs Group, a stake in Jack White’s catalog and music cata­logs by Queen and Pink Floyd, which include not only their recorded music and publishing, but also name, image and likeness rights that can potentially be exploited using AI and other technologies.

Why the free-spending first-wave cat­alog buyers stumbled: “They didn’t have any infrastructure to build a story around where they were going to get the money back,” says Stringer. “We have an overhead of people all facing the same direction that pre­sumably have quite a bit of expertise in this area, and that costs too much to replicate.”

Suzanne Prete
President, game shows
Flory Bramnick
Executive VP, distribution, North America
Mayuko Winn
Executive VP, global distribution, business and legal affairs
Sony Pictures Television

This trio has successfully ushered Sony’s long-running classic game shows “Jeopardy!” and “Wheel of Fortune” — the #1 and #2 non-sports programs on linear televi­sion — into the modern streaming era through a revolutionary co-ex­clusive multi-year deals that allows fans to stream the game shows the day-after-broadcast on Peacock, Hulu and Hulu on Disney+. Soon after, they struck a similar deal with Canada’s Crave to stream the shows. The key was tailoring deliveries and approaches to each streamer and ensuring they had the collateral materials needed to support the iconic shows.

Game changer: “When you think about when sports first went to streaming, everybody said, ‘People are never going to tune in to stream­ing platforms to watch sports,’” says Prete. “It took a minute to educate the viewers. That’s what we’re see­ing with our shows too — and our partners are in it for the long haul.”

Founder and executive chairman
Spotify

Ek guided Spotify to new heights in 2025, surpassing 700 million monthly active users in Q3 and delivering double-digit revenue growth and strong profitability, while expanding advertising part­nerships and brokering new multi-year agreements with several major music labels and independents (via Merlin). He also established a forward-looking partnership with Sony Music Group, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Merlin and Believe to develop “artist-first” and responsible generative AI music products, with principles including upfront licensing, artist opt-in and fair compensation.

Going out on a high: Ek stepped down as CEO at year-end to become executive chairman.

Writer, producer, director, showrunner
101 Studios, SGS Studios, Bosque Ranch Studios

Sheridan scored a bona fide hit this year with Billy Bob Thornton-starrer “Landman,” the prolific showrunner’s latest Paramount+ drama. Behind the scenes, Sheridan inked a blockbuster production pact with NBCUniversal that covers his film and TV work start­ing in 2029. Reports of a $1 billion val­uation are untethered to reality, but it is a monumental commitment from the studio to provide overhead and production support for Sheridan’s grandest visions. Sheridan and his reps at CAA were fortunate that they were shopping for a new studio home at the time when NBCUniversal was in the midst of a next-chapter transfor­mation, spinning off its linear cable channels into Versant.

Not so lame duck: His current bosses at Paramount have tapped him to adapt the video game franchise “Call of Duty” for the big screen.

Artist and entrepreneur
Taylor Swift Prods.

On the heels of wrapping her block­buster 21-month “Eras Tour,” which set a record as the highest-grossing tour of all time with more than $2 billion in ticket sales, Swift took full ownership of the master recordings of her first six albums in a deal with Shamrock Capital in May, paying a reported $360 million. In October, she released her wildly anticipated 12th studio album, “The Life of a Show­girl,” which sold more than 2.7 million copies in its first week of release and quickly achieved quintuple-platinum certification.

Ownership reclaimed: “To say this is my greatest dream come true is actually being pretty reserved about it,” wrote Swift in a letter announcing the masters acquisition.

Ariel Emanuel
Executive chair and CEO, TKO; executive chairman, WME Group
Mark Shapiro
President and chief operating officer, TKO; president and managing partner, WME Group
Andrew Schleimer
Chief financial officer, TKO
TKO, WME Group

This trio has been the brains behind some of the biggest and most impactful deals at the intersection of sports and entertainment, and the years of collaboration have made them a well-oiled machine. In August, they announced a land­mark media rights agreement, val­ued at $7.7 billion over seven years, that moves all of the UFC’s marquee numbered events from pay-per-view to Paramount+ at no additional cost to its subscribers, with some events simulcast on CBS.

