Month: November 2022

In October of 2021, Amazon Studios announced it was acquiring Trevor Beck Frost and Melissa Lesh’s “Wildcat” for a price nearing $20 million, a staggering sum for a doc of its kind. Produced by 30WEST (“Tiger King,” “Flee”), the film tells the story of former British soldier Harry Turner and conservationist Samantha Wicker, who help
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Friends that pretend to save the world together also roast the hell out of each other. During a visit on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” Chris Hemsworth revealed that the six original actors from Marvel’s “The Avengers” used their group text chat to roast Chris Evans for his recent People magazine cover declaring him the “sexiest man
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Trying to see Taylor Swift live? You’re on your own, kid.  Tickets for the pop star’s highly-anticipated “Eras Tour” became available for presale on Tuesday morning to lucky Swifties selected as “verified fans” by Ticketmaster. However, for many, today wasn’t a fairytale.  I started my ticket-buying journey at 8 a.m. PT, an hour before my
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The National Football League is taking a serious pass at making premium content, entering a joint production venture with David Ellison’s Skydance. The NFL and its NFL Films division announced Tuesday it will work Skydance’s sports vertical to make a broad range of programming. The studio behind “Top Gun: Maverick” has experience in scripted and
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“To me, it’s pure joy,” says Czech filmmaker Filip Remunda (“Czech Dream,” “Steam on the River”) of shooting his latest project, “Love Exposed,” which he presented as part of the prestigious IDFA Forum this week. This is Remunda’s first time back at IDFA in 14 years. “Czech Dream,” his breakout film, was screened at the
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Disney is returning to Genovia for a third “Princess Diaries” movie. It’s not clear whether Anne Hathaway will reprise her role as the down-to-earth royal Mia Thermopolis in the new installment, which is being written by Aadrita Mukerji (“Reacher,” “Supergirl”). However, Hathaway recently expressed her interest in returning — with her on-screen grandmother Julie Andrews,
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It starts with elephant feces and ends with a random clip from “Avatar.” That narrative leap, one lubricated with scatology and film history, sums up the bulky 188-minute “Babylon” after its first initial, somewhat puzzling screening at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills on Monday evening.   Chazelle’s film is the one of the last
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When Apple announced in October that it would be releasing “Emancipation” in theaters by the end of the year, many moviegoers were left scratching their heads: How can any studio release a Will Smith vehicle in the same year he slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars? For “Emancipation” director Antoine Fuqua, there was never any
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“The Crown” Season 5 has taken the throne on this week’s Netflix Top 10’s English TV chart as the No. 1 show over the Nov. 7-13 viewing window. According to the streamer’s figures, the show’s fifth season was viewed for 107.39 million hours following its premiere on Nov. 9, and is in the Top 10 in 88 countries. In
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Who’s still talking about Bruno? Grammy voters, as “Encanto” and its popular song “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” were nominated in three of the four Music for Visual Media categories during Tuesday’s announcement of nominees for the 65th annual Grammy Awards. Grammy’s offbeat eligibility period (which began Oct. 1, 2021) ensured the Disney animated film
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The upcoming comedic thriller series “Based on a True Story” has added five new cast members, Variety has learned exclusively. Natalia Dyer (“Stranger Things,” “Yes, God, Yes”), Alex Alomar Akpobome (“Industry,” “Twenties”), Aisha Alfa (“Good Trouble,” “Degrassi: Next Generation”), Annabelle Dexter-Jones (“Succession,” “The Calling”), and Li Jun Li (“Babylon,” “Devils”) have all joined the series.
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Author and activist Roberto Saviano, whose Neapolitan mob exposé “Gomorrah” is the basis for the popular HBO Max series of the same title, was unrepentant on Tuesday during the first hearing in a defamation lawsuit being brought against him by Italy’s current right-wing prime minister Giorgia Meloni for calling her “a bastard” while blasting her
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Peter Billingsley, the blond moppet from “A Christmas Story,” was 11 years old when he starred in that 1983 holiday-sleeper-that-became-a-classic (though it depends who you ask — I’ve always been something of a Scrooge about it). The image of Billingsley from “A Christmas Story” — goggle-ish glasses, beaming gopher grin — became, in its way, as
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Walter Hamada, the former president of DC Films, has signed an exclusive, multi-year production deal with Paramount Pictures.  Under the agreement, which begins on Jan. 1, 2023, Hamada will spearhead the studio’s mainstream horror movies, with the goal of releasing several low-to mid-budget films per year across theatrical and streaming. The studio recently scored at the box
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Given Hollywood’s obsession with tales of great financial ruin — and the trophies many actors have collected for playing the figures behind them — we say confidently that it is only a matter of time before we get a scripted account of the still-unfolding Sam Bankman-Fried disaster.  Bankman-Fried is the wild-haired 30-year-old Silicon Valley whiz
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Netflix is giving customers a new way to lock down their accounts, marking another step in its larger efforts to curtail illicit password sharing. Starting Tuesday, the company is rolling out Manage Access and Devices, a new feature in Netflix’s Account Settings that lets customers view all the recent devices that have streamed using their
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Style Points is a weekly column about how fashion intersects with the wider world. More than a million people have seen “Thierry Mugler: Couturissime” over the course of a run that’s taken the show from Montreal and Paris to Rotterdam and Munich. But until this month, it had never come to New York, where the
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National Geographic Documentary Films has revealed the air dates for feature documentary “The Territory.” The critically acclaimed film, which marks the feature documentary debut from director Alex Pritz, will premiere on National Geographic Channel on Dec. 1, at 10 p.m. EST/PST and will then be available to stream Dec. 2 on Disney+. “The Territory” provides
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After Warner Bros. Discovery chief David Zaslav mentioned the possibility of working with J.K. Rowling on more “Harry Potter” content, Voldemort actor Ralph Fiennes expressed his interest in reprising his villainous role in the Wizarding World. “Sure, of course,” Fiennes told Variety when asked if he wants to play Voldemort again. If Warner Bros. or
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