that “Avatar: The Way Of Water” will be released in China on Dec. 16, the same day it is slated to be released globally, according to people familiar with the matter.
Executives at Disney and at movie-theater chains had been closely watching for a decision from Chinese censors on the movie, director
James Cameron
‘s sequel to the 2009 science- fiction epic. It will be distributed by Disney-owned 20th Century Studios.
“This is fantastic news for Disney, for
James Cameron
and for the movie, because the potential box office from China is enormous,” Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore, said in an interview. “This may be the pivotal moment that indicates that ‘Way of Water’ will earn enough money to justify further installments of the Avatar franchise.”
The last seven superhero films produced by Marvel Studios, Disney’s most-profitable film studio over the past decade, haven’t received release dates in the crucial China market, denting the global box-office gross.
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In July, for example, Disney cited the lack of a China release for “Thor: Love and Thunder,” the fourth solo film featuring Chris Hemsworth’s Thor character from the popular Avengers superhero team, as one reason the movie underperformed at the international box office.
Disney and other Hollywood studios have run up against Chinese censors in recent years, especially when their movies deal with sensitive political themes or when actors or directors make statements that Chinese authorities find objectionable.
Two recent Marvel films were blocked from release in China after comments that the Chinese government viewed as insulting, made by the director of one movie and a star actor of the other, were unearthed and circulated in the country.
While Disney hasn’t revealed the “Avatar” sequel’s budget, Mr. Cameron, the director, said in a recent interview in GQ magazine that the “Avatar” sequel was “the worst business case in movie history” and that it would have to be the third- or fourth-highest-grossing film in history just to break even. Disney has said that it plans to make five Avatar movies in total.
The first Avatar movie from 2009 grossed nearly $2.9 billion worldwide, with $259 million of that total coming from China, making it the highest-grossing movie of all time. It narrowly edged out Marvel’s “Avengers: Endgame” after a September 2022 rerelease of the movie added $73 million in ticket sales, according to Comscore, a box-office tracker.
It sparked a boom in multiplex construction in China, as Chinese audiences flocked to see the film in 3-D and government authorities sought to encourage consumers to spend more money in shopping centers.
Theaters saw lines for the first “Avatar” up to six hours long, and scalpers sold tickets for $100 apiece, according to
Richard Gelfond,
chief executive of the movie technology company
IMAX Corp.
In Beijing, Chinese authorities closed an IMAX theater so high- ranking party members could watch it at a private screening, he said. Before the 2009 movie, IMAX had 14 screens in China, but now has 800, with 200 more contracted to be built.
“Everything changed after ‘Avatar,’” Mr. Gelfond said. “It was really the match that lit the entire movie industry” in China.
When a good song comes on, people can’t help but move with the music, nodding their heads or tapping their feet in time with the rhythm. This ability to perceive the beat and move in sync with it was previously thought to exist only in humans and a small group of other species.
But rats can keep the beat too, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science Advances. Researchers in Japan played Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K. 448) for 10 rats, and tiny wireless accelerometers affixed to the animals’ heads revealed that the rodents subtly nodded in sync with the musical beat.
The research undercuts a longstanding theory that the ability to sync body movements with musical rhythms is found only in animals that can change the sounds they produce in response to experiences. These so-called vocal learners include some birds, bats, elephants, whales, dolphins and seals, in addition to humans.
Since rats aren’t vocal learners but bopped to the beat anyway, “beat synchronization might be more widespread across the animal kingdom than previously thought,” said Juan Manuel Toro, a comparative cognition researcher at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona who wasn’t involved in the research.
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“This is the kind of work that needs to be done if we are going to uncover the vast abilities that other species have to connect with the world that we’re not yet aware of,” said Nina Kraus, a professor of neurobiology at Northwestern University who wasn’t involved in the new research.
Dr. Kraus said the finding didn’t surprise her. “It may be they’ve had these skills all the time,” she said of rats. “It’s just been scientists who have been slow to measure them.”
Previous research looked at rats’ ability to perceive and move in sync with musical rhythms. But those efforts involved analyzing video footage of the animals’ movements, which are “too small to be captured by visual inspection,” said Hirokazu Takahashi, an associate professor in the University of Tokyo mechanical-engineering department and a co-author of the new study.
Dr. Takahashi’s research team played 60-second clips of the sonata at four different tempos. Data from the accelerometers showed that five of the 10 rats moved their heads in time with the sonata when it was played at its original tempo of 132 beats per minute, or bpm. The researchers also saw a similar effect when the sonata was played at 75% of its original speed.
“At first the rats wait and see, then they begin to move and then those movements get stronger,” Dr. Takahashi said, adding that only some rats move rhythmically in response to music. “Some humans show very large movements in response to music, but others are very shy,” he said. “There are a lot of individual differences in rats as well.”
At faster tempos—when the sonata was played at double and quadruple the original speed—the rats didn’t move much.
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The rats also heard songs by Lady Gaga, Queen, Michael Jackson and Maroon 5. But the study focused on data collected when the animals were exposed to the sonata, which, according to Dr. Takahashi, has been widely used in other studies on rodent cognition and behavior.
The researchers also recorded neural activity in a different set of rats while exposing them to clicking sounds at various tempos. Using electrodes affixed to the animals’ brains, they examined the auditory cortex, a brain region that processes sound. The scientists found that activity there synced with the beat of rhythmic sounds with a tempo falling between 120 bpm and 140 bpm.
The research also included human study participants who listened to the sonata at the four tempos using headphones fitted with accelerometers. Like the rats, the humans’ movements synced most distinctly to tempos between 120 bpm and 140 bpm. That makes sense, according to Dr. Takahashi, as evidenced by the fact that popular music frequently employs tempos in that range.
“The study is interesting because it shows beat synchronization in rats, and more importantly, it shows that the preferred tempos for such synchronization are the same ones observed in humans,” Dr. Toro said. “This provides evidence for biological bases of musical preferences that are shared between humans and other species.”
Henkjan Honing, a professor of music cognition at the University of Amsterdam who wasn’t involved in the new research, criticized its methodology. The rats’ head movements may simply have been a startle response to certain loud passages of music, he said.
“They’re scared basically,” he said of the rats.
To prove that the rats are perceiving and syncing up with the beat, Dr. Honing said, researchers would have to show that the animals’ movements came a few milliseconds before the beats. “It should sort of be slightly early and a bit predictive,” he said, adding that the rats in the study reacted to the beat rather than anticipating it.
One convincing follow-up to this study, he said, would be if researchers slowly sped up or slowed the music during the experiment and examined whether the rats’ physical responses changed over time and adapted to a new beat.
Though the new study presents no evidence that rats can anticipate the beat, “that’s not to say that it doesn’t exist,” Dr. Kraus said. “It may be we just haven’t been clever enough to figure out how to measure it yet.”
SEOUL—The eldest member of the South Korean boy band BTS will be conscripted for the country’s mandatory military service later this year, ending a debate over whether the singers’ cultural achievements should merit an exemption.
