Innholdsfortegnelse for February 7, 2024 i The Hollywood Reporter

In the last week of January, Spotify made new deals with The Joe Rogan Experience, which had been the top podcast of the year globally at the audio giant for the past four years, and with Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy, which had also been among the top-ranking titles. The Daniel Ek-led firm will retain exclusivity of the video form of Cooper’s podcast and sell ads for both, in a strategy that appears likely to keep both podcast creators and Wall Street happy. Spotify had already ended many high-profile exclusive distribution deals, including its pacts with the Obamas and Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. While all these deals, and those of Joe Rogan and Cooper, were meant to bring in big audiences and ad dollars to the platform at a…

Brittany Howard has one word to describe her feelings about 2024 so far. “Suspicious,” she says flatly as we lock eyes in agreement over Zoom. “Highly suspicious.” It’s an attitude shared by many still adjusting to life post-2020 pandemic, which is when Howard first began working on her new sophomore solo album, What Now. Despite her skepticism about the world at large, the former Alabama Shakes blues rock band frontwoman is secure in her personal ventures, which include “The Brittany Howard What Now Tour” that kicked off in Chicago on Feb. 6, just three days before her Island Records debut releases. “What Now is what the world felt like,” Howard says of the album title’s double meaning. “I remember somebody said it was like some aliens landed and people were…

Halle Berry Goes Down With The Mothership It didn’t set off nearly the online uproar as did Warner Bros.’ decision to dynamite its $70 million Coyote vs. Acme action-animation hybrid, but another high-profile movie was recently, much more quietly, dumped. Netflix has grounded The Mothership, a Halle Berry sci-fi thriller directed by Oscar-nominated Bridge of Spies co-writer Matt Charman. The $40 million project started filming during the pandemic in 2021 and ran into one snafu after another — scheduling conflicts, reshoots, strikes and, most recently, continuity issues brought on by growth spurts among some of the children in its cast. During a Jan. 31 news conference, Netflix content chief Bela Bajaria cited “lots of production issues and story issues” for shelving the movie and insisted that “everybody just felt like…

The runaway success of Suits on Netflix in 2023 gave the show the biggest year ever in the short history of streaming viewing measurement. It also headlined a banner year for “library series” (aka shows that ended their run years ago) across a number of platforms: The top 10 overall titles in Nielsen’s year-end rankings are all acquired shows, the first time that’s happened in the four years streaming rankings have been publicly available. Viewers spent a lot more time on streaming platforms last year than the year before — streaming use rose by 21 percent, according to Nielsen — and licensed shows are responsible for a lot of that increased time. The top 10 original streaming series last year combined drove 133.6 billion minutes of viewing, accounting for about…

Seconds after Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson entered the holding room where presenters and performers at Clive Davis’ annual pre-Grammy gala were to take this picture, someone became starstruck — but who that was might surprise you. “It’s Jelly Roll!” Wilson shouted excitedly as she saw the Grammy-nominated singer-rapper. But the feeling was mutual, as Jelly Roll later murmured, if only to himself, about the surrealness of the moment. He was standing in proximity to Hanks and Wilson as Dionne Warwick sat nearby and members of Green Day were hanging out while everyone waited for one of music’s greatest architects — Davis himself — to arrive. The interaction was just one of several “pinch-me” moments as the likes of The Isley Brothers, Maluma, Josh Groban, Lainey Wilson and many more…

The Berlin International Film Festival, which kicks off Feb. 15, is already preparing for protests and debate surrounding the ongoing war in the Middle East, protests of the kind that have shaken up film festivals throughout the world in the months since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and Israel’s invasion of Gaza. At Sundance in January, several hundred pro-Palestinian protesters, including actors Melissa Barrera and Indya Moore, shut down traffic on Main Street in Park City. In November, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) was caught between demonstrators on both sides of the issue, with several directors pulling their films in protest over IDFA statements in reference to the war. Berlin, the world’s largest public film festival — and by some measures the most political of the big…

