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.
Bruce Miller The Handmaid’s Tale showrunner enters a rich, multiple-year development deal with Disney-backed ABC Signature and Hulu for his White Oak Pictures banner. Dan Dworkin & Jay Beattie The Lost Symbol creators couldn’t re-create the blockbuster magic of The Da Vinci Code as Peacock cancels the drama series after a single season. Tom Kapinos The Lucifer creator saw his six-season Netflix/Fox show top Nielsen’s streaming chart as the most watched original series in 2021 with 18 billion-plus minutes viewed. John Foley As the Peloton CEO fends off an activist investor, a second show — Billions, following And Just Like That — featured a character having a heart attack on its bike. Showbiz Stocks $79.12 (-4.3%) ACTIVISION BLIZZARD (ATVI) Amid a larger market sell-off, the video game publisher’s sale to…
In May 2016, Disney sent shock waves through the video game sector when it ended its stint as a publisher of console titles to, it said, “transition exclusively to a licensing model.” It later replicated that move in the mobile games space and let outside studios create projects built on its intellectual property like Star Wars, Marvel and Pixar. “We are good at making movies and television shows and theme parks and cruise ships and the like,” then-CEO Bob Iger said in 2019. “We have just never managed to demonstrate much skill on the publishing side of games.” Most Hollywood giants have similarly retreated from video game ambitions. NBCUniversal shut down its game studio in 2019, before its current CEO, Jeff Shell, took over. And Discovery chief David Zaslav hasn’t…
Over the past 20 years, America and its allies in Afghanistan helped finance and train a new generation of Afghan film and TV professionals in an effort to build a democracy in the country. Last summer, amid the rapid and chaotic U.S. military withdrawal, they abandoned them to the Taliban. Since then, a small group of volunteers has been trying to get them out. The Afghan actors, directors, producers, sound engineers and makeup artists had worked on series like Eagle Four, a police thriller modeled on 24, or the American Idol-style singing competition Afghan Star — all shows that received backing from the U.S. embassy and development agency USAID. “We had men and women working side-by-side together as equals. That was something new for the country,” says Muffy Potter, a…
ATV viewer in the early 1990s looking for the latest news would likely turn on CNN, where Wolf Blitzer delivered up-to-the-minute reporting from the Middle East and Washington, D.C. If it was Sunday, perhaps they would turn the dial to NBC and watch Meet the Press. Or maybe they would turn on ABC’s Primetime Live, where Chris Wallace (a former Meet the Press moderator) would grill interview guests. As daytime turned into primetime, they might flip to Fox, where the reality TV show Cops introduced a new format to the airwaves. And anyone seeking documentary fare could find those on CBS Reports, the long-running CBS News series. Fast-forward to 2022, and TV news outlets are beginning to lean on nostalgia and familiarity with formats as they revamp and reorient their…
As moviegoing in North America and Europe is getting battered amid omicron, China’s theatrical film sector is revving up to set a slew of box office records. The country’s weeklong Chinese New Year holiday period, always a bonanza for local studios and exhibitors, kicks off Feb. 1, and analysts believe a bumper crop of high-profile potential blockbusters — eight local titles are scheduled for simultaneous release this year — could lift the market to unprecedented heights. This year’s Chinese New Year season could reach a high-water mark of $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion (RMB 8 billion to RMB 8.5 billion),” says Rance Pow, president of cinema industry consultancy Artisan Gateway. Leading the charge is The Battle at Lake Changjin 2: Water Gate Bridge, the second installment in a nationalistic war…
39 episodes 195M minutes viewed There’s an outlier among the new and recent releases that make up most of the top 10 original series on Nielsen’s streaming chart for Dec. 20-26: Daredevil, which ranked eighth for the week, debuted its final season on Netflix way back in October 2018. Its presence on the chart is due to two of its characters popping up in other parts of the Marvel universe: Daredevil’s alter ego, Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), is Peter’s (Tom Holland) lawyer in Spider-Man: No Way Home, while Wilson Fisk, aka Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio), guest stars on Hawkeye on Disney+.…
