Innholdsfortegnelse for November 9, 2022 i The Hollywood Reporter

BEST PICTURE The Fabelmans Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical film emerged from self-imposed hibernation (it went away after premiering to raves at Toronto in September) with a Nov. 6 AFI premiere, Spielberg-involved screenings and Q&As for the DGA, SAG and WGA. Top Gun: Maverick The Tom Cruise vehicle, a sequel to a 36-year-old film, grossed nearly $1.5 billion worldwide since May. It was released Nov. 1 on DVD and Blu-ray, with Miles Teller and Jerry Bruckheimer stepping in to do promotion for campaign-averse Cruise. Tár After it scored the year’s second best per-theater average, propelled by great reviews for Cate Blanchett, Todd Field’s film has expanded to 1,000-plus screens but has barely cracked $3 million in grosses. Its nearly three-hour run time and bleak story can’t be helping. BEST ACTOR Austin Butler…

Disney+ 1.47B minutes viewed through episode five The slow burn of Disney+’s latest Star Wars series was apparently a bit too slow for some. Despite solid reviews, viewing time for Andor fell off by more than 20 percent in each of the two weeks after its three-episode premiere on Sept. 21, per Nielsen. That runs counter to Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Book of Boba Fett, which never had more than a single decline that large. Both those shows built on lows midway through their runs, and with a 12-episode first season, Andor has time to follow a similar trajectory.…

Only six visitors per day, per the artist’s wishes, are permitted to visit City, Michael Heizer’s monumental land sculpture in the Nevada desert, which finally opened to the public in September — after 52 years of construction. A mile and a half by a mile wide, it’s been called the largest contemporary artwork ever created. To get to City is a pilgrimage; to view it, life changing; to understand it, a form of mental sublimation, or so it has been said. Sign me up. On a chilly Thursday in October, I drive about 90 miles to the dusty cattle town of Alamo in southern Nevada, known for its proximity to the famed Area 51. There, I meet up with a handful of fellow explorers, all from the museum world in…

The stars and power players came out en masse for LACMA’s celebrated Art+Film Gala on Nov. 5 in Los Angeles. A bevy of celebrities wore Gucci on the red carpet, dressed by the longtime supporter of the evening, before heading in to a dinner honoring Decision to Leave director Park Chan-wook and artist Helen Pashgian, a pioneering member of California’s Light and Space art movement. The 11th annual benefit — chaired once again by Leonardo DiCaprio and LACMA board member Eva Chow — featured a five-song set by Elton John and raised more than $5.1 million for the museum’s overall mission and for its program that spotlights film. Among those on the starry guest list were Billie Eilish (making her carpet debut with boyfriend Jesse Rutherford), Jared Leto, Sydney Sweeney, Elliot…

PRESENTED BY OCTOBER 19 SPAGO | BEVERLY HILLS The Hollywood Reporter hosted its annual Power Business Managers breakfast presented by City National Bank. The event honored Hollywood’s top financial gurus including Business Manager Icon Award recipient Richard Feldstein with a keynote conversation with CAA’s Chief Metaverse Officer, Joanna Popper.…

This coming holiday season, many glasses raised in Hollywood may be filled with spiritless spirits. Stars are jumping into the nonalcoholic adult beverage market with their own brands; sales are up dramatically in the $395 million sector (rising 20.6 percent between August 2021 and August 2022, according to market research company NielsenIQ); and a growing list of celebs are speaking out about alcohol-free, sober and sober-curious lifestyles (Ben Affleck and wife Jennifer Lopez, Anne Hathaway, Chrissy Teigen, Drew Barrymore and Kit Harington among them). “We are at the beginning of a new era of social drinking,” trumpets Christopher Lackner, co-founder of Jeng, a maker of CBD-infused, alcohol-free canned cocktails. “Now that there are high-quality alternatives, it’s no longer difficult or awkward to be sober. In fact, it’s quite a treat.”…

In recent years, British production designer Mark Tildesley has earned credits on such films as No Time to Die, The Two Popes and Phantom Thread. This season, he created two distinct period looks for a pair of movies from Searchlight that are generating awards buzz. Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light is set largely in a vintage movie theater in a sparsely populated English seaside town during the early 1980s. Finding such a location for the period drama starring Olivia Colman and Micheal Ward proved difficult. “We scoured the whole South Coast [of England], which is where it was originally written for, and we just couldn’t find it. It’s too developed,” Tildesley remembers, adding that someone then suggested the seaside town of Margate on the North Coast of Kent. “We arrived…

