Movies

Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group has cut roughly 15 jobs in New York and Los Angeles, several insiders familiar with the company told Variety. The reduction comes with a consolidation of the marketing and public relations teams under Blair Rich, president of worldwide theatrical and home entertainment marketing. The cuts were not related to or

In today’s film news roundup, “Walking on Water” gets North American distribution, Abramorama acquires rights to “Family in Transition,” and the Cinema Italian Style film festival sets its opening night film.  ACQUISITIONS  Kino Lorber has acquired North American rights to “Walking on Water,” centered on installation artist Christo and his 2016 art piece “The Floating

October 24, 2018 4:36PM PT James Karen, character actor with hundreds of roles who was best known for “Poltergeist” and “Night of the Living Dead,” died Tuesday in Los Angeles, his friend Leonard Maltin confirmed. He was 94. Born Jacob Karnovsky in 1923, the actor later changed his last name to Karen after setting out to

October 24, 2018 4:35PM PT With “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” postponed for the foreseeable future, Chris Pratt looks to have found his next film — he is in negotiations to star in Taylor Sheridan’s new writing and directing gig. The film, which David Heyman is producing, follows a former special forces commando (Pratt), who’s

October 24, 2018 4:30PM PT Legendary is producing a live-action feature film version of Shueisha’s Japanese manga franchise “My Hero Academia.” The company, a subsidiary of the China-based Wanda Group, made the announcement Wednesday and noted that the franchise, created by Kohei Horikoshi, has more than 17 million copies in circulation and was the 2017

Richard Linklater will write and direct an untitled film based on the life of comedian Bill Hicks for Focus Features. Hicks was raised as a Southern Baptist and began performing comedy in the late 1970s in Texas. He toured extensively during the 1980s, specializing in dark humor and social commentary. A typical joke: “I never

With scant high profile offerings hitting theaters, Michael Myers won’t need to put up much of a fight to top box office charts again. After “Halloween’s” massive $76 million debut, Universal and Blumhouse’s slasher film starring Jamie Lee Curtis will easily repeat at No. 1 in North America. The question is: how much of a killing

DreamWorks Animation is in final negotiations for the movie rights to Jerry Hawthorne’s board game “Mice and Mystics,” Variety has learned exclusively. Alexandre Aja attached to direct and co-write the script with “Aquaman” scribe David Leslie Johnson. Vertigo Entertainment’s Roy Lee and Jon Berg are producing. “Mice and Mystics” is a role-playing game in which

MORELIA — There is no doubt that anytime Alfonso Cuarón shows up at a Mexican film festival, it will be one of the highlights of the event. Today’s Masterclass, given at the Morelia Film Festival, was no exception. In the standing-room-only Teatro Ocampo, Cuarón regaled the assemble mix of press, industry professionals from films in

A plus-sized makeup artist with candy-colored hair and a marijuana addiction has a hard time holding down a proper job, so to make ends meet she deals drugs door to door, pedaling her bike to a colorful cast of clients – including her landlady, a soap star, and a nun – across a wide swath

In an ongoing series, Variety profiles 10 emerging Mexican women filmmakers. A year has been a long time for Mexican actress-dramatist-director Lila Avilés. Last October, she was preparing to screen her first feature, “The Chambermaid” (La Camarista) in rough-cut at Los Cabos.“The Chambermaid” won at Los Cabos, attracted co-producers in Bad Boy Billy Production and

The estate of Ana Mendieta has reached a settlement with Amazon Studios over its claims that the film “Suspiria” borrows heavily from the late artist’s work. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed. The film is set for release this weekend in New York and Los Angeles before going wide the following week. The

CANNES — There’s a scene in “Bayoneta,” Mexican Kyzza Terrazas’ second fiction feature, where Miguel, played by “Club of Crows’” Luis Gerardo Méndez, is asked to sing a song. He does so, Chalino Sanchez’s “Nieves de enero,” a lovely spare ballad about heartbreak. Miguel knows something about that sentiment. An up-and-coming Mexican boxer, a Sydney

Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese are officially reteaming. Imperative Entertainment has attached Scorsese to direct and DiCaprio to star in the feature adaptation of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the New York Times best-selling book by David Grann. Imperative acquired the rights to the book in 2016. DiCaprio and Scorsese quickly expressed interest in the

October 24, 2018 11:26AM PT “Hamilton” actor Javier Munoz, David Sullivan, and Marguerite Moreau will star in the independent comedy “Monuments,” which has started shooting, Variety has learned exclusively. David Pasquesi, Joel Murray, and Shunori Ramanathan round out the cast. The movie marks Munoz’s first film role since departing the Broadway production of “Hamilton.” He

