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.
Gemma Garcia The Spanish-language media veteran is tapped to oversee NBCUniversal-owned Telemundo’s news programming, editorial units and digital news. Sean Bailey Disney’s live-action film chief exits after 15 years with a producing deal but no job publicly lined up. (Netflix is said to be still looking for its Scott Stuber successor.) Josh Griffith The Young and the Restless exec producer and head writer nabs a four-season renewal of the daytime soap that will take the show through its 55th season in 2027-28. Sara Ramírez The star’s lightning rod character Che Diaz won’t be returning as a regular to Max’s Sex and the City offshoot And Just Like That for its third season. Showbiz Stocks $2.96 (+47.3%) ALTICE (ATUS) The midsize cable company is now a reported acquisition target by Charter…
Just weeks after the company he founded entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy last May, Shane Smith jetted to the French Riviera. But this wasn’t a vacation for the 54-year-old flamboyant former Vice CEO to drown his sorrows. Smith landed in Cannes on a mission to save the media company that he had started as a scrappy punk music magazine in Montreal three decades ago from the financial scrap heap. Smith, the brash face of Vice, had been quietly operating behind the scenes since stepping aside as CEO in 2018. In his new capacity as executive chairman, he worked the phones and hustled for deals as only he knew how. Now, accompanied by his chief of staff, Alon Soran, he was at Cannes Lions, the annual advertising confab that attracts the monied…
As it preps for an IPO, the social media platform boasts 73 million daily active users and $804 million in revenue last year, but it’s still losing money — $90 million in 2023 alone. It has since taken a bullish approach to artificial intelligence, inking a $203 million deal, reportedly with Google, to help train its AI system with content drawn from users. 6.8% Ben Mahdavi The former NFL player turned venture capitalist’s Tacit Capital and Quiet Capital each own a stake in the company. 8.4% Fidelity One of the largest asset managers in the world, Fidelity led Reddit’s 2021 investment round via its Blue Chip Growth Fund. 35% Other 8.7% Sam Altman The OpenAI founder invested in Reddit when he led Y Combinator, but Reddit’s IPO filing revealed a…
When Mark Ford turned up at Wendy Williams’ apartment in the late summer of 2022, he’d planned to chronicle her comeback. Sure, she’d lost her daytime talk show of 12 years and there were well-documented health concerns, from Graves’ disease to lymphedema, but now she’d be returning to the public eye with a splashy new podcast. “But as we filmed, it became evident that this wasn’t going to be a career comeback story,” says Ford, whose two-night Lifetime documentary event, Where Is Wendy Williams?, aired Feb. 24 and 25. “This was going to be a deeper story, and there was something ultimately disturbing going on in Wendy’s life.” For the better part of the next year, Ford’s cameras kept rolling, capturing the increasingly fragile state that Williams found herself in,…
The first-ever television commercial ran July 1, 1941, during a Brooklyn Dodgers-Philadelphia Phillies baseball game airing on the local New York TV station WNBT. The 10-second spot, for Bulova Watches, featured a graphic of a Bulova watch face over a map of the United States. A voiceover declared that “America runs on Bulova time.” As it happens, many giant American companies leveraged TV’s ubiquity, reach and impact to become the behemoths they are now. That includes Walmart, which in 1980 (shortly after it began running TV ads) posted revenue of $1.2 billion (about $4.5 billion when adjusted for inflation). The company expanded dramatically, helped along by the reach provided by TV. Walmart’s revenue in 2023 was $611 billion. Times have changed, and linear TV now finds itself at a precipice.…
Berlin’s European Film Market was the first big test of the post-trike indie film market — and there were encouraging signs for its health. Executives were cautiously optimistic ahead of EFM, reporting a “flood” of big, star-stocked projects that came together just ahead of the market, including A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (Margot Robbie’s first film post Barbie), The Materialists (Celine Song’s first film post-Past Lives, which has Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal circling) and action packages featuring box office draws Will Smith, Dave Bautista, Channing Tatum and Bob Odenkirk. “It was a really productive market,” notes one U.S.-based seller. “There wasn’t that much presold in Sundance, and most of the deals there were for smaller films. In Berlin, we saw a real appetite for bigger-budgeted movies, the…
