Innholdsfortegnelse for June 7, 2023 i The Hollywood Reporter

After one of the most impressive winning streaks in Hollywood history, Pixar has seen its fortunes reversed in recent years, with last year’s flop Lightyear and a pandemic-era policy of sending its features straight to streaming at Disney+. Now, Pixar faces a major test of brand strength as it prepares to unveil Elemental, its first original theatrical feature since COVID-19 hit. Directed by Peter Sohn, the film is based on an original story set in a world where fire, water, earth and air residents live together. Among early reviews, the title has an underwhelming 64 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a low number for Pixar. Additionally, the movie is tracking to soft numbers, just $37 million to $38 million over the June 16-18 opening weekend, which it shares with…

Not since 1980 — when they shut down production over residuals from now-quaint tech like videotapes and cable TV — have Hollywood’s actors gone on strike against the major film and TV studios. But with SAG-AFTRA voting to authorize a strike, another historic labor action is possible over a new generation of tech: streaming. And the work stoppage would grind to a halt the already diminished production that has been hit by Hollywood’s ongoing writers strike. “I voted yes on the strike authorization because actors have been getting the short end of the stick from streaming,” says Nadia Alexander, a member of both SAG and the WGA. “All creators are.” SAG-AFTRA will strike if they can’t reach a deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers over a…

In a TV and media landscape revolutionized by technology, network evening newscasts are somewhat defined by their lack of evolution. The dramas, comedies and variety shows of today look little like those of the 1950s and ’60s, but the nightly news programs still beam their anchors into the living rooms of America each night — providing a digest of the day that was, and perhaps a peek into the day ahead. But that doesn’t mean the format isn’t immune to adaptation. For Lester Holt, anchor of NBC Nightly News (the network is set to celebrate 75 years of an evening newscast this year), that means spending time on deeper dives into a topic (like with a recent visit to Florida, eight months after Hurricane Ian) or offering commentary after a…

With the children of famous parents increasingly in the red carpet glare — like North West, who wore Messika jewelry while escorting mom Kim Kardashian to the 2023 Met Gala — some kids have their own style pros at the ready. Stylist Alana Van Deraa (who started as an assistant to Chrissy Teigen’s stylist, Monica Rose) tends to the fashion looks of John Legend and Teigen’s kids — Luna, 7, Miles, 5, and Esti Maxine Stephens (born in January) — for public appearances, photo shoots and social media moments. “In the beginning, Chrissy was just buying all these girly, pretty dresses for Luna by Chloé and Zimmermann,” says Van Deraa, who has worked with the family for over six years. “A few years ago, we put together a lookbook of…

For decades, children’s and family programming was largely defined by three cable channels and PBS. But the rise of streaming and dualdistribution deals over the last decade led to an influx of newcomers, upending the industry. An avalanche of series orders gave way to an equally drastic wave of cancellations — driven by the pandemic and tax write-offs — affecting the robustness of new originals slates and back catalogs alike. As the dust settles, THR takes a head count of 10 platforms and their kids’ shows, including originals and acquisitions airing, already renewed or awaiting renewal as of June 2023.…

Star Wars may be a wild sci-fi fantasy galaxy of aliens, pirates and space wizards, but it actually has a lot of secret rules. For instance: Paper does not exist. There are no wheels. Doors always slide open — no hinges. And windows can be many shapes, but not square. So writer Tony Gilroy was surprised when Lucasfilm proposed that he make a radically different kind of Star Wars series where he’d enjoy plenty of creative latitude: a prequel to Rogue One, the 2016 Star Wars film Gilroy helped improve with a script rewrite and reshoots. “The original mandate was: ‘Can you open a new lane for us? Can you find us a new audience?’” recalls Gilroy (in an interview conducted before the WGA strike). “‘If we back your play…

Abbott Elementary principal Ava Coleman (Janelle James) confidently dresses for many jobs she takes seriously: running her podcast networks; shilling suspect eye masks; and live-streaming as a prolific Depop influencer from her office during school hours. Ava’s caftans, sleek dresses and faux-leather staples highlight all her endeavors — except overseeing the struggling Philadelphia public school she runs, as documented by the crew that trails the show’s characters. “Ava wears whatever she’s in the mood for that day. It has nothing to do with her [administrator] job,” says James with a laugh. But with a looming charter school takeover and burgeoning respect for her staff in the ABC sitcom’s second season, Ava seizes the leadership role. Her stylish — and oft-dress-code-flouting — wardrobe, by returning costume designer Susan Michalek, reflects her…

