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ON THE MORNING OF AUG. 17, A PALL SETTLED over the half-dozen or more Warner Bros. executives gathered for their weekly senior staff meeting in chairman and CEO Kevin Tsujihara’s conference room. After a quarter-century in which the studio often had dominated the box office, with successive regimes that took one victory lap and then another (first Bob Daly and Terry Semel, then Barry Meyer and Alan Horn), even the most cockeyed optimists had to admit things didn’t look great. With two back-to-back summers in which Warners — typically the No. 1 studio in market share — had trailed at No. 3, this weekend seemed especially depressing. It wasn’t just that the big-budget spy caper The Man From U.N.C.L.E. imploded with a $13.4 million domestic opening (hope that it might…
F. GARY GRAY After a rocky decade in development, the director’s Straight Outta Compton opens to awards-worthy reviews and a massive $60.2 million weekend, by far the biggest for a musical biopic. MERYL STREEP After a low $6.6 million opening weekend, her Ricki and the Flash fails to improve in week two despite adding screens, bringing its total to just $15.2 million box office. JIMMY FALLON The Tonight Show star scores a big new contract with NBC, keeping late-night’s top-rated host locked in through 2021. EMILE HIRSCH The actor pleads guilty to assault for choking Paramount exec Daniele Bernfeld at a Sundance party and is sentenced to 15 days in jail. SHOWBIZ STOCKS $15.25 (+6.3%) NEWS CORP (NWSA) The publishing company beats quarterly earnings expectations, announces its first cash dividend…
STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON’S HUGE $60.2 million domestic debut marks the latest win for Universal in a historic year. In July, the studio hit the $5 billion mark in global box office faster than any studio has. Only three other studios ever have reached so high — Paramount set the bar with $5.17 billion for all of 2011, Warner Bros. collected $5.04 billion in 2013, and Fox hit $5.52 billion in 2014. But Universal, once derided for a lack of franchises, already has blown past them all — its tally as of Aug. 17 stood at $5.77 billion — and the year has four months remaining. “This is the box-office equivalent of the 100-year flood,” says Paul Dergarabedian, analyst at Rentrak. “To get to this level, you have to have everything…
AFTER DEFYING expectations with a $60.2 million opening weekend in the U.S., Straight Outta Compton will attempt to conquer the world. On Aug. 20, Universal kicks off an ambitious international rollout throughout Europe. It’s a significant effort as studios once considered blackthemed films as having little overseas prospects. But Universal is so bullish on the N.W.A story’s appeal overseas that it will open Compton in 23 territories, including Britain (Aug. 28), Korea (Sept. 10) and Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates (Oct. 1). Discussions are underway in additional territories, where there is growing excitement based on the F. Gary Gray-helmed film’s U.S. performance. “In order to greenlight it [at a budget of $29 million], we had a conversation about its prospects internationally,” says Universal chief Donna Langley. “To us, it’s…
AFTER 18 DAYS AND JUST AS MANY cracks about its duration, summer’s grueling gathering of the Television Critics Association finally wrapped up Aug. 13 in Beverly Hills. Not exactly the most newsworthy iteration of the biannual event, it nonetheless set the tone for the upcoming fall season — one that FX CEO John Landgraf was quick to point out is more bloated with original scripted programming than ever before (his words: “There is simply too much television”). The volume of panels (nearly 200) is commensurate with that spike in original series, so it can be hard to break through all the noise. Still, a handful of shows, executives and talent managed to do just that — by turns both impressive and unfortunate. So before the book is (finally!) closed on…
122 People who described their experience as rewarding 44 Claims that their current project is the “favorite” script they’ve read 37 Instances of network notes and the note-giving process described in a positive way 34 Times someone claimed to have “creative freedom” 27 Descriptions of the series’ locale as “a character” in the show 26 Mentions of Donald Trump 25 Claims that Nielsen ratings don’t tell the whole story 23 Jokes about the lack of applause (TCA has a “no clapping” rule) 22 Actors who claimed their cast is like “family” 20 Cracks about the length of the press tour 13 References to the “golden age” of television 7 Ways in which execs proclaimed that their outlet is No. 1 by some metric Stat of the Summer: ‘There’s Too Much…
