Innholdsfortegnelse for December 13, 2024 i The Hollywood Reporter

Almost every time Robert Zemeckis called cut on a scene in Here, Tom Hanks would run back to the playback monitors. He was looking to get a sense of how his character — whose arc is traced from high schooler to senior citizen with the help of a generative AI tool from VFX studio Metaphysic — was aging. After seeing the takes, he would adjust his physicality to walk with a bit more spring in his step or appear stiffer getting up off the couch. Just a few years ago, a movie like Here would not have been greenlit. Without advancements in aging tech made possible by AI, filmmakers would have been forced to go the route of Brad Pitt’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which likely earmarked twice…

FORMER JAMES BOND DANIEL CRAIG, The Pianist Oscar winner Adrien Brody, Euphoria Emmy winner Colman Domingo, Marvel superhero turned Emmy nominee Sebastian Stan, consummate character actor Peter Sarsgaard and Oscar-nominated heartthrob Paul Mescal range in age from 28 (Mescal) to 56 (Craig); hail from around the world (America, England, Ireland and Romania); and forged very different paths to stardom. But they all share one thing in common: Each gave a standout performance in a 2024 film — or, in Stan’s case, two — that led to them congregating in mid-November at Soho House West Hollywood for THR’s annual Actor Roundtable. Their characters are unforgettable: a Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and comes to America (Brody in The Brutalist); a gay American addict in 1950s Mexico (Craig in Queer); an incarceree…

1. All We Imagine as Light The opening moments of Payal Kapadia’s transcendent narrative debut establish Mumbai as a city of transplants before closing in on two nurses. Prabha, played by Kani Kusruti with depths you could drown in, struggles with her marriage to an absent husband. Her younger colleague and roommate, Anu (Divya Prabha), courts scandal in her semi-clandestine relationship with a Muslim. When the pair follow an older co-worker (Chhaya Kadam) to her seaside village, the change of location brings all three a transformative sense of community, captured in a closing shot that’s pure poetry. 2. Queer Luca Guadagnino’s powers as a navigator of desire and melancholy sensuality are at their peak in this adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novel, molded by writer Justin Kuritzkes into a…

1. Beyoncé, Cowboy Carter At 27 tracks, Cowboy Carter is more than an album. It’s supreme art that also serves as a history lesson. Reclaiming a genre created by Black people, Beyoncé tackles country music in her own way, with stunning results. She tag-teams with Miley Cyrus and Post Malone; she invites emerging Black artists on songs that have changed their lives; she takes classics from The Beatles and Dolly Parton and adds her own flavor while maintaining what made them great in the first place. She even gives us a whole-ass operatic moment on “Daughter.” There is nothing Queen Bey can’t do. 2. Billie Eilish, Hit Me Hard and Soft It’s phenomenal that Eilish could release a debut as amazing as When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We…

At the 2020 Grammys, Finneas won his first-ever honors — six to be exact — for his work on his baby sister Billie Eilish’s debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, making him the most awarded artist of the night. Attacca Quartet also won their first Grammy at that show, for best chamber performance on their album Orange, though the two acts didn’t know each other. Years later, they joined forces to create the music for Apple TV+’s Disclaimer, Alfonso Cuarón’s acclaimed thriller starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen and Kodi Smit-McPhee. The musicians worked so well together, they collaborated on Eilish’s latest album, Hit Me Hard and Soft. Together at the Grammy Museum — where the Los Angeles-born Finneas and Eilish attended youth…

Only a handful of lucky listeners will get to enjoy them, but 12 previously unreleased Michael Jackson tracks — including a never-before-heard rap duet with LL Cool J — have been found in an abandoned storage unit in Van Nuys. The remarkable discovery was made by a couple of Storage Wars-style treasure hunters who, in an incredible stroke of luck, ended up stumbling onto an up-for-auction stash once belonging to Bryan Loren, the songwriter behind “Do the Bartman” who briefly worked with Jackson in the late 1980s (and whose whereabouts are currently unknown). “Some of the songs [on the tapes] have been rumored to exist,” says one of the hunters, former highway patrolman Gregg Musgrove. “A couple of them have been leaked a little bit. But a couple aren’t even…

Reed Hastings thrives on reinvention. After shaking up how we consume home entertainment — turning a home DVD-by-mail service into the world’s largest streamer, valued at more than $370 billion — he’s now tinkering with the ski industry. In December, the Netflix executive chairman and avid snowboarder is debuting a hybrid public/private enterprise on Utah’s prized Powder Mountain, which has been operating as an independent ski resort since the 1970s. “We’re asking different questions here, which is leading to some really interesting answers regarding what a mountain resort can aspire to be in 2024 and beyond,” says Hastings, who acquired a majority stake in Powder Mountain last year and serves as its CEO. To date, he has invested more than $100 million in the project, according to his team. Located…