We’ve moved from true-crime shows to shows about true-crime shows to shows about people making shows about true crime, and I’m tired. Peacock’s comedic thriller Based on a True Story is a half-hour series that’s Only Murders in the Building meets The Patient, but less smartly silly than the former and less moodily introspective than the latter. Kaley Cuoco and Chris Messina make a likable central pair, and the West L.A. setting offers a subtle detour from standard Hollywood noir locales. But halfway through an eight-episode first season, the attempts at shocks become repetitive and the few original ideas grow stale. Nathan (Messina) and Ava (Cuoco) have a decent life. They’re expecting their first child. They own a house in Mar Vista. But they’re unfulfilled. He’s a former tennis pro…

Moguls Maddow’s Next Move The MSNBC star expands her podcast empire p. 18 Labor SAG-AFTRA’s Turn What’s at stake as the union starts studio talks p. 16 Phil Lord, Christopher Miller The Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse brain trust scored an impressive $120.5 million bow in North America, well ahead of expectations, for Sony’s animated sequel. Chuck Todd The Meet the Press moderator steps down but stays at NBC News, saying that the key to survival in media “is for leaders to not overstay their welcome.” Bridget Everett The creator’s critical favorite drama Somebody Somewhere gets a vote of confidence from HBO for a third season despite relatively modest viewership. Anders Jensen The Viaplay CEO exits after his aggressive move into original production and a streaming-first focus don’t pan out for…

NETFLIX 88.9M minutes viewed 8 episodes Arnold Schwarzenegger can still draw a crowd — now he’s doing so in his first starring role in a TV series. FUBAR, featuring the action icon as a CIA operative who finds out his daughter (Monica Barbaro) also works for the agency, opened as Netflix’s top series over Memorial Day, drawing almost 89 million hours of viewing worldwide and taking over the top spot in the streamer’s internal rankings from Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story. That translates to about 12 million complete runs of the eight-episode season.…

Balenciaga Back in Red Carpet Spotlight After Ad Scandal Less than a year after the controversy over an ad campaign involving children and BDSM themes, Balenciaga continued its comeback by dressing a slew of stars during the Cannes Film Festival, including Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh. The Everything Everywhere All at Once star wore not one but two Balenciaga Couture looks May 21, first on the Palais red carpet and later that night to accept top honors at the Women in Motion Awards, an event sponsored by the house’s parent company, Kering. Salma Hayek-Pinault (married to Kering boss François-Henri Pinault) wore Balenciaga as did model Anok Yai. The festival, which followed a March 5 runway show during Paris Fashion Week, also saw Balenciaga ensembles on Naomi Campbell, Isabelle Huppert, Alton Mason,…

THE VIDEO THAT CHANGED ALAYA HIGH’S LIFE IS, BY PRODUCTION STANDARDS, RATHER ELEMENTARY. Shot on a phone, handheld at a slightly offkilter angle, it shows the tiny 11-year-old girl as she sits in the passenger seat of her father’s car. It looks, in fact, like the sort of video every parent has taken in the spur of the moment. Footage fired off to a spouse or a grandparent, meant for a space no more public than a group chat, destined for an emoji reaction or, if the recipient is feeling generous or a little bored, a follow-up question. The content, though, is pretty extraordinary. Lay Lay, as she calls herself, is rapping with the talent and tenacity of someone twice her age. A speck of a thing, she’s checking herself…

As he prepares for the release of Pixar’s 27th film, Elemental, on June 16 — and hopes to turn the page on recent box office disappointments — chief creative officer Pete Docter looks back on his early influences and muses at the varying reactions of Pixar’s younger and older fans: “Kids and adults respond to different elements in our films.” What children’s film or TV program most inspired or influenced you when you were young? I loved Sesame Street long beyond when it was socially acceptable. I got so excited by The Muppet Show that I would dangle a tape recorder over the TV so I could listen to the show again throughout the week. (These were the days before home video recording.) You can definitely see the influence of…

