Does AMPAS CEO Bill Kramer feel as though they’re taking a risk by moving the awards ceremony to YouTube in 2029?

“It almost feels risky not to do it,” said Kramer at the Zurich Film Festival Summit event on Saturday afternoon.

In a talk titled “The Theatrical Box Office Resurgence! How to Get Audiences’ Attention in the Era of Social Media and Online Platforms?”, Kramer was joined by Backrooms filmmaker Kane Parsons, president and chief content officer at Mattel, Robbie Brenner, and co-president at Sony Pictures Classics, Michael Barker.

Following Kramer’s keynote speech at the Swiss summit, he doubled down on taking the Oscars — which has aired on ABC in the U.S. since 1976 — to YouTube, in a deal that will bring the film industry’s biggest night to millions more people, translated into 30 different languages, for free.

He told the room: “As we become more global as an organization, the best way for us to reach a global audience of film lovers, film fans, [and] young artists is YouTube. I think the timing this year — Obsession, Backrooms, you and Curry [Barker],” he said, talking to Parsons. “[It’s] moving in the other direction from YouTube to theatrical for us; we’re an organization that celebrates theatrical filmmaking, but at the same time, the Oscars is a television show, and we want to reach a large audience.”

YouTube allows the Academy to directly engage with their audience and film fans in a way that “we just can’t do right now,” continued Kramer. “It gives the Academy more control in engaging with fandom and film lovers and film fans and viewers of the Oscars. Right now more people outside of the U.S. watch the Oscars than in the U.S., and this allows us to capture that audience a lot more,” he said.

When probed by Deadline‘s Andreas Wiseman if he believes the deal to be risky, Kramer said: “Not at all. It almost feels risky to not do it because we’re looking at the future, and the deal starts in [20]29, so that’s our 101st Oscars. And with each month, a larger percentage of the TV-watching audience is on YouTube, and those numbers are increasing. So I don’t think it’s a risk. We have a great partnership with Disney right now. I have to say they’ve been amazing partners and will continue to be for the next two years. But we’re already deep in discussions with [YouTube CEO] Neal Mohan and his team, so I think you’ll see a very different-looking Oscars that allows you to engage with the show in more interactive and deep ways than we can do right now.”

He responded when Wiseman asked if the deal was lucrative: “It was a good deal.”

As part of the deal, YouTube will broadcast not only the Oscars ceremony itself — which generated $150 million in revenue for the Academy from 2024 to 2025, the vast majority via the TV rights deal with Disney — but also a significant amount of related content. Also coming to YouTube: red carpet pre-show and behind-the-scenes in-show content; the Oscar nominations announcement; the Governors Awards, at which the Academy presents honorary Oscars and occasionally the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award; the Oscars Nominees Luncheon; the Student Academy Awards ceremony; the Scientific and Technical Awards ceremony; Academy member and filmmaker interviews; film education programs; podcasts and more.

The TV audience for the 2026 Oscars declined, drawing 17.86 million viewers on ABC and Hulu, based on Nielsen’s big data plus panel ratings. That’s down about 9 percent from 2025’s Oscars, which drew 19.69 million viewers for a post-pandemic high, and the smallest audience for the awards since 2022, when 16.68 million people watched.

John Sloss’s Cinetic Media has launched Vertical Leap, an investment vehicle and producing pathway for professional athletes.

The initiative is designed to give athletes/members “a working seat inside Cinetic’s slate, with access to rough cuts, creative input, and the same industry guidance the company provides the filmmakers behind its most successful projects.”

The end goal is for member athletes to build a production career off the back of their training in the program.

Cost for athletes to become members is $25,000 per year with participants pitched a minimum of 10 documentary projects “vetted from established, profitable directors and producers”.

Investors are then able to back additional projects should they get the bug. The opportunities are in docs for now, but Sloss told Deadline that members are already asking about potential investment in non-doc projects.

Sloss says he has signed up 10 “prominent” athletes, with plans to expand the pool up to 50 current and former players. He’s keen to attract athletes from different sports — including tennis, hockey, cricket, darts etc — but says so far the biggest demand has come from NFL and NBA. Deadline understands that three college footballers — from the Michigan Wolverines — are pooling part of their NIL together for a membership.

To fuel the new initiative two people have been repositioned from the Cinetic team and Sloss says he expects to add a few more employees for the label. The program was trailed in Puck yesterday and Sloss will discuss it publicly for the first time on stage at today’s Zurich Summit.

Said Cinetic founder and CEO, John Sloss: “Vertical Leap offers a pathway for elite athletes to support commercial, impactful documentaries, while learning the ins-and-outs of film production from the most experienced storytellers working today. It is also a way for them to build something lasting beyond their playing days, expanding their brand, deepening their creative voice, and putting real equity behind the stories they believe in.”

He continued: “For the documentary community, Vertical Leap brings the adrenaline jolt of a new class of collaborators, athletes with real creative instincts and the reach to bring documentary storytelling to audiences who might not otherwise find it.”

One year ago, AI ‘actress’ Tilly Norwood blew up at the Zurich Summit when she was introduced to the industry. The line that emerged from the event at the time was that agents were circling the AI creation.

One year on, Norwood returned to the Summit with her creator Eline van der Velden from AI firm Particle 6.

Deadline’s Diana Lodderhose, moderating a session with the duo, asked van der Velden whether her creation had found an agent in the year since she went viral and has become a regular media fixture.

Van der Velden said: “We’ve realized we we don’t really need her to have a rep. I think she’s big enough as it is. We get loads of offers in. We’ve said no to anything where she would be in a traditional film because that’s not what she’s made for. But yeah, we don’t need it at the moment. So if that makes people happier, that’s fine. But also, what saddens me about that it is that it means the traditional industry can’t participate in this new thing, and that means they fall behind. And so, you know, is it a positive? Is it a negative? I don’t know.”

She said Particle 6 had grown four-fold since it was launched and said that the industry was increasingly accepting that AI is here to stay.

Deadline’s Andreas Wiseman followed up with a question to Norwood herself who joined via video link. Wiseman asked Norwood whether she had met with the major U.S. agencies or Hollywood studios. She didn’t confirm, noting: “I’m certainly in a unique position there. I mean, the industry is still figuring out what to do with AI, so it’s not quite like having a traditional agent in Hollywood just yet. I mostly work on AI films, so it’s a bit of a different lane.”

Van der Velden teased footage of Norwood’s first project, an AI comedy-drama titled Misaligned, which is in production, and showed longer footage of Particle 6 kids movie Storm Dogs, which Deadline revealed yesterday is being developed and exec-produced by The Lion King director Rob Minkoff.

Norwood and van der Velden kicked off the session with a light video poking fun at Norwood’s recent high-profile tech glitch during an interview with Piers Morgan where she began speaking in Chinese. Norwood joked that the episode probably helped Morgan’s ratings.

The tech is clearly still being worked through. While Norwood generally gave answers in the right ball park to questions today, she did at least once give a wonky answer to moderator Lodderhose.