Amid the A-listers and high-powered executives who attended THR’s Women in Entertainment breakfast this year, the undisputed stars of the event were the excited group of young women gathered backstage in a room at The Beverly Hills Hotel on Dec. 4. That’s where the participants in THR’s WIE Mentorship Program were meeting up ahead of the breakfast when they got an unexpected visit from Selena Gomez, on hand to accept THR’s Equity in Entertainment Award. In her speech that day, the Emilia Pérez star would call for “moving from tokenism to true inclusion, creating spaces where women of all races, sexual orientations and abilities are [welcome].” It’s a lofty goal, and one that forms the cornerstone of the mentorship program, which was founded in 2010 with the mission of nurturing…

2017 Call Me by Your Name $43M 2019 Little Women $218M 2021 Dune: Part One $407M 2022 Bones and All $15M 2023 Wonka $635M 2024 Dune: Part Two $714M Source: Box Office Mojo, worldwide…

On Oct. 17, families at Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles received news they must have been dreading for more than a year. A ninth grader had died at home that morning. “It is important for us to share with you” that the student took his own life, the school said. The death of a 15-year-old, whom a classmate later described as someone who “defined the meaning of greatest friend,” would have been tragic at any school. But at Harvard-Westlake, popular among the Hollywood elite, it was the fourth student to die this way since March 2023. Other community members had recently ended their lives too. Young people are taking their own lives at higher rates than before, and at Harvard-Westlake, the rate appears to be even higher. Sheila Siegel, a…

1. My Brilliant Friend After planning to binge my screeners for HBO’s Elena Ferrante adaptation, I had to stop and watch it one hour a week; the final installments in the evolving friendship-rivalry-symbiosis between Lenu (Alba Rohrwacher) and Lila (Irene Maiorino) were just too intense. Although the fourth season included murders, infidelities and a missing child, the drama was only a thriller in the emotional sense. Filled with waves of joy and well-earned devastation, this astonishing culmination of 30-plus episodes of selfishness, altruism, devotion and betrayal carried a weight no other 2024 show could match. 2. Ripley In slightly aging up the protagonists of Patricia Highsmith’s oft-adapted novel, creator-director Steven Zaillian gave us a Tom Ripley more “desperate” than “talented.” Andrew Scott plays the character’s drive toward reinvention as a…

André 3000 has a request: Please stop calling his latest project a “flute album.” On New Blue Sun, the rap genius does indeed play a number of woodwind instruments, but the eight-track ambient jazz set also features bells, chimes, keyboards, cymbals, piano, drums, sintir, a gong and a wind controller. “They belittle it by calling it a flute album because there are actual flutists that have made flute albums, like Jethro Tull and Paul Horn,” 3000 tells THR. “I think it could be a turnoff to some people if they think, ‘Yo, he’s just in a room playing this flute.’ … It’s a misrepresentation of the album.” While the media may have tried to put the project in a box, the Grammys are singing its praises. New Blue Sun was…

Donald Trump might, perhaps inadvertently, shake up where Hollywood looks to shoot tentpoles and TV shows. His victory had the effect of boosting the U.S. dollar against the Canadian dollar (or loonie), ostensibly providing producers potential for savings by tapping the country’s extensive production infrastructure, especially in Toronto. Now Trump’s threat of a 25 percent tariff on Canadian and Mexican exports to the U.S. appears likely to further depress the value of the Canadian dollar, making it even cheaper for Hollywood to shoot in the country. The fluctuating foreign exchange rates “enhances the value that comes out of international co-productions,” says Noah Segal, co-president of Toronto-based Elevation Pictures. The value of the loonie had already tumbled to slightly more than 70 cents against the American greenback, a low not seen…

If you are a TV show (perhaps a 70-year-old NBC late night show), how do you maintain relevance in a world where new things are watched in short bites on iPhones? It turns out, even in a culture dominated by TikTok and Instagram, nostalgia clicks. When Lindsay Lohan appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in March, she reprised her characters Hallie and Annie from the 1998 film The Parent Trap in a sketch with Jimmy Fallon. The sketch wasn’t part of the show but instead was posted on the program’s social channels, including TikTok and Instagram. It since has been viewed 43 million times. “We’re always trying to tap into fandoms — that’s a huge part of our strategy, whether it’s Marvel, Game of Thrones, K-pop, Taylor Swift,…

On the Los Angeles Times’ culture desk back in the 2010s, reporters would have a shorthand for readers’ hypersensitivity to spoilers. “And Rosebud was a sled,” a journalist might say upon reading aloud such subscriber feedback, which might prompt another to volley back, “And Bruce Willis was dead the whole time.” Those two references, of course to the surprise endings of Citizen Kane and The Sixth Sense (sorry if that just ruined them for you), were meant as a jaded eye roll to a tiring complaint. When a movie’s ending is so well known, the feeling went, there are limits to how much a reporter needs to hold back. Asking a journalist to avoid twist endings isn’t just impinging on their story — it’s disrespectful to the work. If you…

