Listen: MediaTalk | Season 2 Ep. 13 - Who Is Investing In The Metaverse And Why

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Mike Reynolds: Hi, I'm Mike Reynolds, a senior reporter covering the media industry with S&P Global Market Intelligence tech, media and telecom news Team. Welcome to "MediaTalk," a podcast hosted by S&P Global, wherein the news and research staff explore issues in the evolving media landscape. Today, I'm joined by Ian Hughes, a senior research analyst at 451 Research within S&P Global Market Intelligence, who specializes in the internet of things, artificial intelligence and that ever-morphing entity known as the metaverse. How's it going, Ian?

Ian Hughes: Really good, thank you. Really pleased to be here.

Reynolds: Since the metaverse can mean different things, can you start us off with your and S&P Global's definition of sorts?

Hughes: Absolutely. I'm going to go with our S&P Global Market Intelligence definition that the metaverse is the long-term vision for the next phase of the internet, which will feature a single, shared immersive and persistent 3D virtual space where humans and machines interact with one another and with data, enhancing the physical world as much as replacing it. And yes, I was reading that, but it's important when you hear this that, there are pieces of this happening, but this is a very long-term view of how we interact and how the digital world evolves for us. And when we say single, that's debatable, isn't it?

You say there's only one internet and there is only one internet, but it's made up of lots of little bits of internet. And the internet in your house is different in some respects to the internet out in the world, but it's a protocol. There is a unification here in trying to understand that many things will be done in similar ways by more than one company and more than one thing.

And then we're talking about humans and machines and data interacting. This isn't just about social interaction. This isn't just about entertainment and gaming. This is also about understanding how you might train an autonomous robot for a factory in a digital version of the factory that doesn't exist yet whilst also training people in that factory as to how they're going to operate and run those things. So it's the full gamut of industrial enterprise, B2B enterprise, B2C and kind of some consumer stuff. And then the really interesting bit on the end of that definition is enhancing the physical world as much as replacing it.

Very often people assume the metaverse is something you disappear into or it's all about VR headsets and losing the world. Actually, the entire thing when you take the broad view of it, it's about us being able to see and engage with data, with digital artifacts and digital information, that we wouldn't otherwise be able to see. And whether we do that with headsets or not, it's when I'm doing a job when I'm trying to figure something out, what do I do? At the moment, you look it up on the web. So what do I do now? I bring it to me, to my human experience. And that's what the broader metaverse is going to be.

Reynolds: All right. That's a lot of components. One thing that S&P Global focuses on is money. So you guys did a metaverse investment analysis, Ian, can you tell us about that and what the first quarter brought?

Hughes: Yeah, sure. We have a set of representative companies that we've identified that are doing some things in this space. And there's nearly 300 of them now. This goes up all the time and the list could probably be even longer because everyone's engaging this in some way. And that list itself — 22 of those companies have already been bought up within that ecosystem in M&A transactions. And so we've seen this [first] quarter was the biggest set of investments that we've had yet. So even though everyone assumes maybe metaverse has gone away and we're all talking about GenAI —which is what is happening if you go to a lot of conferences and things like that, people are mostly talking about gen AI — there is still this underpinning of this evolution of the digital and the physical interactions that we're having. And there is a lot of money floating around and even this quarter there's going to be some more of those that will spike that as well.

Reynolds: So what kind of money did your assessment find for the first quarter?

Hughes: As we write in the report, the investments for the first quarter grew fivefold year over year to $2.5 billion. There's some individual ones that have made that bigger, but that's bigger than any we've had. We had $2.2 billion about a year ago, I think, in one of the quarters.

Reynolds: Okay, a lot of the action came from Walt Disney Co. and Epic Games Inc. What's going on there?

Hughes: Epic has their Fortnite game and that has been a very successful platform and game that people have engaged with, but they have turned that into a development platform and user-generated content platform and one that they can then also bring partners in. So they already had a partnership with Lego. And Lego, about six months ago, they launched this Lego-themed set of experiences and things for other people to build with. And now Disney is in on that as well. So that's like a $1.5 billion investment in this Fortnite platform and ecosystem. And so it's become a set of individual portals to drag you and take you to an experience, but everything might be completely different once you get there. But it is all under the same sign-on and the same financial ecosystem and the same, potentially the same, some of the same content being able to take you as a user from place to place. So it's big, but it's like a small version of the entire metaverse if you consider that. It's not all going to be Epic, but that's where Disney has gone and that's where Lego has gone rather than the building lots of their own games and applications.

