Innholdsfortegnelse for January 20, 2021 i The Hollywood Reporter

On Jan. 15, Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige expanded the Marvel Cinematic Universe into streaming with WandaVision, a nine-part TV series that marks the studio’s first original for its parent company’s prioritized Disney+ service. With five more shows and four movies slated for release in 2021, the goal is for Marvel to always have something new for MCU fans, enticing audiences to join Disney+’s 86 million global subscribers and keep them paying monthly. Feige tells THR that every project he’s developing fits in one of two categories: Marvel theatrical films and then “everything else,” which encompasses live-action and animated series as well as one-offs that include an upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy holiday special. Disney+ shows are key to setting up characters and plotlines, he says: “It really does come…

Of the 158 million Americans who voted in the recent presidential election, likely zero did so with music licensing rules in mind. Nevertheless, the election has already proved consequential for the song industry. When Donald Trump leaves office Jan. 20, it’ll be a mild surprise that key restrictions on ASCAP and BMI — the two largest performance rights organizations — will survive his administration. Those restrictions date to the early 1940s, when the Department of Justice settled an antitrust investigation into how a group of composers and publishers had gained enormous power by pooling rights. Since then, thanks to the ASCAP and BMI consent decrees, anytime a TV or radio broadcaster, sports stadium, restaurant, etc., wants to play a song to the public, they can get immediate access to a…

After mid-2000s success building the Star TV empire into one of India’s top broadcasters and the dominant local streaming service, James Murdoch and Uday Shankar are back with a new project. Murdoch and Shankar, Disney’s former president in Asia Pacific, unveiled an ambitious new partnership Jan. 14 targeting digital business opportunities in India and Southeast Asia. But details of the venture, including its name and exact strategy, are scarce. Murdoch told the Financial Times that the venture with Shankar will be a “major priority” and a “center of gravity” for Lupa Systems, the holding firm he launched in March 2019 with his $2 billion share of the Murdoch family’s windfall from the $71.3 billion sale of 21st Century Fox to the Walt Disney Co. The “crowded” Indian streaming space will…

Weddings Melissa Orton, a TV agent at ICM Partners, married Brian Cortez on Oct. 24 at Greengate Ranch in San Luis Obispo, California. Births Simon Heuer, director of comedy development at NBC, and wife Kate Heuer welcomed daughter Winnie Kate Heuer on Nov. 20 in Burbank. Emma Roberts and Garrett Hedlund announced the arrival of son Rhodes Robert Hedlund via Instagram on Jan. 12. Congrats Jason Richman was upped to co-head of UTA’s media rights group on Jan. 12. John Agbaje was hired as senior vp animation for Bad Robot on Jan. 14. Former WME agent Tanya Cohen joined management firm Range Media Partners on Jan. 13. Former Paramount executive Elizabeth Raposo was named head of Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society banner Jan. 13. Tom MacDougall was promoted to president…

Widely recognized as the first Black production designer in motion pictures, Wynn Thomas has enjoyed a professional relationship with Spike Lee that goes back nearly 35 years — amassing credits including Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues and Malcolm X — which has created a trust and shorthand that Thomas says was an advantage in designing Lee’s Da 5 Bloods. “He needed to be in the United States for much of the preparation, so I essentially did all the prep work,” says Thomas of their collaboration on the Netflix title, filmed in Vietnam and Thailand, which follows four Black Vietnam vets who return to Saigon decades after the war. “I scouted and chose all the locations and designed the film and was communicating with [Lee] through the phone or…

This season’s contenders for the Oscar for best sound — renamed this year to combine sound editing and sound mixing into a single category — include a pair of dramas, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and The United States vs. Billie Holiday, that rely heavily on music but faced their own unique challenges to maintaining the authenticity of the narratives. Based on August Wilson’s play, Netflix’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom follows blues singer Rainey (Viola Davis) during a recording session in Chicago during 1927; it also stars Chadwick Boseman, in his final screen performance, as her band’s trumpeter. The songs were recorded in a studio, with Davis singing “Those Dogs of Mine” and the rest of the tracks recorded by vocalist Maxayn Lewis, who was recruited by the film’s composer, Branford…

It’s easy to imagine Hulu’s new maybe-supernatural thriller The Sister reconfigured into a compact B-movie. With a shorter runtime, writer Neil Cross’ protagonist (played by Russell Tovey of HBO’s Looking and Years and Years), director Niall MacCormick’s more-generic-than-aspirin atmospherics and their indifference-inducing twists might have seemed less glaring. But stretched over four hourlong episodes, the tale feels droopy and drab. Aired in October on the U.K.’s ITV, The Sister begins with Tovey’s Nathan, a well-to-do, 30-something married man, reeling after a visit by an old acquaintance. A professor of the paranormal whom Nathan had met years earlier, Bob (Bertie Carvel) demands that his onetime associate join him in the exhumation of a body they’d interred together — that of Nathan’s wife’s sister Elise (Simone Ashley), a party girl who’d gone…

