U.K. creative industries workers’ union Bectu has reported that job losses in the theater industry have jumped from 3,000 to 5,000 in a month. Some 2,700 of the job losses are set to take place in London and the West End while the other losses are distributed around the U.K. They include redundancies of those
Month: August 2020
California’s production tax credit program has attracted HBO’s”‘In Treatment” and TBS’s “Miracle Workers.” The California Film Commission announced Monday that the drama series “In Treatment” is relocating from New York and that the “Miracle Workers” anthology comedy is moving from the Czech Republic. The state’s production tax credit program requires recipients to begin production within
Warner Music Group (WMG) has named Dr. Maurice Stinnett head of global equity, diversity and inclusion. He arrives from BSE Global, whose portfolio includes NBA team the Brooklyn Nets, the WNBA’s New York Liberty, and Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, where he most recently served as vice president of diversity, inclusion and culture. Based in New York,
Snap, whose features have been copied directly by Facebook, is now borrowing a concept popularized by short-form lip-sync app TikTok: It’s going to let Snapchat users add officially licensed music tracks to videos. Snap plans to launch the music feature widely in the fall of 2020 for English users. For now, Snapchat has kicked off
Placing an early bet on the booming Spanish-language market, Starzplay, Starz’s premium international streaming service, has unveiled its first slate of international original productions, made up of four series from Spain and Mexico. The titles will all be made available across the service’s footprint in Latin America. Select titles will debut in Spain and the
First Artists Management, the Los Angeles-based talent agency specializing in composers and music supervisors, is expanding its operations by opening an office in London and hiring two new partner-agents. Hamish Duff joins First Artists from independent management and publishing company Involved Productions. He will head the London office and oversee all U.K. and European operations,
Specialty channel Sky Arts, part of pay TV operator Sky, has ordered a new photography project by acclaimed photographer Rankin. From Monday through Aug. 23, amateur and professional photographers are invited to send in new photographs or something from their back catalogs that represents their 2020, in the categories Family, Fun, Self, Beauty, Empathy and
Regina King’s directorial debut “One Night in Miami” and Pedro Almodovar’s Jean Cocteau adaptation “The Human Voice,” starring Tilda Swinton, have been added to the lineup of the Venice Film Festival’s upcoming 77th edition. Both additions will screen out-of-competition. “One Night in Miami,” to which Amazon Studios recently acquired worldwide rights, takes place in 1964
China’s Huanxi Media has struck a deal with All3media International to license 110 hours of factual content, that will play on its Huanxi.com SVoD platform. The deal covers 25 titles with genres including true crime, travel, food, arts/culture, history and royalty. Titles include two seasons of Studio Lambert’s globe-trotting adventure “Race Across the World,” and another
Australia’s pay-TV leader Foxtel is expanding its on-demand offering by adding A+E Networks’ LMN-Lifetime Movie Network to its film lineup. The package, which targets a predominantly female audience with made for television movie content, will be made available from Sept. 1, at no extra charge to subscribers of the Foxtel Movies bundle. Foxtel says that
Veteran manager and recording executive Merck Mercuriadis’ Hipgnosis Songs Fund Ltd. is adding the Barry Manilow catalog to its $1 billion-plus portfolio. Manilow, a Grammy, Tony and Emmy winner, is among the most successful recording artists of the 1970s and 1980s with 50 Top 40 singles to his name. Manilow’s career has continued to flourish
Filming has got under way in Adelaide on Australian comedy-drama series “Aftertaste.” It is the first major production to shoot in the state of South Australia since the coronavirus shut-down, and comes as a state of disaster and a nighttime curfew are declared in neighboring Victoria state, which includes Melbourne. The six-part Closer Productions show
Action thriller “Steel Rain 2: Summit” dominated the South Korean box office in its opening weekend. In doing so, it knocked “Peninsula” from the perch where it had been for the past two weeks. Released on Wednesday by Lotte Entertainment, “Steel Rain 2” earned $4.92 million from 663,000 admissions over the weekend. Over its five
Tom Pollock, the former chairman of Universal Pictures and the American Film Institute, died Saturday of natural causes at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. He was 77. “We are incredibly saddened by the loss of Tom Pollock,” said NBCUniversal vice chairman Ron Meyer in a statement. “He played a critical role in securing our studio’s
Microsoft confirmed that it is in talks to buy TikTok from China’s ByteDance — and expects to conclude the M&A negotiations by Sept. 15 — coming after Donald Trump said he opposed such a deal and has claimed he plans to ban TikTok. Microsoft said that if it consummated a deal for TikTok, it would
“Pineapple Express” fans will be disappointed to learn that a sequel was shot down over budget concerns from Sony. In an interview on SiriusXM’s “The Howard Stern Show” on Wednesday, Rogen said Sony wasn’t interested in a “Pineapple Express 2” movie several years ago when it was being pitched. “We tried to make one and
Local content is proving more of a draw than Hollywood films as China’s cinemas get back on their feet. Chinese drama “Enigma of Arrival” quashed “Dolittle” and “Jojo Rabbit” to take the top spot in theaters’ second weekend back in business, while a local animation bested the whimpering China debut of Paramount’s “Sonic the Hedgehog.”