Imelda Staunton, who on Nov. 9 will become the third actress to portray Queen Elizabeth II on the Netflix hit The Crown (and the first to play her since her death), came to Hollywood’s attention as the nurse to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Viola in 1998’s Shakespeare in Love. But it was her leading turn in 2004’s Vera Drake that established Staunton, then 48, as a talent to be reckoned with. The film, from British auteur Mike Leigh, tells the story of a modest woman living in London in 1950. Her day job is housekeeper; but on the side, and unbeknownst to her husband and children, she performs abortions for young women. She takes no money for the act (to her knowledge — one of Vera’s collaborators charges clients behind her back),…

Elon Musk’s journey as owner of Twitter was fraught from the beginning. But, after seven months of negotiations and a lawsuit, he’s now officially in charge of the microblogging platform and is facing a new wave of headaches. There are legal threats over mass layoffs, advertisers fleeing the platform and widespread backlash after his proclamation that blue checks would cost $20 per month — which Musk lowered to $8 after a public exchange with author Stephen King whose response was, “Fuck that, they should pay me.” Then, of course, there’s his $44 billion investment. Musk — who brought on outside backers including Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, VC fund Sequoia Capital and cryptocurrency exchange Binance; convinced current equity holders Jack Dorsey and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal to retain their stakes in the…

As Hollywood executives ponder the next phase of streaming strategy, the major services will see just how loyal their customers are as subscription prices creep up during an economic downturn. Such services as Disney+, Netflix, Apple TV+ and Amazon’s Prime Video have all brought up their monthly prices by $2 to $3, signaling the end of a honeymoon period when entertainment companies, fully aware of the competitive streaming landscape in front of them, were willing to price their streamers low to attract subscribers. HBO Max, now run by David Zaslav’s Warner Bros. Discovery, will also see a price hike of some kind in 2023 as the company prepares to merge the prestige streamer with Discovery+. Raising prices when consumers may be more conscious of their spending may seem counterintuitive, especially…

Since the beginning of her career, showrunner Liz Feldman has been laser-focused on making people laugh. A teenage stand-up, she joined The Groundlings after college and worked for mentor Ellen DeGeneres before writing on a string of traditional broadcast sitcoms. But with Dead to Me, her Netflix comedy-mystery with a high character mortality rate, Feldman’s aware that the third and final season might make some viewers cry when it drops Nov. 17. “I want people to feel things,” Feldman says of her homage to grief, starring Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini. (Both actresses have received Emmy noms for their roles.) “If anything, the pandemic only made me want to tell this story more. What we all went through was not just grief, it was a very weird and ambiguous grief.”…

Reteaming with Baz Luhrmann to make his audacious musical biopic Elvis, cinematographer Mandy Walker began with meticulous planning and testing to bring the iconic singer’s most memorable performances to the big screen. The Warner Bros. picture is currently one of the top 10 highest grossing movies of the year, with $286 million worldwide. And more recently, Walker’s work on the movie was selected for the main competition of the Camerimage international cinematography festival — a prestigious bellwether for the cinematography Oscar race — whose 30th edition begins Nov. 12 in Torun, Poland. Luhrmann and Walker (who previously lensed the director’s 2008 epic Australia and the Chanel No. 5 campaigns that featured Nicole Kidman and Gisele Bündchen) did meticulous research and testing before production began. This involved collecting and studying historical…

You’re sitting with Sylvester Stallone, and the word that keeps coming to mind is so simple and grunty that it could be dialogue from one of his tough-guy action movies: “big.” The man is barrel-chested big. His tanned, lined face is broad with a wide nose and dramatic eyebrows. His luxuriant suede jacket flaps when he shifts, like roomy cow drapes (he just picked it up this morning from Ralph Lauren — the man, not the store, because that’s the level of famous Stallone is). His rottweiler is massive and sweet and keeps coming back for more pets. For more than an hour at his L.A. home, we discussed the Rocky and Rambo writeractor’s career, which spans back to 1976 and across more than 50 films that have collectively grossed…

