Movies

October 29, 2019 5:49PM PT In this week’s edition of the Variety Movie Commercial Tracker, powered by the always-on TV ad measurement and attribution company iSpot.tv, Paramount Pictures claims the top spot in spending for the second week in a row with “Terminator: Dark Fate.” Ads placed for the sci-fi action film had an estimated

In today’s film news roundup, Patrick Schwarzenegger will star in high school drama “Moxie” for Netflix with Amy Poehler directing; Blake DeLong boards a Billie Holiday movie; “Bombshell” moves up a week; and UTA topper Jeremy Zimmer heads a veterans group.  CASTING Patrick Schwarzenegger has joined the cast of Amy Poehler’s high-school drama “Moxie” for

Paramount’s “Terminator” franchise is back to rule box office charts. “Terminator: Dark Fate,” the sixth installment in the sci-fi series, should earn $40 million when it bows in over 4,000 North American theaters, while some estimates show that figure could reach $47 million. Though it will launch against three other nationwide releases, “Dark Fate” is

Mark Ruffalo debuted his latest film “Dark Waters” to an eager audience on Monday night at Harmony Gold in Hollywood, sitting amid the audience as he watched the fully finished project for the first time himself. After the screening, the Oscar nominee and film’s producer was joined for a conversation, led by moderator Pete Hammond,

October 29, 2019 12:51PM PT Jeremy Irons, currently appearing in HBO’s “Watchmen” and an Oscar winner with “Reversal of Fortune,” is to star in and produce biopic “Frankel,” which WaZabi Films will be selling at next week’s AFM. Irons plays horse trainer Sir Henry Cecil, who fought years of failure and illness to make Frankel

Studiocanal, the pan-European film and TV production/distribution arm of Vivendi-owned Canal Plus Group, has appointed Hugh Spearing as its head of global marketing, publicity and distribution strategy. Spearing joined Studiocanal in 2004 and was previously in charge of international marketing. In his new role, Spearing is overseeing international distribution, global marketing and publicity with teams

Amid the big-budget Hollywood sequels jockeying for position, this year’s awards race has a sizable contingent of contenders from overseas, including both foreign-made films and co-productions. The pack is led by indie animation mainstay GKids, but Netflix has also entered the fray as a distribution partner and entries from China are slipping into the mix.

October 29, 2019 10:15AM PT I don’t usually get starstruck. But once in a great while, like when I encounter one of my all-time entertainment idols, as I did years ago when I ran into Stevie Wonder in an underground parking lot for New Line Cinema, I have no shame letting artists know what their

No race for the animated feature Oscar has been as dominated by sequels since the category’s debut in 2001 as this year’s. Leading the conversation are big-studio front-runners “Toy Story 4,” “How to Train Your Dragon 3” and “Frozen 2.” Lower down the card, “Secret Life of Pets 2,” “The Lego Movie 2” and “Angry

“Cinema is not about advertising or propaganda. Cinema is not about beauty or beautiful images. Cinema is about truth.” So stated Romanian director Cristi Puiu, delivering a masterclass at the Ji.hlava Intl. Documentary Film Festival. A pioneer of the “Romanian New Wave” movement, Puiu won the Un Certain Regard section in Cannes for his film

Are Eastern European films under-represented at Western European film festivals? Concern that this might be the case prompted Ji.hlava Intl. Documentary Film Festival to carry out research this year to find out how many documentary films from Eastern Europe made it into Western festivals, and vice versa. Unveiling the study at Ji.hlava, festival director Marek

Roland Emmerich’s 1994 sci-fi adventure “Stargate” ended up grossing over $196 million worldwide, but the path to becoming a hit wasn’t easy. The independently-made film that opened 25 years ago this week spawned TV series including the 1997-2007 “Stargate SG-1,” direct to video movies, video games and comic books, but it was not well-received with

The Rachel Brosnahan-led indie “I’m Your Woman” has rounded out its cast and filming has commenced in Pittsburgh, Pa. The actress, who is the streamer’s most decorated star thanks to her Emmy and Golden Globe-winning work on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” welcomes a slew of actors on the drama about a woman and her child

“Almost Famous” did make perhaps more sense to translate from the big screen to a stage musical than some other films have because, for one thing (spoiler alert for anyone who’s been asleep at the switch for the last 19 years), it already has music in it — and it’s about musicians, or those who’d

Robert Evans, the legendary head of Paramount Pictures and larger-than-life producer of “Chinatown” and “Marathon Man,” died Saturday at the age of 89. An aspiring actor, the tan and good-looking Evans claimed that actor Norma Shearer spotted him poolside and asked him to play her former husband, the legendary MGM exec Irving Thalberg, in the