Owing to series creator-star Larry David’s unique deal with HBO, Curb Your Enthusiasm never seemed like the sort of show that would formally conclude. Since Curb premiered back in 2000, the official line on future seasons was always some variation on: “Curb will be back whenever Larry has a story he wants to tell.” That sometimes meant months; more recently, it meant six years during which no enthusiasm whatsoever was curbed. When HBO announced in December that Curb’s 12th season would be its last, it felt like a violation of the show’s eternal Schrödinger’s comedy status according to which, between seasons, Curb was always somehow both alive and dead, its future hinging on Larry David eventually finding something fresh to be irritated by (a prospect as likely as Dick Wolf…

Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival Feb. 7-14 ELECTRA Bodies Bodies Bodies and Borat Subsequent Moviefilm breakout Maria Bakalova stars in the feature debut of Bahraini filmmaker Hala Matar about a journalist (played by Daryl Wein) who brings his female friend along to interview a famous musician at an extravagant Italian estate when things start to go dangerously wrong (think Saltburn meets Infinity Pool, sort of). CHOSEN FAMILY Heather Graham’s second foray into writing and directing sees her starring alongside Julia Stiles and Thomas Lennon in a feature about a yoga teacher (played by Graham) whose life — which includes a rocky dating history, a volatile family and bad boundaries — is way more chaotic than her on-mat persona conveys. It will close out the festival. BYE BYE TIBERIAS Decades before…

In the basement of a car dealership in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District last spring, The Messenger chairman and CEO Jimmy Finkelstein addressed a throng of New York’s media elite. Finkelstein was there to unveil his grand plans for a new website that he claimed would revolutionize the news, talking a big game in the process. “When I was at The Hill, we did 125 million visits a month,” he told the gathering that featured media heavyweights Barry Diller, Kara Swisher, Chris Licht and Jen Psaki. “It was the second highest political site next to CNN. That’s with 70ish journalists and maybe 90 people in editorial. Here, we are going to have hundreds of journalists. We are not just covering politics, we are covering sports, we are covering business, we are covering…

When Vince McMahon stepped into the New York Stock Exchange on Jan. 23, he was on hand to celebrate what was supposed to be a triumph for TKO Group Holdings, the company for which he was executive chairman and the owner of the WWE, the wrestling promotion that McMahon turned into a multibillion-dollar business. Earlier that morning, the WWE announced a blockbuster 10-year, $5 billion deal with Netflix to stream Raw in the U.S. and almost all of its other live programming in other markets around the world. And Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, one of the WWE’s biggest stars turned global movie star, was set to ring the opening bell, in connection with an agreement to join TKO’s board of directors. Speaking to attendees in the NYSE’s ornate sixth-floor boardroom…

In 2021, an Instagram account emerged that harnessed the frustration of crewmembers. Debuting Aug. 1 of that year, IATSE Stories (@ia_stories) shared anonymous tales of workplace conditions from self-described crewmembers in stark black-and-white. The often-shocking stories shared on the page — ranging from people nodding off at the wheel after long workdays, to one crewmember allegedly laboring for 39 days straight — touched a nerve at a time when crew union IATSE was negotiating rest periods with studios in a new labor contract. The page — which would quickly attract more than 100,000 followers — channeled a fresh brand of Hollywood labor fervor, one that would erupt that year as IATSE members authorized a strike (less than two years before the industry’s actors and writers made history with their work…

Between Valentine’s Day and the long Presidents Day weekend, February is the perfect month to scoot out to Palm Springs for some fun in the desert sun. The Modernism Week festival, which this year runs Feb. 15-25, is the centerpiece of the month’s events. Highlights of its 19th year include tours of The Shag House, which brings to life the mid-century-inspired drawings of artist Josh Agle, better known as Shag, and Wexler ’54, a post-and-beam collaboration between master architects Donald Wexler and Richard Harrison. The celebration of all things midcentury isn’t the only game in town. The February calendar also includes the Intersect Palm Springs Art and Design Fair (Feb. 8-11) and the High Desert Art Fair (Feb. 24-25), while the Palm Springs Art Museum — which is about to…

