Innholdsfortegnelse for May 8, 2024 i The Hollywood Reporter

Whatever fate befalls Paramount Global after the smoke clears, one of the Hollywood Trivial Pursuit questions someday will be which heavy hitters have issued statements of support for Skydance’s proposed acquisition of Paramount’s holding company, National Amusements Inc. — and which didn’t. Even as the Paramount special committee passed on the offer from David Ellison’s company May 4, sources say the Skydance-RedBird alliance has not given up. The premise, a source tells THR, is that the rival Apollo/Sony Pictures offer now up for Paramount’s consideration will fail for multiple reasons, with Skydance still waiting in the wings. So despite much Wall Street skepticism over a proposed deal that favors controlling shareholder Shari Redstone over other investors, “Skydance has been on an extremely aggressive PR campaign in the last month to…

If the 2023 upfronts were about disruption, the 2024 upfronts are about Disruption with a capital “D.” Last year’s events were quite literally disrupted, with striking WGA writers on picket lines outside the New York City venues and the annual presentations to advertisers blunted by a noted lack of star power, as actors proved unwilling to cross those picket lines. While companies like Disney and NBCUniversal tried to make up for it by leaning on their news and sports talent, it was nonetheless a muted week. This year, the disruption is more figurative, but in many ways much worse: Linear TV, the linchpin of the ad business for Hollywood, is rapidly eroding. At the same time, this is the year that the streaming behemoths have decided to go for the…

Two years ago, Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, ventured to Bentonville, Arkansas, with his management team to talk creators — and chocolate. Donaldson, a giant on YouTube (252 millionplus subscribers), was aiming to leverage his audience to build a real-world business: a candy line called Feastables. And Walmart, based in Bentonville, signed on as a launch partner. Feastables now brings in nine figures annually in revenue, Donaldson told a conference last year, making it a textbook example of how a creator can monetize fandom. “I know for a fact that Walmart and a lot of these retailers are now going, ‘OK, what Jimmy did in chocolate, what Logan [Paul] did in hydration [with energy drink Prime], are creators building in other categories? And should we be more aggressive?” says…

In 2006, UTA presciently launched a group dedicated to the field of then-emerging digital creators, at a time when other major agencies’ online efforts were primarily focused on finding supplemental opportunities for existing film and TV clients. Now, as its portfolio of creator clients has ballooned to include heavyweights like Emma Chamberlain, the D’Amelio family and Call Her Daddy’s Alex Cooper, the 33-year-old company is debuting an umbrella division that is “tailor-made for their needs and success across the creator economy,” in the words of agency CEO Jeremy Zimmer. Called UTA Creators, the just-launched division brings together four previously separate agency groups — digital talent, gaming and esports, audio, and the influencer management company DBA — under one shingle, with the goal of super-serving a pool of talent that is…

It’s a frigid Sunday afternoon in April, and Andy Cohen is perched on a park bench, ruminating about the ups and downs — but mostly the ups — of his nearly 3-decade-long career in broadcasting. Occasionally, a passerby walks past and smiles, or shyly waves hello. This, it quickly becomes apparent, is a common occurrence for Cohen, 57, who seems to be something of the unofficial mayor of this cobblestoned, townhouse-lined neighborhood in downtown Manhattan, where he — and now his two children, Benjamin, 5, and Lucy, 2 — has been living for 27 years. Everybody, it seems, loves Andy Cohen. Well, not everyone, but we’ll get to that in a moment. He started his career in New York in his early 20s, a precocious, fiercely ambitious network executive with…

Is there a harder-working actor in the movie business than Willem Dafoe? The 68-year-old, who splits his time among Los Angeles, New York and Rome, has appeared in more than 150 films, co-starring in everything from superhero features to dozens of movie-buff favorites from David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Lars von Trier, Paul Schrader, Oliver Stone, Julian Schnabel, Wes Anderson, Sean Baker, Spike Lee, Robert Eggers and so many more. Fresh from his acclaimed performance in Yorgos Lanthimos’ recent awards season favorite Poor Things, Dafoe is already returning to Cannes this month in the Greek director’s much buzzed-about follow-up, Kinds of Kindness. Described as a surrealist fable set in the present day, the new project is an anthology film told in three parts, reuniting Lanthimos with the provocative screenwriting partner of…