The 29-year-old
Kim Seok-jin
—who goes by the stage name “Jin” to fans—had until his December birthday to begin his mandatory military service of 18 months. His start date had already been pushed back two years, following an amendment to South Korea’s conscription law in 2020 designed with the BTS group in mind.
That reprieve had allowed Mr. Kim to delay his military service until he turned 30. On Monday, Mr. Kim, through his management agency
HYBE,
said he would initiate steps to join the military as soon as his schedule for his solo release is concluded at the end of October. The other six members of the group plan to carry out their military service based on their own individual plans,
HYBE
said in a statement.
“Both the company and the members of BTS are looking forward to reconvening as a group again around 2025 following their service commitment,” HYBE said.
BTS—short for their Korean name
Bangtan Sonyeondan,
which they alter in English to “Beyond the Scene”—is one of the world’s most popular bands. Their devoted fans around the world officially go by the name ARMY.
Members of BTS arrived for the annual Grammy Awards in Las Vegas earlier this year.
Photo:
angela weiss/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Mr. Kim’s conscription announcement comes after the group held a free concert in South Korea’s southern port city of Busan on Saturday to help promote the country’s bid to host the World Expo in 2030.
In June, the group had also announced that they would be taking time to focus on releasing music as solo acts, citing struggles to create new music in order to live up to the expectations of their fans. The news sent HYBE shares tumbling by nearly 25% at the time—marking the company’s worst single-day decline since it went public in October 2020.
The weekend concert in Busan was widely expected to be the last involving all of the members of the K-pop boy band, as discussions around the South Korean government potentially exempting BTS from the mandatory military service had failed to reach a conclusion.
In social-media posts, fans of the K-pop band expressed a mix of sadness, resignation and acceptance over the news the group would begin military service. Many fans said BTS prepared them for a day like this when they announced they would be taking a break to focus on solo work. Other members of the ARMY said they were already looking forward to the new material the band would release when their time in the military ends.
South Korean legislators had been discussing the possibility of amending the local conscription law since last year without taking action.
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In South Korea, all able-bodied men must serve in the military for at least 18 months, though the length of the service may vary by the type of post. The draft starts from the age of 18, though men can postpone until 28, with those in the entertainment profession permitted to postpone conscription until the age of 30.
BTS, which formed in 2013, was the first K-pop act to top the U.S. album chart and has produced a series of No. 1 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. They have sold out U.S. stadiums for their massive, global fan base and appeared on “Saturday Night Live.”
Earlier this year, BTS visited the White House where they discussed discrimination against the Asian community with President Biden. Fans lined up outside of the White House to try to get a glimpse of the band during the meeting.
BTS is the crown jewel of HYBE, which last year said it would acquire U.S.-based Ithaca Holdings to bring artists such as
Mr. Birchall, a straight-laced, 48-year-old wealth manager who rose to become Mr. Musk’s top deputy and the head of his family office, had growing concerns about a new power player in the
Tesla Inc.
TSLA 0.74%
CEO’s orbit.
Mr. Musk was increasingly relying on a new adviser, a 34-year-old, Russian-born ex-professional gambler named
Igor Kurganov.
Mr. Kurganov spent some of the pandemic sleeping in Mr. Musk’s home, where they chatted late into the night about how the world’s richest person might use his fortune to help shape the planet through a giving strategy known as “effective altruism.”
Mr. Kurganov had no experience in finance or security but was suddenly a central figure in both areas for Mr. Musk. He had moved from London to Texas and replaced some of Mr. Musk’s protection detail with new hires of his own. Not long after, the Tesla CEO told Mr. Birchall that he was so taken by the younger man’s ideas that he wanted to leave him in charge of his charitable giving, dispersing funds from Mr. Musk’s vast private fortune, currently around $230 billion, as he saw fit.
“Elon,” Mr. Birchall told his boss, according to three people briefed afterward. “You can’t.”
The clash between the two men, and their dueling efforts to gain the upper hand with Mr. Musk, provides a peek into the often tumultuous private workings of Mr. Musk’s inner circle. As Mr. Musk’s breakneck, $44 billion bid for Twitter shows, the entrepreneur can be prone to quick decisions, ones that he can reverse just as quickly as he makes them. That deal is now in peril, with Mr. Musk trying to walk away and
Twitter
TWTR 4.00%
suing him to complete it.
All the while he is egged on by a rotating crew of investors, underlings and ever-changing friends whose power and personal wealth is closely tied to their proximity to Mr. Musk, according to people who do business with him.
Two men in particular have pulled the Tesla CEO in opposing directions.
Mr. Birchall is an Eagle Scout and practicing Mormon who doesn’t smoke or drink and grew up traveling California as part of a song-and-dance troupe called “The Birchall Family Singers.” He declined to be interviewed through a representative of Mr. Musk’s foundation.
Mr. Kurganov is a high-roller with a reported more than $18 million in poker winnings, with long hair and beard and a peaceful demeanor. He has said in a podcast interview that he dropped out of college because he was smoking too much marijuana. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Igor Kurganov, shown playing poker in a tournament in 2016, became a top adviser to Mr. Musk on charitable giving.
Photo:
Joe Giron/World Poker Tour
Last winter, Mr. Musk came to a compromise between the two. He allowed Mr. Kurganov to oversee $5.7 billion in Tesla shares that the CEO pledged late last year to eventually donate to charity. The rest of Mr. Musk’s overall fortune remained under Mr. Birchall’s purview.
That decision wasn’t, however, the end of the fracas.
This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen people close to Messrs. Musk, Birchall and Kurganov, including associates of the Musk Foundation and investors.
Ultimate fixer
For a man of immense resources, Mr. Musk is a minnow in the world of big-dollar philanthropy. Compared with other magnates such as
Microsoft Corp.
co-founder
Bill Gates
and
Amazon.com Inc.
founder
Jeff Bezos,
whose wealth, like Mr. Musk’s, is tied up in shares of their companies, Mr. Musk has said little concrete about his approach to giving. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Musk’s personal foundation gave away $23.6 million in fiscal 2020, the most recent year for which data is available, filings show. That represented roughly 0.02% of his net worth as of the end of that year, according to Forbes rankings.
Though Mr. Musk is known to favor his own counsel most of all, the man in charge of his foundation since 2016 has been Mr. Birchall, one of the longest standing in his inner circle.
Jared Birchall is a top deputy to Mr. Musk and head of the firm managing his fortune.
Photo:
Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg News
The alliance reflects Mr. Birchall’s role as the ultimate fixer for Mr. Musk, taking care of matters large and small. In addition to handling billions in assets, Mr. Birchall in 2018 under a pseudonym registered the website www.justballs.com, for example, after Mr. Musk mused online that he might want to own the domain name someday, legal documents show.
Mr. Birchall entered the technology world through finance. After his brief singing stint with his siblings—he is one of 11 children—he attended Brigham Young University.
He then spent a year at Merrill Lynch, where he was discharged for what the firm described in a filing as “sending correspondence to a client without management approval.”