British actor George Blagden, who played Louis XIV in period drama “Versailles,” has been cast opposite Belarussian actress and model Katsiaryna Shulha (“Hotel Gagarin”) in “The Land of Dreams,” an English-language movie musical set in 1920s New York being produced by Italy’s Leone Film Group for the international market. Shooting has just started at Bulgaria’s

It seemed like any other movie premiere. Journalists and photographers swarmed the red carpet as stars Tessa Thompson and Justin Theroux smiled gamely for pictures and struck a pose, just as they would for any other Hollywood screening. Except there was one key difference. The film they were in New York City to promote last

Crowned the best world documentary at this year’s Ji.hlava Intl. Documentary Film Festival, “Fonja’s” journey to the screen is an extraordinary story of perseverance and motivation in the most challenging of conditions. The film is directed by Germany’s Lina Zacher and 10 young prisoners – Ravo Henintsoa Andrianatoandro, Lovatiana Desire Santatra, Sitraka Hermann Ramanamokatra, Jean

After seeing Cynthia Erivo blow the roof off the theater in the Broadway production of “The Color Purple” in 2016, Debra Martin Chase was sure she’d found her Harriet Tubman. Chase, the producer behind such movies as “The Princess Diaries” and “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” had been trying to make a film about

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts has announced the first winners of its new talent-cultivation program in China, including a young director, an up-and-coming actress, and a line producer on a $127-million-grossing romcom. Five Chinese artists were named Tuesday as the inaugural honorees of BAFTA’s Breakthrough China program. Among them is young director

In Roz Mortimer’s “The Deathless Woman,” a main competition entry at the 23rd Ji.hlava docu fest, a British woman becomes increasingly obsessed with answering the call of a Roma Holocaust victim whose soul is seemingly reaching out from an unmarked mass grave in Eastern Europe. The film, which mixes interviews with Holocaust witnesses, evocative Romani-language

A handful of docus from the Central and Eastern European region screening at the Ji.hlava fest have impressed the jury for this key section for their embrace of unconventional structure and political astuteness. Juror Srdan Keca, himself a veteran of the Czech Republic’s primary docu fest, says the best filmmakers in the Between the Seas

“Game of Thrones” creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss will no longer write or produce a trilogy of “Star Wars” movies, Variety has confirmed. The pair attributed the departure to their upcoming Netflix projects. “We love Star Wars. When George Lucas built it, he built us too,” they said in a statement. “Getting to talk

The word “legend” refers to a great many people who have worked in Hollywood. But when you’re talking about a movie star or a fabled director, the essence of the legend can be found up onscreen. With a producer, the legend usually has more to do with the shadow world offscreen — with what, exactly,

October 28, 2019 6:51PM PT Following Netflix’s announcement that the streamer is testing faster playback speeds — allowing consumers to watch films at a higher rate than intended — various industry members including Judd Apatow, Aaron Paul, and Brad Bird have come forward to share their feelings on the possible update. Apatow was particularly displeased

October 28, 2019 5:51PM PT Mark Damon’s DCR Finance Corp. has signed a deal to provide $65 million in financing for a new version of “Sinbad” with production set to begin in early 2020, Variety has learned exclusively. DCR, a media financing fund headed by Damon, Adi Cohen and Jordi Rediu, will unveil details to

October 28, 2019 5:12PM PT Angelina Jolie kept the crown away from Joaquin Phoenix over the weekend in one of the closest box office races in recent memory. Final figures released Monday showed that Disney’s “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” slipped past Warner Bros.’ “Joker” with $19.37 million to $19.25 million for the Friday-Sunday weekend —

Japanese screen legend Kiyoshi Atsumi built his entire career on one role. For nearly three decades, the comic actor played a character named Torajiro Kuruma — “Tora-san” to his onscreen family and real-world fans — appearing in approximately two new installments of the long-running franchise per year. To Japanese audiences, Atsumi was Tora-san, a connection the actor

UPDATED: “Booksmart” director Olivia Wilde and stars Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein expressed shock and disappointment over news that an airline apparently censored their film’s lesbian sex scene. “I don’t understand it,” Wilde told Variety’s Marc Malkin on the red carpet at the Academy’s Governors Awards on Sunday night. “There’s censorship, airline to airline, of

Alex Gibney’s “Citizen K” is a devastating portrait of corruption in Vladimir Putin’s Russia that seems to grow ever more timely. It follows Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oligarch and ally of Putin who became an unlikely political dissident, risking everything to blow the whistle on the threat the Russian leader poses to democracy. “After 2016,