Innholdsfortegnelse for July 27, 2022 i The Hollywood Reporter

Deal of the Week? For 40 years, Vince McMahon reigned as the boss of World Wrestling Entertainment. Then, after TheWall Street Journal reported that he had sexual relationships with female employees and gave them millions in alleged hush money payments, he abruptly retired July 22 as chairman and CEO. The company now says it will revise past financial statements to account for $14.6million in “unrecorded expenses” that have or will be made by McMahon from 2006 through 2022, with investigations also alluded to in filings. The transition is leading some financial observers to bring up a question that’s been brewing for years: Could WWE now be sold by McMahon, its controlling shareholder? Loop Capital analyst Alan Gould is among those who see an increased chance of that happening. He upgraded…

San Diego Comic-Con Vampires stalked San Diego Comic-Con as the stars of What We Do in the Shadows celebrated the show’s fourth season at a July 22 party, co-hosted by The Hollywood Reporter and FX. The event transformed Gaslamp Quarter restaurant Mezé into a vampire nightclub — with the bash coming fresh off of the comedy’s seven Emmy noms — and welcomed stars Matt Berry (3), Kristen Schaal (3), Harvey Guillén (3), Mark Proksch (3), showrunner Paul Simms (7), writer-producer Stefani Robinson (7) and director Kyle Newacheck. Guests also included Shazam! stars Zachary Levi and Jack Dylan Grazer (2), The Suicide Squad’s David Dastmalchian, Minnie Driver (5), Danny Trejo (8), The Boys’ Jack Quaid (1), Chris Parnell and Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon. “This is incredible, being at Comic-Con,”…

Federal antitrust enforcement has typically been considered through the lens of consumers. The logic goes, if a megamerger leads to lower prices and more choices, then it’s good for competition and good for the economy. Conversely, if it leads to higher prices and fewer choices, then it’s bad for competition and bad for the economy. Most deals authorized by the government have been approved under this view of antitrust law. However, that sole focus on consumer welfare is starting to change, which could be worrying news for Hollywood executives eyeing major deals. In November, the Department of Justice sued to block ViacomCBS from selling its Simon & Schuster publishing unit to Penguin Random House, with a trial scheduled to start Aug. 1. The $2.18 billion deal would combine the world’s…

This summer, Sydney Sweeney experienced her first glimpse of millennial burnout. At 24, the actress is by definition a member of Gen Z, but this feels like a technicality given the amount of life experience she has. The panic attacks began in June, fast and furious events that convinced her brain she was probably dying. “I was losing my shit,” she says. She went home to the Pacific Northwest for two weeks of family-mandated phone-free time, grounding herself in the region’s fresh air, “hiking and skiing and doing what I truly love.” The regimen worked in the immediate sense — though, she adds, “I still can’t get my mind to shut up, and I don’t sleep” — and helped her realize that her punishing schedule of back-to-back film and TV…

For anyone who’s ever seen an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Michelle Visage is a superstar. The singer, actress, producer and television personality has served as a judge on the hit drag competition series since season three, and, since coming on as a producer in season 11, she has picked up three consecutive Emmy wins for outstanding reality competition series. This year, she’s nominated in that category for the fourth time. And, for the first time, her aftershow interview series, Whatcha Packin’ With Michelle Visage, is nominated for outstanding shortform nonfiction or reality series. She heard the news while getting ready at home with her husband, and was absolutely ecstatic. “I started beeping the horn in my car in my garage. My husband was like, ‘What is wrong with you?…

Air Bud — the Disney film about a dog who could play basketball (and which starred Buddy, a golden retriever that could indeed launch the ball into the net with his nose) — first dribbled its way into our hearts 25 years ago. The idea for Air Bud had been hatched by Canadian brothers Robert and William Vince, who churned out low-budget horror films. When they caught Buddy on Late Show With David Letterman, inspiration struck for a family film. They described the idea to director Charles Martin Smith (who’d go on to direct 2011’s Dolphin Tale and 2019’s A Dog’s Way Home). “I said, ‘That just sounds horrible,’ ” Smith recalls of their pitch. “This is what I said to them: ‘If you’d let me rewrite it and make…

For the major U.S. sports leagues, changing viewer habits and lucrative TV deals are giving way to a happy dilemma: Do they forge a direct relationship with fans? Or do they lean on their media partners to help them win the streaming wars? Increasingly, the answer seems to be both. The latest effort to split the difference debuted July 25, with the Roger Goodell-run NFL launching a streaming service of its own: NFL+. The live games it included weren’t new, per se (it took some preseason games and live audio from its former NFL Game Pass product and combined them with in-market mobile rights that it had previously sold to Verizon), but it nonetheless marked a major bet on direct-to-consumer from the notably conservative league, one that just signed new…

Marvel Studios may have once again whipped the fans at Comic-Con’s Hall H into a mind-melting fervor by laying out a timeline of movies and shows until the close of 2025, but there was no time for a victory lap or even a breather. Multiverse sagas don’t build themselves, you know? The day after Comic-Con wrapped, Marvel head Kevin Feige was bound for London, where the studio is in production on season two of multi-Emmy-nominated series Loki and doing additional photography on its The Marvels movie, both set for summer 2023. The company, which is in prep to begin shooting Blade in Atlanta in October and will release Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in November, is now setting up the generals to implement the plans across its giant chessboard. Destin Daniel…

One of the most frequent jokes that isn’t really a joke is that when it comes to various Hollywood movie and TV awards, industry folks like to vote for people they’ve worked with before. Were that true, the legendarily interconnected Kevin Bacon would have all of the trophies. But among the nominations for the 74th Primetime Emmy Awards, the acting fields are dominated by deep ensemble casts and, at the same time, other big ensembles feel like the biggest victims of these category-clogging juggernauts. In our 500-plus show universe, in which six-to eight-episode limited series are in vogue and even most broadcast shows no longer produce 22 (or more) episodes per season, a star can be top-of-the-call-sheet on one project and a day player on another in the same year,…