Mr. Birchall eventually moved into private wealth and crossed paths with Mr. Musk about a decade ago while working as a client adviser in
Morgan Stanley’s
southern California offices. There, he impressed Mr. Musk by helping arrange hundreds of millions of dollars of loans from the investment bank at a time when the Tesla co-founder was strapped for cash, a person close to Mr. Musk says. When Mr. Musk started a private firm to manage his own money roughly six years ago, he tapped Mr. Birchall to run it.
Mr. Birchall’s work for Mr. Musk has at times led him into strange public controversies and lawsuits. After a British spelunker criticized Mr. Musk’s offer to help rescue a youth soccer team trapped in a flooded Thailand cave in 2018, Mr. Birchall created a fake email address under the name “James Brickhouse” to hire a private investigator to investigate the man, according to court documents.
Mr. Musk during a Tesla event in Shanghai in January 2020.
Photo:
Aly Song/REUTERS
Mr. Musk subsequently called the man “pedo guy” in a tweet, though he later apologized and said it was a joking taunt. The spelunker unsuccessfully sued Mr. Musk for defamation in a Los Angeles federal court.
In addition to his role helping manage Mr. Musk’s fortune, Mr. Birchall is also a director of his tunneling startup, Boring Co., and chief executive officer of Mr. Musk’s Neuralink, which aims to make a brain implant that could be used by quadriplegic patients to control a computer or other devices.
When Mr. Musk announced in 2020 he would move from California to Texas, Mr. Birchall moved his family there, too. He has since become the closest thing Mr. Musk has to a public face in the Texas capital, handling business and attending events on Mr. Musk’s behalf.
“No one else you reach out to who is close to Elon is going to return your calls,” says Tyson Tuttle, former chief executive of Austin semiconductor manufacturer Silicon Valley Labs.
‘Make big moves’
Mr. Kurganov first became friendly with Mr. Musk socially.
Born in Russia but raised in Germany from age 4 by parents who were engineers by trade, Mr. Kurganov grew up in a working class, immigrant household, according to an interview he gave to the Paul Phua Poker podcast.
In his 20s, he gained a level of fame as a professional poker player. Beginning around a decade ago, he began playing high-stakes tournaments in Las Vegas and racking up wins, fellow poker players say. He earned particular renown in 2012 when he won a €1,080,000 purse in Monte Carlo.
He was known as an aggressive player, and had the respect of his fellow pros, the players say. “Igor had a willingness to play a lot of hands and make big moves,” says one of them, Dan Smith.
Though he was spending much of his time in Las Vegas, his personality didn’t match the city’s loud stereotypes. One person who knows him says he was often drawn into long, philosophical conversations on topics such as the rise of artificial intelligence in poker. Mr. Kurganov was concerned that a computer program could be built that could beat even the most talented human player.
Ging Masinda, a Las Vegas marketer and acquaintance of Mr. Kurganov, says the flashiest thing about him is that he sometimes wears eyeliner. “There’s a kid in him,” she says.
In a 2015 interview on the Poker Life Podcast, he said he was developing an accounting app for poker players. He also co-founded the organization Raising for Effective Giving, designed to help poker players, as well as fantasy-sports players and finance professionals, find the right charities to which to donate their winnings, according to archived webpages.
REG was focused on effective altruism, an approach to giving that suggests that inherently subjective qualities such as relative charitable need can be quantified. It’s still a niche approach, because many charitable experts say it can encourage an impersonal, utilitarian approach to complicated moral issues.
Mr. Kurganov and Liv Boeree at an event in San Francisco in 2016.
Photo:
Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images for The Ocean Gala
Mr. Kurganov’s social life, the fellow poker players say, revolved around his longtime partner, fellow professional poker player Liv Boeree. Ms. Boeree has long been friends with the recording artist Grimes, who was first romantically linked to Mr. Musk in 2018. Around the same time, Mr. Musk made Ms. Boeree one of the handful of people he follows on Twitter.
“She was elated” about the follow, according to Joe Stapleton, a poker commentator who spoke to her about it.
The two couples began spending time together. Messrs. Musk and Kurganov bonded over a shared love of Burning Man, the free-spirited desert festival that both regularly attend. Ms. Boeree, meanwhile, stayed close with Grimes; the two women posted photos together on social media. Ms. Boeree didn’t respond to requests for comment, and Grimes, whose legal name is Claire Boucher, couldn’t be reached.
The introduction to Mr. Musk came as Mr. Kurganov was soon to retire from professional poker with millions in personal winnings. Yet his poker accounting app had never gotten off the ground, and REG remained small-fry in terms of the amount of money it directed.
REG said on its website that it directed $3.1 million in charitable giving in 2019, the most recent year mentioned, which the organization said “reflects all donations that have been significantly influenced by us.” The amount couldn’t be independently verified. REG didn’t respond to requests for comment.
When the pandemic hit, Messrs. Kurganov and Musk became closer. Mr. Kurganov laid out a vision in which he might be able to help Mr. Musk combine his interest in science and his vast fortune, for the greater good.
Mr. Musk, known to be open to new ideas, was intrigued by the prospect of an approach to giving that no other major donor had yet tried, according to people familiar with the matter. He gave Mr. Kurganov a job vetting grant requests from his foundation.
When Mr. Musk moved to Texas, Mr. Kurganov and Ms. Boeree soon followed.
A launch facility under construction in Brownsville, Texas, in February for SpaceX, one of Mr. Musk’s companies.
Photo:
Mark Felix/Bloomberg News
‘Donation decisions’
By last August, two years after retiring from poker, Mr. Kurganov had an official email address at the Musk Foundation and was heavily involved in the charity. That month, he corresponded with Chris Carberry, CEO of the nonprofit Explore Mars Inc. The group was looking to raise $600,000 to spirit an Afghan girls robotics team out of the war-torn country.
Mr. Kurganov was skeptical about the cost. “Regarding the price breakdown, what I’m trying to find out is what the expenses will be specifically—I imagine there are additional costs to simply the flight costs, but am still surprised that the total cost scales linearly with the number of people,” he wrote in an email reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Carberry, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, was disappointed but not dissuaded. In another email, also reviewed by the Journal, he wrote to an associate “We have worked effectively with Igor in the recent past. Igor makes the day-to-day donation decisions.”
To Mr. Birchall, that was an untenable situation. He was legally head of the foundation, and as he saw it, Mr. Kurganov was a newcomer who suddenly had immense influence on what to do with Mr. Musk’s money, he told people.
Mr. Birchall also learned that a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent had begun making preliminary inquiries into Mr. Kurganov as part of his job to watch for foreign interference in U.S. companies, people familiar with the matter say. The FBI agent was concerned that a newcomer had so quickly been welcomed into Mr. Musk’s inner circle, the people say.
Mr. Kurganov hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing. An FBI spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Birchall, alarmed that Mr. Musk could be drawn into a federal investigation, this spring again pressed his internal case against Mr. Kurganov, people familiar with the matter say. It was inappropriate, in Mr. Birchall’s view, for Mr. Kurganov to have a central role in the $5.7 billion in shares that Mr. Musk had promised to donate.