Reynolds: All right. I think another notable investment in the first quarter involved the Saudi Public Investment Fund, and they're working with Magic Leap Inc..

Hughes: Yes. So Magic Leap as a headset was always an augmented reality headset. And for quite a long while, they've been hoovering up quite a lot of money, but they've pivoted towards being more in the business space than in the consumer or the even more the kind of artistic and creative side of the world. And so they're saying let's engage with some of these things. They engage with things like NVIDIA Corp. Omniverse and things like that. So it's trying to be an engineering platform headset and move on from just trying to reach consumers, because consumers aren't ready yet for all this stuff.

Reynolds: Okay. What else caught your eye during the first quarter in terms of some of the big monies that got moved into the space?

Hughes: At CES, Siemens Ltd. presented. So Siemens is the major industrial automation company and lots of other pieces of the industrial side of the world. They gave a keynote about their industrial metaverse drive, which is a partnership with Nvidia and a whole bunch of other ecosystems. But then they brought in Sony Corp. and said Sony now has a mixed reality headset that they have developed specifically to work with Siemens in that Siemens industrial ecosystem and industrial metaverse ecosystem. And so that's crossing all sorts of streams there, isn't it? We're at CES with Siemens talking industrial metaverse with Sony talking about headsets. So whilst everything doesn't have to be about headsets, it's an interesting trigger.

Reynolds: All right. CoStar Group Inc. and Matterport Inc. Why should we care about that one?

Hughes: That happened while Hannover Messe was going on — Hannover Messe, the big industrial show. And so Matterport is a visual digital twin management platform and capture platform that started off in real estate in saying this is what my apartment looks like. And they've evolved over the years into doing wider things such as entire buildings and manufacturing plants. So they were at Hannover on the AWS stand showing the integration of that and industrial IT data and things like that.

And so CoStar has just bought them for $1.6 billion. CoStar, another real estate company, they're saying it's important for us to be able to understand an instrument's physical world. And if you haven't got the original digital models of everything, then what are you going to do? You're going to scan it in order to get some of that information. And so they've settled on Matterport. And so that was quite a big deal that lots of people at Hannover didn't know was happening, obviously, because it was a slightly different angle. But yeah, it's an important one because the visual side of digital twin is important. It's showing us the data we can't see on things, but that we need to know.

Reynolds: All right. Maybe as we talked about before the Saudi Public Investment Fund — what's going on in that nation?

Hughes: Saudi Arabia is putting a lot of investment into various aspects of metaverse. And one of the ones in particular, which kind of came up last year at Mobile World Congress, is they're building this $500 billion project for a new city.

Reynolds: Just a few dollars there.

Hughes: Yeah. From the ground up, just everything. And in doing that, they're starting digitally and that is a prime example of the sort of heavy-duty industrial metaverse side of things. I'm saying, how do we simulate and build absolutely everything down to the last bolt about this thing that we're going to build and make sure everything's working before you build it? And that's the sort of thing that BMW does with Siemens and Nvidia on factories. That, it's everything about the factory. And so part of what Saudi is doing is pushing into that space to say where does all the technology roll in together to help us build this thing. And then when it's running, it's obviously gonna be quite high-tech as well. So you then end up in the operational, digital twin, operational industrial metaverse space.

But at the same time they've built a kind of cultural metaverse experience, virtual world experience for people to go together to go to events and hear about the country, and hear about what it's going to be. So they're in a space where they're looking at it in all kinds of ways.

Reynolds: That's quite the undertaking. Nvidia's been in the news a little bit. What's going on with those guys, Ian, or what are you looking at?

Hughes: They have an engineering platform called Omniverse, which is their industrial metaverse enabling platform. And one of the important things there is that they're partnered with people, so Siemens is building things with Omniverse. So it's the things actually being used in solid engineering examples. But as part of being this ecosystem, they're also contributing along with everyone else to this OpenUSD standard, which is called Universal Scene Descriptor. And it's an open standard for understanding how 3D objects interact, how they work, how they can be in one application and another, and how you can edit them all at the same time in multiple platforms and how they can be deployed. All that, all the stuff. It's not just a file format. It's a, "What does it mean? What is it? What does it do?" And the interesting thing about that entire standard is that it's evolved from Pixar, from making movies and making CGI movies. Because they have huge amounts of 3D assets and lots of teams of people working on everything. And so that has now moved from "Cars" to actual cars. So now that sits there helping BMW and Siemens and NVIDIA build the factory.

