Innholdsfortegnelse for May 19, 2021 i The Hollywood Reporter

In 1988, Ted Turner had a vision: CNN should merge with Discovery Channel. It was still early days for cable television (Discovery debuted an experiment called “Shark Week” that year), but the outspoken CNN founder, someone with an eye for deals, floated the consolidation. “They just belong together,” Turner told Discovery founder John Hendricks at the time, inviting him to CNN’s Atlanta headquarters for a tour. Discovery executives convened in the wood-paneled boardroom of the boutique investment firm Allen & Co. under the watchful eye of the Norman Rockwell paintings that adorned its walls. “It was clear to all of us on the board of directors that the Discovery Channel would one day be worth $500 million, $1 billion or more. So why sell out now when the value might…

Renowned artist and activist Ai Weiwei spent 81 days in a Chinese prison in 2011 following a government crackdown targeting human rights lawyers, writers and advocates. His experience and that of fellow freedom fighters is reflected in his installation Trace, a series of Lego portraits memorializing 176 political prisoners from throughout the world. First exhibited on Alcatraz Island in 2014, then the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C., the show, pared down to 83 portraits, is on view at L.A.’s Skirball Cultural Center through Aug. 1 (with reservation-only, one-hour time slots). “When I was in detention, the man [a jailer] said, ‘Ai Weiwei, you watch too many Hollywood movies. This freedom you are fighting for will cost you your life. Day by day, minute by minute, second by second, you will spend…

The Herb Alpert Foundation has selected the recipients for the 27th Herb Alpert Awards in the Arts, a group of 10 (double the number in previous years) who will each receive $75,000 and a residency at the California Institute of the Arts. The mid-career honorees are choreographers Beth Gill and Will Rawls; filmmakers Kahlil Joseph and Adam Khalil; musician Toshi Reagon; composer David Virelles; playwright Kimber Lee; director Kaneza Schaal; and artists Steffani Jemison and Tanya Lukin Linklater. The awards were founded by trumpeter and label founder Herb Alpert and his wife, Grammy-winning singer Lani Hall, to single out artists for “challenging and transforming art, their respective disciplines and society,” says Alpert. “I like artists who take the road less traveled. Artists are more important than politicians. Their function is…

Back in 2000, Eric Bana captured Hollywood’s attention with his role as a homicidal thug in Chopper, a breakout hit in his native Australia. Soon after, the actor was being courted by the likes of Ridley Scott for Black Hawk Down and Steven Spielberg for Munich. Despite leading tentpoles such as Ang Lee’s Hulk and J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek, he longed to return to his gritty Aussie indie roots. Enter director-producer Robert Connolly, who first met Bana on Richard Roxburgh’s 2007 film Romulus, My Father. They’ve now teamed on four projects, and their latest — the crime drama The Dry, which Connolly directed, Bana toplines and they both produced — is set for a May 21 release in the U.S. after earning $18 million in Australia alone. They caught up…

Whirring along on the 101, I pass the Porsche 911 in the fast lane next to me. Looking down at the navigation unit, the same one I can get in a Panamera, it hits me: The Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo EV — a station wagon, of all things — is the most important car Porsche has launched since the 911 in 1964. It stays true to the Porsche ethos while also dialing back anything superfluous that distracts from the drive. “The Taycan Cross Turismo is the best EV you can buy at any price,” says Matt Farah, host of The Smoking Tire podcast. “You can get a stupid-fast one — the Turbo S for $200K — or a base model that’s very fast and would be a great commuter for…

Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead, which opened May 14 in theaters and hits Netflix on May 21, owes a tip of the hat — and perhaps the crumbling of a limb — to 1932’s White Zombie, the first zombie film. An independent feature shot primarily on the Universal lot and starring Bela Lugosi, White Zombie was not met with the same critical plaudits bestowed on Universal’s Dracula — the horror flick that made Lugosi a star — and Frankenstein, both released in 1931. “If it succeeds in nothing else,” wrote one critic, “it at least teaches any number of people in the audience what a Zombie is.” As THR’s review put it: “A ‘Zombie,’ according to native superstition, is a creature half dead, but one without the blood-sucking proclivities…

The irony of David Zaslav’s ascent to the top of the unnamed WarnerMedia and Discovery combination is that had the Discovery CEO gotten this job at any other time in Hollywood history, he would have been the lowly outsider with no meaningful scripted experience, a purveyor of home shows and reality fare beneath the notice of the elite. He would have been in for a potentially fatal hazing. But at this moment, many in the entertainment business are eager to be rid of the AT&T regime — led by CEO John Stankey and WarnerMedia chief Jason Kilar — that seemed unwilling and unable to learn the language. So they’re prepared to welcome the head of the company that brings you 90 Day Fiance, House Hunters and Dr. Pimple Popper with…

In untangling itself from its WarnerMedia holdings with a $43 billion deal with Discovery, AT&T is seeking to join Verizon in saying goodbye to Hollywood ambitions. Both telecom giants tried to reap gains from tying content businesses to vast wireless distribution networks. But getting these buys to pay off was more difficult than management expected. “The simple rule from the past 20 years is that telco and media assets generally do not mix,” says Ian Whittaker, a London-based finance consultant. “The mind-set between the two sides is too different, and it always ends up with the telco companies regretting their purchase.” Cowen analyst Colby Synesael says that the Discovery combination will allow AT&T to “unwind much of the company’s vertically aligned strategy it had pursued the last seven years,” which…