During this period, Mr. Birchall was a constant presence at Mr. Musk’s side as his boss pursued Twitter. He helped line up billions of dollars in financing and spoke to shareholders and investors on Mr. Musk’s behalf about the future of the social-networking service.
By spring, the Tesla CEO’s bid for Twitter required him to put up tens of billions of dollars in personal funding and was consuming much of his attention. Meanwhile, Tesla’s stock was dropping as the broader market pulled back, pinching Mr. Musk’s net worth.
Mr. Birchall in May asked Mr. Musk to remove Mr. Kurganov from his post at the foundation.
Mr. Musk agreed to let Mr. Kurganov go, the representative of the foundation says.
None of Mr. Musk’s money was ultimately spent on projects related to effective altruism, the representative says, and Mr. Kurganov’s Musk Foundation email was switched off roughly six weeks ago.
—Elisa Cho and Rebecca Elliott contributed to this article.
Santa Fe, N.M.—New camera footage released by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office Monday shows Alec Baldwin whipping out a revolver and pointing it toward the camera two times while rehearsing for a scene in the Western movie “Rust.”
The footage was taken from the movie set on the day Mr. Baldwin discharged a live round from a revolver, killing Halyna Hutchins, the 42-year-old cinematographer for the low-budget Western. The film’s director, Joel Souza, was also wounded in the incident.
The footage is one of dozens of videos and other images released by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office. The files were released Monday in response to public records requests by media outlets. They include body-camera footage from sheriff’s deputies responding to the incident and investigators’ interviews with key witnesses as well as text message exchanges.
Video from a deputy’s body camera shows a chaotic scene in the moments after the shooting. Emergency responders attempted to save Ms. Hutchins as she lay quietly on the floor of the set’s Old West church. Nearby, Mr. Souza, also on the ground, groaned in pain. Deputies told crew members to stay out of the church because it was a crime scene. Ms. Hutchins was put into an ambulance as a medical helicopter landed nearby.
A shaken-looking Mr. Baldwin sat outside the church and asked someone for a cigarette, the released video shows. He asked if Ms. Hutchins and Mr. Souza had been taken away for treatment and told a deputy he didn’t know how many people were in the church when the shooting occurred.
Text messages also released from the sheriff’s office Monday shed light on how crew workers responded immediately following the shooting and in the subsequent days. In one message sent three days after the shooting, Sarah Zachry, the prop master on “Rust,” commented on how Mr. Baldwin preferred to use real guns and props on set, and referenced a time he didn’t want to act with a “rubber knife.”
“He always wanted his real gun,” she said in a message to an acquaintance who didn’t work on the film.
Two days after the shooting, Ms. Zachry texted Seth Kenney, the film’s weapons supplier, according to the released material, “I talked to Alec, and he’s having a difficult time recalling things like most of us.”
Ms. Zachry also texted with Mr. Baldwin directly in the days following the shooting.
“The sheriff’s dept still will not tell me that I won’t be charged w something,” Mr. Baldwin texted Ms. Zachry on Dec. 2. “But they seem to be getting very close to the truth of what happened.”
Ms. Zachry didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Baldwin’s lawyer Luke Nikas didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In a television interview with ABC News that aired in December, Mr. Baldwin claimed he never pulled the trigger but acknowledged cocking the hammer and releasing it while practicing drawing the gun from its holster.
“I let go of the hammer of the gun, the gun goes off,” Mr. Baldwin said.
Sheriff’s investigators haven’t yet completed their probe into the Oct. 21 shooting, which includes determining how live rounds ended up on the set. Investigators have interviewed a range of people involved in the movie, including Hannah Gutierrez Reed, the armorer in charge of guns on set, assistant director David Halls, Mr. Kenney and Mr. Baldwin.
Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza said several components of the investigation are pending, “including FBI firearm and ballistic forensics along with DNA and latent fingerprint analysis, Office of the New Mexico Medical Examiner findings report and the analysis of Mr. Alec Baldwin’s phone data.”
Another text message exchange released Monday between Ms. Gutierrez Reed and Mr. Kenney from when she worked on a different movie, shows Ms. Gutierrez Reed talking about wanting to use live rounds. While working on a movie called “The Old Way” in August 2021, she asks Mr. Kenney if she can “shoot hot rounds out of the trap door…like a pretty big load of actual ammunition.”
Mr. Kenney in response warned her to never shoot live ammunition and only use blanks. “It’s a serious mistake, always ends in tears,” Mr. Kenney texted. Ms. Gutierrez Reed replied: “Good to know, I’m still gonna shoot mine tho.”
Jason Bowles, an attorney for Ms. Gutierrez Reed, said Monday that during filming of “The Old Way,” Ms. Gutierrez Reed had wanted to fire a special historical gun, away from the movie set when she was off work, but never fired it. “As armorer, she wanted to be familiar with the historical weapon and how it operated but never intended on shooting during production or on set.” He said she has never brought live rounds on set or fired live rounds on set.
In written summaries released Monday of an interview with investigators after the “Rust” shooting, Ms. Gutierrez Reed said one morning, she had planned to work with Mr. Baldwin on using guns, but when he showed up, he didn’t say anything about a lesson. She told other crew members she was concerned “about him practicing because of the draw with the holster,” according to a summary.
At one point, Mr. Baldwin got mad when he tried to draw the gun and it got caught on his microphone, Ms. Gutierrez Reed told the investigators. She reached out to Mr. Baldwin’s assistant to get him additional training, “to which she didn’t hear much back other than he would speak with Alec,” according to the interview summary.
The Santa Fe County Sheriff said in October that a bullet recovered from “Rust” director Joel Souza’s shoulder is believed to have been fired from a revolver by Alec Baldwin during a rehearsal of the movie. Photo by Andres Leighton/AP
An attorney for Mr. Kenney didn’t comment on the releases.
Mr. Bowles has previously said that no one on the set had told Ms. Gutierrez Reed that Mr. Baldwin was doing an impromptu scene rehearsal with the gun, and that she should have been informed so she could have inspected the gun again.
According to a report released last week by state workplace safety inspectors, Ms. Gutierrez Reed wasn’t given proper authority to determine whether gun training was needed, or time to thoroughly inspect ammunition.
Mary Carmack-Altwies, the district attorney for the Santa Fe area, said in a statement Monday that no decision will be made on criminal charges until the Sheriff’s Office completes its investigation and turns over its findings to her office.
Write to Dan Frosch at dan.frosch@wsj.com, Katherine Sayre at katherine.sayre@wsj.com and Erich Schwartzel at erich.schwartzel@wsj.com
KYIV, Ukraine—Russian forces bombarded the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv and hit the capital’s TV tower as Moscow, frustrated in its plans for a quick victory, shifted to a new strategy of pummeling civilian areas in an attempt to demoralize Ukrainian resistance and reignite its slowing military advance.