On Jan. 12, Jennifer Lawrence showed up at a private screening room in Beverly Hills for Jonathan Glazer’s searing Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest. When the movie ended, she sat on a makeshift stage and asked questions of Glazer, production designer Chris Oddy and sound designer Johnnie Burn during the post-screening Q&A. The event was officially sanctioned by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, meaning that distributor A24 could blast out the invite with the Academy’s blessing to its thousands of members. In addition to appealing to voters, her appearance sparked an outpouring of social media posts and buzzy headlines, including an item in People about her straight-leg jeans. For decades, Hollywood studios and their armies of awards consultants have been perfecting and fine-tuning the art of…

WHEN DONALD GLOVER WAS FIRST APPROACHED ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF REMAKING MR. & MRS. SMITH, HE WASN’T EXACTLY ENTHUSED. “I don’t really do remakes,” he told his buddy, an exec at New Regency, which produced the 2005 original starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as married spies. Of course, he’d never actually seen the film, just the tabloid saga surrounding its stars, who’d later marry. In fact, Glover’s still convinced that was key to its appeal. “When people are like, ‘I love this movie,’ I’m like, ‘What did you like?’ Not to say that the movie’s necessarily bad,” he says, “but I think it just had to do with the chemistry and what was happening between them.” Glover did eventually watch Mr. & Mrs. Smith. “And then I hit my brother…

From the first moments of A.V. Rockwell’s debut feature, A Thousand and One, the audience is in the company of Teyana Taylor’s vivid portrayal of Inez, a woman in 1994 Harlem. She’s just out of Rikers and on a mission to rescue her son, Terry, out of the foster care system. As Terry grows older, the viewer follows their loving, messy relationship in a changing city. After winning the 2023 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, A Thousand and One has continued to rack up accolades for Taylor and Rockwell, who now finds herself nominated for first-time feature film at the DGA Awards. She recently talked to THR about the inception of her indelible central character and her portrait of New York. What is the origin of Inez? It was really…

More than 30 years ago, Married to the Mob was a bona fide hit, well before making its mark as a TikTok trend. Jonathan Demme’s comedy stars Michelle Pfeiffer as Angela de Marco, who is fed up with her Long Island Mafia-adjacent lifestyle and eyes a new path after her husband, Frank (Alec Baldwin), is killed by his crime boss (Dean Stockwell). Edward Saxon, a producer on the film, tells THR that Demme encouraged the crew — including costume designer Colleen Atwood, who has since won four Oscars — to embrace the outlandish nature of the project. “Jonathan didn’t say to anybody, ‘Tamp it down,’” Saxon recalls. “It was, ‘Let’s have fun with this.’ And that describes the mob wife costumes.” Before its release from Orion Pictures on Aug. 19,…

TIM COOK Apple CEO + ADAM SILVER NBA commissioner On Feb. 2, Apple released its Vision Pro headset into the world (priced at $3,500). CEO Tim Cook was on hand to open the doors at Apple’s Fifth Avenue flagship to welcome customers. A few hours later, THR tagged along as Cook toured the NBA league office with commissioner Adam Silver, and spoke with both about the device’s Hollywood potential. Spatial computing seems like it opens new doors to sports and entertainment. How do you get fans invested? Tim Cook I think it’s more immersive than ever before. I think the fan wants to be a part of the game and a part of the action, and there’s nothing like being in Vision Pro and feeling like you’re on the court.…

Cinema operators might be wishing for their own atmospheric river storms right about now, at least figuratively speaking. Heading into the new year, long-range forecasts showed the box office facing a bad drought during the first two months of 2024, and they were unfortunately spot-on. The culprit? A sparse crop of new Hollywood studio titles as a result of production delays caused by last year’s strikes and a less-than-memorable class of year-end holiday holdovers to goose January’s bottom line. Domestic box office revenue year-to-date of $581.2 million is running 43 percent behind the average haul during the same time period in 2016-19, when movie ticket sales clocked in as high as $1.08 billion, according to data provided by Comscore for Jan. 1-Feb. 4. Of that, January clocked in at $513.6…

