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.
Carolyn Everson As the veteran tech executive joins the Disney board, CEO Bob Chapek signals a truce between the company and activist investor Dan Loeb, who pushed for the change. David Kosse As Netflix shakes up its Europe team to centralize its production hubs, the vp international film steps down amid an executive leadership reorganization. Parker Finn/Sosie Bacon The Smile director and star lead the Paramount Players horror film, budgeted at $17 million, to a strong $22.6 million domestic bow from 3,645 theaters. Lorne Michaels A major cast shake-up didn’t help the launch of Saturday Night Live as the exec producer saw the show’s premiere drop 19 percent year-to-year, to 4 million viewers. Showbiz Stocks $20.07 (+3.7%) PARAMOUNT GLOBAL (PARA) Despite a stark downgrade from Wells Fargo warning of linear…
Finding a new host for The Daily Show wasn’t on anyone’s to-do list at Comedy Central. Not anytime soon, anyway. That changed Sept. 29, as the face of the network’s late night franchise, Trevor Noah, revealed on air that he’d be stepping down after seven years in the role. Until then, executives including Noah’s boss, MTV Entertainment Group CEO Chris McCarthy, who’d had lunch with Noah the previous day, believed he would be staying put at least through the 2023-24 season. After all, he had re-upped his eight-figure deal for two more years at parent company Paramount Global in June. Then, in a stunning twist, Noah announced that he was done. “We were completely shocked,” says one high-ranking insider, with others there acknowledging they’d watched Noah’s signoff with mouths agape.…
The Oct. 3 announcement by Apple, the distributor of the most recent best picture Oscar winner, that it will release Antoine Fuqua’s Emancipation, a film starring Oscar’s most recent best actor, Will Smith, in 2022 rather than in 2023, sparked widespread speculation about how members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will react to the film and its central performance. Oscar voters will, of course, be evaluating it less than one year after Smith’s infamous slap of Chris Rock — en route to winning the best actor Oscar for King Richard — at the 94th Oscars, which caused the Academy considerable embarrassment and led to Smith being banned from attending the ceremony for the next decade. THR went directly to the voters to find out, surveying dozens…
There’s an adage dating back to TV advertising in the 1970s: “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” And while Netflix and Disney+’s ad tiers will not quite be free, viewers will be able to subscribe to the services at discounted price points as long as they can tolerate a few ads. The launches arrive as the digital ad industry is mid-evolution. Third-party data, the information users indirectly give to companies by granting permission to track what they’re viewing across the internet (i.e., “Do you accept these website cookies?”), has been the backbone of the online ad ecosystem since the turn of the millennium, but it’s under fire as big tech responds to regulatory scrutiny around data privacy. Amid the shifting tides, one thing has become…
The NFL’s decision to move its Thursday primetime game to streaming is looking like a sound one in the early going. Through its first three weeks, Thursday Night Football on Amazon’s Prime Video is averaging 11.93 million viewers, per Nielsen. That’s well above the same three weeks in 2021, when the NFL Network carried the games, although short of what the league draws for its Sunday games on CBS, Fox and NBC. Amazon won rights to the Thursday games as part of a massive $100 billion rights package the league negotiated with media companies in 2021. The tech giant’s Prime Video had already been streaming Thursday games as they aired on Fox and NFL Network, but the new package gave Prime Video exclusive national rights to the midweek package (games…
After a summer movie-going boom, September 2022 was a bummer as Hollywood studios ran out of all-audience event titles to release as a result of pandemic-related supply-chain issues. Revenue came in at $330 million, the worst showing in 26 years, according to Comscore. (That excludes September 2020, during the heart of the pandemic.) Though September always has been a sleepy box office month, before the COVID-19 crisis, its revenue hadn’t fallen below $500 million or so since 2005. Source: Comscore…