The thrill of the game: “Sports and sports entertainment are garner­ing the highest valuations in terms of any content in the marketplace right now,” says Schleimer. “Unlike scripted content, sports are part of the conversation the next day. FOMO is a real thing, and it’s even more prevalent and prominent when it comes to your favorite sports team.”

President, CEO
UFC

Since taking the reins of the UFC in 2001, White has led the league and MMA fighting in general through a quarter century of exponential growth. It reached another pinnacle in August when its parent company TKO Group signed a new seven-year, $7.7 billion deal with Paramount that will move all of UFC’s 13 annual mar­quee numbered events and 30 Fight Nights to the studio’s streaming ser­vice beginning in 2026.

Moments to remember: “I sell ‘holy shit’ moments for a living,” says White. “I’m asking you every Sat­urday to stay home and watch my events. You have a ton of options on Saturday night. I don’t ever want you to wish you’d done something else.”

Founder & CEO
UnitedMasters

Veteran mogul Stoute acknowledges that when he founded music distrib­utor UnitedMasters in 2017, he faced resistance from artists with major label dreams, even though the deals he offered allowed them to retain 100% ownership of their masters. But he says that with recent suc­cesses such as BigXthaPlug, whose single “All the Way” debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 on the Hot Country Songs and Hot Rap Songs charts earlier this year, “we’ve checked all of those psychological boxes in order to get people past it.”

AI renaissance: “I think it’s going to be an opportunity for new creators to get in the game and add new flavor to it,” says Stoute.

Chairman, CEO
Universal Music Group

Under Grainge’s leadership, UMG posted 6.5% revenue growth in the first half of the year, while closing multi-year licensing deals with Spo­tify and Amazon Music emphasizing artist-centric payouts and better fan engagement. He also renewed its partnership with YouTube and part­nered with Udio on a new, licensed AI music service launching in 2026.

Statement of purpose: “We’re not a financial institution that views music as an ‘asset.’ And we’re not an aggre­gator that views music as ‘content,’” he wrote in a February memo to staff. “We are a music company built by visionary music entrepreneurs. For us, music is a vital — perhaps the vital — art form.”

Global head of business affairs
Universal Television Entertainment

Promoted to her current position this year, Lefcourt oversees negoti­ations and deals for NBC, Peacock, Bravo and Universal Studio Group. That spans every deal connected with some 300 original productions from “A Man on the Inside” to “SNL.” Understanding she’s heading a leg­acy studio in an ever-changing era, her first mandate was to be more flexible and creative in dealmaking.

Precedents are a thing of the past: “I can only speak for our studio, but it might not be as hard as you would think because there is a real accep­tance and realization that the busi­ness is changing, and the way we did things is not the way we’re going to be doing things going forward,” she says.

Paul Bernstein
Chair, entertainment transactions
Nick Jacobus
Partner
Sam Djahanbani, Justin Behnam
Associates
Venable

The foursome advised the princi­pals of Untitled Entertainment and Grandview Entertainment in their sales to the Initial Group, a newly formed entertainment company backed by private equity firm TPG. The group also repped Entertain­ment 360 in a strategic investment from mega-fund the Carlyle Group and former Broadway Video exec Andrew Singer in the formation of Revue Studios, an independent con­tent studio backed by Wasserman.

Ethical AI: “People are afraid that AI is going to replace humans,” says Behnam. “It’s going to replace inef­ficiency. It’s not going to replace creators. It’s not going to replace attorneys. I feel like the studios, attorneys, record labels, creators that adopt AI ethically and transpar­ently will end up not only controlling but being able to leverage and build the next generation of IP and really safeguard those interests.”

Chief business officer
Vermillio

Maher orchestrated Vermillio’s $16 million Series A funding round, co-led by DNS Capital and Sony Music Entertainment, which closed in March 2025. The year also saw him set up partnerships with Steve Harvey and artist and brand devel­opment company Iconoclast for the Chicago-based AI platform, which enables rights holders to protect their IP and likeness from unautho­rized generative AI use (including deepfakes), while enabling secure licensing and monetization through its TraceID technology.