October 24, 2018 10:30AM PT Fans of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium franchise won’t be pleased with the way Lisbeth Salander has been reduced to a Batgirl-like figure with a tacked-on psychological profile. It was probably inevitable that Hollywood would neuter the best elements of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” franchise, but did the producers really need to shift

Oscar-winning filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón didn’t know why, but the instinct was clear: “Roma,” his most personal film to date, taken from his memories of growing up in Mexico City, had to be shot in black and white. It wasn’t about conjuring nostalgia or referencing the neorealist masters of old, whose work would later be name-checked

October 24, 2018 9:07AM PT The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced the 25 animated features submitted for consideration in this year’s Oscar race. Among the entries is Pixar’s box office hit “Incredibles 2,” Wes Anderson’s stop-motion “Isle of Dogs” and Sony’s upcoming “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.” Also in play are a

With Asia representing a whopping 65% of the earth’s population, it’s small wonder that the continent’s film industries are becoming more influential on the world stage. By some measures, China’s rising box office numbers have already surpassed those of the U.S., and India’s film business is the world’s largest by number of films produced. That’s

The International Documentary Assn. announced nominees for the 34th annual IDA Awards Wednesday, spotlighting the best in documentary filmmaking. Among the feature nominees were mainstays on the circuit so far this year like Hulk’s “Crime + Punishment” and “Minding the Gap,” as well as National Geographic’s “Free Solo” and Focus Features’ “Won’t You Be My

AT&T leaders touted WarnerMedia’s positive impact on its bottom line in the first full quarter of consolidated earnings since the telco giant completed its acquisition of HBO, Turner and Warner Bros. in June. AT&T chairman-CEO Randall Stephenson said the addition of the unit now known as WarnerMedia was “immediately accretive in the first full quarter

MORELIA — This year’s Impulso Morelia, the festival’s works in progress section for Mexican films, runs Wednesday to Friday, and ends with writer-director – and in this case supporting actor – Hari Sama’s semi-autobiographical coming of age film “This is Not Berlin.” Set in the art-filled, politically charged world of 1986 Mexico City, the film

MORELIA, Mexico — Mexican helmer-scribe Marcelo Tobar is teaming up for the third time with producer Elsa Reyes of Zensky Cine to make his most ambitious film to date. Contrary to his earlier features, which cost roughly $150,000 each to make, Tobar’s latest film, “Los Idealistas,” boasts a $1 million budget. Zensky Cine produced and

MORELIA, Mexico —  In Morelia for multiple reasons, outgoing Imcine director general Jorge Sanchez sat with Variety in an exclusive interview to take stock of his tenure, which ends Nov. 30. Since he joined Mexico’s national film institute on Jan. 14, 2013, Sanchez has presided over a sea-change in Mexico’s entertainment industry. New public and

AT&T beat revenue expectations for the third quarter of 2018 while falling short on profit, with the telco touting the addition of WarnerMedia as contributed top-line and income growth. For Q3, WarnerMedia — as Time Warner was rechristened — posted revenue of $8.2 billion, up 6.5% year over year. WarnerMedia delivered operating profit of $2.57 billion

Ambitious building plans are intended to cement Ikebukuro and the surrounding Toshima district of Tokyo firmly at the center of the Japanese film industry. Plans unveiled Wednesday at TIFFCOM, part of the Tokyo International Film Festival, include the construction of two new complexes, housing 22 movie screens in total. The are expected to be completed

China’s Bona Film and Japan’s Toei Animation have teamed to develop and co-produce big-budget English-language animation feature, “The Monkey Prince.” The film, which has already been in early preparation since 2015 is pitched as “a Chinese legend, mixed with Hollywood story-telling, and Japanese animation.” John A Davis will direct from a script by David Stem

Even in the endlessly eccentric annals of independent animation — where the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” took flight and Ralph Bakshi tripped out amid jive-talking rabbits and X-rated cats — “Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles” is an oddity: a feature-length cartoon about the making of a 27-minute documentary. Frankly, it was a brilliant choice

October 23, 2018 8:56PM PT In this week’s edition of the Variety Movie Commercial Tracker, powered by the TV advertising attention analytics company iSpot.tv, Universal Pictures claims the top spot in spending for “The Grinch.” Ads placed for the remake of the Christmas classic had an estimated media value of $4.97 million through Sunday for

October 23, 2018 8:27PM PT IndieWire has announced the lineup for its 2018 IndieWire Honors, including “Black Panther” director Ryan Coogler and “Crazy Rich Asians” star Constance Wu. Other honorees include Natalie Portman, Charlize Theron, Bill Hader, Cary Joji Fukunaga and Amandla Stenberg. The awards ceremony takes place Nov. 1 in Los Angeles. “For our