On Tuesday afternoon, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it would strike Ukrainian intelligence and communications facilities in central Kyiv that it said are being used for “information attacks” against Russia, and urged residents living nearby to leave for their own safety. Western diplomats took the warning as a signal that a massive strike on Kyiv’s residential areas was imminent. Some of the remaining staff at foreign embassies left Ukraine’s capital.
Live-cam footage from Kharkiv’s central Freedom Square showed a missile landing just outside the local government’s headquarters at 8:01 a.m. local time, with a fireball charring nearby buildings and cars. Ukraine’s national emergency service said seven people were killed and 24 injured in the strike.
Later in the day, additional Russian airstrikes hit Kharkiv’s residential neighborhoods, killing more than 10 civilians, local authorities said.
“A missile targeting the central square of a city is open, undisguised terrorism,” said Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky,
adding that numerous children had died in other attacks. “It’s terrorism that aims to break us, to break our resistance.”
The Tuesday afternoon strike on Kyiv’s iconic TV tower, erected in 1973, killed five people who were nearby and injured another five, Ukraine’s state emergency service said. It also temporarily disabled the broadcasting ability of Ukraine’s central TV channels, Ukraine’s communications authority said. The authority said it would switch on reserve broadcast facilities. The TV tower stands in the Babyn Yar area, where much of Kyiv’s Jewish population was massacred by the Nazis during World War II.
Russian President
Vladimir Putin
has said that his goal is to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, alleging without any evidence that Mr. Zelensky, who is of Jewish background, is beholden to American-guided neo-Nazis.
“Putin seeking to distort and manipulate the Holocaust to justify an illegal invasion of a sovereign democratic country is utterly abhorrent. It is symbolic that he starts attacking Kyiv by bombing the site of the Babyn Yar, the biggest of Nazi massacres,” Nathan Sharansky, the chairman of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center and a former Israeli deputy prime minister who was born in Donetsk, Ukraine, said in a statement.
The strike came amid signs that Russia’s military forces were pausing their advance on Kyiv, having encountered a range of obstacles since entering Ukraine. A senior U.S. defense official said the Russian advance has stalled amid food and fuel shortages, Ukrainian resistance, and slower-than-expected troop movement toward Kyiv. The Russians “are regrouping and trying to adjust to the challenges they have had,” the U.S. official said.
In an emotional video address to the European Parliament on Tuesday, Mr. Zelensky said Ukrainians were dying in a struggle for the country’s survival. “We are giving our lives for the right to be equal,” he said, unshaven and wearing a green army T-shirt. “Prove that you are with us and will not let us go.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—launched six days ago by Mr. Putin with the aim of overthrowing the country’s elected government and ending its alignment with the West—has made slower progress than most military analysts had expected. Russian forces are struggling with fierce Ukrainian resistance and logistical problems.
Ukraine’s second largest city of Kharkiv came under heavy shelling; a nearly 40-mile-long Russian convoy inched closer to Kyiv; President Zelensky addressed the European Parliament. Photo: Sergey Bobok/AFP/Getty Images
Russian troops appear to be “risk averse,” the U.S. official said, adding that there is evidence that some Russian forces have surrendered and that troop morale is weak. The U.S. official said no evidence has emerged that Russia is considering retreating from its aim of capturing Kyiv.
And Russia has managed to gain a swath of land in southern Ukraine, including capturing Kherson city, in addition to its push in the northeast and northwest.
Mr. Putin, who claims that Russians and Ukrainians are the same people, initially abstained from the kind of indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas that Russia used to subjugate its rebellious province of Chechnya in 1999-2000. The new barrages indicate that this relative restraint is falling away as Moscow seeks to crush Ukrainian resistance.
Heavy fighting continued throughout Ukraine on Tuesday, with Russian forces advancing in the country’s south and trying to push into Kyiv.
A large column of Russian forces kept heading toward Kyiv from the northwest, U.S. officials said. Satellite imagery from
Maxar Technologies
showed a long convoy of vehicles snaking toward Russia’s forward positions. However, the front line in the battle for Kyiv remained stationary near the town of Bucha on Tuesday.
A first round of cease-fire talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations meeting in Belarus on Monday produced no immediate results, and the two sides initially agreed to meet again in coming days on the Ukrainian-Polish border.
Russia is facing growing international isolation and its financial system is reeling under the impact of Western sanctions imposed over the weekend. The ruble nosedived and Russia’s central bank more than doubled its key interest rate to 20% on Monday in an attempt to prevent a run on Russian banks as sanctions curb their access to international markets. The U.S. and the European Union said over the weekend they would hinder Russia’s central bank from using its foreign reserves and exclude a number of Russian banks from the international Swift payments network, among other measures. The EU also closed its airspace to all Russian planes.
Russia on Tuesday stepped up shelling of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, pounding civilian targets there.
Photo:
Pavel Dorogoy/Associated Press
Russia struck Kyiv’s TV tower on Tuesday, killing five people who were nearby, Ukraine’s state emergency service said.
Photo:
CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS
Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, whose population is mostly Russian-speaking, has put up stiff resistance to Russian advances since Mr. Putin began the invasion on Thursday, citing alleged discrimination against Ukraine’s Russian-speakers as one of his reasons. Ukrainian forces repelled a tank column heading to Kharkiv last week and then killed or captured a unit of Russian troops that entered the city over the weekend.
On Monday, Russian forces unleashed a barrage of rocket fire against residential neighborhoods in Kharkiv, killing at least 10 civilians, including three children and their parents who were incinerated in a car struck by a Russian projectile, and injuring at least 40, according to Kharkiv officials.
Some 87 Kharkiv apartment buildings have been damaged, and several parts of Kharkiv no longer have water, electricity or heating, Mayor Ihor Terekhov told Ukrainian TV channels. Kharkiv, which served as the capital of Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s, is home to some 1.4 million people.
Areas penetrated by Russian ground troops
Controlled by or allied to Russia
Ukraine territory, recognized by Putin as independent
Controlled by
separatists
Areas penetrated by Russian ground troops
Controlled by or allied to Russia
Ukraine territory, recognized by Putin as independent
Controlled by
separatists
Areas penetrated by Russian ground troops
Controlled by or allied to Russia
Ukraine territory, recognized by Putin as independent
Controlled by
separatists
Areas penetrated by Russian ground troops
Controlled by or allied to Russia
Ukraine territory, recognized by Putin as independent
Areas penetrated by Russian ground troops
Controlled by or allied to Russia
Ukraine territory, recognized by Putin as independent
“This is not a random mistaken salvo, but a conscious extermination of people. The Russians knew what they were firing at,” Mr. Zelensky said about Monday’s shelling.
Tuesday’s missile struck Freedom Square near the spot where Ukrainian volunteers in 2014 displayed the remains of a Russian rocket that hit the city of Kramatorsk in the eastern Donbas region, where Ukrainian troops have been at war with Russian-backed forces for the past eight years. “Is Kharkiv Next?” read a banner that used to stand on the spot before the Russian invasion began. The missile left a large crater in the square on Tuesday. Buildings all around the square were severely damaged, with their windows blown out and walls cracked and pockmarked.
