Candle Media co-CEO and former top Disney exec Kevin Mayer sat down for a wide-ranging Paley Dialogue conversation on Monday that focused heavily on how he sees social media impacting Hollywood.
“The Future of Storytelling with Kevin Mayer,” moderated by Variety‘s Janelle Riley at the Beverly Wilshire, began with Mayer’s involvement in Disney acquiring Marvel and his decision to leave Disney in 2020 after overseeing the launch of Disney+, exiting to become CEO of TikTok.
“The folks at [TikTok owner] ByteDance had tried to recruit me for a long time, first to be CFO of ByteDance; I loved Disney and didn’t want to leave, thought I had a really good future there, which I did,” he explained. “And then when I didn’t get the CEO job, it was a very public thing where it was Bob Chapek and I and they chose the other guy — it happens, all good, someone gets the job, someone doesn’t, can’t complain about that — they said, hey, why don’t you become CEO of TikTok?”
Mayer said he saw TikTok as “the future of storytelling” with the app’s powerful algorithm, but departed the company just a few months later “because Trump was shutting us down and issued executive orders shutting down TikTok. It was very tough to be an American executive and be the head of that company.”
He then went on to launch entertainment company Candle Media with fellow former Disney exec Tom Staggs, recognizing the value of independent content as studios were making projects and only selling it to their own streaming services, in “what I would call the verticalization of Hollywood that Bob [Iger] and I did start, actually.”
But when Netflix stalled on subscriber growth in 2022 and Wall Street looked for profitability from the streamers, Mayer noted there was “a substantial contraction in the amount of content that was being purchased from independent studios” and “it’s been much harder to sell content to the streamers now than it was three years ago when we launched.” Candle Media’s two biggest properties are Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine and children’s media company Moonbug Entertainment, which is behind the hit Cocomelon.
Looking ahead, Mayer said that “most acquisitions we’re going to do going forward will be on the Moonbug side,” which has the second biggest channel on YouTube and, according to the exec, Cocomelon has been the biggest show on Netflix since 2021.
Following his experience at TikTok, Mayer spent much of the conversation discussing the shifting entertainment industry, noting, “I think more and more influencers are becoming sort of the celebrities of the youth, much more so than maybe even movies and TV stars are today” and although “influencers might be easier to trade in and out than like a well-established movie star has been, maybe, influencers as a group are more influential than ever.”
He also emphasized how “the center of gravity in youth is not Hollywood” in 2025 — overtaken by social media, TikTok and influencers — and “it’s just now mathematics” that Hollywood is going to shrink.
“Will it disappear? No. Will it be a growing, dynamic, relevant — will the relevance continue to grow? No,” he said, pointing to how pay TV was a “dream come true for Hollywood” and has been replaced by the much less profitable streaming.
“Not only is Hollywood becoming less and less relevant and less and less time spent on it, the time spent is less profitable,” Mayer continued. “So there is a very substantial secular challenge that the industry is facing, and I mean, there’s been some alarm but not quite enough. This is quite alarming.”
He added that legacy media should be “very, very concerned” and he sees the path forward by getting “into YouTube in a big way,” along with, “as the appetite for traditional length entertainment compresses, you better be highly differentiated, hence why we bought Hello Sunshine.”
Mayer also used the chat to weigh in on A.I. — “I don’t think A.I. is ever going to replace ingenuity and creativity of human beings, but it can augment it, and in some businesses replace it. So I think that was a valid concern” — and forecasted that social media platforms will soon have to pay their creators in a meaningful way, as YouTube does.
“YouTube pays half of their revenue to content, plus or minus,” he said. “TikTok and Instagram enjoy this free content, they make a lot of money in advertising. They don’t want to necessarily have to pay creators, but they’re going to have to at some point.”