Welcome back to Tune In: our weekly newsletter offering a guide to the best of the week’s TV. Each week, Variety’s TV team combs through the week’s schedule, selecting our picks of what to watch and when/how to watch them. This week, the Oscars air on Sunday night on ABC, and “Homeland” returns for its
Month: February 2020
Jen Welter, who made history as the first woman to serve as a coach in the National Football League, is partnering with Amelia Baker and Mackenzie Munro’s Blonde Mamba and independent producer Casey Russell Hanley on the original series “FanGirl,” a half-hour single-camera comedy about best friends who become the first-ever female assistant coaches for
“Mayans MC” co-creator Elgin James has signed a multi-year overall deal with Fox 21 Television Studios. The deal encompasses development, writing and directing for TV and streaming projects. News of the deal comes around four months after James was named as the sole showrunner for the FX series’ upcoming third season, following the firing of
Sunday’s Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers drew 102 million total viewers across Fox and all its platforms. The game drew a hair under 100 million viewers on Fox, up barely 2% on last year. For comparison, last year’s low-scoring matchup between the New England Patriots and the Los
Veteran U.S. film and TV executive Michael Garin has been appointed CEO of Abu Dhabi’s twofour54, the outfit that provides infrastructure and incentives to more than 500 entertainment companies and drives media and entertainment industry growth in the United Arab Emirates. Set up in 2008 and named after Abu Dhabi’s geographical coordinates, this so-called media
Jessica Mann, a key witness in the trial of Harvey Weinstein, faced a second day of cross-examination on Monday about the complex nature of her relationship with the disgraced producer. Mann, a hairdresser and aspiring actor, gave explosive testimony on Friday in which she accused Weinstein of violent sexual assault and rape, and claimed the
The Chinese box office is gearing up for a starkly unsexy Valentine’s Day, with “Jojo Rabbit” and a local title formally pulling out of the mid-February line-up, while unconfirmed reports suggest that others – including “Little Women” – will soon pull the plug, amidst strict measures to prevent the spread of deadly coronavirus. Cinemas are
The shortest Oscar season ever has been especially brutal for strategists trying to gain traction with smaller-scale offerings later in the season: Early birds and conventional choices scooped up the lion’s share of Oscar nominations. And yet, as final voting comes to a close on Feb. 4 with certain categories seemingly locked up, it bears
Filmlance International, the Swedish production company owned by Endemol Shine Group, is set to produce “Tsunami,” a psychological drama mini-series directed by Henrik Georgsson (“Bron/Broen”). “Tsunami,” which is being co-produced by Swedish broadcaster SVT, is set in Stockholm in the aftermath of a tsunami. The gripping drama explores how humans behave when faced with a
Jane Austen has been through a lot on screen in recent years. From watching details of her own life contorted into a romantic comedy framework in “Becoming Jane,” seeing her most enduring masterpiece invaded by the undead in “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” or observing the cottage merchandising and tourism industry that has sprung up
The Miami Film Festival will open on March 6 with “The Burnt Orange Heresy,” starring Mick Jagger, Donald Sutherland, Elizabeth Debicki and Claes Bang. Miami Dade College’s festival, now in its 37th edition and running March 6-15, will screen more than 125 narrative features, documentaries and shorts from 30 countries. “Charles Willeford’s classic 1971 art
Movie theaters aren’t throwing away their shot to have “Hamilton” on the big screen. Disney is bringing a film of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical sensation with the original Broadway cast to cinemas in North America on Oct. 15, 2021. The movie version isn’t an adaptation in the vein of Miranda’s upcoming “In the Heights,” but rather
China has officially ordered an indefinite halt to all film production in the country as it seeks to stop the spread of the deadly coronavirus that has swept the nation. The death toll in China stands at 361 – higher now than that of SARS, which killed 349. China has confirmed 17,205 cases as of Sunday,
Change sounds like this: South Korean director Bong Joon Ho accepted his foreign film award for “Parasite” at the Golden Globes, saying: “Once you overcome the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” Bong’s statement echoes Alfonso Cuarón’s comments last year when he took the foreign-language Oscar for
Jarin Blaschke’s black-and-white cinematography in Robert Eggers’ “The Lighthouse” lends the proceedings a mythic quality and highlights the tour-de-force acting by Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson. The monochrome images are in harmony with the elemental story: trapped together in an unforgiving 1890s landscape, two lighthouse keepers begin to lose their grip on sanity. Blaschke, a
