Hollywood Studios Warn Staff Off Prediction Market Bets

In the week of November 2, 2026, the betting site BetOnline temporarily pulled its market on who will be cast as the next James Bond. A representative told The Hollywood Reporter that "sharp money" had suddenly come in on Callum Turner, lifting him above longtime favorite Jack Lowden, and that the book worried the bets reflected a credible leak.

The same November 5 report said Hollywood studios and production companies have been quietly issuing guidelines that tell employees not to bet on prediction markets tied to their work: studio earnings, casting, even release dates. Passing tips to friends and family so they can bet is also forbidden, and at least one company set up a hotline for staff to anonymously report colleagues suspected of betting. Entertainment has become one of the easiest places to profit from a secret, and neither the studios nor the exchanges have a reliable way to stop it.

By the numbers

• $32.7 million: wagers on Kalshi's "Survivor 50" winner market, which had Aubry Bracco at 97% by its close on finale day (Variety).
• About $213 million: Oscars-related trading on Kalshi and Polymarket for the March 2026 ceremony, by DeFi Rate's count. Favorites won 19 of 24 categories (DeFi Rate).
• $20,397.58: Kalshi's penalty on a MrBeast video editor, who was also suspended for two years; The Hollywood Reporter put his profit at about $5,000 (Finance Magnates, The Block).
• $143 million: anomalous profit on Polymarket over a two-year period, as estimated in a March study by Columbia's Joshua Mitts and the University of Haifa's Moran Ofir (The Hollywood Reporter).
• 2: kinds of futures contracts federal law bans by name, onions and motion picture box office receipts (7 U.S.C. 13-1).

What are studios telling employees?

The Hollywood Reporter did not name the studios, but it did describe one policy in detail: its own parent company. PMC, which also owns Variety, Deadline and Dick Clark Productions, updated its employee handbook in recent weeks to forbid betting on "award nominations, casting decisions, production timelines and release dates."

The rules extend long-standing bans on insider trading in stocks to a much wider set of contracts. "You now have, essentially, an explosion in the number of employers who have to think about insider trading rules from an ethical standpoint," Mitts, a Columbia law professor, told the trade paper. He added that apart from any criminal question, there is "just the compliance problem," teaching employees what is allowed.

What can you bet on in Hollywood?

Awards, casting, reality TV and talk shows all have markets, and awards are the largest category. On Kalshi, the 2026 Best Actor and Best Picture markets each traded roughly $25 million, and Polymarket's Best Picture market, at about $39 million, was the largest single Oscars market on either platform, according to DeFi Rate. Kalshi also listed markets on which celebrities would attend and on what Conan O'Brien would say.

Casting is another. The Hollywood Reporter noted markets on who will play the next James Bond or the next Wonder Woman, and on who will be eliminated from "Dancing with the Stars." Reality TV markets have repeatedly priced winners long before the broadcast. Kalshi users had Galaxy Girl at 91% to win "The Masked Singer" three months before the finale, and a "Survivor 50" market that opened at 61% for Bracco reached 97% before the live finale on May 20, Variety reported.

Talk shows are a third. One TV network source told The Hollywood Reporter there are markets on what a guest will say on "The Tonight Show," "Saturday Night Live" and other shows, many of which are pretaped or have dress rehearsals, and some of which have audiences drawn from the public who could bet without breaking any company rule.

Box office is off limits. Federal law says no contract for the sale of "motion picture box office receipts" may be made on a U.S. exchange. The onion part of that ban dates to the Onion Futures Act of 1958, and the box office language was inserted in 2010 by Public Law 111-203, according to the statute's amendment notes.

Why is entertainment a market for insiders?

In pretaped entertainment, the answer often exists before the market opens, and a small group of people knows it. "Survivor 50" contestants were sent home in July 2025 without being told the winner, so only a select number of staffers knew Bracco had won. A source told Variety that CBS had to reckon with the fact that any leak would have come from production.

Mitts argues these markets carry most of the risks of insider trading with little of the benefit. "There's a high degree of asymmetric information, and a high degree of secret information, but there's very little social utility to having this priced correctly," he told The Hollywood Reporter.

Kalshi's view of "Survivor" is that traders were following spoilers already circulating online, especially from a Reddit user known as "Lifetimerobot." "No traders with large positions seem to have a relationship to the show or to the network," Robert DeNault, Kalshi's head of enforcement, wrote on X after the finale. "Public rumors don't equal insider information."

How do the exchanges police it?

Both Kalshi and Polymarket ban insider trading. Kalshi's head of communications, Elisabeth Diana, told Variety the exchange uses AI-powered third-party surveillance, and that its investigators go beyond a trader's household: "We can also see from their social activity, what they're doing on the site, who they're connected to." Traders whose activity is flagged as anomalous are interviewed.

The MrBeast case shows how detection works. Kalshi said its surveillance team flagged the editor's account for "near-perfect trading success on markets with low odds," which it called "statistically anomalous," The Block reported. At the time, in February 2026, Kalshi said it had opened roughly 200 investigations, with about a dozen escalated to active cases. By May, it had publicly disciplined five offenders, according to Variety.

Polymarket updated its rules in March to ban trading on stolen confidential information or illegal tips, and trading by anyone able to influence an outcome, Finance Magnates reported. Decrypt reported that Polymarket has investigated dozens of bets on the U.S. midterms.

Detection has limits. Mitts told The Hollywood Reporter that on blockchain-based platforms, a trader who uses a mixer and layers of intermediaries can be "basically impossible" to catch. The same report noted that six newly created Polymarket wallets earned $1.2 million in February betting correctly on U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, and nobody has been caught.

Who else is drawing lines?

Sports leagues have written their rules into contracts. Under the agreements the NBA announced on October 26, 2026, naming Kalshi and Polymarket its preferred exchanges, league and team personnel are explicitly prohibited from trading NBA event contracts, and the deals restrict which markets are permitted (NBA.com). In comment letters to the CFTC over the summer, MLB flagged markets on post-game interviews, team personnel decisions and which celebrities attend a game as open to insider trading, and the major players' unions asked for a ban on "mention markets" (Front Office Sports).

Corporate America is moving too. Apple's insider trading policy, filed with its annual report on November 3, 2026, bars staff from trading on prediction markets with confidential company information "whether or not the activity constitutes insider trading or securities trading under applicable laws." Emcor, GoDaddy and Seagate added related language earlier in the year, according to Finance Magnates. Governors in New York, California, Illinois, North Carolina and Arizona have issued orders barring state employees from betting on nonpublic information (Route Fifty).

Can studios enforce any of this?

By their own accounts, studios will have a hard time. A source at Paramount, CBS's parent company, told Variety that extending stock-market compliance systems to prediction markets would take large amounts of money and infrastructure. "The tools aren't there yet," the source said. Variety also noted that most reality TV crew members are independent contractors, outside the compliance monitoring that covers salaried staff.

The exchanges have signaled limits on how far they will bend. "We would not be able to compromise on the experience for traders," Diana told Variety when asked about partnerships with studios. That leaves employers where the Paramount source put them: "The only viable path is for corporations to monitor themselves."

Mitts expects regulators may eventually look harder at this corner of the market. Given the potential for insider trading and what he called the "low social benefit" of the bets, he told The Hollywood Reporter, entertainment markets "might be good candidates" for stricter policies or investigation.