How to stop worrying and learn to love AI: Maher says that as AI becomes more pervasive and impactful in people’s daily lives, “the mindset will shift over to more positivity or inevi­tability, just as it did with the internet.”

CEO
Warner Bros. Discovery

As 2025 comes to a close, Zaslav is in the thick of a mergers and acquisi­tions brawl. In other words, he’s in his element. Zaslav has been a deal maven since his days as a telecom­munications lawyer who got to know the early cable TV pioneers, includ­ing John Malone and Ted Turner. Zaslav has more often been on the acquiring end of the M&A equation during his long run as a senior exec­utive at General Electric’s NBC, Dis­covery Communications and now Warner Bros. Discovery. But this time around, Zaslav is in the unfamiliar position of leading the selling entity. And he has not been amused by the aggressive and unsolicited overtures lobbed at the company — and Zaslav personally — by David Ellison, newly minted CEO of Paramount Skydance.

Always the player: Zaslav enrolled in Cornell University but transferred to Binghamton University after his freshman year because he felt the Ivy League institution involved “too much studying and not enough fun.”

Adam Glick
Executive VP, business operations
Matt Matzkin
Executive VP, operations, Warner Bros. Unscripted Television and Warner Bros. Animation
Shanon Muir
Senior VP, legal, Warner Bros. Television Group — Animation
Warner Bros. Television Group

Warner Bros. Television Group accomplished a lot in 2025. For start­ers, it closed straight-to-series deals for the “Big Bang Theory” spinoff “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” for HBO Max and the Greg Berlanti-Carly Wray comic book adaptation “Still­water” for Amazon. It also put two other Berlanti-produced series into development, “Afterlife With Archie” for Disney+ and “Foster Dade” for Hulu, and closed deals to renew the entertainment news magazine show “Extra” for Season 32 with new host Derek Hough and develop the ani­mated series “Steven Universe: Lars of the Stars” for Amazon.

Anime aboard: “We’re embracing anime in a big way,” says Muir. “Jump­ing onto the train, looking at our IPs and creating original ideas in that space is really fun.”

Michael Ryan-Southern
Executive VP; chief corporate development and strategy officer
Paul Robinson
Executive VP; general counsel
Carletta Higginson
Executive VP; chief digital officer
Warner Music Group

The Warner Music Group made headlines when it entered into a $1.2 billion joint venture with investment firm Bain Capital to acquire record­ing and music publishing catalogs. It also looked to the future with partnerships with four different AI companies — Suno, Udio, Stability AI and Klay — that will launch in 2026. Suno’s licensed music model will necessitate artist and songwriter opt-in for use of name, image and likeness, voice and compositions in new AI-generated songs to expand revenue streams. Udio allows users to craft non-downloadable remixes and new songs using artist’s voices. Stability AI will develop professional tools to create music using ethically trained models. Its licensing deal with Klay is designed to deepen fan engagement on a catalog level. Warner has also joined Spotify, Sony, Universal, Merlin and Believe Music to develop artist-first AI products.

Preventative measures: “It’s really imperative to shape the business models and the guardrails and pro­actively chart the path for the benefit of our artists and songwriters,” says Higginson.

Senior VP, head of sales
Wave Sports & Entertainment

In Q4 2025, Jones ushered partners like Amazon into a new era by intro­ducing one of the industry’s first shoppable podcast formats that allows advertisers to generate cul­tural impact and measure revenue. Her Hasbro campaign announcing a “Peppa Pig” character’s pregnancy on the also-pregnant Kylie Kelce’s “Not Gonna Lie” podcast spurred a cultural moment, generating over 10.8 million impressions and garner­ing considerable media attention.

Consumer shift: “I’m focused on ways to really think about video and social more opportunistically, and really drive the value of those two mediums, because it’s about win­ning YouTube,” she says. “Spoiler alert: that’s where all of the views and attention is.”