British defense intelligence said early on Tuesday that Russia still hadn’t managed to gain control of Ukraine’s airspace, leading Russian forces to shift to nighttime operations in an attempt to reduce losses. “The use of heavy artillery in densely populated urban areas greatly increases the risk of civilian casualties,” the British statement said.
A sports center in the city of Mariupol, on Ukraine’s southeast coast, served as an improvised bomb shelter late on Sunday.
Photo:
Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated Press
A woman held her newborn son on Monday in the basement of a maternity hospital used as a bomb shelter in Mariupol.
Photo:
Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated Press
Air-raid sirens and the thud of explosions sounded all morning in Kyiv.
Video footage released by Ukrainian news channels on Tuesday showed about a dozen smoldering Russian military vehicles with “V” identifying signs in the town of Borodyanka, along the route of the long convoy heading toward Kyiv, the result of what they said was a Ukrainian strike.
“For the enemy, Kyiv is the key aim. They want to destroy our statehood, and that is why the capital is under constant threat,” Mr. Zelensky said. Russia, he added, is trying to blow up the city’s main power station and leave the capital without electricity. On Tuesday, he put Kyiv under temporary military administration, naming Gen. Mykola Zhernov to oversee the city alongside elected Mayor
Vitali Klitschko.
Russian forces overnight encircled the southern city of Kherson, establishing checkpoints around it, according to local authorities. Video footage showed Russian patrols detaining local men somewhere in the city. Protests began to break out in the few Ukrainian towns already under Russian occupation. In the town of Kupyansk, east of Kharkiv, several dozen unarmed local residents took to the streets with Ukrainian flags on Tuesday, with some trying to stop a Russian military vehicle. Similar protests took place on Monday in the newly Russian-occupied town of Berdyansk.
In the eastern Sumy region, regional governor Dmytro Zhyvytski said that a salvo from Russian multiple-rocket launchers in the town of Akhtyrka killed as many as 70 Ukrainian soldiers.
In the large southern city of Mariupol, which advancing Russian forces have nearly encircled, most neighborhoods were without power or heating on Tuesday morning after Russian shelling hit electricity substations, according to local authorities.
“Enemy forces are coming at Mariupol from all directions, destroying our infrastructure, killing our women, children and elderly, and calling it a war to liberate us,” Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko said in a video address recorded Tuesday morning. Later in the day, Russia shelled several of the city’s residential high-rises, he said.
In the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, Dmytro Bugoslavskyi, director of retail for the Ukrainian branch of U.S.-based Winner Auto Group, has been supplying cars to the Ukrainian military since the war began.
“Lviv is preparing,” he said. “Everybody realizes the threat. Nobody’s secure anywhere. If you see what’s going on in Kharkiv, these guys can do anything. So we’re preparing for the resistance.”
Ukrainians trying to leave Kyiv by train crowded a train station in the capital on Monday.
Photo:
Manu Brabo for The Wall Street Journal
The Kyiv station hall was packed with people on Monday.
Photo:
Manu Brabo for The Wall Street Journal
The Kremlin on Monday cited Mr. Putin’s demands for ending the conflict as Ukraine recognizing the 2014 annexation by Russia of its Crimean Peninsula by Russia, neutrality, and “demilitarization and de-Nazification” of the country.
French President
Emmanuel Macron,
who spoke to Mr. Putin on Monday, said that the Russian leader agreed during the call to his request not to attack Ukraine’s civilian targets and infrastructure and not to encircle Kyiv. In previous conversations this year, Mr. Putin promised Mr. Macron that he wouldn’t invade Ukraine.
Mr. Zelensky on Monday asked EU leaders to allow the country to immediately join the club, signing an application letter in the afternoon, but membership is a request the bloc is unlikely to grant.
The EU membership process can take years and involves broad economic, legal and political changes.
A man held a Ukrainian national flag at the window of a damaged administrative building in Kharkiv on Tuesday
Photo:
sergey dolzhenko/Shutterstock
—Brett Forrest in Lviv, Ukraine, and Nancy A. Youssef contributed to this article.
Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com
“The Matrix Resurrections” co-producer Village Roadshow Entertainment Group filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros., alleging the studio parent’s decision to release the movie simultaneously on HBO Max and in theaters was a breach of contract.
The suit, which was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Monday, is the latest indication of growing tensions between factions of the entertainment industry as major media companies give priority to direct-to-consumer streaming over traditional distribution platforms.
Warner Bros. parent WarnerMedia, a unit of
AT&T Inc.,
T -0.19%
put its entire 2021 slate of movies on its sister streaming service HBO Max at the same time as their theatrical release. The studio also moved the release date of “The Matrix Resurrections” to 2021 from 2022 in an effort to help HBO Max attract more subscribers, the lawsuit alleged.
“WB’s sole purpose in moving the release date of ‘The Matrix Resurrections’ forward was to create a desperately needed wave of year-end HBO Max premium subscriptions from what it knew would be a blockbuster film, despite knowing full well that it would decimate the film’s box office revenue and deprive Village Roadshow of any economic upside that WB and its affiliates would enjoy,” the suit said.
“The Matrix Resurrections” performed disappointingly at the box office, garnering only a fraction of the revenue generated by its predecessors.
Other films released during the pandemic performed well at the box office, including “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” which unlike “The Matrix Resurrections” wasn’t released on a streaming platform when it came out in theaters, the lawsuit said.
Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss in the latest ‘Matrix’ movie.
Photo:
Warner Bros./Everett Collection
Moves by major media companies to give priority to their streaming services over other platforms have potentially significant financial implications for actors, producers and financial partners who fear that the push to streaming will come at their expense.
In July, actress Scarlett Johansson filed a lawsuit against
Walt Disney Co.
, alleging her contract to star in the Marvel movie “Black Widow” was breached when the media giant released the movie on its streaming service Disney+ at the same time as its theatrical launch.
Ms. Johansson, who argued her box office-based performance bonus was hurt by the Disney+ move, was seeking as much as $80 million in damages. Disney, which denied it violated her agreement, settled with Ms. Johansson in September.
In Monday’s lawsuit, Village Roadshow also alleges that Warner Bros. is attempting to cut the company out of future movies and TV shows based on characters or intellectual property that it has ownership stakes in. Village Roadshow said it has invested $4.5 billion in its more-than-two-decade partnership and co-financed many Warner Bros. hits including “Joker,” “American Sniper” and the “Matrix” franchise.
“WB has also been devising various schemes to deprive Village Roadshow of its continuing rights to co-own and co-invest in the derivative works from the films it co-owns,” the suit alleged.
In response to the lawsuit, a spokeswoman for Warner Bros. said: “This is a frivolous attempt by Village Roadshow to avoid their contractual commitment to participate in the arbitration that we commenced against them last week. We have no doubt that this case will be resolved in our favor.”