If you have ever yearned for a version of It’s a Wonderful Life in which “magic” is replaced by a literal black box and “joy and sadness and wonderment” are replaced by “dejection and self-seriousness and washed-out solemnity,” Apple TV+’s new series Dark Matter may be for you. Blake Crouch’s adaptation of his own novel doesn’t lack for ingenuity and, especially in the last two hours, ideas pop up that border on inspired. But ultimately, a lack of tonal variation dooms the show. Joel Edgerton plays Jason Dessen, a Chicago-area physicist living an unremarkably content life with wife Daniela (Jennifer Connelly), an art gallery something-or-other, and teenage son Charlie (Oakes Fegley). At one point, Jason had dreams of making big discoveries and winning big prizes, but in prioritizing his family,…

It takes a veritable village of vendors to make a movie theater as appealing as possible, and if ever cinemas need to sparkle — from floors to seats to bathrooms to you name it — it’s now, as the summer box office gets underway. The one-two punch of the pandemic and Hollywood’s labor wars created a perilous slowdown in content that, which means 2024 will have a very tough time matching the $9 billion grossed last year. But summer could make all the difference. Foot traffic is everything for theater owners. While their profit margin on a movie ticket will be 33 percent, that number shoots up to 56 percent on a concession, according to one industry executive with access to data. Popcorn remains king and represents 30 percent of…

Weddings Lindsay Mendez married fellow actor J. Alex Brinson at Bethesda Terrace in Central Park, followed by a private dinner at The Lambs Club, on April 22. Mendez’s Merrily We Roll Along Broadway co-stars also took part in the ceremony, with Jonathan Groff acting as officiant and Daniel Radcliffe as ring bearer. Births Candice Ashton, senior vp publicity and events for Hulu and Disney Television Studios, and Robert Valenziano, executive director of corporate real estate at Rivian, welcomed Annie Frances Valenziano on March 5. Congrats Jessica Casano-Antonellis joined the unnamed sports joint venture formed by Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery as senior vp communications May 2. Josh Austin was tapped national director for the IATSE-affiliated labor group United Scenic Artists, on May 2. Tahra Grant was promoted to chief…

The business of real estate in London is characteristically British: reserved, unostentatious, conservative. Dealmaking is opaque and listings are typically sold off-market via exclusive contracts — thwarting competition among agents and agencies. The U.K.’s estate agents queue rather than showboat. Worse still, lips stiffen on payday. In London, agents often receive just 1 to 2 percent of their sales as commission, compared to as much as 6 percent in the U.S. It couldn’t last. On May 22, Buying London bows on Netflix. The U.K.’s answer to reality spectacles like Selling Sunset and Million Dollar Listing, the series promises to take TV audiences where they’ve never been before: inside London’s most exclusive residences and the quietly cutthroat business of selling them. “Expect to see beautiful homes and people with a lot…

When it comes to being a concierge at one of the world’s great hotels, Wes Anderson and The Grand Budapest Hotel got it (mostly) right. “Of course it’s a movie, so not everything is true,” says Maxime Nerkowski, chief concierge at the Carlton Cannes, about Anderson’s 2014 Oscar winner in which Ralph Fiennes plays Monsieur Gustave H., concierge extraordinaire of a fictional Eastern European resort. “But the work, a lot of it, is like that. Doing whatever you can to fulfill your guests’ requests, however strange or unusual.” The scene from the film where Gustave calls in a favor from the “society of the crossed keys,” a secret association of the best-of-the-best concierges from around the world, has its own real-life precedent. It’s called Les Clefs d’Or (The Golden Keys),…

It was on a backstreet in Tel Aviv while filming her last film, M — which would go on to win a César Award for best documentary — that the French documentarian Yolande Zauberman found the subject for her latest, La Belle de Gaza. Zauberman was filming three young Arab trans women, one who told her filmmaking partner in Arabic that she walked from Gaza to Tel Aviv. “I thought it was such a nearly impossible path,” recalls Zauberman. “First, to be a man, becoming a woman, coming from Gaza to Tel Aviv, and being a Muslim in Tel Aviv. I really wanted to find this woman and to see how she was seeing the world.” After losing contact with the woman, Zauberman began searching for her. That journey would…

