Wonderloom's Debut & the Letterboxd Bidding War

The Digital Dealflow

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Quartermast Advisors
July 16, 2026

Good Morning,

Investment fund Content Partners, which owns the cash flows behind Forensic Files and Black Swan, launched Wonderloom Media with former Wheelhouse strategy chief Ed Simpson as CEO, then made its first buy: Dr. Insanity, one of YouTube's largest true-crime channels at more than 5M subscribers and 1.3B views. The thesis is a roll-up of YouTube-native content businesses under institutional capital.

Staying with creator IP, Wheelhouse is teaming with youth social platform Zigazoo on a joint-venture studio to build content, live events, and consumer products from young creators. In agency land, Havas acquired Barcelona experiential shop MUT, folding its 30-person team and clients like Audi and Freixenet into Havas Spain.

On the pre-M&A radar, Letterboxd has formally kicked off a sale process through LionTree at a reported $250M valuation, up from the roughly $50M Tiny paid for a majority stake in 2023, with Netflix, Paramount, Sony Pictures, RedBird, TPG, and Alexis Ohanian all circling. And in AI, Tencent is leading a roughly $2B buyback of agent startup Manus, unwinding Meta's December acquisition after Beijing blocked it on national-security grounds.

Speaking of Meta, it ended a three-year silence on X to launch an AI image tool trained on everyone's public photos, then pulled it three days later after the backlash.

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Layoff Watch:

  • WPP: Cutting around 300 roles at VML and across back-office functions under CEO Cindy Rose's Elevate28 plan, which targets £500M in annual savings by 2028 and leans on workflow automation.

  • Fandom: Laid off roughly 11% of its workforce in another restructuring, gutting GameSpot's entire commerce team and cutting its VP of games and entertainment across properties like GameSpot and Giant Bomb.

The Weekly Roundup

  1. Agentio Automates Creator Ads: The automated creator-advertising platform expanded from YouTube to Instagram and Facebook, pushing programmatic creator ad-buying onto the two biggest social surfaces (PR Newswire).

  2. Mythical Joins Netflix: Starting September 7, Mythical will drop 6-plus episodes a week of Good Mythical Morning, Mythical Kitchen, and Last Meals on YouTube and Netflix simultaneously, the latest sign of Netflix stacking creator libraries (Variety).

  3. YouTube Passes Spotify in the UK: YouTube overtook Spotify as the UK's top podcast platform, extending its video-first lead in audio (Search Engine Journal).

  4. The EU Eyes a Kids' Ban: Ursula von der Leyen said the European Union will propose limiting social media for children, with under-13s allowed access only alongside an adult, in a plan due after the summer (Bloomberg).

  5. Unilever Automates the Creators: Unilever is automating nearly every step of managing its 300,000-creator program, from sourcing to briefing to payments, while deliberately keeping the relationship human (Digiday).

  6. AI Writes LinkedIn: An estimated 41% of long-form LinkedIn posts and 30% of short-form posts are likely AI-generated, the highest rate of any major platform, per detection firm Pangram (Business Insider).

  7. Shark Tank's Creator Sharks: ABC's Shark Tank tapped MrBeast and Steven Bartlett as guest sharks, the clearest sign yet of creators taking mainstream business-TV seats (Hollywood Reporter).

  8. Dude Perfect x Good Good: The sports-creator brands formalized a partnership across merchandise, content, and a 22-stop arena tour, with Good Good's retail footprint up from roughly 800 to 4,000 doors in a year (Business Insider).

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