The partnership between the two companies does contain an arbitration clause to resolve disputes, but Village Roadshow said in the suit that it doesn’t apply in this case.
“Instead, the parties’ contracts expressly allow Village Roadshow to bring any action for injunctive or non-monetary relief in this Court, as they agreed that the arbitration agreement `shall not prevent any party from seeking injunctive relief and other forms of non-monetary relief in the state or federal courts located in Los Angeles County, California,’” the suit said.
The suit comes just weeks before AT&T is expected to close on its deal to combine the WarnerMedia assets with
Discovery Inc.
and create a new company dubbed Warner Bros. Discovery.
Village Roadshow has also been exploring strategic options including taking on investments or even selling itself, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.
Bradley Cooper starred in the 2014 movie ‘American Sniper,’ which Village Roadshow co-financed.
Photo:
Warner Bros./Everett Collection
When Warner Bros. unveiled its strategy to put its 2021 movie slate on HBO Max and in theaters, it said it was doing so both to boost the new streaming service and as a counterbalance the effects the Covid-19 pandemic had on the theatrical industry.
The studio earned the wrath of Hollywood producers and stars by not alerting them to the decision in advance. Many feared they would be shortchanged by the move and were openly critical of the studio.
Warner Bros. ended up cutting new deals with much of the talent involved in its 2021 slate, which cost the studio more than $200 million, the Journal previously reported.
No deal regarding “The Matrix Resurrections” was reached, and Village Roadshow said in its suit that not only was the box office for the movie cannibalized but that it was also a victim of “rampant piracy” that Warner Bros. “knew would come by distributing this marquee picture on a streaming platform on the same day as its theatrical release.”
Piracy has been on the rise since more films have been released on streaming platforms, according to firms that track such data. Theater owners have also been vocal about their concerns of increased piracy due to the streaming first strategy.
The issue over the release of “The Matrix Resurrections,” isn’t the only significant crack in Village Roadshow’s 25-year partnership with Warner Bros. It also claimed Warner Bros. is violating Village Roadshow’s rights to participate in projects derived from movies it co-produced.
Village Roadshow co-financed the 2019 film ‘Joker,’ starring Joaquin Phoenix.
Photo:
Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros./Everett Collection
Village Roadshow said Warner Bros. tried to force it to give up its rights in a TV series based on the movie “Edge of Tomorrow,” which it co-financed and co-produced.
“When Village Roadshow refused, WB said the quiet part out loud: it will not allow Village Roadshow to benefit from any of its Derivative Rights going forward, despite the over $4.5 billion it has paid WB to make and distribute 91 films. In other words, if Village Roadshow won’t give up its rights, WB will make sure they are worth nothing,” the suit said.
“Warner Bros. has a fiduciary duty to account to Village Roadshow for all earnings from the exploitation of the films’ copyrights, not just those it can’t hide through sweetheart deals to benefit HBO Max,” said Mark Holscher, a Kirkland & Ellis litigation partner who represents Village Roadshow.
Village Roadshow also said under its agreement with Warner Bros. it should have the option to partner in “Wonka,” a prequel to “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” that it co-produced.
use of a racial slur in previous podcast episodes has impacted them, saying the situation “leaves many of you feeling drained, frustrated and unheard.”
He said in a letter shared with The Wall Street Journal by a company spokesman that he has no plans to remove the star podcaster from the streaming platform and committed to spending $100 million on music and audio content from what he called historically marginalized groups.
“There are no words I can say to adequately convey how deeply sorry I am for the way ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ controversy continues to impact each of you,” Mr. Ek said to Spotify staffers on Sunday, referring to Mr. Rogan’s podcast. “Not only are some of Joe Rogan’s comments incredibly hurtful, I want to make clear that they do not represent the values of this company.”
The Spotify executive’s comments doubled down on his statements last week that Spotify is an open platform despite its exclusive deal to distribute Mr. Rogan’s podcast and that excluding Mr. Rogan isn’t the right choice. Mr. Ek’s letter follows Spotify’s acknowledgment that it was delayed in addressing outcry sparked by rocker
Neil Young
over Mr. Rogan’s shows about the Covid-19 pandemic and vaccines.
Mr. Ek said in his letter that Mr. Rogan chose to remove some episodes from Spotify following discussions with the company and Mr. Rogan’s own reflections. Tracking site jremissing.com says 113 of Mr. Rogan’s episodes have been taken off Spotify since Friday.
Mr. Rogan apologized for the second time in a week on Saturday after a compilation video emerged showing how he and some of his guests used the N-word numerous times on his show. In a video on his Instagram account, Mr. Rogan said he offered “my sincere and humble apologies” for “the most regretful and shameful thing that I’ve ever had to talk about publicly.”
In an Instagram video post, Joe Rogan addressed the growing backlash against him and Spotify, which distributes Rogan’s podcast, stemming from accusations that his show spread false information about Covid-19 vaccines. Photo: USA Today Sports/Reuters
He said the clips were taken out of context and that they were based on 12 years of conversations. He added that they look “horrible, even to me.”
The influence Mr. Rogan’s show has and how much responsibility Spotify has for its content has generated significant attention in recent days. Several artists, including Mr. Young,
Joni Mitchell
and
Graham Nash
have said they want to remove their content from Spotify for what they deem is misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic and vaccines spread by Mr. Rogan.
Singer-songwriter
India Arie
said she pulled her music from the platform because she opposed the language Mr. Rogan used around race and the amount of money he makes from Spotify. She shared the compilation video of Mr. Rogan using a racial slur in numerous instances on his show, which sparked the latest outcry.
“While I strongly condemn what Joe has said and I agree with his decision to remove past episodes from our platform, I realize some will want more. And I want to make one point very clear—I do not believe that silencing Joe is the answer,” Mr. Ek said. “We should have clear lines around content and take action when they are crossed, but canceling voices is a slippery slope. Looking at the issue more broadly, it’s critical thinking and open debate that powers real and necessary progress.”
Last week Spotify publicized its content policies and created advisories for pandemic-related shows that send listeners to an information hub about Covid-19.
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In 2020, Spotify paid $100 million, according to people familiar with the deal, to host “The Joe Rogan Experience” exclusively on its platform. The podcast has been critical to Spotify’s growth and expansion beyond music streaming. Mr. Ek repeated in his letter to staffers that he wants the company to be the biggest audio platform in the world.
Spotify’s response comes as companies increasingly are being forced to address backlash stemming from content appearing on their platforms.
Netflix Inc.
late last year responded to the outcry over a
Dave Chappelle
stand-up special that some employees said was offensive to the transgender community.
At the time, Netflix Co-Chief Executive and Chief Content Officer
Ted Sarandos
issued a companywide email defending the special and saying the service wouldn’t pull it down. Mr. Sarandos said the company works hard to support creative freedom and this means “there will always be content on Netflix some people believe is harmful.” He also said he didn’t think the special incites hate or violence.