As Bob Dylan approaches his 80th birthday May 24, his maverick spirit continues to fuel Hollywood’s imagination. In the past year alone, his ’60s classics informed a number of prestige projects, including One Night in Miami, wherein Malcolm X drops a needle on “Blowin’ in the Wind” to teach Sam Cooke what he feels a protest song should sound like. In Soul, Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” wafts from a galleon filled with hippie mystics, while his “I Shall Be Released” is heard in The Good Lord Bird. And his scorching “Masters of War” launches the third episode of Raoul Peck’s kaleidoscopic documentary series on racism and genocide, Exterminate All the Brutes. “He’s one of the rare poets who really felt the pulse of society and of the world,” says Peck,…

International films and series have a greater reach and wider audience than ever thanks to the success of global streaming platforms and a growing acceptance to leap over, as Parasite director Bong Joon Ho put it, “the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles.” So why, then, is the adaptation business booming? In the past three weeks, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way has optioned the remake rights to Thomas Vinterberg’s Oscar-winning Danish dramedy Another Round, Chris Columbus’ 26th Street Pictures has agreed to put an English-language spin on hit 2013 Mexican comedy Nosotros Los Nobles for Netflix, and Bron Studios and Headline Pictures confirmed they’ll adapt cult French series Call My Agent! as a cameo-heavy satire of the entertainment industry in the U.K. And that’s just the English-language adaptations. The business of non-English to…

In the run-up to Chloé Zhao’s historic best director win for Nomadland at the 93rd Oscars, Disney began tiptoeing around potential land mines with regard to China, the director’s home country and the studio’s most important international market. “Please note in your ongoing coverage of Nomadland that Chloé Zhao is a Chinese filmmaker,” an executive for Disney-owned Searchlight emailed members of the Hollywood press on March 4. “You may accurately refer to her as Chinese or a Chinese National.” A number of news outlets, including The New York Times, had mistakenly referred to Zhao as Asian American, but the bluntness and blanket nature of the proviso was conspicuous. As it would turn out, Disney had abundant reason to be concerned over how the provenance and perceived allegiances of its rising…

The silence of a darkened theater is the best place to experience a horror movie, and that was doubly true of John Krasinski’s 2018 hit A Quiet Place, in which a family’s bid for survival depends on their remaining unheard by blind alien predators with heightened auditory powers. Taking on solo screenwriting credit in his taut follow-up, director John Krasinski again foregrounds that disorienting premise of a modern world in which noise can get you killed, as the same characters this time struggle to protect one another without their fallen paterfamilias. It’s another breathless chamber piece, expertly crafted. Having lost the rural farmhouse whose familiarity gave them a fragile safety, the surviving Abbotts are now forced out into the post-invasion world to seek new sanctuary. In 90 minutes and change,…

The potential pairing of AT&T’s WarnerMedia with Discovery presents the Biden administration with its first major merger review. How will it play out? Notably, the previous administration went to court in 2017 to stop AT&T’s $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner and failed in its antitrust case. AT&T’s decision to now spin off its Warner unit marks a stunning turn, although past legal history may not be relevant in the forthcoming review. The prior merger represented vertical integration in the industry — the combination of content plus distribution — this one features horizontal consolidation of content companies; both WarnerMedia and Discovery have massive footprints in TV production. That said, the merging parties will surely point to their nascent streamers — HBO Max and Discovery+ — as lagging behind Netflix and…

Perception of Brand Credibility TV Anchor Favorability (MAY 2021) Source: THR-Morning Consult polls conducted May 6 to 9, 2021, and April 16 to 18, 2020, among a national sample of 2,200 adults. Respondents were asked “how credible are each of the following?” and answers add together “Very credible” and “Somewhat credible” into a single category and “Not too credible” and “Not at all credible” in another category. Percentages don’t equal 100 percent.…

Coming Out of the Pandemic’s Magazine-Cover Chaos Timothée Chalamet’s November 2020 GQ cover was supposed to promote Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, originally scheduled to hit theaters a month later, on Dec. 18. But COVID-19 had other plans, upending releases and challenging magazine bookers. (The film is now set for Oct. 1.) Alison Ward Frank, global head of talent for Condé Nast, says, “The most overused statement during the pandemic: ‘Do you think it will move again?’ ” Andrea Oliveri and Nicole Vecchiarelli, heads of editorial booking and events firm Special Projects (WSJ. Magazine, Departures) jointly say the past year was “actually liberating”: “[It] allowed for more creativity because you could look at what everyone is talking about versus, ‘This Marvel franchise comes out on this date.’ ” They add that with…

Back in 2013, Shemar Moore — then playing the role of Derek Morgan on the CBS procedural Criminal Minds — told THR about his present to himself to mark a contract renewal: “When Iron Man came out and I saw the [Audi] R8, I lost my mind. I said if and when CBS gives me a raise, I’m going to get one.” That Audi R8, while still a fast-as-all-get-out exotic, now seems slightly quaint in comparison to Moore’s present collection of cars, all of which have personal meaning to him, including a brand-new Ferrari F8 Tributo with the license plate “Hondo 2” — in honor of his starring role on CBS’ S.W.A.T., on which he portrays Daniel “Hondo” Harrelson, and which was just renewed for a fifth season. In addition…

When Master of None premiered in 2015, the Netflix romantic dramedy joined a crowded landscape of stories about 30-ish protagonists on a quest to meet The One, even if they couldn’t imagine settling down anytime soon. The cultural specificity that star/co-creator Aziz Ansari brought to his character Dev’s search for love distinguished the series, as did its expansive approach to diverse storytelling, which didn’t end with Indian American Dev, his Taiwanese American friend Brian (Kelvin Yu) and Black lesbian childhood bestie Denise (Lena Waithe) but looked toward the wider urban topography they occupied. New York City is packed with more types of people than can be readily pictured, Master of None argued, and every one deserves their own love story. Ansari and company return after a four-year break, still guided…