Category: media

“The Fox film studio essentially died July 27 when shareholders voted to merge with Disney. As the House  of Zanuck and Murdoch faces a fraught future, The Hollywood Reporter looks back at the hits (The Sound of Music, Star Wars), the flops (Cleopatra), the stars (Marilyn Monroe) and the legacy of a Hollywood institution.”

The company announced a plan. Gone is the previously planned price hike to $15 a month from $10. Instead, the company is targeting the 15% of users a month who are “stressing the system,” in the words of chairman and CEO Ted Farnsworth. They will do so by limiting the use of the subscription service to three movies a month. The new plan will take effect August 15. Shares immediately jumped 80% on the news.

Women are still massively underrepresented in movies, and no, that hasn’t statistically changed at all, sadly.”What is harder to define, but does seem like a genuinely positive trend, is a shift in the narratives of female-led biopics, a change in the kind of stories that get told. Previously, the main criterion for biopic treatment seemed to be a set of male genitalia, and failing that, royal blood or a singing career. The Hollywood approach suggested that women’s stories were more valuable if youth and beauty were key plot points. And for some reason, doomed and tragic tended to be an easier sell to financiers than difficult and complex. Now, bad behaviour is not just permitted, it’s positively encouraged.”

Scripted series are still on the rise, up five percent over the same time period last year – and that’s because of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and other streaming services. And that trend isn’t about to stop.

James Mathis III plays T’Challa, the Black Panther, in Marvel cartoons and video games. What’s the difference between him and Black Panther (the 2017 movie) star Chadwick Boseman – and did the wild success of the movie change his ways of approaching the character? “It’s still acting, and it’s still creating character,” he says. “You are limited in voiceover though … you have to figure out how to convey emotion using just your voice.”

Stewart, who last played Captain Jean-Luc Picard in a 2002 movie, said, “During these past years, it has been humbling to hear many stories about how ‘The Next Generation’ brought people comfort, saw them through difficult periods in their lives or how the example of Jean-Luc inspired so many to follow in his footsteps, pursuing science, exploration and leadership. … I feel I’m ready to return to him for the same reason — to research and experience what comforting and reforming light he might shine on these often very dark times.”

To Netflix, of course, which made a decision after watching the data on viewers streaming old romantic comedies since studios were only producing things that would do well with 12-year-old boys (and their parents). “That business decision has led to what Netflix has deemed ‘summer of love,’ a three-month period in which the platform is releasing a slew of exactly what Witherspoon described longing for: ‘romantic movies.’ They’re not all comedies, per se, but they’re the kind of movies that give viewers the feels.”

Kevin Kwan’s satirical rom-com novel sold over a million copies in more than 20 languages, and the studios promptly came calling. First, he sold the rights for $1, in exchange for the right to keep some control over the development process and keep Hollywood from whitewashing the Asians out of it. Then Netflix offered an eight-figure package that included complete artistic control for Kwan and director Jon Chu. They turned it down in favor of Warner Bros., just for the chance to get an all-Asian cast on the big screen in a major Hollywood production.

A new study of reality television suggests that much-derided genre falls on the negative side of the scale. It finds that, to a surprising degree, it relies on the stereotypes of the aggressively angry African American.

“Speak to writers, producers, actors and executives — speak, in fact, to the whole chain of employees toiling across the film, television and music industries, as THR did — and you’ll have trouble finding people who won’t admit to heightened feelings of stress, anxiety and depression, three interlinked mental-health issues that have escalated over the past decade in the entertainment sector. … The current industry turbulence has set alarm bells ringing louder than at any time since the Great Recession.”