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.
Elizabeth Banks The Cocaine Bear director takes a big swing and hits as the film opens to $23 million domestically and already inspires at least one imitator (Meth Gator, anyone?). Rupert Murdoch The Fox News chief admits under oath that his hosts inflated claims of 2020 election fraud as the mogul faces a risky trial and damages that could hit $1.6 billion. Perry Sook The Nexstar CEO can shrug off The CW’s $94 million quarterly loss when the TV station giant reports political ad revenue of $266 million, up more than 1,000 percent year-to-year. Scott Adams Elon Musk jumped to his defense, but the Dilbert creator’s racist comments led the comic strip to be dropped by dozens of newspapers across the U.S. Showbiz Stocks $7.14 (+11.9%) AMC THEATRES (AMC) The…
Adecade ago, the visual effects industry hit a creative high note when Ang Lee’s adaptation of Life of Pi — highlighted by an extraordinary photoreal CG Bengal tiger — won the VFX honor at the 2013 BAFTA awards. But the celebration quickly turned to devastation when, shortly after, in Los Angeles, the film’s lead VFX company, Rhythm & Hues (R&H), began calling artists to let them go. Recalls Academy member and former employee Gene Kozicki, “It didn’t matter if you were an Academy Award-winning VFX supervisor or a production manager with 13 years’ tenure — if you weren’t working on a show right then, you were laid off.” Weeks before its work collected the VFX honor at the Oscars, the 25-year-old studio filed for bankruptcy. The shocking occurrence led to…
If the past five years were about chasing Netflix’s up-and-to-the-right trajectory for streaming subscribers, this year begins a pivot in that approach for its rivals. While adding subscribers is still important, now the likes of Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount and NBCUniversal find themselves envious of something else Netflix has in spades: streaming profits. Like Gollum and the One Ring to Rule Them All, streaming profits have become the entertainment industry’s ultimate MacGuffin, always seemingly out of reach. Netflix now finds itself atop the subscription streaming heap, ending 2022 with 231 million paid subscribers and $5.6 billion in profits. Next quarter, the company projects $1.6 billion in profits, and for 2023, it expects to have operating margins of 21 to 22 percent, up from 18 to 20 percent in 2022.…
When Amazon debuted its highly anticipated Most Expensive TV Series Ever Made — The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power — last fall, the company had to contend with a bothersome rival from Warner Bros. Discovery: the Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon. Warners picked a debut date for its prestige TV drama 12 days before Amazon’s $1 billion gamble launched, ensuring nonstop media and fandom comparisons, many of which were less than favorable to the family-friendly Rings. For Amazon, the head-to-head rivalry was all the more galling because Warners is a minority licensee stakeholder in Rings, so they’re ostensibly supposed to be on the same side. Team Rings’ public reaction to the matchup went like this: None of this matters because these shows are totally…
While Warner Bros. Discovery holds the film rights to The Lord of the Rings and Amazon holds the TV series, the two companies are not necessarily at odds over the J.R.R. Tolkien franchise when it comes to streaming. Ahead of Amazon’s LOTR series last year, the tech giant struck a deal with WBD to license the original Peter Jackson trilogy, as well as the Hobbit films, for Prime Video. But the ties between WBD and Amazon run deeper. WBD is a client of Amazon Web Services. (WBD engineers delivered a presentation called “How Warner Bros. Discovery uses Amazon Personalize to drive cross-brand marketing” at an AWS summit last year.) And WBD and Amazon cut a deal to return HBO Max to Prime Video Channels, which uses the Amazon platform to…
When top podcast executives and creators gathered at the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn for the Hot Pod Summit on Feb. 23, a question seemed to underlie each conversation: As the industry seeks an injection of new energy amid an advertising market correction and creators experiment with format (i.e. adding video), what is a podcast and how will people make money? Many podcast studios and creators are struggling to turn a profit on podcasting — even Spotify is reevaluating its spending after pouring more than $1 billion into licensing deals and acquisitions in the past few years. Finding success in another format and seeking out derivatives could be the key to actually making good money in podcasting, especially now that the megadeals of recent years are getting rarer and podcasters feel…