Author Rick Riordan has enthralled two generations of readers with his Percy Jackson and the Olympians novels — beginning in 2005 — and other books based on Greek, Norse and Egyptian mythology. He’s also shepherding a long-awaited Percy Jackson TV series for Disney+, elevating authors and stories from historically marginalized cultures through his publishing imprint, and will release a sixth Percy book, Chalice of the Gods, in September after a 14-year hiatus. Was there a particular element from the books that you really wanted to make sure was part of the series? One thing that we all agreed on was that we should do everything we could to preserve what makes Percy Jackson, Percy Jackson. That’s a combination of modern-day setting, classical mythology, action and humor. One of the ways…

Earlier this spring, TBS announced that it had ordered a new season of The Joe Schmo Show, the format in which a single ordinary person found themselves in the middle of what they thought was an unscripted series, only to eventually discover that everybody around them was actually a comedian attempting to bamboozle that one Joe Schmo. On one hand, it was a somewhat unlikely resurrection for the quirky reality-comedy hybrid, which originally debuted on Spike TV — remember Spike TV? — back in 2003, aired a second season in 2004, went into hibernation until a third season in 2013, and then returned to sleep for another decade. On the other hand, bringing back The Joe Schmo Show became an oddly obvious choice after a year in which the lines…

In February 2013, DreamWorks Animation Television teamed with Netflix on its first-ever children’s and family series, Turbo Fast. Just four months later, the studio and streamer would unveil a multiyear content deal — 300 hours of exclusive original, first-run content. The pact was the official beginning of the television animation studio and at that time, the largest content deal in the streamer’s history. One of the most significant signs of the rise and permanence of the streaming era, the deal heralded a new age for the kids and family content industry. DreamWorks Animation TV and current DWA president Margie Cohn’s team would spend the next decade steering the studio through that and an NBC Universal acquisition, producing more than 2,100 episodes of animated programming across 43 series and partnering with…

Eliza Skinner had no idea that her Disney+ series Earth to Ned would be taken off the platform until a text on the show’s writer group chat in mid-May shared an article about Disney removing more than 70 films and series from its streaming services that month. Among the disappearing titles was the comedic talk show — which launched in 2020 with Skinner as head writer — centering on an alien welcoming celebrities to his spaceship. Due to its classification as a streaming variety series, Skinner says the writers and performers weren’t receiving residuals, although the show’s team had heard speculation about Disney’s tax bill being to blame for the cuts. While her loss isn’t a financial one, Earth to Ned can no longer be a calling card to help…

Where were you when you first heard about Scandoval? For fans of Bravo’s reality series Vanderpump Rules — in which former The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills castmember Lisa Vanderpump has been presiding over troublemaking employees at her West Hollywood restaurant, SUR, for the past decade — March 1, 2023, is a day that will live in infamy. That’s when Ariana Madix, a Vanderpump regular since its first season, discovered that her partner of nine years, Tom Sandoval, had been carrying on an affair with Vanderpump co-star Raquel Leviss. For the Vanderpump agnostic who may have only a fleeting idea of what any of this means, the question might be: So what? After all, this is a reality show full of cheaters; Sandoval and Madix themselves got together while the…

The entertainment industry’s blacklist during the early years of the Cold War — an era in Hollywood marked by the public investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), private rifts, political factions, media bias and antisemitism — gets thoughtful treatment at the Skirball Cultural Center in a new exhibit, open now through Sept. 3. Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare opens with a wall covered in copies of The Hollywood Reporter, as then-publisher William R. Wilkerson’s entertainment trade infamously not only covered the conflict at the time but also helped instigate it by publishing names of purported Communist sympathizers. “We are 75 years out from that history and it felt like a good time to share this very local story that took on national prominence, because so many of the…

Tom Holland, Amanda Seyfried, Emmy Rossum, Will Chase, Lior Raz and Thomas Sadoski attended the New York premiere of their Apple TV+ thriller series The Crowded Room on June 1. The show stars Holland as a man who is arrested after his involvement in a shooting in 1979 and is loosely based on the real-life story of Billy Milligan, the first person to be acquitted of a major crime on the basis of dissociative identity disorder. It also sees the Spider-Man star serve as executive producer, and about doing double duty, he told THR on the carpet: “To be honest, I can’t say that I balanced it. This show absolutely broke me in every way possible. I just kept my head down, I dug my heels in, and I just…

