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.
On Oct. 27, Netflix’s freshly installed global TV head, Bela Bajaria, unveiled a new organizational structure designed to break down silos and make the company’s priorities in comedy and drama clear. “What I wanted to do was set up the team to be creator-friendly and to reflect how TV is made,” Bajaria tells THR. While those efforts have been applauded, many inside suggest it will take more than a new org chart to quell anxiety at the streaming behemoth. “It didn’t used to be this way,” says one executive in the original series group who would speak only on the condition of anonymity. “Now, it’s all, ‘Who’s going next? Am I going to have a job? What’s it going to look like?’” That seismic shift in morale, as at least…
Susan Wojcicki The YouTube chief leads the streaming video giant to $5 billion in advertising revenue over the summer, up 32 percent compared with the same period a year earlier. Eric Shanks The Dodgers may have won, but the Fox Sports CEO saw the World Series go down as the least-watched ever, dropping 30 percent from 2019 to an average of 9.74 million viewers. Taylor Swift Her Folklore becomes the first album to sell a million copies in the U.S. in 2020 and returns to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart dated Oct. 31. Richard Gelfond The Imax CEO presides over a loss of $47.2 million in the quarter ended Sept. 30, compared to a year-earlier $9 million profit, with the exhibitor facing a lack of tentpoles as theaters…
In an interview with CNBC on Oct. 22, the day after disclosing that the 6-month-old mobile entertainment startup Quibi would shut down, CEO Meg Whitman described returning money to the company’s investors as “the honorable thing to do.” Unmentioned during the appearance were the hundreds of crewmembers who would lose their jobs during a pandemic as Quibi wound down production on its original shows. Although many of those crewmembers long doubted the viability of the business model, Quibi’s Oct. 21 announcement that it was closing shop came as a blow in a tight job market. Several show sources tell THR that they, just like most Quibi employees, did not know about the news in advance of the general public. “We were blind-sided. We had just signed contracts and turned down…
It’s been a setting-of-the-sun time for Hollywood power players of a certain age lately. Ron Meyer, 76, was ousted as vice chairman of NBCUniversal amid scandal. In August, former Universal chairman Tom Pollock died suddenly of a heart attack at 77. Now Jeffrey Katzenberg, who will turn 70 in December, finds himself contending with the high-profile failure of Quibi only six months after the premium streaming service launched in April. While some say they think he has the resilience to fight another day, others question what future awaits him. What he has accomplished in the entertainment industry has been more than formidable: Working with powerful allies Steven Spielberg and, for many years, David Geffen, Katzenberg enjoyed enormous success: running the Disney Studios, launching DreamWorks and then overseeing DreamWorks Animation. It…
In late October, European governments — in Germany, Italy and France — shuttered movie theaters, again, amid a rise in COVID-19 infection rates. In the U.S., New York has allowed most theaters in the state to reopen as of Oct. 23, but New York City cinemas remain shut. It’s a similar story in Los Angeles, where a rise in average daily new coronavirus cases makes it increasingly unlikely that L.A. county theaters will be allowed to reopen soon under California’s safety guidelines. Film distributors and exhibitors, battered by the first COVID-19 lockdown in early March, had hoped the worst was behind them. Outside the U.S., box office returns in countries that had reopened have been climbing steadily — albeit from a lower level, the result of restrictions on theater capacity…
FILM Kenya Barris (CAA, Artists First, Morris Yorn) will write and direct a biopic on Richard Pryor for MGM. Jennifer Lopez (CAA, Medina, Hirsch Wallerstein) and Armie Hammer (WME, Sloane Offer) will star in Lionsgate’s action-comedy Shotgun Wedding. John Ridley (Brillstein, Hirsch Wallerstein) will write and direct a 1960s-based Poltergeist film for Blumhouse. Daisy Edgar-Jones (UTA, the U.K.’s Hamilton Hodell) will star in Sony’s feature adaptation of Where the Crawdads Sing. Emma Thompson (CAA, the U.K.’s Hamilton Hodell) will star in sex comedy Good Luck to You, Leo Grande from director Sophie Hyde. Bebe Rexha (UTA, Sal & Co., Goodman Genow) will make her feature film debut in STXfilms’ Queenpins alongside Kristen Bell. Haley Lu Richardson (Gersh, 3 Arts, Sloane Offer) will star in and executive produce an adaptation of…
