Roundup: Race for ABC News Breakfast replacement, Kyle & Jackie O ratings, Meta

Who will replace Lisa Millar, who last week announced that she was ditching the comfy couch on ABC’s News Breakfast program for the dust and dirt of hit show Muster Dogs?, reports News Corp’s James Madden and Sophie Elsworth.

Millar, who has co-hosted the news program for five years alongside Michael Rowland, is a big loss, as she managed to deftly handle the challenges of a timeslot that demands both political gravitas and lighthearted banter.

Millar was adept at flicking the switch between the two, which is no small feat.

As for her successor, Diary understands it’s down to a two-horse race.

The favourite is Bridget Brennan, a Dja Dja Wurrung and Yorta Yorta woman who has been filling in for Millar while she has been travelling around the country filming Muster Dogs.

ARN Media’s $200 million flagship program, The Kyle and Jackie O Show, has failed to grow its audience in Melbourne, posting a 5.9 per cent share in the second survey since expanding into the market, reports Nine Publishing’s Calum Jaspan.

Nova’s Jase and Lauren show, whose hosts Jason Hawkins and Lauren Phillips were sacked by KIIS FM to make way for Sydney duo Kyle Sandilands and Jackie “O” Henderson, again grew its share. It is now the third-most popular program in the breakfast slot.

Meta has claimed news is not the antidote to misinformation and disinformation spreading on Facebook and Instagram, as the company continues to push back against being forced to pay media companies for news in Australia, reports The Guardian‘s Josh Taylor.

Meta announced in March it would not enter into new agreements with media companies to pay for news following the end of contracts signed in 2021 under the Morrison government’s news media bargaining code.

The assistant treasurer, Stephen Jones, is considering whether the Albanese government should use powers under the news media bargaining code legislation to “designate” Meta under the code, which would force the tech company to enter negotiations for payment with news providers, or risk fines of 10% of its Australian revenue.

In 2006 I was fired from my job at EB Games. It was, with the benefit of hindsight, a well-earned dismissal. One Sunday I’d set up a camera and filmed myself jumping over a stack of boxes and hip thrusting at a stranger. Then I uploaded that highly pixelated video of an emo-fringed teenager in a black shirt and slacks to YouTube. Ah, the innocence of youth, reports The Guardian‘s Jackson Ryan.

My area manager saw the video about eight months later. I was fired on the spot. (Today, of course, this would probably be some sort of TikTok trend.)

Ten years later I landed a job at the video game and culture website Kotaku Australia and its sister sites, Lifehacker and Gizmodo. Those brands kickstarted my career.

See also: Changes to Pedestrian brand licences as CEO announces departure

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David Ellison mastered flying planes in his teens. Now, Hollywood’s newest mogul has to avoid a hard landing in merging his Skydance Media and Paramount Global, reports The Wall Street Journal‘s Jessica Toonkel and Joe Flint.

Hours after the merger was announced, Ellison on Monday made the kind of cautious remarks one would expect from someone seeking to win over skeptics from across the entertainment industry, on Wall Street and among Paramount executives.

In 1994, when Sumner M. Redstone bought Paramount Pictures for about $10 billion, the equivalent of about $22 billion today, he did more than just take over a company. He ascended a cultural throne, reports The New York Times‘ Brooks Barnes.

Studios like Paramount — founded in the 1910s, operating soundstage complexes and controlling vast film libraries — were valuable businesses on the verge of hitting a mother lode: the DVD. Perhaps more important, however, they gave their owners a precious identity as certified members of the cultural elite.

Alex Cooper made waves in 2021 when she inked a three-year, $60 million deal with Spotify for Call Her Daddy, her raunchy podcast about sex and dating that became a slick sit-down interview show. Now that the agreement is approaching its end, she has her sights set on a much bigger entertainment empire, reports The Wall Street Journal‘s Sara Ashleigh O’Brien. 

Last year, she and her film-producer husband, Matt Kaplan, founded Trending, a media company aimed at Gen Z audiences. Through a subsidiary called Unwell, she is recruiting online personalities to host new podcasts, looking for buzzy books to option and developing reality shows. Cooper is also on the hunt for a new distribution partner for her podcast, and she’s hoping to pocket $100 million in her next deal, according to people familiar with the matter, a hefty sum in an industry that has retrenched since its frothiest days.

Last night, Dream Home’s semi-final episode saw three teams eliminated – Brad and Mel, Hannah and Jonny, and Jacinta and Jordan – after they failed to achieve high enough scores for the final episode.

The three teams that accumulated the highest scores throughout the season and made it to the final were Lara and Peter, Taeler and Elle and Rhys and Liam.

See also: Dream Home crowns the winners of inaugural season

For the second season of Foxtel’s award-winning drama The Twelve (three AACTAs, three Logies for 2022’s first season), the location and most of the cast are new. But the central premise – a multitude of micro-plots revolving around a central courtroom drama – as well as Sam Neill as the criminal defence barrister Brett Colby, remain, reports Nine Publishing’s Karl Quinn.

The action, this time, takes place in a remote town in Western Australia, to which Colby has been flown to defend one of two people accused of murder. He represents Patrick Harrows (Erroll Shand), an itinerant farmworker who may or may not have had a role in the death of his employer, Bernice Price (Kris McQuade), a crotchety old landholder with no shortage of enemies in the tiny town of Tunkwell.

It’s time to step back into the ring as Paramount Pictures has debuted the official trailer for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator 2, starring Paul Mescal as a grown-up Lucius. The long-anticipated sequel is set for release on Nov. 22, reports Variety Australia‘s Zack Sharf and Jaden Thompson.

Lucius is the son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) and the nephew of Commodus, the original film’s antagonist played by Joaquin Phoenix. He was portrayed as a child by Spencer Treat Clark in the original Gladiator movie.

Since new local drama Fake has premiered on Paramount+ word of mouth has been spreading of the volatile relationship depicted between Birdie Bell (Asher Keddie) and Joe Burt (David Wenham), reports TV Tonight‘s David Knox.

How could Birdie have let it go on so long? Didn’t she see the red flags? What was Joe’s ultimate motivation?

The 8 part series, inspired by Stephanie Wood’s book follows on from her Good Weekend article in which she revealed she was the victim of a scam.

Doug Liman and Tom Cruise haven’t shut down the idea of an Edge of Tomorrow sequel quite yet, Carly Thomas.

Ten years following the release of the 2014 sci-fi action film, the filmmaker told Empire magazine that he and the actor “keep talking about” doing a follow-up because “we love that world.”

“Tom and I just actually rewatched it about two months ago, because I hadn’t seen it in 10 years,” Liman added. “I was like, ‘Wow, that is a really good movie.’”