Reynolds: So Buzz Lightyear — to infinity and beyond.

Hughes: Absolutely, that's it, that is it. We've got so many of them, and that's important because interoperability across the metaverse, as I use that word single at the top, a single metaverse, or the ability to take things from one place to another with you as you need them, whether it's a business saying, I've got a model of this machine and all the data on it, and I'm now building a new factory. How do I get it in next door to my partner's machines or competitors' machines? What does that mean? There's a lot of data interoperability there. Or in the consumer space, how do I flow from being in Roblox Corp. to being in Fortnite — will they let me? But it's not about cutting and pasting a file. It's about true interoperability, and all the tools that are important in this space are starting to pick up this standard. So things like Unity Software Inc.'s game development engine and rollout engine. Things like Unreal, which is Epic's one, have it in but also things like Siemens NX, which is a CAD package. An old-fashioned, proper engineering, computer-aided design package is enabled for this USD format. So you could see that an engineer and marketing department and product designer and the customer could all interact through the same open standard.

Reynolds: Talk about shipments, maybe not so strong for augmented and virtual reality headsets last year.

Hughes: I think headsets still have a challenge in that it's a barrier to entry. You wander in a room and somebody's got a headset on, you're not quite sure what to do. If you're an individual or gamer or whatever, then you may have them. They've gotten better. They've gotten lighter. We've had the Vision Pro, which is expensive, but in the Apple Inc. ecosystem. It's a full computer on your head. There's lots of wonderful things, but it's still early days for people. Something will happen eventually, but it may not be the headsets in the form factors that we're used to now because there's plenty of other things evolving like light-field displays, so things you just look at that are actually twisting your eyes with 3D, but actually being 3D proper, not necessarily holographic, but proper 3D representations of things. And there are clever things that can be done with projection as well. If you're looking at fixing an engine on a car, it can project stuff onto the engine. So you don't need anything on your head other than your safety glasses, maybe, but we're back to this improving the physical world for us, not removing it.

And with all the wind in the world, I still don't think we're all going to sit with headsets on for eight hours doing our work and then take them off and put another headset on for eight hours to watch movies. That's quite tricky.

Reynolds: We're getting to the end here, Ian. Is there, over the next few months, anything you are — and therefore we should be — on the lookout for?

Hughes: I think this ever-advancing side to the industrial map is like a space race of technology and things and ways of doing things. I mentioned the OpenUSD, the ability to interchange information between things. And whilst it started in filmmaking, it's industrial. It's making it more robust and solid and making all the use cases. And that's not the thing that gets a lot of press. It should — manufacturing is a third of the world's GDP and it's being rapidly changed from industrial IoT evolving into digital twin stuff evolving into this industrial metaverse piece and that is having impact on the rest of enterprises as well. So now the engineering models that you make for your car, for instance, are not just sat in the design department. They're the things that flow all the way out to the marketing department now on the web and out into the metaverse for somebody to try the car out driving around in a game engine somewhere as a consumer. And so that whole digital thread is the thing that you need to pay attention to because the more people who link these things together, the wider the impact we get. And it will impact consumer stuff and it'll impact media, but it's this space race from industrial that's intriguing.

Reynolds: All right. That concludes this episode of "MediaTalk." I just wanted to thank Ian Hughes for spending a lot of time sharing his views on investments and some of the key developments in the ever-morphing space.

Hughes: Thank you very much. It's been awesome.

Reynolds: Appreciate it, Ian. This is Mike Reynolds, and thanks to all of you for listening. We'll catch up soon on the next edition of "MediaTalk."

Mike Reynolds: Hi, I'm Mike Reynolds, a senior reporter covering the media industry with S&P Global Market Intelligence tech, media and telecom news Team. Welcome to "MediaTalk," a podcast hosted by S&P Global, wherein the news and research staff explore issues in the evolving media landscape. Today, I'm joined by S&P Global Market Intelligence Kagan Senior Research Analyst Wade Holden, who specializes in the box office and the movie business, and Mac Mathews, who's an associate director of editorial design and publishing and a film aficionado. How are you doing Wade?