After testing positive for coronavirus last month, Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan has recovered and was discharged from the hospital, he announced on Sunday. The Indian actor, who is 77 years old, was admitted to Mumbai’s Nanavati hospital on July 11, a little more than three weeks ago. On Twitter, the actor thanked the “excellent care
When it came to choosing an artist to sing a theme song for HBO’s documentary series “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” (which has its finale tonight), it’s far from inconceivable that the producers might have looked just as a matter of course to Aimee Mann. Speaking of the dark, she’s a woman who’s spent
Play video content Exclusive TMZ.com Tekashi 6ix9ine is fully free, having just completed house arrest, and he’s already out shooting a music video. We got this vid of Tekashi out in Brooklyn Sunday, bright and early (7:30 AM) …. alongside some super wild rides. It’s no surprise … a few security guards were patrolling the
Iconic auteur director, Wong Kar-wai has finally confirmed “Blossoms Shanghai” will be his first dive into dramatic TV series production. An adaptation of Jin Yucheng’s multi-award-winning Shanghai-set novel, “Blossoms,” the series also marks a return for Wong to his birthplace. Although he is associated with the free-wheeling Hong Kong film industry, Wong was born in
Delayed by over a year for mysterious political reasons, epic Chinese war film “The Eight Hundred” has finally locked down a date for release in theaters. It will open in conventional and Imax cinemas in China from Aug. 21, making it one of the first outings for a high-profile local film since Chinese cinemas hesitantly
HBO Max still isn’t available directly on Roku or Amazon’s Fire TV streaming devices — more than two months after the service’s launch — as the companies remain deadlocked in disputes over business terms. For now, Roku and Fire TV still support the newly renamed HBO app for legacy customers of HBO Now, and both
More than 700 members of the U.K. music community, including artists, managers, executives at record companies, agencies, the live music industry, in addition to creatives like songwriters and producers, have come together to sign a letter pledging to combat division and hate. Citing instances of anti-Semitism, like British rapper Wiley’s recent Twitter rant, islamophobia, xenophobia,
Wilford Brimley, best known for his roles in “The Natural,” the 1982 remake of “The Thing,” “The Firm” and “Cocoon,” died on Saturday. He was 85. His agent, Lynda Bensky, told The New York Times that he had been sick with a kidney problem for two months. Brimley was also famous for the series of
More than 150 people in Rhode Island accidentally received tax refund checks signed by none other than Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney, rather than their state officials. According to CNN, the misprinted signatures were on 176 tax refund checks. The error was the result of a technical glitch in the printing system for the state’s
Michael Schur, the creator of “The Good Place” and co-creator of “Parks and Recreation” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” took to Twitter on Friday to pay tribute to television host and his father-in-law Regis Philbin, who died on July 24 at 88. Not only did the two work in the same industry, but Schur has been married
Mahlon Reyes, a deckhand on Discovery Channel’s reality show “Deadliest Catch,” died on July 27. He was 38. Reyes’ wife confirmed to TMZ that he suffered a massive heart attack in his hometown of Whitefish, Mont., on July 25 and was rushed to the hospital. However, he did not regain consciousness and his family decided
Charlize Theron hosted a drive-in screening of “Mad Max: Fury Road” on Friday night in Los Angeles. The festivities, which served as a fundraiser for the Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project, took place on top of the parking structure at the Grove mall. Here, Variety goes inside the event for a look at how Theron
Play video content @JFNYC1/Twitter A NYC man was so intent on painting over the Black Lives Matter street mural in front of Trump Tower … not even cops pulling him off the ground was gonna slow him down. This wild incident went down earlier this week in the Big Apple, right in front of Trump’s