This Week in Gossip: #2

Royal affairs, Cassie sues Sean Combs, TMZ is the worst, and Acme vs. Coyote is back on the release calendar..

Welcome to the first paid subscribers-only edition of This Week in Gossip. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s dive right into it.

(Content warning: This newsletter discusses issues of domestic violence and abuse against women.)

1. Warner Bros. Reverses Course on ‘Coyote vs. Acme’, Proving That Bullying David Zaslav Works

After initially announcing plans to dump Coyote vs. Acme into a hole for a $30 million tax write-off, Warner Bros. Discovery seems to have changed course. Reporting by Puck indicated that some executives had lobbied hard for the chance to have the film shopped to other distributors. David Zaslav, the wannabe cowboy who hates art, seems to have acquiesced. See, bullying works, kids!

On top of that, Congressman Joaquin Castro has called for the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission to look into whether the studio violated antitrust guidelines with this write-off scheme. He took to Twitter to say, "The WBD tactic of scrapping fully made films for tax breaks is predatory and anti-competitive. As the Justice Department and @FTC revise their antitrust guidelines they should review this conduct. As someone remarked, it’s like burning down a building for the insurance money."

I hope this film gets released. Even before the plans to Batgirl its release were dropped, it was receiving great word-of-mouth from industry figures. I saw one person say it was the best live-action/animation hybrid since Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (which is unfair to Looney Tunes: Back in Action, which is a blast.) That Warner Bros. seemed unable to imagine a wide and successful release for a Looney Tunes family movie starring John Cena is further evidence of their ineptitude. As is this reversal, frankly. I'm glad it's happening but the fact that they u-turned so quickly just indicates that Zaslav and company have no effing idea what they're doing.

2. Ariana and Spongebob Go Broadway Public and Soft Launch Romance on Social Media

(Image via Instagram.)

Ariana Grande and Ethan Slater have slowly been making their relationship more public in the months following the shock announcement of their romance. She’s been seen supporting him at performances of Spamalot, which he’s currently starring in, and they posed backstage for photos with Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad after Grande guest-starred in their new show, Gutenberg! The Musical. The pair still have work to do on the (inexplicably two-part) adaptation of Wicked.

Grande and Slater have largely avoided public attention since their relationship made headlines. That was obviously for the best. Leaving your spouses for one another is one level of messy. One of you leaving your childhood sweetheart and newborn child for your colleague? Yikes all the way down. Grande’s not always so shy with her romances, even ones where crossover between her and the guy’s ex is, shall we say, muddled. We saw a hell of a lot of TMZ headlines (the reported favourite outlet of Scooter Braun) trying to push the true love angle, then pivoting to an attempt at dignified silence when Slater’s now-ex wife Lilly Jay refused to stay silent. I wrote about the messy spin for Pajiba a few months ago.

So, it’s notable that they’ve decided to lay as low as possible. We’ve see pictures of them, but they’re always taken by fans at a distance, not paparazzi (and, for some reason, always shot on phones that look as though the lens has been dipped in gravy.) There weren’t doing glowing Instagram selfies together or pap walks in Central Park. If Grande were on tour, I doubt you’d see her doing a Taylor Swift and running into Spongebob’s arms for a kiss. Celebrities may get a lot of leeway on certain issues, but infidelity, especially when a child is involved, is tough to sell as anything other than shitty. Will they eventually make a more thorough public appearance as a couple? I imagine so, but it’ll take a few months. These are tough optics to shift.

The soft launch started this week as Spamalot officially opened following a few weeks of previews. Grande attended the premiere looking, it must be said, stunning. She didn’t pose with Slater but did share an image of a t-shirt that was revealed on Slater's Instagram to be worn by him. So it’s Broadway official now.

Grande’s hardcore fans are pretty ride-or-die for her. Many see her landing yet another taken man as a sign of her incredible charisma, and she’s long been infantilized by the Arianators as a helpless little girl instead of a multi-millionaire in her 30s. You saw this echoed in the initial TMZ spin, which tried to sell this new love as some move of destiny rather than colleagues cheating on their respective spouses. It’s hard to square the idea of smol bean Ariana with the woman who sings “Break up with your girlfriend, I’m bored.” And this doesn’t even get into dirtbag Spongebob. Good luck trying to break Hollywood, Ethan.

Infidelity is an interesting thing to discuss in terms of celebrity. Many of the most iconic relationships in Hollywood history were the result of cheating, from Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks to Liz and Dick, to Brangelina. It can be spun into a true love story that the masses will support. For the original America’s sweethearts, Mary and Doug, it took some careful media planning and bolstering of their respectable images to get the job done. Brad and Angelina had so much chemistry that a lot of people viewed their coupling as inevitable. This isn’t to condone or endorse cheating. A lot of hearts get broken and families with it. One of the reasons cheating scandals are so juicy to the public is because they’re deeply human and relatable. Everyone knows someone who’s been cheated on and it’s tough to emotionally sit that out. But again, there’s a newborn baby involved here. How do you make that collateral damage seem like a net gain?

And no, nobody expects this relationship to last. I’ll be stunned if they’re still together by the time the first full Wicked trailer drops.