“The Joe Rogan Experience” is the No. 1 show in 93 markets, Spotify has said. In 2021, Mr. Rogan’s show was the most-listened-to podcast every month in more than 30 markets, including in the U.S., said a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Rogan’s listeners have grown by 75% from the time he joined Spotify’s platform in September 2020 to December 2021, the person said.
Mr. Ek said that having an open platform was a core value of Spotify and that disputes were inevitable. Still, he said, the company could do more to elevate creators from underrepresented communities and diverse backgrounds.
News Corp’s Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, has a content partnership with Spotify’s Gimlet Media unit.
Spotify, Neil Young and Joe Rogan
Write to Steven Russolillo at steven.russolillo@wsj.com
remove his music due to what he says is vaccine misinformation spread by podcaster
Joe Rogan
on the streaming service. The folk-rock star and his record label were in discussions over the matter Tuesday, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Young, whose hits including “Heart of Gold” and “Harvest Moon” have gained hundreds of millions of plays on Spotify, wrote an open letter to his manager and record label criticizing Mr. Rogan and Spotify. “I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines—potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them,” he wrote. The letter has since been removed from his website.
Mr. Young didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The letter came in response to “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, which is currently Spotify’s most popular podcast and also tops
Apple’s
podcasting charts. In 2020, Mr. Rogan signed an exclusive podcasting deal with Spotify, worth more than $100 million, according to people familiar with the matter.
Joe Rogan has used his podcast to discuss Covid-19 vaccines and restrictions.
Photo:
Carmen Mandato/Getty Images
“With an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, JRE, which is hosted exclusively on Spotify, is the world’s largest podcast and has tremendous influence. Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform,” Mr. Young wrote in the letter. “I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform…They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”
While Mr. Young’s label,
Warner Music Group Corp.
’s Warner Records, is the licensor to Spotify and may legally have control over how and where his music is distributed, it is typical for a record company to take an artist’s wishes into account. An act of Mr. Young’s cachet in particular tends to have more control over their career and creative output. If a decision is reached to remove the music, Spotify could take it down in a matter of hours, according to people familiar with the matter.
Streaming accounts for 84% of recorded music revenue in the U.S., according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Spotify is by far the largest music-streaming service by paid subscriptions.
Mr. Young’s letter cited an episode of the podcast in which Mr. Rogan spoke with
Dr. Robert Malone,
a virologist who worked on research into several mRNA Covid-19 vaccines but who is now critical of the treatments. Among the claims made was the suggestion that hospitals have been financially motivated to falsely diagnose deaths as having been caused by Covid-19.
Mr. Rogan has regularly used his podcast to discuss Covid-19 vaccines and restrictions, railing against vaccine mandates for indoor events and suggesting that young, healthy people shouldn’t be vaccinated.
Spotify’s bet on Mr. Rogan’s show has caused trouble in the past for the audiostreaming company. Some employees expressed concern over the podcast’s content during a town-hall meeting in September 2020, relating to material they felt was anti-transgender, according to people familiar with the matter.
The company stood by its star podcaster, with Chief Executive
Daniel Ek
saying that the ambition to make Spotify the “largest audio platform in the world” involves embracing diverse voices and differing opinions as the company chases scale in podcasting.
“The most important thing for us is to have very clear policies in place,” he said in an interview a month after the town hall. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Joe Rogan or anyone else, we do apply those policies and they need to be evenly applied.”
Amid a surge in cases, some countries are handing out second booster shots. In Israel, early data suggest a fourth vaccine dose can increase antibodies against Covid-19, but not enough to prevent infections from Omicron. WSJ explains. Photo composite: Eve Hartley/WSJ
Earlier this month, a group of 270 scientists and healthcare professionals signed an open letter to Spotify accusing the podcast of “promoting baseless conspiracy theories” and asking the service to take action against mass-misinformation events on its platform.
“Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Joe Rogan has repeatedly spread misleading and false claims on his podcast, provoking distrust in science and medicine,” it said.
Since the start of the pandemic, Spotify has removed over 20,000 Covid-related podcast episodes as a result of creators violating its policies, according to a person familiar with the matter. While more than 40 of Mr. Rogan’s episodes have been removed, none of them have been related to the pandemic, this person said.
Mr. Young also launched his own streaming service in 2018 called the “
Neil Young
Archives,” which offers different yearly subscriptions ranging from $19.99 to $99.99 to access the artist’s albums.
Mr. Young has previously had issues with streaming platforms. In 2015, he said he didn’t need his content “to be devalued by the worst quality in the history of broadcasting or any other form of distribution” and that he was pulling his music from streaming services. The artist’s music returned to Spotify in 2016. “That’s where people get music,” he later told Rolling Stone.
Monday’s letter wasn’t the first time the outspoken 76-year-old has used his website to take on big companies in the music business. Last summer, Mr. Young criticized concert promoters in a post, calling live shows super-spreader events and wondering why more artists weren’t canceling shows.
—Allison Prang contributed to this article.
Write to Anne Steele at anne.steele@wsj.com and Gareth Vipers at gareth.vipers@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications Some Spotify employees expressed concern over the content of Joe Rogan’s podcast during a town-hall meeting in September 2020. An earlier version of this article suggested that the town-hall meeting took place last September. (Corrected on Jan. 25)
are exploring a possible sale of a significant stake or all of the CW Network, which they jointly own, according to people familiar with the matter.
Among the suitors is
Nexstar Media Group Inc.,
NXST -1.86%
the nation’s biggest broadcaster and a large owner of affiliates of the network, the people close to the talks said. The CW Network caters primarily to teens and young adults.
People close to the talks said they are far along and an agreement could be reached soon, though the talks could still fall apart. There are other interested parties as well, but the discussions with Nexstar are most advanced, they said.
The most prevalent scenario is Nexstar’s taking a controlling stake in the CW, with CBS and WarnerMedia remaining as minority owners and receiving commitments to be the primary program suppliers for the network, the people said.
CBS and WarnerMedia have been exploring strategic options for the CW Network for several months, some of the people involved in the talks said. The network isn’t profitable as a stand-alone broadcast entity, but the content produced for it is a valuable asset for other platforms at the parent companies.
Warner Bros., which produces some of the CW’s biggest shows, including “Riverdale,” has generated significant revenue selling the shows to
Netflix Inc.
over the years. Other popular shows on the CW include “All American” and “The Flash.”
Popular CBS-produced shows for the CW include “Walker,” based on intellectual property from the TV show “Walker Texas Ranger.”
With the launch of HBO Max, the WarnerMedia-owned direct-to-consumer streaming service, the CW shows made from Warner Bros. in the future will be funneled there.
AT&T is in the process of merging its WarnerMedia entertainment assets, which also include the cable networks TNT, TBS and CNN, with programming behemoth
Discovery Inc.
to create a separate company. The deal is expected to close in the spring.
For Nexstar, a controlling stake in the CW would represent a significant step in its content aspirations. It already has been investing heavily in a national cable news service called NewsNation.
ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia have been longtime partners in the CW Network since the merger of the UPN and WB networks in 2006.