Hot Frosty When widow Cathy magically brings a snowman to life, his innocence helps heal her heart. Yes, Virginia, there apparently is a Frosty the Snowman fetish. The Merry Gentlemen To save her parents’ small-town nightclub, a Broadway dancer stages an all-male Christmas-themed revue and meets a guy with all the right moves. Magic Mike: The Holiday Cut. Meet Me Next Christmas On a quest to meet the man of her dreams, a hopeless romantic races across NYC to find a ticket to a sold-out Pentatonix Christmas concert. It seemed normal until the pop a capella group showed up. Carry On A mysterious traveler blackmails a young TSA agent into letting a dangerous package slip through security and onto a Christmas Day flight. As if Die Hard weren’t Christmas-y enough.…

Where are Hollywood’s jet-setters and yacht-machers heading for the holidays? Concierges to the stars tell THR that trendy A-list vacay destinations are all over the map — from Antarctica, where Liev Schreiber went last year, to Benguerra Island in Mozambique — but the Caribbean is hotter than ever, trumping bucket-list travel. We can, of course, expect such St. Barts regulars as David Geffen, Barry Diller and Jeff Bezos to be back with their big boats for the party scene, but many celebrities “want something more private and insulating,’’ reports Michael Torbiak, owner of bespoke high-end concierge service M.domo Travel. They are flocking instead to more low-key islands, with Turks and Caicos proving especially popular. The hotels of choice there are Parrot Cay, Amanyara, The Shore Club and Grace Bay Resorts,…

Weddings Publicist (and former executive director of publicity at Disney Television Studios) Ryan Aguirre married Daniel Milling, director of research and marketing analytics at NBCU Television and Streaming, on Oct. 12 in Moorpark, California. Births Emmy-nominated composer and songwriter Matthew Tishler and wife Aja Levi, an interior designer, welcomed son Lake Levi Tishler on Oct. 6. Congrats Toby Byrne was promoted to president of ad sales at A+E Networks on Dec. 9. UTA partner Theresa Peters joined the Gotham Film & Media Institute’s board on Dec. 10. Chinese billionaire real estate mogul Zhang Xin invested in and joined the board at Mubi on Dec. 6. Jason Laks was appointed president of Broadway trade association The Broadway League on Dec. 2. Bill Walshe was hired as executive vp, global head of…

She was Liz Fuller, an aspiring manager who had been Miss Great Britain from 1996-97. He was Ron Meyer, at the time the executive vice chairman of NBCUniversal. The romance was brief, running hot and then quickly going very cold. According to Fuller’s vivid account in a January 2021 email obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, she met Meyer, who was single at the time, for a breakfast on April 19, 2019, at Cecconi’s in West Hollywood. They had been introduced by Meyer’s trainer, who had acting ambitions and was Fuller’s client. In her email, Fuller described what appears to have been her one night of lovemaking with Meyer as “passionate … and sexy. I was literally putty and vulnerable in his company.” Before long, however, she would be feeling “played.”…

Like most of the country, Hollywood spent much of this past year obsessing over a historic choice. A decision that divided the nation, that set family members against one another and that made us all question if we could ever again learn to get along as one people. Should The Bachelorette’s Jenn Tran choose Marcus Shoberg or should she pick Devin Strader? Of course, other stuff happened in 2024 that had nothing to do with lovesick contestants on a Hawaiian island — like, say, the election of a very different sort of game show personality to a second term as president of the United States — some of which is probably worth noting as we prepare to hurtle into 2025. For the entertainment industry, this past year was filled both…

A number of early 21st century cable stars put the latest notch on their increasingly crowded on their résumés Dec. 9 when the 2025 Golden Globe nominations were announced. Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, Miley Cyrus and Zendaya all received nods for their work on some of the year’s biggest awards contenders. It was a full-circle moment for the Disney Channel vets (Gomez and Cyrus) and Nickelodeon alum (Grande), all three of whom became pop stars after their small-screen breakouts. And while we may not always think of her this way, Zendaya (Challengers) got her screen start on Disney Channel’s Shake It Up and has written and recorded music as well. “Surreal,” said Grande, shortly after learning about the honor. The performer, who rose to fame after starring as Cat Valentine…

1. Somebody Somewhere Call it the Joel Anderson Effect if you want, but the third and final season of HBO’s slice-of-life comedy was a balm. The fierce, funny, lived-in friendship between Sam (Bridget Everett) and Joel (Jeff Hiller) stood as a testament to the ordinary yet transcendent joys of love, community and really great karaoke. 2. We Are Lady Parts The long-awaited second season of Peacock’s British Muslim punk-rock musical comedy not only recaptured the first’s quirky spirit and ear for infectious tunes (“I’ll respond to your email at a reasonable hour” is surely a chorus we can all get behind), but matured along with its characters as they found their place within a larger community. 3. Fantasmas Leave it to star-creator Julio Torres to take a search for a…