Wade Holden: I'm doing well, excited that the summer movie season is upon us.

Reynolds: Mac, what's going on your side?

Mac Mathews: I got my chin up and my popcorn buttered.

Reynolds: There you go. All right. Today, our Hollywood guys are going to provide a review of the spring season, which wasn't necessarily blooming at the box office. Let's get to it. In reading some of your analysis, it would seem like two thumbs down so far in 2024. Wade, the box office of the spring season was way down from last year?

Holden: Yeah, our spring season — it's the first 17 weeks of our box office calendar — was down 24.6% to $2.05 billion. A combination of the strikes mucking up the production pipeline and some film titles having to be pushed made things a little more spaced out. And also, there was not a big hit rolling over into the spring of 2024 like there was in 2023 with "Avatar: The Way of the Water" making $6 million of its total box office in the spring season of 2023.

Reynolds: Wow, Mac, but '24 is up a bit from 2022 levels?

Mathews: Yeah, and the difference comes down to a deeper pool of independent films in 2024 versus 2022, which was more during the pandemic and so there weren't as many things coming out. There were 241 independent films in release in 2024 that grossed $317.2 million compared to 96 films in 2022 that grossed $104.3 million.

Reynolds: All right. As we go to wider releases, Wade, the big films this spring were "Dune: Part Two," and "Kung Fu Panda 4." Your assessment of how these films did?

Holden: They're great. We did have some bona fide hits in the spring season despite lower totals. Dune 2 did $281.9 million domestically and $428.5 million internationally. And when you put that up against its $192 million budget, that's great returns for it. I think it was the same with Kung Fu Panda. It's grossed $534 million worldwide on a budget of $86.2 million.

Reynolds: That's a nice return there.

Holden: Yeah, it's really good. It seems people are thirsty for big franchise films.

Reynolds: Mac?

Mathews: "Dune: Part Two" and "Kung Fu Panda 4" were both released in March and are still playing around the corner at my local theater. And so they have really had time to find the audience that's out there for them, much like the smaller rom-com "Anyone But You" did. It was released in December 2023, didn't have a great start, but it found its audience. We're in an age now where the theatrical market isn't quite as crowded as it used to be with releases, so good movies are finding their markets. So when the movies play well on the big screen, they're still going to do pretty well with word of mouth.

Reynolds: All right. Let's move on to the summer season, guys. May's usually a time for superheroes. There's nothing for Marvel this year, which often starts the summer with an Iron Man or an Avengers entry. And Wade, is there anything on the horizon that can possibly approach "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer?"

Holden: We are missing the big Marvel bump that usually starts the summer because the first two weeks it's already down 33% compared to last year's summer season. It's like $219.3 million vs. $327.3 million last year, and the second week of summer 2023 is when Guardians of the Galaxy had its big opening weekend. Looking forward, at this point, I don't think there's anything on the calendar that looks like it'll be capable of capturing that cultural zeitgeist that "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" did.

Reynolds: Gotcha. Mac, anything out there that's caught your eye? Maybe not to that level, but something that you think is going to resonate.

Mathews: Yeah, in terms of cultural impact, "Despicable Me 4" has the Minions and then "Deadpool & Wolverine" has Deadpool. Those characters are all over the internet. They're all over Christmas trees in terms of ornaments and things like that. They have cultural saturation in a way that if those movies were playing or debuting on the same weekend, the internet would have a field day with that. That could be a zeitgeist type of thing, but they're separated on the calendar by a few weeks. And so I think they both will captivate audiences and do really well, but I don't know if it's going to pop off in the same way as "Barbie"/"Oppenheimer."

Reynolds: Those are tough acts to follow no matter what. Summer season started with "Fall Guy." It's an adaptation of a 1980s ABC series starring Lee Majors as a stuntman. The theatrical stars Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. Wade, how has "The Fall Guy" fared?

Holden: Not that great, unfortunately. This isn't the first film to be inspired by a television series, and sometimes they're big hits like the 21 Jump Street pair of films; or you get a "CHIPS" that really doesn't quite tick the meter. Unfortunately, it looks like that the first major release of the summer is also going to be the first major flop of the summer.