When Joe Biden takes the oath of office Jan. 20, amid a pandemic and shortly after a Capitol riot, it will be one of the more unusual inaugurations. But a 1933 movie offers eerie echoes of this strange moment in U.S. history. MGM’s Gabriel Over the White House was a political allegory rushed into production to coincide with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s March 4 inauguration, his first. (It was made in two months and released March 31.) In fact, the film opens with an inauguration: that of newly elected Judson Hammond (Walter Huston, the lead in D.W. Griffith’s 1930 biopic Abraham Lincoln), who was a proxy for then-president Herbert Hoover. The fictional new president is a corrupt political hack with a hands-off approach to the Great Depression and a hands-on approach…

It’s 5 a.m., and my whole body is shaking. Not because I’m cold or having a caffeine or drug withdrawal, but because I have been up for 18 hours straight, six days a week, for the past three months, working on an unscripted TV show. I am not a “veteran producer” yet, but with a decade of experience under my belt on projects for major networks and streamers, I’ve seen enough to know that behind the scenes, the postproduction world in unscripted TV has changed. Story producers, most of whom are freelancers, are traditionally leaned on in reality formats to go through hours of footage and create a rough “string out,” a sequence of clips strung together in the order that an editor will later cut. But that job description…

Best Picture Cherry Robert Downey Jr. moderated a Q&A session with three fellow Marvel alums — star Tom Holland and directors Anthony and Joe Russo — plus their leading lady, Ciara Bravo, that was posted on Apple TV+’s FYC site on Jan. 8, praising their efforts in the genre-bending film. Judas and the Black Messiah Warner Bros.’ hopeful about the life, betrayal and death of Black Panther Fred Hampton, played by Get Out Oscar nominee Daniel Kaluuya, will launch Feb. 1 from an unusual place in this most unusual, extended Oscar season — the virtual Sundance Film Festival, ahead of its Feb. 12 day-and-date release. Nomadland Searchlight finally answered the question of how it will release its Oscar front-running film starring Frances McDormand: It will debut in select Imax theaters…

Hunt for COVID-19 Vaccines Is On: Allen Shapiro Jets to Florida THR has learned from multiple sources that veteran entertainment executive Allen Shapiro, former chairman of Dick Clark Productions, and a small group traveled by private jet from California to Florida to take advantage of the Sunshine State’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout that allows anyone 65 and older to receive a shot, residents and nonresidents alike. Shapiro, though, is not alone. Former Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons told CNBC that he traveled from New York to get his, too: “I don’t know how Florida got the march on everyone else. But you go online. You make an appointment,” he said. While the practice has been referred to as vaccine tourism, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis disputes that characterization. “It’s not like they’re…

This season’s many awards possibilities directed by women are as different as Nomadland, Chloé Zhao’s expansive view of itinerant Americans today, and One Night in Miami, Regina King’s tightly focused drama about soon-to-be Black icons in the 1960s. But within that range, one especially eye-opening trend has emerged. Several women writer-directors have used bold aesthetics to reveal heroines grappling with the life-altering issues of abortion and sexual abuse. Eliza Hittman’s subtle, eloquent Never Rarely Sometime Always, Kitty Green’s taut The Assistant and Emerald Fennell’s mordant dark comedy Promising Young Woman use sophisticated points of view and unusual, revealing camera choices to show us their heroines from the outside and also give us moving firsthand access to their experiences. These timely films, among the season’s best, never clobber us with clumsy…

Back in summer 2018, Riz Ahmed was preparing for a classroom scene for his latest film, Sound of Metal, and his American Sign Language coach, Jeremy Lee Stone, was becoming increasingly annoyed. Stone had worked with the actor for the better part of a year, teaching him ASL for the role of Ruben, a rock drummer whose life begins to spiral out of control when he loses his hearing. This, however, was his first day on the Massachusetts set, and he hadn’t seen his star pupil in months. Stone made a “voices off” sign, and Ahmed was expected to reciprocate with an identical sign. But Ahmed sat defiantly, refusing to sign, and “it boiled my blood,” Stone recalls. After all, the actor was well beyond fluent in ASL by that…

Multihyphenate Chloé Zhao wrote, directed, edited and produced Nomadland, but she notes, “I’m happier in the editing room than I’m anywhere else in the process. “I grew up with manga. I wanted to be a manga artist. So before I knew I could tell stories in words, I was telling stories in pictures, in edited pictures,” she says, explaining her process. “When I’m writing a script, I’m editing it in my head. On set I will be thinking about how I’m going to edit it.” During a shoot, she watches dailies every night and continues to write. “The script doesn’t finish until the morning of the last day [of the shoot],” she says. Searchlight’s Nomadland, which has collected a string of honors including the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion, is…

