Samantha Masunaga

Samantha Masunaga covers the entertainment industry as a business, tracking how studios, streaming platforms and exhibitors make decisions that shape Hollywood’s economics and workplaces. Her reporting sits at the intersection of corporate strategy, labor, technology and policy, with a particular focus on film studios and their franchises. She is an entertainment business reporter for the Los Angeles Times and writes a weekly newsletter on the business of Hollywood.

Hollywood studios and franchise economics

Masunaga’s core focus is the film business and the major studios that power it. She follows how companies such as Disney and Pixar manage their portfolios, covering layoffs affecting divisions like Pixar and National Geographic alongside broader restructuring at the parent company. Her work on Disney’s leadership in entertainment streaming examines how executive appointments signal strategic bets on technology and content pipelines. She has also written about enduring franchises such as “Toy Story,” treating them as long-term commercial assets and indicators of studio priorities rather than purely nostalgic properties.

Her coverage extends to policy decisions that affect studio economics, including stories on state legislators’ pushback against new caps on film and television tax credit programs. In those pieces she connects legislative detail to real-world effects on production levels and studio decision-making. Across these reports, Masunaga tends to frame individual news events - layoffs, tax changes, executive moves - in terms of what they reveal about studios’ long-term strategies for content, cost control and growth.

Streaming, gaming and the convergence of entertainment tech

Masunaga regularly reports on how traditional Hollywood players and newer platforms compete and converge in streaming. Her stories on Disney’s entertainment streaming leadership and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings’ departure situate personnel changes within the larger contest for subscribers and global reach.

She tracks how companies use technology and organizational shifts to reposition themselves, giving readers a clear view of the business rationale behind high-profile executive moves.

Her work on Blizzard Entertainment shows how gaming companies are expanding into television and other media, blurring boundaries between games, film and series. In her coverage of union contracts ratified by Blizzard video game workers, she links labor negotiations to the broader economics of interactive entertainment and content production. Taken together, these stories show Masunaga treating streaming and gaming not as isolated beats but as parts of a single competitive landscape where tech, labor and storytelling collide.

Exhibition, formats and the theater business

Masunaga also devotes sustained attention to movie theaters, premium formats and how films reach audiences. She has written about the resurgence of movie theaters after years in the shadows, examining how exhibition companies rebuild business models and audience habits.

Her reporting on a strong summer for Imax and other large-format screens explores why certain technologies and viewing experiences outperform, tying box-office data to investment in high-end projection and sound.

These theater-focused pieces often show the downstream impact of studio and streaming decisions - how release strategies, windowing and franchise management play out in physical cinemas. By treating exhibition as a business in its own right, Masunaga gives a fuller picture of the entertainment ecosystem, from corporate headquarters to multiplexes.

Background in aerospace and workplace coverage

Before concentrating on entertainment, Masunaga reported on the aerospace industry, workplace culture and Southern California’s Japanese American community. She wrote about the aerospace sector for several years, developing a familiarity with complex, highly technical businesses and their supply chains.

Her past coverage of workplace issues and sports-related business stories added experience with labor dynamics and revenue models beyond Hollywood.

She has also worked for regional and community-focused outlets, including newspapers such as the Oregonian, the Orange County Register and the Rafu Shimpo. That mix of aerospace, workplace and community reporting informs her current entertainment beat, where she consistently approaches Hollywood’s decisions through the lenses of business fundamentals, labor relations and audience impact.