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Comics The Next Marvel? Indie startups race to mine IP for film and TV p. 12 ↑ Streaming Sony’s New Web Studio inks first-look deal at Netflix p. 16 Shonda Rhimes Netflix orders seasons three and four of the mega-producer’s buzzy hit romance drama series Bridgerton while season two begins production. Christopher Forman The CEO of Decurion Corp., which operates ArcLight and Pacific Theatres, decides to shut down 16 locations in California, including the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. Eddie Murphy The star’s Coming 2 America shows staying power as the Amazon film repeats as No. 1 on Nielsen’s latest streaming chart with 770 million minutes of view time. George Sherman After its stock rally fueled by Reddit users, GameStop’s board is aiming to replace its CEO as it looks to…
Spring has brought a few glimpses of post-pandemic stability to the TV sports world. The NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments put up fairly healthy ratings, and Major League Baseball has shown early promise, with games once again being played in front of some fans. Those cautiously optimistic notes are a far cry from the cratering ratings seen by a number of sports last fall, when the World Series, NBA Finals and NHL’s Stanley Cup Final plummeted by 30 percent or more. Though there’s doubt about a full ratings recovery in the near term — “2021 is going to be a very sloppy year,” says Fitch Ratings analyst Jack Kranefuss — a leveling off of the declines is likely in the next several months, industry insiders tell THR. With the…
Even as TV viewership remains flat or down, there appears to be pent-up demand from major marketers looking for the large audiences that live sports provide. Todd Krizelman, CEO of ad sales tracker MediaRadar, says that after pushing spend last year to streaming services, many marketers once again are sending their dollars to linear TV, with sports being the biggest beneficiary. “I do think it helped reinforce that traditional TV, at least for live sports, is very effective,” Krizelman says. The apparent success of 2021’s NCAA March Madness follows what the NFL and its broadcast partners presented as a very successful football season. Ad firm Standard Media Index estimates that NFL advertising revenue rose 3 percent year-over-year for the past season, helped by the fact that there were more national…
For 17 years, Axel Alonso was a key figure in guiding Marvel from bankruptcy to ubiquity, reviving the Spider-Man and X-Men franchises. But since 2018, he’s been chief creative officer and editor-in-chief of start-up publisher Artists, Writers & Artisans, one of a new generation of comic book publishers positioning themselves as the next Marvel to potential investors. Those would-be competitors, including AfterShock Comics and Valiant Entertainment, are cultivating a financial model that focuses on a leaner publishing output. In comparison with indies like Image, Boom! Studios and Dark Horse Comics, the new guard is smaller in size but arguably more centered on potential film and TV adaptations. That has attracted the attention of business partners: Valiant — a 2012 relaunch of a publisher founded in 1989 — was bought by…
The flight of Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick from the July 4 corridor to Thanksgiving isn’t causing the panic that such a move would have prompted a few months ago. While theater owners weren’t ecstatic to learn of Top Gun’s shift, they’re confident there will be some semblance of a summer season based on a flurry of positive data regarding the recovery of the U.S. box office. “You learn to roll with it. Other movies have moved into that space,” says Patrick Corcoran, vp and chief communications officer at the National Association of Theatre Owners. Within hours of Paramount’s Top Gun switch to Nov. 19, Universal snapped up the July 2 date for The Forever Purge. (Notably, Paramount didn’t relocate A Quiet Place Part II, which debuts May 28.) The decision…
With Netflix unlikely to repeat its pandemic-driven 2020 subscriber growth of 36.6 million, focus is on pricing ahead of its April 20 earnings report. Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger’s tracker of countries shows that the cost of Netflix’s standard plan varies from the $14 in the U.S., which lies above the average revenue per membership of $11.02. After a Netflix U.S. hike late last year, followed by moves in the U.K., Germany, Japan and Argentina, Juenger noted that “evidence is growing that we will see widespread pricing increases in 2021.”…