Mathews: I saw "The Fall Guy" opening weekend and it had the audience in stitches. Very funny. I wasn't expecting as much of a rom-com as it was. It really put Ryan Gosling's charm on full display. But I think the connection to the old TV show and it's action-movie aesthetic may have made for a challenging marketing situation for a movie that they effectively wanted to market as, "You liked Barbie, and Ken was in Barbie. Here's more Ken." The movie itself is doing a lot of things at once. It's a romance and a tribute to stunt people, which isn't maybe the most intuitive combination. And it also contains a shaggy detective story. I don't know if they needed to do as much in terms of the action side of things that really brought the budget up on that one.

Reynolds: Okay. So the next summer film is the latest installment in Planet of the Apes. Wade, Mac — what do you guys think of that? How has it done? Have you guys seen it?

Mathews: It opened to over $130 million worldwide, which does make it feel like the summer season could have a pulse after all, after "The Fall Guy" opening. I saw "Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes" opening weekend, and it had some visuals that were really impressive, almost Avatar-like in their immersive quality, and this is a formidable franchise. I don't see this installment breaking out in a bigger way than prior installments. I felt the movie was a little slow and felt like it was doing a bit of setup work for movies to come.

Reynolds: Wade, what's your thoughts?

Holden: I haven't seen it, but it opened to $58.4 million, which, that's a really good number. And it's the second best of the four films when they rebooted it, going back to 2014. So it seems it's going to be on par with the previous installments of the last few years. It's just a kind of a solid performing franchise, another one that Walt Disney Co. gets to have with Marvel and Star Wars and other things.

Reynolds: Okay. "IF" — it's a kid's film starring Ryan Reynolds, among many others. Mac, how much can you imagine this film will resonate?

Mathews: We haven't had any big PG releases out in theaters since "Kung Fu Panda 4." So the family audience has been underserved. We have "Inside Out 2" and "Despicable Me 4" on the horizon. So are families so starved for content that they'll try out "IF" or are they going to hold on for a few more weeks until school is out across the country and go for something that they know already?

Holden: On a personal note, when we were in the theater last weekend re-watching "Phantom Menace" and the trailer for "IF" came up and my 17-year-old son looks over at me and says, "Can we go see that one?" So, I think it's got a very broad appeal. I think having Ryan Reynolds in there opens it up and I think attracts a wider audience to it.

Reynolds: All right, Mac, here's the most important question of the day. When it comes to the Ryans, who you got, Reynolds or Gosling?

Mathews: You ask me today, I'm saying Ryan Gosling. I just saw him in "The Fall Guy." He's been out doing the press for that movie. Incredibly charming guy, but he's still capable of solving the mystery and doing the action. Ask me again after Deadpool comes out, maybe I'll have a different answer because I'm also susceptible to the charms of Ryan Reynolds and his motor-mouth antihero.

Reynolds: I'm going Reynolds for a number of reasons. First, married to Blake Lively. Secondly, he owns the Wrexham soccer club. Thirdly, he's got the, is it the home field name advantage? Anyway, I'm going Reynolds.

Okay, Memorial Day. The big film is a Mad Max prequel, "Furiosa." Expectations, Wade?

Holden: Expectations from what I've seen are that it's gonna open around $40 to $50 million, which it's not bad, but it's got a pretty big price tag of around $170 million. It's going to have to do well, both domestically and internationally if it's going to turn a profit. But the good news is that the film was cleared to be released in China, which is one of the world's biggest box office markets. So that's really good news for it. "Mad Max: Fury Road" made $216.2 million worldwide and it did not play in China. So there's hope they'll have big international returns.

Reynolds: All right. Let's talk about Will Smith and Martin Lawrence together again.

Mathews: Yeah, and Bad Boys 3, or "Bad Boys for Life" did over $400 million, easily cleared $400 million on a modest budget for an action movie.

It had the highest gross of the franchise and came 17 years after "Bad Boys 2." This sequel only comes 4 years after the last one, and it's yet to be seen whether audiences went to the last one out of nostalgia, or if they are hungry for more from this franchise. It may be the latter as I found the 2020 film to be a delight. Martin Lawrence was very funny in it and I could see audiences wanting more.

Holden: There was a lot of positive word of mouth about the new Bad Boys film. It was really exciting. And the chemistry between Will Smith and Martin Lawrence was as spot on as ever. So yeah, I think people seem to be excited about it.