Big Deal Warner Bros. Discovery’s efforts to create $3 billion in synergies has claimed its biggest victim to date: Samantha Bee’s Emmy-winning late night show Full Frontal. The TBS comedy’s July 25 cancellation was the latest in a string of decisions that has gutted the so-called “T-Nets,” including TNT and TruTV. The moves started in late April — shortly after Kathleen Finch was tapped to oversee all of WarnerMedia’s U.S. networks — with the decision to scrap Damon Wayans Jr.’s Kill the Orange-Faced Bear. Since then, David Zaslav’s chief lifestyle brands officer also has axed dating show The Big D and season two of Nassim Pedrad’s Chad and announced the final season of TNT’s Snowpiercer while dumping comedy Obliterated from the trio behind Cobra Kai, which went to Netflix. The…

Why Seeing Marcel the Shell Was an ‘Out-of-Body’ Experience for Star Lesley Stahl Marcel the Shell With Shoes On — the A24 feature film from Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate based on their viral hit starring an animated mollusk with one eye and a pair of kicks — is a tribute to the power of family, the comfort of grandmothers … and legendary 60 Minutes reporter Lesley Stahl. She is praised as “fearless” and “heroic” in the film, in which she plays herself in scenes depicting an interview with Marcel. But it wasn’t until she was seated in the theater for a preview showing that Stahl learned of the magnitude of the homage. “I was stunned and a little embarrassed. I blushed,” Stahl tells THR of seeing the film alongside…

I wanted to subvert the expectation of what an office space should look like,” explains Paul Lee, the CEO of production company wiip, which has produced a slew of acclaimed fare including Mare of Easttown, Dickinson and The Summer I Turned Pretty since its founding in 2018. “Plus, if I’m being honest, I’d spent far too long in the cold corridors of corporate life.” Lee, who previously helmed ABC Entertainment Group, launched wiip alongside Matteo Perale, CAA’s former head of strategy and corporate development. Backed by the agency, the boutique production company — whose name is an acronym of “word,” “idea,” “imagination” and “production” — had originally been based at CAA’s Century City offices. But Lee decided to move wiip and its 32 employees to a much different space in…

There have been few (if any) days in 2022 when a piece of devastating news — the ongoing plague, myriad mass shootings, the war abroad and the daily incursion on democracy at home, to name just a few — doesn’t elicit one very specific GIF or screen grab on social media. Doom-scroll long enough, and you’re bound to see it … a man, obscured by a grotesque human-skin suit, offering a despondent stare above his defeated quote: “I don’t even want to be around anymore.” It’s not really a cry for help, just one of the many moments from Netflix sketch comedy series I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson that’s been clipped, cropped and captioned by fans on Twitter and Instagram. Context for the image in question, featuring…

NETFLIX 30 episodes 2.45B minutes watched It took one of Netflix’s other big shows to push Stranger Things out No. 1 on Nielsen’s rankings. The Umbrella Academy’s third season premiered June 22, and for that week it racked up enough viewing time to knock Stranger Things (2.33 billion minutes) out of first place. Umbrella’s big debut is not a surprise — it had 3 billion minutes of viewing the week after its second season dropped in 2020 — but its reign may be short. The next Nielsen rankings will include the final episodes of Stranger Things’ fourth season.…

Jerald Cooper’s career began in music, managing artists like Young Guru (Jay-Z’s audio engineer) and Ama Lou, a British R&B singer-songwriter whom he eventually signed to Interscope. But after years of working in music production and creative direction for artists, Cincinnati-born Cooper was feeling burnt-out creatively, until a stroll in his native Midwest neighborhood sparked an idea. Frustrated by circular conversations about gentrification with no clear solutions offered, Cooper realized that many people in his community didn’t even know the architectural significance of the buildings around them. “You want to save the hood, but what are the basic things that you could know?” recalls the architecture aficionado of what led to him launching his Instagram account @hoodmidcenturymodern, which documents for its 63,000 followers midcentury modern architecture in Los Angeles, as…

The most haunting frame in Ron Howard’s Thirteen Lives shows a huddle of bicycles deposited along the fence leading into Tham Luang Nang Non cave in northern Thailand. They belong to 12 soccer players (between the ages of 11 and 16) and their 25-year-old coach who decided to go exploring one muggy day in June 2018. What the group thought would be a brief post-practice excursion on familiar terrain turned into an 18-day nightmare: Hours after the team entered the underground karstic cavern, it flooded. Most people know the story of the mission to rescue the team, even if they’re hazy on the details. The news galvanized the international community and drew a captivated, sympathetic audience. Thirteen Lives is not the first attempt to tell the tale: In 2019, Tom…

Midway through the first eight-episode season of Netflix’s Uncoupled, Michael (Neil Patrick Harris) explodes after a disastrous hookup. “I’m not supposed to be here!” he yells. “I’m not supposed to know about Botoxed buttholes, and PrEP, and no condoms. I am supposed to be sitting on my couch, watching TV while my boyfriend is chewing way too loud beside me. That is the world I want.” Michael’s reaction stems from heartache, having recently been dumped by Colin (Tuc Watkins), his partner of 17 years. But he’s also struggling to reenter a scene he just doesn’t get anymore — one in which even meeting guys at clubs, like he and his ex once did, involves connecting with them first on Grindr. Uncoupled, from creators Darren Star and Jeffrey Richman, is aimed…