Month: October 2023

Brainstorm Media has acquired North American rights for “Cora Bora,” a millennial comedy starring “Hacks” breakout Megan Stalter and “The Good Place’s” Manny Jacinto. The film, directed by Hannah Pearl Utt (“Before You Know It”) and written by Rhianon Jones, will be released in theaters sometime in February 2024. It follows a struggling musician named
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Why did it take five months? That’s the vexing question that entertainment industry insiders are wrestling with even as they cheer the end of the Writers Guild of America strike. Union leaders said it again and again all summer — that Hollywood’s system for collective bargaining was “broken.” Turns out they were right. The economic
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In 1937, Walt Disney was desperate to find a way to make “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,”the first feature-length animated movie ever made, actually feel like a feature-length movie. He’d been doing his best to ignore the naysayers who christened the very idea of the film as “Disney’s folly.” But they did trigger a
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Google said it will no longer claim that YouTube TV is “$600 less than cable” in its advertising, after an industry ad-review board found the assertion was potentially misleading. The YouTube TV pricing claim, which had appeared in two of Google’s ads for the service, had been challenged by Charter Communications in a fast-track complaint
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Philippe Bober’s Coproduction Office, whose recent films include Jessica Hausner’s Cannes Competition title “Club Zero” and Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winner “Triangle of Sadness,” has kicked off international sales on Gust Van den Berghe‘s “The Magnet Man.” The Paris and Berlin based production and sales outfit is attending this week’s MIA Market in Rome. Van
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Bille August, the two-time Palme d’Or winning director of “Pelle the Conqueror,” is directing a sprawling English language series adapted from Alexandre Dumas’ classic novel “The Count of Monte Cristo” starring an international cast led by Sam Claflin (“Peaky Blinders”). “The Count of Monte Cristo” marks the first series which is entirely produced within Mediawan
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All anime, all the time: Crunchyroll, the Sony-owned anime service, announced a new 24-hour free, ad-supported channel in the U.S. to promote the Japanese animation format — and try to win a few new fans for its core offerings. The first services to carry Crunchyroll’s free, ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channel are LG Channels, the
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Italian distribution and production company Notorious Pictures is expanding into the TV series sphere by snapping up rights to buzzy literary property “Forbidden Notebook,” a 1952 novel by Italian-Cuban writer Alba de Céspedes that has been recently rediscovered and successfully republished in English. De Céspedes has been described by the New York Times as “a bestselling
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European Union commissioner Thierry Breton has issued a warning to Elon Musk over “illegal content and disinformation” about the Israel-Hamas war on X, formerly known as Twitter, giving him 24 hours to respond. “Following the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas against Israel, we have indication that your platform is being used to disseminate illegal
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Ryadh-based media conglomerate SRMG has partnered with Warner Bros. Discovery to launch Asharq Discovery, a free-to-view pan-Arabic-language platform with a lineup that includes shows that have never been seen for free in Arabic before. These include international dating reality TV series “90 Day Fiancé” (pictured), reality shows “Gold Rush” and “Wheeler Dealers” and the Morgan
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Brussels-based co-production and financing powerhouse Umedia — the backer of recent festival sensation “How to Have Sex” and French Oscar submission “The Taste of Things” — is branching out. Complimenting co-production, tax shelter fundraising and VFX services through subsidiary UFX Studios, Umedia has now launched a development branch to bring in-house productions to the screen.
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ROME  — Film Factory Ent. – a sales agent on “Wild Tales,” “The Clan,” “Close Your Eyes” and “The Kings of the World” – has boarded “Jokes & Cigarettes” (“Saben Aquell”), the latest movie from Spain’s David Trueba which is fast-emerging as one of Spain’s late year Goya Award contenders after a San Sebastian sneak-peek and
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Some twenty aspiring film projects have been selected to participate in the inaugural edition of the Qcinema Project Market (Nov. 18-19) that this year represents and expansion of the QCinema Film Festival in The Philippines’ Quezon City. The selected titles include development projects by several of East Asia’s better known independent and art-house directors and
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The competition continued to heat up during week three of “Dancing With the Stars.” Many of the pairs took on their most challenging routines yet for “Motown Night.” For some, it was all about improvements — and it was a bit easier to get a higher score, thanks to a fourth judge without dance experience, Michael
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Universal’s “The Exorcist: Believer” debuted atop the U.K. and Ireland box office with £1.6 million ($2 million), according to numbers released by Comscore. In its second weekend, in second place, Disney’s “The Creator” collected £1 million for a total of £4.1 million. Also in its second weekend, in third position, Lionsgate’s “Saw X” scared up
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John Tilley, a longtime distribution exec and advocate for independent film at companies including United Artists Classics, Cinevista and Strand, who was instrumental in introducing the films of Pedro Almodovar to U.S. audiences, died Sunday in New York City. He was 75. “John was always a consummate encyclopedia of knowledge of the industry, and his
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The Spirit of Life Gala, hosted by the cancer research and treatment organization City of Hope, will honor hip-hop mogul and entrepreneur Lyor Cohen with a one-time-only version of DJ Cassidy‘s “Pass the Mic Live!” at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles on Oct. 18. The performance will include appearances by Public Enemy, Big
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Variety Awards Circuit section is the home for all awards news and related content throughout the year, featuring the following: the official predictions for the upcoming Oscars, Emmys, Grammys and Tony Awards ceremonies, curated by Variety senior awards editor Clayton Davis. The prediction pages reflect the current standings in the race and do not reflect personal preferences
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Patrick Stewart writes in his new memoir, “Making It So,” that Paramount executives wanted him to audition for the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard in “Star Trek: The Next Generation” with a wig on, which required his then-wife Sheila Falconer to ship a hairpiece from London to Los Angeles. “Right as I was boarding my
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For the millions who loved him, John Prine was an angel from Illinois. The singer-songwriter had a 50-year career trajectory that went the full distance from being part of the “next Dylan” brigade in the early ’70s to inspiring Next-John-Prines by the thousands before his death in April 2020. He would have turned 77 on
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Veteran film executive Paul Davidson has acquired the remake rights to “Electric Dreams,” the 1984 film written and produced by Rusty Lemorande. Davidson — who previously ran The Orchard and IDW Entertainment — struck the deal with Lemorande (“Yentl,” “Caddyshack”), who retained the rights to the film after its release nearly four decades ago. Brian
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The CW has named Ryan Sharkey as its new senior vice president of programming and content strategy, announced Brad Scwartz, the network’s president of entertainment, on Tuesday. In the new role, Sharkey will oversee the scheduling and acquisitions teams to optimize programming across all platforms including identifying co-productions and innovative strategies to create compelling content
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