After he finished his most recent film, 22 July, about a family caught up in right-wing extremism and the domestic terrorist attacks in 2011 in Norway, Paul Greengrass was plagued by a question. “The world is so bitterly divided,” Greengrass says he asked himself. “What is the road out of this going to look like for our children?” To find the answer, Greengrass ended up looking backward, to a story set in post-Civil War Texas, the backdrop of his latest film, News of the World. The British director, best known for the visceral action of his Jason Bourne movies and the tension of his fact-based thrillers like United 93 and Bloody Sunday, didn’t want to make another movie exploring the darkness like 2018’s 22 July. “I wanted to make a…

Hollywood executives in charge of the release calendar couldn’t have imagined they’d be facing another great migration in 2021 as the COVID-19 crisis keeps up. The feeling of deja vu is demoralizing as they look to rearrange their spring and early summer slates. Almost a year ago, MGM surprised its rivals when pushing James Bond pic No Time to Die from April to November. Soon, though, all the studios followed suit before most cinemas shut down March 20 in the U.S. Hollywood and cinema owners assumed moviegoing would resume in fall 2020. That wasn’t to be. In the case of No Time to Die, it was subsequently pushed to April 2, but not even that date will hold, sources tell THR. The only question left is whether MGM will relocate…

Early on in the pandemic, many adoption shelters nationwide were emptied out, as people with more time on their hands thanks to lockdowns rushed to get rescue dogs and cats. Now, months later — as the White House welcomes its first shelter dog, President Biden’s Major — adoption rates remain strong across the U.S., according to Barb Williamson of the national advocacy group Best Friends Animal Society. Lesley Brog, founder of L.A.-based dog rescue Wags & Walks, agrees: “We are still receiving thousands of adoption applications per week.” In addition to providing companionship during this time of great isolation, pets provide other benefits, so it’s no surprise the yearning is strong. “Pets help reduce stress and anxiety, and help us cope with loss,” says Dr. Jeff Werber, co-founder of telehealth…

The filmmakers behind Netflix’s animated short Cops and Robbers — a spoken-word response to police brutality and racial injustice produced by Lawrence Bender and executive produced by Jada Pinkett Smith — have committed to making an impact beyond the screen. Co-directors Arnon Manor and Timothy Ware-Hill will use profits from the film to initiate scholarships at historically Black universities Alabama State and Morgan State. Says Ware-Hill, “The film had a zero-dollar budget, and everyone who contributed and collaborated on it did so for the important message and the cause, with no compensation. We made a promise from the start that if any monies come in, we will donate all of that to organizations that empower and help Black lives.” They add that the goal of the scholarships is to help…

Mulan Everything in this shot is CG except Yifei Liu as Mulan, who was photographed on a tuning-fork rig at Kumeu Film Studios in Auckland to swing her in front of the camera. “We reanimated her element and the camera to create a more natural pendulum motion, adding a digital rope for her to swing on,” says VFX supervisor Anders Langlands of lead VFX house Weta Digital who worked closely with overall VFX supervisor Sean Faden. They then created and added a digital double of the evil Bori Kahn falling off the beam below her, and the background is a digital watchtower and construction site. “We replaced the watchtower in a lot of these shots,” says Langlands. “It’s easier to do that than to try to line up all the…

Viewers who have spent the past 10 months at home revisiting their favorite sitcoms will get a particular kick out of Disney+’s WandaVision, which, through its first three episodes, is one of Marvel’s oddest properties yet. OK, the show may not be weirder than Guardians of the Galaxy, with its talking raccoon and adolescent sapling. But there’s something courageous about handing a postmodern exploration of sitcom conventions to an audience anticipating snazzy suits and explosions. The series takes place sometime after the events of Avengers: Endgame and — mysteriously — finds Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) living in domestic bliss like something out of a sitcom. Exactly like something out of a sitcom. They’re in black-and-white and framed in the 4:3 aspect ratio, and when they flirt…

The entertainment landscape continues to evolve at a breakneck pace thanks to developments in technology and an increasing consumer appetite for content — but this year, change happened at warp speed as companies across Hollywood looked for ways to stay afloat amid the novel coronavirus pandemic. From shattering theatrical windows to dealing with shuttered cinemas to playing professional sports in a bubble, in 2020, there was no such thing as business as usual. THR’s fifth annual dealmakers list spotlights the people who stayed on their toes to keep the entertainment industry on its feet. ERICH ANDERSEN General Counsel, TikTok The veteran Microsoft lawyer joined ByteDance-owned TikTok in January 2020, just in time for the social video app’s pandemic-fueled rise to around 100 million active U.S. users. Andersen oversees the company’s…