Ken Kao
Founder, CEO
Josh Rosenbaum
Partner, producer
Waypoint Entertainment

As filmmakers themselves, Kao and Rosenbaum are passionate about helping visionary independent film­makers succeed. Their recent deal with Neon has financed mid-bud­get features like Boots Riley’s “I Love Boosters” and Aneil Karia’s “Hamlet,” while Waypoint’s Cweature Features genre-focused label, responsible for last year’s breakout hit “Longlegs,” will soon release the Adam Scott-led “Hokum.” Rosenbaum says while indie film and foreign sales collapse and distributors dry up, Waypoint is creating new financial models, part­nerships and deal structures they hope others can replicate.

Adaptability: “I’m a cinema lover. I love the theatrical experience, but we’re also not naive to how the world has changed,” Kao says. “When we talk about sustainability … the goal is to make sure that what we’re making is getting appreciated or seen.”

Partners
Weil, Gotshal & Manges

This group worked across different deals incorporating many areas of expertise. Ara repped Coral Tree Part­ners in its acquisition of a minority stake in Innovative Artists and TWG Motorsports in connection with var­ious matters, including F1 content partnerships (e.g., Keanu Reeves’ Cadillac F1 team docuseries). Ara and Markman advised Cook Media Global in its acquisition of faith-based record label Fair Trade Services and Concord Music in connection with its acquisition of RKO Pictures. Mark­man counseled Rich Eisen Prods. on its multi-year deal to move its televi­sion, radio and podcast production and distribution to ESPN.

Multi-vertical approach: “Whether it’s entertainment, sports or media, I think what this year really proved is that the smartest money in enter­tainment, sports and media really isn’t betting on just one vertical,” says Ara. “It’s understanding how, whether it’s streaming platforms or sports rights, music catalogs or even talent representation, [they’re] all kind of chapters in the same story of this industry or these industries.”

Owners, founding partners
Weinstein Senior

The duo helped top YouTuber Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson further expand his multi-faceted corporate empire, closing a deal for “Beast Games,” a reality competition series for Ama­zon featuring a $10 million prize. They also helped structure the deal for Fox’s survival competition series “Extracted,” produced by Sylvester Stallone, and facilitated more than $100 million in talent deals for Meta’s AI platform.

Main motivation: “I think what gets Todd and I out of bed every day is strategizing with the clients, thinking about the industry and how things are evolving,” says Senior, who also reps top digital media creator Dhar Mann Studios with Weinstein. “We’re thinking about how we can structure deals and strategize for the next step. That’s what keeps us passionate.”

Partners
Weintraub Tobin

The duo maximizes opportunities born out of the ever-expanding dig­ital media space, from podcasts to brand partnerships. For client Alex Cooper, host of the podcast “Call Her Daddy” and founder of media com­pany Unwell, Gordon negotiated a deal to make her beverage brand Unwell Hydration an official spon­sor of the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), while Marlow repped Claudia and Jackie Oshry, the voices behind the top-performing podcast “The Toast,” in a three-year deal to remain with Dear Media.

True to yourself: Marlow says con­tent creators need to be authentic. “People respond to authenticity, and if you’re going to build something from the ground up, it’s better to start with that.”

Shane Nix
Partner, tax
Beau Stapleton
Partner, corporate & financial services
Alan Epstein
Chair of entertainment transactions practice; partner, corporate & financial services
Andrew Kramer
Chair of motion picture, television & entertainment finance and partner, corporate & financial services
Steve Hurdle
Partner, corporate & financial services
Willkie Farr & Gallagher

The Willkie Farr team has been a force in the film, TV and music worlds. Stapleton repped Hopeless Records in its acquisition of punk rock label Fat Wreck Chords and dig­ital influencer Alan Chikin Chow in launching a new joint venture record label with HYBE. Epstein and Hurdle advised Create Music Group on its May acquisition of electronic music label Monstercat and Hyphenate Media Group on its purchase of a stake in GloNation Studios. On the film and TV side, Kramer advised Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s prodco Artists’ Equity and 101 Studios (“Yel­lowstone,” “Y: Marshals”).