As November begins, Netflix is giving Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio a highprofile debut while several more movies in this season’s crowded race have yet to be released. Netflix Animation — despite its challenging year on the business side — has a strong and varied slate of animated feature contenders, the most notable being del Toro’s moving stop-motion retelling of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, which will have a theatrical rollout starting Nov. 9 ahead of its Dec. 9 streaming debut. Netflix burst onto the animation scene in 2019, releasing its first original animated feature, the Christmas movie Klaus, directed by Sergio Pablos, as well as French film I Lost My Body, from Jérémy Clapin. Both movies earned Oscar nominations in 2020, and Netflix has had at least one category nomination each year…

ARMAGEDDON TIME In James Gray’s coming-of-age drama, set in 1980 and following young Paul (Banks Repeta), key scenes take place in various rooms of his childhood home in Queens. The exterior was a location in Flushing, while the interior was a set built in a home in New Jersey. “The bathroom in Paul’s house was one of my favorite sets in the movie,” says production designer Happy Massee. “It was important for me that the bathroom felt like a safe and comforting place for Paul to take refuge. The warm colors and tones, along with the costumes and lighting, helped us achieve that, and [it’s] possibly one of the best scenes in the movie.” DON’T WORRY DARLING In Olivia Wilde’s psychological thriller, married couple Alice (Florence Pugh) and Jack (Harry…

Faced with the challenge of following his $1.3 billion-grossing blockbuster without the charismatic lead who provided that first film’s noble heart, Ryan Coogler delivers an emotionally resonant tribute to Chadwick Boseman in the early scenes of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. The intro invites audiences to share in the grief felt by the filmmakers and cast, as well as the characters they play, planting a vein of sorrow that ripples through this sequel. That’s not to say the movie is short on excitement, action or even humor. Just thinking about Winston Duke’s Wakandan mountain warrior M’Baku chomping on a carrot while snarling “You bald-headed demon” at Danai Gurira’s Okoye, his rival general from the all-female Dora Milaje unit, makes me laugh. More than any entry in the MCU canon, Black Panther…

ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED An exploration of the life of artist Nan Goldin, as seen through the lens of her passionate activism against the Sackler family. FIRE OF LOVE A posthumous homage to married scientists Katia and Maurice Krafft, who paid the ultimate price in their pursuit of volcanic exploration. GOOD NIGHT OPPY The Angela Bassett-narrated story of two NASA rovers that spent 15 years exploring Mars’ landscape is the feel-good doc of the season. NAVALNY Russian dissident Alexei Navalny is well-known, but this in-depth look at his work — and the Kremlin’s attempt to poison him in 2020 — goes extra deep. SIDNEY From producers Derik Murray and Oprah Winfrey, this is a loving portrait of Sidney Poitier’s role in Hollywood and the civil rights movement. Critics…

THE BATMAN The Warner Bros. franchise relaunch capitalized on a spring date, and its only major rival was Sony’s Uncharted… DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS … while the Marvel Studios sequel opened in a May corridor ahead of Top Gun: Maverick’s Memorial Day weekend launch… BLACK ADAM … and the Dwayne Johnson DC Comics film, the lowest grossing of the hat trick trio so far, had three weekends mostly bereft of major releases, save for Ticket to Paradise, which served as counter programming. What About Top Gun: Maverick? While the sequel is the No. 1 film domestically with $716 million and won three weekends, they weren’t in a row: One was in May, one was in June and one in September, a feat unto itself.…

Tim Allen Shares Frosty Feelings About Santa Clause 3 Tim Allen has returned to the North Pole to reprise his role as Kris Kringle in The Santa Clauses, a miniseries debuting Nov. 16 on Disney+. But before he even got close to a beard or fake belly, he had notes. “I thought we overshot the runway on number three, and I wanted to rein it in,” the actor tells THR, referencing 2006’s The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause, which cast him opposite Martin Short’s zany Jack Frost. “We became infected with our own success. [1994’s The Santa Clause] was huge, but we had about $11 for special effects. [2002’s The Santa Clause 2] was an extension of that but now we could… put lights in the window because we…

Weddings Matt Thunell, recently appointed president of Skydance Televison, married Peter Denny, program manager, augmented reality at Google, on Sept. 17 at Alisal Ranch in Solvang, California. They wed in front of 150 guests and their dog, Roger. Births Zero Gravity manager Ryan Olson and fiancée Michelle Hoover welcomed Axel Ryver Olson on Sept. 12. Congrats Brad Schwartz was tapped president of entertainment of The CW on Nov. 2. Sue Kroll was named head of marketing for Amazon Studios on Oct. 31. Sydnee Rimes was elevated to senior vp series at ABC Signature on Nov. 3. Alyssa Sapire was upped to senior vp development, series and strategy at Disney Junior on Nov. 4. APA lit agent Adam Perry was promoted to partner on Nov. 3. Irene Tallman was upped to vp…

