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.
Lady Gaga The House of Gucci star brought younger adults to theaters — 45 percent of ticket buyers were ages 18 to 34 — to power the film’s five-day, $21.8 million bow. Mark Zuckerberg The U.K.’s antitrust regulator orders the Meta mogul to sell off its GIF-sharing platform Giphy to avoid potential harm to consumers. Meta is considering an appeal. Adele The singer’s 30 lands atop the Billboard 200 chart with the year’s top debut: 185 million-plus streams of the album’s 12 tracks in the week ending Nov. 25, per MRC Data. Chris Cuomo As the New York attorney general discloses details about the CNN anchor’s role in helping his governor brother amid scandal, the network will “review” the host’s actions. Showbiz Stocks $165.30 (+2.6%) APPLE (AAPL) While omicron hit…
Just as the global film industry thought it was coming out of the pandemic, omicron may pull it back in. On Nov. 26, the World Health Organization, led by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned that the risk posed by the new, heavily mutated variant of COVID-19, first discovered in southern Africa, was “very high.” Days later, more than 40 countries, including the United States, the U.K., the European Union countries and Australia imposed travel restrictions from southern African nations including South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe. The variant has since been detected in several nations, including the U.K., Canada, Germany, Hong Kong and Israel The news couldn’t come at a worse time for the global film industry, which after two years of shutdowns, cinema closures and box office collapse, had finally begun…
When Endeavor offloaded its studio subsidiary Endeavor Content to South Korean entertainment giant CJ ENM for $775 million on Nov. 18, Hollywood insiders marveled at the price the Ari Emanuel-led firm was able to command. The studio has dozens of films and series in varying stages of production — management will stay in place and the unit will get a $120 million capital injection as part of the CJ ENM deal to further fuel that pipeline — but the company was established only recently, in 2017, and the South Korean firm led by CEO Kang Ho-sung will be acquiring a relatively shallow pool of established IP with that $775 million sticker price. (Endeavor co-produced hits include BBC America’s Killing Eve, AMC’s The Night Manager and Hulu’s Normal People, among others.)…
Amid a production rise fueled by Hollywood’s pivot to streaming, the need to lock in filming space is becoming more critical — and a soundstage boom is overtaking the Southland, with competition for venues and clients. “I’ve never seen so much activity in my career,” says Bob Hale of architecture and design film RIOS, which completed the Harlow production building at Sunset Las Palmas Studios and is in development on Echelon Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard. In the past two years, as the pandemic has left office buildings empty, this has been especially true — Warner Bros., HBO, Sony and NBCUniversal are all developing or leasing new Los Angeles stages, and companies like Hackman Capital, Hudson Pacific and Quixote are in construction on more, adding to the total of 394…
BEST PICTURE West Side Story On Nov. 29, just three days after the death of Stephen Sondheim, Disney held bicoastal screenings of Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Sondheim’s musical (the New York one at Lincoln Center, appropriately enough), and people flipped for it. Sixty years after the original film won this award, its remake could too. Licorice Pizza MGM-UAR had plenty of reason to cheer over the Thanksgiving break as its new Paul Thomas Anderson movie set a pandemic record for an indie film’s first weekend with an $84,000 per-screen average. Granted, it opened on only four screens, but still encouraging news ahead of its Christmas Day expansion. The Lost Daughter Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut won four of the five prizes for which it was nominated at the Nov. 29 Gotham…
Deal of the Week Who’s not afraid of ghosts? Sony Pictures. With Ghostbusters: Afterlife grossing nearly $90 million domestically — a solid performance for a pandemic release — since its Nov. 19 bow, Sony is doubling down on the filmmakers of that movie, signing co-writer and director Jason Reitman and co-writer and executive producer Gil Kenan to an overall producing deal as they launch their own banner. Reitman and Kenan didn’t start out with the idea of forming a production company, insiders tell THR. The two began their collaboration with this movie, and it was after the project had wrapped production — with both Sony and the filmmakers pleased with what they had on their hands — that the studio approached the pair for a deal. While the studio, led…
