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Heat Index Jon Favreau The Mandalorian creator wins the Lucasfilm director bake-off for the first Star Wars movie to officially head to production since The Rise of Skywalker hit screens in 2019. Brian Robbins After his latest Mission: Impossible sequel disappoints at the box office, Tom Cruise heads to Warner Bros. to ink a film deal. Not a great look for the Paramount studio topper. Don Lemon The former CNN anchor makes his next move with Linda Yaccarino’s X team and plans an exclusive show hosted on Elon Musk’s social platform. Kevin Merida The Los Angeles Times’ top editor, who joined three years ago, reveals his exit effective Jan. 12, as speculation turns to any pivot by billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. Showbiz Stocks $185.14 (+0.5%) APPLE (AAPL) The tech giant…
Mark your calendar: On Jan. 29, Amazon will unleash what one top advertising executive calls a “tornado” that will “upend” the streaming video landscape. The company will flip a switch and turn on ads for all of its Prime Video viewers. Users will have the option to pay $3 a month to remove the ads, but as the executive quips: “Almost no one will do that, are you kidding me?” After all, people are paying Amazon for the fast shipping. Reacher and Thursday Night Football are thrown in for free. It’s a move that has marketers salivating and a few legacy media executives anxiously waiting to see what happens. The move will instantly turn Amazon into a streaming-ad juggernaut, and the largest ad-supported subscription streaming platform in the marketplace with…
Amid Amazon’s streaming ad power play, there is one big quirk: It already has an ad-supported streaming service. The Lauren Anderson-run Freevee (formerly called IMDb TV) has been programming library fare and a handful of original shows since 2019. And just in the past year it has even had some breakout hits, including Jury Duty, Primo, High School and Judy Justice. If Prime Video is adding ads, what will it mean for the company’s other ad-supported streaming service — one that, as it happens, was a focal point of its upfront presentation last May? Sources say it will be business as usual at the platform, which is free and open to non-Prime members. Some executives from Freevee’s tech side have been brought over to help with the launch of the…
Last year, Hollywood took stock of the potential — and dangers — of generative artificial intelligence. As use of the human-mimicking chatbots evolved into a sticking point in the strikes, creators took to the courts, accusing AI firms of massscale copyright infringement after their works were allegedly used as training materials. In the backdrop of these legal volleys, a question stands out: Why haven’t any major studios sued to protect their intellectual property like other rights holders? Studios could now have some of the proof they need to get off the sidelines, with AI image generators increasingly returning nearly exact replicas of frames from films. When prompted with “Thanos Infinity War,” Midjourney — an AI program that translates text into hyper-realistic graphics — returns an image of the purple-skinned villain…
In early January, comedian Katt Williams went on Shannon Sharpe’s Club Shay Shay podcast and took aim at Cedric the Entertainer for stealing “my very best joke.” The bit in question — which involved a pantomime of driving with music blasting — was first performed by Katt in a 1998 appearance on ComicView, then reproduced by Cedric (according to Katt) for his set in Spike Lee’s The Original Kings of Comedy. Cedric called the accusations “revisionist history” on Instagram. We’ve been down this road many times before. For much of the 20th century, joke stealing was an open secret. “All comedians steal from all comedians,” the legend Stan Laurel once mused. Some of the biggest names in comedy did it. Milton Berle was so blatant in his joke stealing that…
Jonathan Majors is working to save his reputation and career in giving a Jan. 8 interview declaring his innocence ahead of sentencing, in a move that experts see as risky legally and professionally. The Creed III and Marvel actor was convicted by a jury in December of reckless assault in the third degree, a misdemeanor, and harassment in the second degree, which is a violation. The charges stem from an incident inside a car on March 25 in which Majors’ ex-partner Grace Jabbari testified that she saw a text on his phone suggesting he was cheating on her and grabbed it from him. She said the actor then injured her, including prying her finger from the phone and striking her head as he tried to take the phone away from…
