Month: May 2019

Discovery wants to tout “Shark Week” during TV’s Upfront Week. Discovery will elbow its way next year into TV’s annual May showcase, the mid-month series of presentations the nation’s big media companies give to Madison Avenue in an effort to woo billions of ad dollars for their coming programming schedules.  Discovery is betting that its
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May 28, 2019 6:00AM PT Toonz Media Group has acquired a minority stake in the Emmy-winning kids’-content producer Telegael in Ireland. India-based Toonz further enlarges its international footprint with the deal, having already acquired Spanish animation studio Imira. Toonz is based in Trivandrum, southern India, and is part of Geneva-based Comcraft Group. The deal means
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May 28, 2019 2:48AM PT Leading Indian director-presenter-producer Karan Johar will host a dating reality show that will bow on Netflix. BBC Studios India will produce. Titled “What’s The Love? With Karan Johar,” the show will have Johar expressing his thoughts on love and relationships. But with a twist. A flamboyant talk show host, Johar’s
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Karlovy Vary Intl. Film Festival, the leading movie event in Central and Eastern Europe, unveiled its competition lineup Tuesday with a geographically diverse selection, which includes 10 world and two international premieres. Cambodia-born British filmmaker Hong Khaou brings the follow-up to his critically acclaimed Sundance debut “Lilting” with a moving drama about a young man
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Sports Illustrated over the decades has chronicled stellar match-ups, blow-outs, squeakers, sudden deaths and photo finishes. Now it’s getting ready to take on a whole new kind of game. Publisher Meredith Corp. has sold for $110 million the intellectual property around the venerable sports-news outlet to Authentic Brands Group, the brand-development company that manages Juicy
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Leading Italian sales company True Colors has closed a slew of sales at the Cannes Market and landed North American deals on horror pic “In The Trap” and gay-themed comedy “An Almost Ordinary Summer,” acquired respectively by MPI Media Group and Wolfe Releasing. The English-language “In The Trap” (pictured) directed by Italy’s Alessio Liguori as
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Disney’s live-action “Aladdin” soared far above the competition in North America, with an estimated $112.7 million at 4,476 sites over four days. It’s the fifth-highest Memorial Day weekend total ever, topping “X-Men: Days of Future Past’s” 2014 mark of $110.4 million. Disney holds the record for the holiday, with 2007’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: At
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The Match Factory has closed-out deals on Marco Bellocchio’s ‘The Traitor’ for most of the world following the Mafia drama’s Cannes competition premiere which has propelled the pic to the number two spot on Italy’s box office chart. Besides Sony Pictures Classic’s previously announced acquisition of “The Traitor” for North and Latin America, Scandinavia, Australia
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Netflix is stepping up production in the Middle East with its third and most ambitious Arabic original, titled “Paranormal,” with young Egyptian director Amr Salama (“Sheikh Jackson”) on board as director and showrunner. “Paranormal,” which is based on bestselling Arabic horror books by late Egyptian author Ahmed Khaled Tawfik, is being jointly produced by Salama
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“They don’t just want to take my body, they want to take my soul!” So runs the overripe line of dialogue that actress Nina Wu (Wu Kexi) has to repeat again and again in “Nina Wu,” the fascinating, glitchy, stylish, and troublesome new film from Taiwanese director Midi Z (“The Road to Mandalay”). Nina practices
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Benoit Forgeard’s dorky “All About Yves,” bizarrely chosen as the closing film of 2019’s Directors’ Fortnight selection in Cannes, is literally about an intelligent refrigerator that ascends to Eurovision fame as a rapper. Imagine Spike Jonze’s “Her” played for the cheapest of laughs, shorn of atmosphere, and absent all melancholic insight into our relationship with
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A perfectly charmant way to, as the song has it, forget about your worries and your strife for 100 airy minutes, writer-director Erwan le Duc’s “The Bare Necessity” is a breezy little sweetheart of a debut, that threatens to give the rather ominous description “quirky French romantic comedy” a good name. In its dappled countryside
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With her debut feature “Adam,” Maryam Touzani allows her audience to sit back and relax comfortably into a beautifully made, character-driven little gem that knows when and how to touch all the right buttons. Taking the stories of two women, both frozen in existential stasis, and bringing them together in a predictable yet deeply satisfying
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After his taut, impressive debut “Old Stone” which tracked with nightmarish relentlessness the high cost of compassion in modern urban China, Canadian-Chinese director Johnny Ma loosens his grip a little to deliver a softer, if not necessarily less pessimistic examination of the failing fortunes of a regional Sichuan Opera troupe. “To Live to Sing” is
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