The all-new Hollywood Reporter offers unprecedented access to the people, studios, networks and agencies that create the magic in Hollywood. Published weekly, the oversized format includes exceptional photography and rich features.
Laura Ingraham It’s early, but the Oct. 30 premiere of her Fox News show outrates MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell among adults 25-to-54 to win cable news’ 10 p.m. hour. Mark Halperin The pundit, accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, gets dropped by Showtime and HBO, loses his contract with NBC News and has his book deal from Penguin Press canceled. Jeff Glor The relatively unknown CBS News correspondent will succeed Scott Pelley as permanent anchor of CBS Evening News this year. Miles Teller Two weekends, two straight box-office flops for the actor as Universal’s soldier drama Thank You for Your Service and Sony’s fire thriller Only the Brave open to less than $10 million combined. Showbiz Stocks $24.10 (+15%) IMAX (IMAX) The exhibitor exceeds quarterly financial expectations as Dunkirk, It…
Is Amazon Studios the new Sony Pictures? Amazon’s issues at its streaming service call to mind the costly disaster that befell Japan’s Sony Corp. after it bought Columbia Pictures in 1989. Sony came to Hollywood facing a huge cultural divide, with little idea on how to navigate the treacherous waters. After Sony hired Jon Peters and Peter Guber, two producers widely known in the industry as operators hardly suited to such a job, their focus seemed to be on milking Sony. After Peters was fired, he boasted that he personally had taken the Japanese for $100 million. When Sony finally rid itself of Guber, it took a $3 billion write-down. Amazon Studios wasn’t run by hustlers, and its management backed several solid, well-reviewed series and films, winning two Oscars for…
The curtain is lifting on Netflix’s mysterious viewership data, so says Nielsen Media. The godfather of TV ratings recently launched SVOD measurement in earnest and plans to go out with viewership statistics on big-swing originals Mindhunter and Stranger Things 2 in the coming weeks as it courts additional clients to the new service. “It’s about shedding light on a large area of viewership that people have been blind to,” says Brian Fuhrer, senior vp product leadership at Nielsen. “We’ve gone public with some insights already, but the logical thing you’ll see next is how all of these big Netflix launches rank against linear TV.” Among those stats floating around are for House of Cards. Now set to end with its sixth season, the show had 4.6 million viewers for its…
Will Blake Lively, Jennifer Lawrence and Keira Knightley lead a new spy movie boom? Hollywood has mined characters like James Bond, Jack Ryan and Jason Bourne for box-office gold for decades, but after Wonder Woman, studios are seeing ever greater potential in femmefocused action thrillers. Producers are now shopping several stardriven spy packages with filmmaker attachments to studios. On Oct. 9, K Period, the company behind last year’s Oscar winner Manchester by the Sea, set Knightley to play a secret agent in an untitled original script from The Newsroom scribe Camilla Blackett. This summer, while audiences were waiting to see whether Daniel Craig would return for Bond 25 (he’ll suit up for his fifth film), the company behind the series was planning its first non-Bond feature. On Aug. 16, EON…
What should a fan-oriented, spoiler-heavy talk show look like on Netflix? The streaming giant is embarking on a seven-episode experiment with Beyond Stranger Things, featuring the creators and stars delving deeper into the themes of the sci-fi phenomenon. The chat show, which launched Oct. 27, comes months after the platform first tested out the concept with a 30-minute 13 Reasons Why postseason featurette on suicide prevention. That one-off special, Beyond the Reasons, was a March success by the streamer’s (elusive) standards, says Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos. While aftershows have traditionally been created for ad-driven networks to own and profit from the conversation around a hot property, Netflix also is looking for ways to increase engagement for its marquee shows. “It’s a nice way of extending the series and…
Forty minutes into Game 5 of the World Series and a half-hour after the kickoff of Sunday Night Football, nearly 30,000 people tuned in to an event that couldn’t be found on television: the new installment of trivia competition HQ. The app, a sort of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire for the mobile generation that awards a cash prize to anyone who can correctly answer a handful of timed trivia questions, has become an overnight sensation among millennials on both coasts. Every day at 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. ET, a perky host (improv comedian Scott Rogowsky or British personality Sharon Carpenter) presides over a test of knowledge. Anyone who selects the correct answer to all 12 multiple-choice questions will split a prize, which has ranged from $250 to…