When Jason Parham’s Wired article “A People’s History of Black Twitter” was published in 2021, the social media platform appeared powerful as ever — a hub of community and influence, where users might go to chat, organize, read and report news in real time, maybe even mingle with a celebrity. Sure, it had problems. But Twitter was chugging along. A lot has changed in the three years since Elon Musk acquired the site. Onyx Collective’s Black Twitter: A People’s History expands on Parham’s article, braiding together interviews with journalists, comedians and commentators to outline the rise of a revolution. Both Parham and Black Twitter director Prentice Penny (Insecure) pin the start of Black Twitter as a phenomenon to around 2009, with Ashley Weatherspoon’s #UKnowUrBlackWhen as one of its first viral…

Peak TV may be over, but even in a time of industrywide contraction, another era is forging ahead unabated: Welcome to Peak Franchise TV. Spinoffs of successful series are almost as old as network TV itself — the first ones premiered in the late 1950s. The current state of the business, however, with its nearly boundless viewing options for both old and new programming, is uniquely set up to reward investment in building franchises. On the broadcast networks alone, the 2023-24 season will feature 21 scripted series that are part of a franchise, defined as a show that has spun off another series set in the same world or is itself a spinoff. They range from Law & Order: SVU — the longest-running primetime drama in U.S. TV history —…

Hollywood Tries (Just a Little Bit Harder) But Can’t Make a Janis Joplin Film Jim Morrison got one. Jimi Hendrix, too. And Kurt Cobain. And now, with Back to Black, Amy Winehouse is getting one as well. But there is one member of the so-called 27 Club — artists who share the same tragically young age of death — who has not yet been memorialized on the big screen. There’s never been a Janis Joplin biopic, though it’s certainly not for lack of trying. By Rambling’s count, there have been at least five attempts at bringing The Pearl, who died in 1970, back to life, most recently in 2010, when Amy Adams was attached to portray the singer in the never-shot Janis: Get It While You Can. Six years earlier,…

Emmy-winning actor Matthew Rhys — who is Welsh by birth — moved to London at 17 to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and fell in love with the local pub scene. Since then, Rhys (who’s married to Keri Russell, star of London-based Netflix series The Diplomat, and next stars in the thriller Hallow Road) has had plenty of time to consider his most cherished haunts, which he shares with THR. Milroy’s of Soho “It’s an experience — a cozy, dimly lit cocoon. On my last visit, I spent much needed time on my own savoring some sublime vintage Port Ellen, and all was right with the world.” 3 Greek St., Soho Satan’s Whiskers “Walking in, you’re hit with that cozy, intimate vibe, like your cool friend’s living room…

ANORA Sean Baker made a splash in the Directors Fortnight in 2017 with The Florida Project before graduating to the main Cannes competition four years later with Red Rocket. He’s a Palme d’Or contender again with this comedy about a young Brooklyn sex worker, played by Mikey Madison, who impulsively marries an oligarch’s son and finds her Cinderella story in trouble once the news gets back to Russia. BIRD After dipping into documentary (Cow), television (Transparent, Big Little Lies) and U.S. youth subculture (American Honey), Andrea Arnold’s new feature appears to be a return to the Brit kitchen-sink realism of her breakout works Red Road and Fish Tank. The film stars Barry Keoghan as Bug, a father raising two young sons in a squat in Northern Kent. One of the…

Despite the glass-ceiling-smashing success of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, gender parity in the global film sector remains a distant goal. Re-Framing the Picture, a recent study from an international and multidisciplinary research team looking at the German, British and Canadian film industries, projects that, at the current rate of progress, true 50-50 equality in key creative positions won’t be reached until 2041 in Germany, 2085 in the U.K., and 2215 (!) in Canada. It’s not an optimistic forecast for the producers, managers, film executives and talents picked by THR as the most influential women in international cinema, but they continue to find new models to produce, finance and distribute movies that amplify diverse voices. More than ever, it’s their efforts that are required if the promise of a more representative and…

In 1979, Bette Midler shot to movie stardom with 20th Century Fox’s The Rose. Directed by Mark Rydell, the musical drama featured Midler as Mary Rose Foster (nicknamed “The Rose”), a brassy rock diva whose talent and fame are undercut by substance abuse. Loosely modeled on the life of Janis Joplin — and setting a music biopic standard narrative with its rise-and-fall storyline, as seen in Focus Features’ Amy Winehouse film Back to Black, in theaters May 17 — The Rose is notable for its live concert performances filmed across the country. THR attended one at the then-dilapidated Wiltern theater in Los Angeles. “Midler is definitely Movies Today (from her “Hello, mother f-----’s” dialogue to the whole Bette look, audience hold and star persona) while the Wiltern house itself is…