Weddings Yesenia Martinez, a CAA commercial endorsements agent, married Arash Taghavi, a cardiologist in Beverly Hills, on Oct. 28 at the Montage Los Cabos. Births Hillary Povar, chief creative officer and executive vp at Smithhouse Strategy, and husband Dirk Levinsohn welcomed Autumn Everly Levinsohn on Dec. 24 in Santa Monica. Congrats Michael Auerbach, Jeff Hynick, Kimberly Jaime, Ryan LeVine and Peter Sample were named partners of law firm Jackoway Austen on Feb. 1. Dwayne Johnson was appointed to the board of directors of TKO, the public company that owns the WWE and UFC, on Jan. 23. Emily Castel was tapped Feb. 1 as chief marketing officer of Colossal, a de-extinction company that is entering the entertainment space. Silver Tribe Media, the management and production venture founded by former CAA agent…

A joyful clip of an ecstatic Godzilla Minus One visual effects team recently went viral, featuring the moment Jan. 23 when it was announced that their film had earned a VFX Oscar nomination — something that must have seemed improbable, or impossible, when the lean 35-person team tackled the Toho Studios’ film that was made on a budget estimated to be in the $9 million to $15 million range. The announcement was made about 10:30 p.m. in Tokyo, where most of the team and reps from Toho were gathered around a TV at their VFX studio, Shirogumi. As their title was revealed, they jumped out of the seats and cheered. Streamers flew around the room. The camera capturing the moment could barely stay steady. They celebrated with sushi, beer and…

Evelyn Arceo works 40-plus hours each week at Universal Studios Hollywood. During her overnight shifts, she prepares the pinkiced Simpsons donuts found in Springfield and the apple pies served at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. The single mother, an eight-year veteran of the park, earns $19 an hour. She’s been struggling to pay rent on her one-bedroom apartment in the working-class Panorama City neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley while also juggling bills and feeding and clothing her four kids. Her car was repossessed. Her phone was disconnected. She worries about quarters for the laundromat. “It’s crazy that I can work 10 hours in a day, including overtime, and still can’t get by,” she says. Yet she knows she’s not alone. Across her workplace, making ends meet — always…

American Cinema Editors Eddie Awards (March 3) There are some longtime director-editor partnerships represented in this year’s Eddie nominees. Notably, Thelma Schoonmaker is nominated for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple TV+), the latest film in their decades-long collaboration. She edited his feature debut, 1967’s Who’s That Knocking at My Door, and has been his regular editor dating back to 1980’s Raging Bull. Kevin Tent, nominated for The Holdovers (Focus Features, pictured), has edited all of Alexander Payne’s movies, starting with 1996’s Citizen Ruth. American Society of Cinematographers Awards (March 3) The ASC-nominated cinematography in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things (Searchlight) took inspiration from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Saying that Poor Things is “very obviously artificial in many aspects,” DP Robbie Ryan explains, “[Dracula] leaned…

BAFTA Film Awards Feb. 18 London’s Southbank Centre There are some people whose work doesn’t neatly fall into traditional film awards categories. June Givanni, for example, is a film curator, writer and programmer of African and African diaspora cinema whose June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive (JGPACA) in London features more than 10,000 artifacts, amassed over 40 years, that document the development of African filmmaking, including in Britain. BAFTA will put her in the spotlight with a special award, the British Academy’s Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema honor, which she will receive Feb. 18 at the 77th BAFTA Film Awards in London, hosted by David Tennant. “June has been a pioneering force in the preservation, study and celebration of African and African diaspora cinema and Black British cultural heritage,” says…

SCAD TV Festival Feb. 7-10 Atlanta When Joel Kim Booster receives the coveted Rising Star Award at this year’s SCAD TV Festival on Feb. 7, the honor will be a capstone to a remarkable few years, including two recent Emmy nominations for Fire Island, a 2022 Netflix comedy special and a new Hulu series in which he co-stars alongside Chrissy Teigen and David Chang. The award will also celebrate, specifically, his work on Loot, the ensemble comedy about a billionaire divorcée (Maya Rudolph) who starts to give away the bulk of her fortune. The show’s second season’s release was delayed by a WGA strike-related production shutdown, which means that despite the timing of the Atlanta-based soiree, almost nothing is known about the upcoming episodes. “One thing I am allowed to…