THR hosted its second annual Raising Our Voices luncheon, featuring a keynote speech by Taika Waititi and honoring 2023 Trailblazers Eva Longoria and Niecy Nash-Betts, on May 31 at Audrey Irmas Pavilion’s Wallis Annenberg GenSpace. The event, sponsored by the Golden Globes, GenSpace and East West Bank, brought together the industry’s most influential and inspiring executives, storytellers and thought leaders to focus on the state and future of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in Hollywood, and coincided with the publication of THR’s Forces for Change Power List.…

THE GEORGIAN HOTEL A yearlong restoration of this circa 1933 Santa Monica icon — once a hideout for such stars as Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Chaplin — has resulted in a vibrant new look. The art deco hotel, with 84 rooms and suites, serves coastal Italian at its in-house restaurant. 1415 Ocean Ave., rooms from $700 a night VICEROY SANTA MONICA The very first Viceroy property unveiled a $21 million renovation this spring that spotlights local art in the 169 midcentury-style rooms and suites. At Sugar Palm restaurant, chef Jason Francisco offers a robust range of plant-based options like cauliflower tikka masala. 1819 Ocean Ave., from $550 a night THE PIERSIDE HOTEL Opposite the Santa Monica Pier, this former Wyndham underwent a full makeover to become a breezy 132-room property…

1. DON’T GO AND HIRE A BUNCH OF KIDS TV WRITERS. “A lot of them are really creative people,” Brumm says, “but they’ve labored in an industry, and in a demographic, which just accepts the same homework turned in. I thought, ‘Look, that will just get you a show that I’ve already seen.’ So I just didn’t hire any other writers.” 2. MAKE SURE YOU’RE WRITING FOR PARENTS, TOO. “You want a good co-viewing show where the parents can genuinely watch it with the kids. There were shows for the older demographics where two different generations could really enjoy them, but they were fewer and further between at the preschool stage, and I thought, ‘This is where you need it the most because, as a parent, you do end up…

IN 2020, 18-YEAR-OLD BILLIE EILISH’S ALTERNATIVE POP ALBUM THAT was created in her Los Angeles bedroom helped her become the youngest act to sweep the top four categories at the Grammys. A year later, the pop-rock sound of Olivia Rodrigo made her a global superstar and the poster child for modern teen angst. That same year, fellow 17-year-old The Kid LAROI topped the charts with his Justin Bieberassisted banger “Stay.” And in 2022, Yahritza Martínez, of the trio Yahritza y Su Esencia, was 14 when she wrote “Soy el Único,” which became a No. 1 Latin hit and reached No. 20 on the pop charts. And let us not forget about the phenomenon of “Baby Shark.” Young talent has always been a good investment for the music industry. It’s an…

Bupkis (PEACOCK) Pete Davidson plays himself in this dramedy about his wild comedy career. Dave (FX/HULU) Dave Burd’s alter ego, Lil Dicky, chases after hip-hop fame and fortune. Mo (NETFLIX) Mo Amer explores dual identities as a Palestinian refugee living in Texas. Ramy (HULU) Ramy Youssef continues his spiritual journey as a millennial Muslim. Somebody Somewhere (HBO/MAX) Bridget Everett’s Sam finds a chosen family in small-town Kansas.…

The opening minutes of Apple TV+’s miniseries The Crowded Room suggest a thriller. In 1979 New York, a disturbed young man, Danny (Tom Holland), and his agitated companion, Ariana (Sasha Lane), open fire near Rockefeller Center. When only Danny is captured — Ariana having disappeared without a trace — the cop (Thomas Sadoski) in charge of the case practically salivates at the idea that they might have nailed a serial killer. But his colleague, Rya (Amanda Seyfried), isn’t so sure. Over long conversations with Danny, now in prison awaiting his trial date, she begins to weave together a picture of his life — how he got to where he is, why he did what he did. As his truth is revealed, The Crowded Room pivots from gritty crime drama to…