Reynolds: Alright, I'm gonna speak here of an even longer return. I'm not talking about Dorothy and her house floating to Oz, but the original "Twister" premiered in '96. Are you ready for another Twister, Wade?

Holden: Yeah, sure, it's quite a long gap. I remember when the original "Twister" came out, I was in college over the summer stacking produce at the grocery store. And now my son's about to go to college. But it looks fun to me. It looks like a classic special effects-laden film, perfect for summer. A great popcorn film.

Reynolds: All right, Mac, Pixar's "Inside Out 2" is coming along, and that film did really well before.

Mathews: Yeah, it's a title that has my kids very excited. They see the poster, they see the preview, and even when they see another preview, and I ask if they want to see it, they say, "But this doesn't mean we can't see 'Inside Out 2,' right?" So it has a great brand awareness and it's the first sequel, so it hasn't been played out. You hope that with some of these Pixar tentpoles that they don't just churn out the next one. They wait until they have a good story to tell.

Reynolds: We've alluded to "Deadpool & Wolverine" this summer. I think it's the one Marvel film that we're gonna get, but it's R-rated. There's everybody's favorite, at least mine, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman — double star power — but is the R-rating hurdle too high?

Holden: I don't think so. There's plenty of R-rated hits out there and the first two Deadpool films both made over $300 million domestically. I think there's an excitement to see Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds together in a movie and Hugh Jackman back as Wolverine. They have a great friendship apparently that plays out with trolling each other online. So I think audiences really connect with those two. While you guys previously picked your favorite Ryan, I pick Hugh Jackman.

Reynolds: Okay, good. Fair enough. What we've talked about so far, guys, are a lot of franchise plays. Wade, any new original film that's caught your eye?

Holden: There's quite a few that have caught my eye. I grew up on Westerns, so I'm very interested in the two-part saga coming out from Kevin Costner, "Horizon."

I've been watching trailers and looking forward to "The Bikeriders" that period drama with Austin Butler and Jodi Comer and Tom Hardy. That looks great. There's a new comedy called "Fly Me to the Moon" with Scarlett Johansson where she's hired by NASA to be their PR person and they want her to film a fake moon landing in case the real moon landing doesn't happen. And then there's an interesting one, coming out in August, called "Trap," starring Josh Hartnett, where he's a serial killer who takes his daughter to some pop star concert. And the police have somehow turned the arena into a trap to try to catch him. I don't know. It looked really interesting to me.

Reynolds: Mac, what do you think about that? Any originals that you think are going to work?

Mathews: There's still a story to be told right now about movies that are held back from theaters and put out on streaming. I don't have the full slate in front of me, but I know so far this year, there was a Jake Gyllenhaal-led remake of "Roadhouse" that went straight to Amazon.com Inc. Really fun movie, probably would have done well in theaters. Anne Hathaway was in a rom-com called "The Idea of You" that went straight to Amazon. Those were both out on Amazon Prime and yet Amazon took this other movie, "Challengers," about tennis and a love triangle and put that in theaters. So Amazon is choosing its battles. The tennis movie "Challengers" was directed by Luca Guadagnino, who did "Call Me By Your Name" and is maybe going for awards. But some of the right-down-the-middle movies, they're putting directly to their streaming services where they're seen widely, but there's probably room in the theatrical marketplace for more movies. You only usually have one wide release per weekend.

Reynolds: Last one for you, Wade. From a box office perspective, the summer 2024 is going to wind up being how big, Wade? What do you think?

Holden: I'm not optimistic it will break $4 billion like last year. I think it's certainly going to be over $3 billion. I think there's a lot to look forward to. There's some interesting titles still coming out in August, so I think there's good momentum all the way through August.

Reynolds: There you have it. This concludes this episode of MediaTalk. I just wanted to thank Wade and Mac for spending a lot of time sharing their views on theatrical performances thus far, and handicapping what Summer '24 may bring to all of us at the box office. Appreciate it, Wade.

Holden: It's always a pleasure.

Reynolds: Thanks for stepping into the virtual recording studio with us, Mac.

Mathews: Thanks for having me.

Reynolds: All right, guys. This is Mike Reynolds. Thanks to all of you for listening. Maybe we'll meet at the movies this summer, but we'll definitely catch up soon on the next edition of "MediaTalk."