The BBC license fee is set to rise again during one of the stormiest chapters in the public broadcaster’s history. The U.K. government confirmed today that from April 1, the annual television license fee – which is used to fund BBC content across television, radio and catch-up services – will rise from £154.50 ($201.03) to
A Milan judge on Monday gave Italian broadcaster Mediaset a significant but not definitive victory in its legal battle with French media conglomerate Vivendi by ruling that there are no legal grounds in Italy to a Vivendi motion to suspend Mediaset’s plan to form a pan-European media company based in Amsterdam. The ruling by judge Elena
February 3, 2020 8:50AM PT Guns N’ Roses who have been on tour for the better part of the past five years, today announced the North American dates for their 2020 global stadium tour. The tour launches in Mexico City on March 14 and then rolls through previously announced dates in Latin America and Europe
Taut, tense and fluid, the Oscar-nominated script for “1917” reflects a collaboration of old guard and new — Oscar-winning writer-director Sam Mendes and debut feature writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns. They structured the WWI epic as a single shot tracking two young British soldiers, lance corporals Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay). Their mission? Cross no-man’s
Motion capture in one form or another has been around for decades, and certainly the most recognizable modern use comes from “The Lord of the Rings” films in which Andy Serkis portrayed the beady-eyed creature Gollum. The actor wore a special bodysuit, helmet and strategically placed markers so that each detail of the part computer-generated,
While on the surface, director James Mangold’s “Ford v Ferrari” is a story about racing, at the heart of it is a character-driven piece about a renegade named Ken Miles (Christian Bale) and the friendship he forges with Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) as he chases a lifelong dream. For the sound team, the characters of
Haunted houses are always full of hidden passageways, secret rooms and a story or two about someone who used to live there who disappeared or died under mysterious circumstances. The Park house in “Parasite” is no exception to that rule. It was first imagined by director Bong Joon Ho as a place that would be
“On the Record,” a harrowing documentary about the burden of women of color in the #MeToo movement, has been upstaged for nearly a month by the departure of former executive producer Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey, who had also guaranteed the film’s distribution through an overall streaming deal with Apple, was always meant to amplify an urgent
Veteran music-business attorney Dina LaPolt has appealed to West Hollywood Mayor John D’Amico and other officials to preserve the “Log Cabin,” a building that for years has been used as a meeting place for 12-step meetings and other efforts supporting substance abusers in recovery. LaPolt, who has worked extensively with Aerosmith, Britney Spears and Deadmau5
Exclusive TMZ.com Colin Kaepernick didn’t spend his Super Bowl Sunday watching his old team lose the big game, instead, he gave back to the less fortunate. Kaepernick went to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem on Sunday, spending over an hour with employees and touring the building. From there, he went
February 3, 2020 6:05AM PT YouTube ranked the most-viewed Super Bowl LIV spots on the video service on Feb. 2, which for many are the real draw of the NFL’s championship game — with Amazon, Facebook and Jeep coming out on top. Viewership of Super Bowl LIV ads on YouTube during the game were up
Beyond the Kansas City Chiefs’ comeback, Super Bowl LIV offered few surprises in the way of ads — the vast majority of which premiered online days prior to the game to maximize the impact and brands’ multi-million dollar spend, which this year soared to as high as a record $5.6 million for 30 seconds of
It’s been one week since the Grammy Awards, and for many people it’s taken a week even to begin to process all the things that happened in the deranged ten days leading up to the show, let alone try to figure out where things currently stand. And while the Academy is certainly behaving as if
February 3, 2020 3:06AM PT The giant film studio complex at Qingdao in Eastern China has halted all film and TV production in response to the novel coronavirus that has infected thousands in the country and claimed more than 360 lives. Qingdao Oriental Movie Metropolis announced on Monday via its official WeChat social media channel
Picturehouse Entertainment has acquired U.K. rights from TrustNordisk for Maria Sødahl’s “Hope,” which stars Stellan Skarsgård and Andrea Bræin Hovig, and will have its European premiere at the Berlin Film Festival this month. Based on the director’s own experiences after being diagnosed with brain cancer, “Hope” explores the relationship between artists and partners Tomas (Skarsgård)