The allure of music catalogs: “These are assets that are regularly generat­ing royalties with an income stream with transparency in a way that can be modeled,” says Stapleton. “I really do think that we are in a new era of it being an alternative asset class that rivals many of the other, more tradi­tional, areas.”

CEO & founder
WTSL
CEO & founder
WIN Sports Group

After Silver Lake’s $25 billion take-pri­vate of Endeavor closed in March, Whitesell launched the investment firm WTSL, backed with $250 million from Silver Lake, and the boutique sports talent agency WIN. WTSL made a splash in June when it launched a joint venture with Universal Music Group to monetize artist IP in film, TV, fashion, consumer products and branded experiences.

Gilded exit: Whitesell received a reported $100 million cash pay­out in the Endeavor take-private, and rolled over $266 million in equity into the company, renamed Endeavor Group Holdings, which serves as the parent company of WME Group and retains a majority stake in publicly traded TKO Group, owner of WWE and UFC.

President
WWE

Khan kicked off the WWE’s Net­flix era in January when its weekly flagship show “Monday Night Raw” began airing live on the platform. Then it was announced that WWE and ESPN had agreed to a five-year deal valued at $1.6 billion for the streaming rights to premium live events like WrestleMania and the Royal Rumble. In 2027, WrestleMania 43 will be held in Riyadh, Saudi Ara­bia, marking the first time the iconic event will take place outside North America.

Working with Riyadh: “If there’s an issue, their default is to get it resolved with you in an amicable and friendly way, so all problems get worked out in short order,” says Khan.

Kevin Yorn
Co-founder, managing partner
Gregg Gellman, Alex Kohner, David Krintzman, Jared Levine
Partners
Jeff Endlich
Attorney
Yorn Levine Barnes Krintzman Rubenstein Kohner Endlich Goodell & Gellman

The Century City offices of Yorn Levine look more like a private social club than a law firm, but a lot of dealmaking gets done within its black-painted walls. Kohner made headlines with the Duffer brothers’ new four-year $100 million overall deal with Paramount, while Yorn closed major brand partnerships for influencers Alix Earle (Meta, Carl’s Jr.) and Hailey Bieber (DKNY, Chase Sap­phire Reserve) and Levine brokered three-year extensions for Tony Korn­heiser and Michael Wilbon with ESPN. Krintzman set up multiple projects for Matthew McConaughey, Gellman negotiated Nick Bilton’s writing deal for an untitled Hawaii-set crime proj­ect with 20th Century Studios star­ring Leonardo DiCaprio and Dwayne Johnson, and Endlich locked Curry Barker’s deal to write and direct the indie film “Obsession.”

Equity brand deals can be insanely lucrative, but … : “As a talent rep, you get a little bit nervous advising a cli­ent to take equity in place of cash if they’re really putting themselves out there and taking on a ton of expo­sure, when you really don’t know whether or not it’s going to pay off at the end of the day,” says Endlich.

Partners
Ziffren Brittenham

The Ziffren Brittenham trio bro­kered a long list of big agreements for big clients. Rubinfeld closed deals for James L. Brooks (write/produce “The Simpsons Sequel”), Jerry Bruck­heimer (produce Joseph Kosinski’s untitled Apple UFO drama) and Tim Allen (voice Buzz Lightyear in “Toy Story 5”). Bahat handled Mae Martin (create and star in mini “Wayward”), Mark Bianculli (“How to Rob a Bank” script sale) and Chad Hodge (“Tomb Raider” co-showrunner deal) on his own, while working with Rubinfeld on matters involving Boulderlight Pictures (Paramount overall) and Danielle Deadwyler (role opposite Steve Carell in Bill Lawrence HBO series “Rooster”). Zajfen brokered deals for Eddie Murphy (“Being Eddie” doc), Martin Gero (create/produce Amazon “Stargate” series reboot) and Katie Dippold (create/ produce Apple series “Widow’s Bay”).

Hollywood will survive AI: “There are going to be good and bad use cases. There are going to be good and bad outcomes,” says Rubinfeld. “I think our industry is dynamic and will find a way to incorporate the tools rather than be eaten by them.”