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The deal that is expected to install Skydance chief David Ellison as chairman, CEO and hopefully savior of Paramount Global is a labyrinth of entities, trusts and transactions. Also potentially complicated, assuming the deal closes sometime next year, is the question of control. Skydance sources say 41-year-old David will select the board and run things entirely independent of his father, Larry Ellison, also known as the world’s fifth-richest man, worth an estimated $178 billion, per Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. But Larry, 80, will own the controlling shares. Having previously bestowed billions on David and his sister, Megan, Larry has now backed his son to the tune of $6 billion as David pursued his dream of running a legacy studio. What role, if any, Larry will play at the new Paramount is…
Neal Mohan As YouTube gains Nielsen market share in total TV viewing and pulls away from Netflix, the platform’s CEO plans a major revamp of its app to defend its lead. MrBeast The star’s upcoming Amazon reality series Beast Games is hit with a class action lawsuit from contestants who allege a “toxic work environment” on set during its Nevada shoot. Matt Walsh The Am I Racist? filmmaker rides controversy to a box office bow of $4.5 million from 1,517 locations, the top debut of 2024 for a documentary. Taika Waititi The co-creator’s reimagining of Time Bandits for Apple TV+ gets canceled after a single season that didn’t make Nielsen’s streaming chart. Showbiz Stocks $7.94 (+3.7%) LIONSGATE (LGF) The independent studio cut a deal with the AI startup Runway to…
There’s a scenario discussed in HBO’s upcoming series The Franchise — a comedy about the behind-the-scenes struggle to make a superhero movie — that sounds rather absurd: A director labored away on a fictional Marvel-like film and gradually realized the studio brass had changed their minds about the project’s creative direction and started secretly shooting the “real” movie somewhere else while he filmed scenes destined to be scrapped. Yet this has happened to at least one filmmaker working on a franchise movie that you have probably seen, according to the show’s producers. “All the research we did — and we did tons, we spoke to so many people — the actual chaos [on superhero films] was really surprising,” says The Franchise creator Jon Brown (Succession), who made the series along…
Many in the business have lamented the slow death of the pay TV bundle for years. Ever since cord-cutting really began to eat at television’s subscriber base around 2015 (Disney CEO Bob Iger seemed to call the peak during an infamous August 2015 earnings call), executives have wondered how quickly it would collapse. No one thinks pay TV will ever return to its heyday, but recent carriage deals and some intriguing streaming bets (many of which seem to involve Disney) do present some hope that maybe — just maybe — there could be a way to rebundle those offerings to slow or stem those declines … or perhaps even start building them back again. The Cablepocalypse in a Chart…
An abortion documentary backed by Hillary Clinton and Jennifer Lawrence is taking an unusual route to audiences courtesy of Bumble Inc., the Austin-based dating app. Zurawski v Texas, which screened to critical raves and sold out crowds at the Telluride Film Festival, will premiere Sept. 24 in Austin as part of a theatrical rollout financed by Bumble. The dating app, which supplied part of the movie’s budget, also will fund a series of free screenings at Alamo Drafthouse theaters nationwide on Sept. 25. The Zurawski v Texas filmmakers are still looking for a traditional distributor for their doc, one of several political nonfiction films seeking a buyer this election year, including Errol Morris’ Separated, on Donald Trump’s border policy, and Apocalypse in the Tropics, Petra Costa’s look at far-right politics…
Catalina (ONE WORLD, JULY 23) BY Karla Cornejo Villavicencio AGENCY CAA The author has been writing about undocumented Americans since the 2016 election, when she set off across the country to learn about their stories. Now, Cornejo Villavicencio has crafted a fictional story inspired by that work and her own life as a DACA recipient. The titular Catalina is a whip-smart Harvard senior who describes her life at the school and her observations of its privileged class with ruthless and hilarious honesty, while the ticking time bomb of her graduation day (and the harsh realities of entering the workforce without papers) looms over everything.…
