🔥Johnny's High Flying Links (#8)🔥
eVTOL, Hollywood, Private Credit, Software Distress? & More.
The team is on Spring Break with the kids but, being a kid himself, Johnny has some spare time. He’s got some links for you.
🔗What We’re Reading (8 Reads)🔗
1. Consumer Product Goods (Long Acquisition Cycles). This is an interesting piece from Sugar Capital’s Brian Sugar about a recent mini-wave in CPG acquisitions that he expects to grow bigger now that DTC froth has flushed out of the system.
2. eVTOL (Long Plummeting Projectiles). Call us paranoid but as we watch Ukrainian drones inflict severe damage on Russia and vice versa, the Islamic Republic deploy Russian-made drones to block the Strait of Hormuz, and laying-in-wait Israeli drones take out several strategic targets in Iran (back in June), we feel a wee bit skittish about the thought of more flying gadgets circling NYC’s skies. But that’s what’s coming. Recently the FAA greenlit a pilot program for the use of eVTOLS in a variety of major cities. What does this mean for RX pros? Probably nothing other than “heads up.” Literally.
3. Hollywood (Short Los Angeles?). This, from Dara Resnik, is familiar territory for these “Links” but, man, the more and more we read about what’s going on in Los Angeles, the more depressed we get. This piece is a roller-coaster: it spends its entire middle section lamenting the demise of Hollywood, even going so far as equating it to … gulp … Detroit … before finishing on a would-be-but-not-entirely-convincing inspirational note. This bit is catastrophic:
“Production has fled. There are fewer buyers, fewer development jobs. The studio lots are devoid of life. I recently had an in-person meeting at the Universal Studios lot, which is huge, and when I inevitably got lost, as I always have, I looked around to ask someone, ANYONE for directions, and I think I literally heard crickets. I was alone. It was eerie. Of course, there are a few productions here and there. But it’s not like it was. And it never will be again. Things change.
The numbers are stark. LA County lost 42,000 entertainment jobs in just two years — from 142,000 in 2022 to 100,000 by end of 2024. Television production peaked at 18,560 shoot days in 2021; by 2024 that had collapsed to 7,716. The Art Directors Guild reported that 75% of its members are currently unemployed. California now ranks sixth in the world for filming, behind Toronto, the UK, Vancouver, central Europe, and Australia. But here’s the Detroit parallel nobody’s talking about: the making jobs didn’t disappear. They moved. Georgia alone brought in $4 billion in production spend in 2023, and its stage space has grown from 45,000 square feet in 2010 to over 4.5 million — now second in the country. And crucially, the crew filling those stages? Local residents. Georgians who didn’t have to pack up and move to a city with $3,000/month studios to work in this industry. It is not lost on many of us that the old system, the one that required you to physically relocate to make it, was quietly filtering out entire zip codes worth of voices. Maybe the change is a good thing. The Decision Makers still live here. But the Makers? That can be anyone now, anywhere.”
The Oscar ratings may have been down this year but, surprisingly, the box office is actually up 19.4% YTD as of March 26, 2026. That, however, isn’t boosting the stock of AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. ($AMC) which is down ~40% YTD (as of March 26, 2026) and has everyone, including CEO Adam Aron, apoplectic.
How can this guy NOT be optimistic? He’s pulled every single balance sheet hail mary possible out of his a$$. And he has some inventory coming on line that ought to bolster revenue. No, not Hail Mary, though that’s obviously off to a great start.
We’re talking Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which broke all sorts of trailer viewing records upon its release.
Potentially great for AMC but to Ms. Resnik’s point, the movie was filmed in Glasgow, Scotland. 😔
4. Opportunistic Credit (Long Talking Your Own Book). Here is an overly long and overly dry “white paper” from Davidson Kempner that is nevertheless worth reading about the near-term future for opportunistic credit. The upshot? Due to extended default cycles, elevated leverage in the tails, aggressive add-backs/adjustments and aging PE portfolios, there’s more stress in the system than the headline grabbing default rates might indicate, suggesting we’re in the early innings of a capital structure reset.
5. Oil & Gas (Long Chokepoints). Here is Carlyle’s Jeff Currie and James Gutman’s take on Iran’s pseudo-”closure” of the Strait of Hormuz. For a more detailed analysis of the potential disruptive effect of the Strait, here is a short summary from Lazard ($LAZ):
6. Private Credit (Long Positive Spin). Here is a private credit market report from Stephen Lerner and his colleagues over at Squire Patton Boggs, summarizing the recent fallout in private credit and highlighting structural issues that are now gaining increased attention.
Related, here is a Blackrock report about BDCs with redemption data with this interesting chart that, for its part, helps explain some of the demand for liquidity:
7. Private Equity (Short Rollups). Long the resistance.
8. Software (Long Disruption). On Sunday, we referenced a Perella Weinberg Partners’ conference on software:
Well, they’ve done us all a favor and followed up with a white paper discussing some of the main points to come out of the panels:
🎧What We’re Listening To🎧
📼What We’re Watching📼
📚Resources📚
We have compiled a list of a$$-kicking resources on the topics of restructuring, tech, finance, investing, and disruption. 💥You can find it here💥.