When James Cameron’s Titanic — the top-grossing best picture winner of all time with $2.2 billion in worldwide ticket sales, including $600.8 million domestically — won the Academy Award for best picture in 1998, more than 55.3 million viewers tuned in to the Oscar telecast. Other box office hits vying for the honor included As Good as It Gets, which earned more than $148 million domestically, and Good Will Hunting, with $138.4 million. A year later, Oscar ratings began a decades-long precipitous decline as smaller, adult-skewing fare from specialty distributors began dominating the best picture contest. In mid-2009 — the final straw was The Dark Knight being snubbed — Academy members were so concerned that then-president Sid Ganis expanded the category to as many as 10 films in hopes of…

Status watch brands are showcasing a stellar list of ambassadors in their current campaigns, including Ryan Gosling for TAG Heuer, Gisele Bündchen for IWC and Jennifer Lawrence for Longines. In October, British-based Bremont announced its newest face, Mark Strong, in conjunction with the release of the brand’s Supernova, an integrated bracelet watch. The London-born actor known for his roles in 1917 and Kingsman: The Secret Service (which featured Bremont timepieces) spoke exclusively with THR about his love of watches and his new gig. What’s your earliest memory of a watch that turned you into a fan? I’ve loved watches ever since I was a kid and got my first electronic watch [a digital Casiotron], which seems very Space Age when you consider it today. The look of a beautiful watch…

AS FAR BACK AS HE CAN REMEMBER, SYLVESTER Stallone always wanted to play a gangster. When reporters would ask the Rocky and Rambo franchise star whether he’d ever do a television show, the actor-writer-director would point to HBO’s The Sopranos and say he’d be down for something like that. The 76-year-old is acutely aware — through a long series of hits and misses across nearly six decades in cinema — of what types of roles best fit his imposing frame. A gangster, yeah, that could work. So when Stallone was offered Tulsa King, the latest Paramount+ series from Yellowstone co-creator Taylor Sheridan, the concept seemed right. The story follows a mafioso named Dwight “The General” Manfredi, who is released from prison after 25 years and gets promptly exiled by his…

It was the heart of winter when Tár writer-director Todd Field and editor Monika Willi unexpectedly took up residency at a 15th century Scottish nunnery outside Edinburgh. They had intended to meet up in London, but another COVID-19 lockdown in early January 2022 waylaid their plans. As it turned out, the nunnery and the silence were a perfect environment to foster the filmmaker’s storytelling tempo and sense of discipline. Amid long walks watching the seasons slowly change, he and Willi got to work, spending nearly four months stringing together the melody of his first film in 16 years. Tár stars Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár, a fictional world-renowned conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic who is brought down for exploiting power to pursue relationships with younger protegées, including a woman who…

As presented in Hugo Blick’s new Amazon limited series The English, the Old West was a dangerous place: a collection of breathtaking vistas connected by trauma from massacres in which disease-ridden, testicle-eating outlaws sold their services to the highest bidder, and the only currency more valuable than acreage was revenge. No place for a woman, or a man. If Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood and their imitators built a body of work tweaking the artificiality of the John Ford Western, Blick has built a series tweaking the artificiality of the revisionist Western. It’s all a construct, The English seems to be saying, and if that sounds distancing, it kind of is. The show is a beautifully shot exercise that’s always right on the border of saying something brilliant, only to frequently…

The Good Doctor has been a compelling and emotionally charged staple for ABC on Monday nights, breaking ground with its depiction of the autistic Dr. Shawn Murphy navigating a prestigious hospital as well as fraught workplace and personal drama. But the show, which marks its 100th episode Nov. 7, had a long path to air, with Daniel Dae Kim, who bought the rights to the 2013 Korean series of the same name, shopping it for several years before it finally landed with House creator David Shore and Sony Pictures Television. Now six seasons in, with Golden Globe nominee Freddie Highmore in the starring role, it has been a ratings success (per Nielsen, its season-six premiere rated tops in the 10 p.m. hour in the 18-to-49 demo) and started new conversations…