So the Golden Globes Are Back—but Is New Trouble Brewing?

On Sunday night, Demi Moore won a best-actress award at the Golden Globes for The Substance. More importantly, maybe, she also gave the kind of acceptance speech that gets people Oscar nominations. The Academy Awards best-actress race is particularly tight this year, with seven or eight actors vying for five coveted spots. Moore’s speech, which was graceful and perfectly pitched emotionally, reminded audiences of her long career and the fact that she may be overdue for these sorts of accolades. “I’ve been doing this a long time, like over 45 years,” she said, “and this is the first time I’ve ever won anything as an actor, and I’m just so humbled and so grateful.”

were criticized for a lack of diversity among their voter body and allegedly unethical behavior.

High-powered publicists demanded change. A-list celebrities called for a boycott and returned their Globes. NBC pulled the plug on the broadcast for the following year. For a moment, it seemed neither the organization nor the show would survive.

But Hollywood’s memory is infamously short, and it would be nearly impossible to believe the group that put on the 2025 Golden Globes this past Sunday had been rocked by such a reckoning. The room was packed with A-list actors and rising stars who were there as either nominees or presenters. Everyone took their wins seriously, giving emotional speeches—like Zoe Saldaña, who had tears streaming down her face when she said, “Thank you so much to the Golden Globes for celebrating our film and honoring the women of Emilia Pérez. This is [the] first time for me.”

The press covered the night like any other awards show, with headlines about Emilia Pérez’s big wins and the ceremony’s other major surprises. The importance of the Globes and the validity of its picks have been restored. And the ratings—9.3 million viewers—were down just a smidge from the previous year’s 9.4 million, according to Nielsen, so audiences at home are tuning in too. But how did a show that was on the brink of extinction come back so unscathed—besides the fact that it’s an increasingly conservative, self-dealing time in America, when #MeToo and other scandals seem to be receding quickly in the rearview mirror?

Like so much of Hollywood, it’s all a matter of perception. The Globes organization did make notable changes, growing its voter body from 87 members in 2021 to over 300 by 2023. Most of them are professional international journalists who work outside of Los Angeles, with 60% of the group self-identifying as racially and ethnically diverse. The Globes also put new rules in place, like banning lavish gifts and doing away with HFPA-only press conferences.

After losing NBC (which agreed to put on the 2023 show, but decided not to renew for the following year), the Globes scrambled to find a new broadcasting partner. CBS signed on, at first only to broadcast the 2024 show. After that went smoothly, the network agreed to a five-year deal beginning with the 2025 telecast.

Solidifying a broadcast partner brought back the show’s relevancy, and Hollywood studios and publicists soon signed on to make sure their talent attended the Globes. It helped that last year’s best-picture winners—awards that went to Oppenheimer and Poor Things—aligned closely with what would eventually happen at the Oscars, which spoke to the new voting body’s more serious tastes. The days of random winners (remember Jodie Foster for The Mauritanian and Aaron Taylor Johnson for Nocturnal Animals?) seemed to be behind the Globes.

Most critically, the Globes’ power resides in the fact that the event takes place just days before voting for the Academy Awards kicks off. The show is a key way to catch the attention of Academy voters, who are most likely scrambling to watch everything they need to see before casting a ballot. If a film wins a bunch of awards at the Globes, voters will notice; wins could sway them to check out a film they may have skipped, or consider an actor they were going to overlook.

“If you do what I do for a living, having a bunch of nominations come out in mid-December gives a breath of fresh air, to both TV and film,” says one awards publicist. “No one’s going to tell me that it doesn’t have some impact.”

Which doesn’t mean they think this group should necessarily be taken totally seriously. “I still wouldn’t say they’re legitimate, I really wouldn’t,” says one studio publicist. “But people still know what a Golden Globe is, so it’s still nice to be [able to say], ‘10 Golden Globes nominations.’”

The transition from the old Globes to the new Globes was successful in part because Todd Boehly’s Eldridge Industries and Penske Media mogul Jay Penske’s Dick Clark Productions took over the organization during the turmoil. When they bought the Globes in 2023, the tainted HFPA was disbanded, though original members were allowed to stay on as Globes voters and employees (earning a salary of $75,000 per year) and hundreds of new, unpaid voters were added. They also made the Globes a for-profit organization.

But it has not been an entirely smooth transition, and the takeover has led to both public-facing missteps and internal conflict. In September, Puck reported that Variety (which is owned by Penske Media, which also owns Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, and IndieWire) was offering studios “a series of intimate, curated dinners” with Globes voters—in exchange for forking over a six-figure price. What seemed like a brazen attempt to sell access to voters by a supposed objective publication didn’t sit well with much of the town. It’s the kind of conflict that sounds like ideal fodder for the trades, though they’re now virtually all owned by Penske.

A spokesperson for Penske Media said in a statement to TheWrap at the time that the reporting wasn’t accurate: “Variety is not selling any standalone dinners as part of the Golden Globes. The information shared in previous articles on this subject was done without any request for comment by Variety or any verification that the deck was veritable. This is a misappropriated deck, not in circulation, and was published by competitive websites portraying journalistic intent with an intent to mislead and misinform.”

Internally, there’s a new storm gathering as members of the original HFPA have become increasingly agitated by Penske and Boehly’s actions toward them, including not granting them seats at the show (they used to get four tickets each) and reportedly limiting their access to talent interviews without Globes-specific press conferences.

According to Puck, an anonymous group of members recently sent a 29-page legal brief to the supervising deputy attorney general for the Charitable Trusts Section of Los Angeles in hopes of getting California’s attorney general to take a closer look at Boehly and Penske’s takeover and its alleged conflicts of interest. As Puck reports, the brief alleges that the former HFPA members never agreed to Penske’s takeover of the Globes, and that there’s been “fraud and breach of fiduciary duties in connection with the transaction.” According to Puck, the attorney general had tentatively signed off on the deal, but the final approval is still pending. When Vanity Fair reached out, a spokesperson for Dick Clark Productions replied, “The deal did officially close, and reports to the contrary are inaccurate.”

In the end, this legal brief may have no impact other than highlighting the internal tensions that continue to threaten the new owners’ hopes for a peaceful return to normalcy at the Golden Globes—after years of very public turmoil.

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