Category: media

Asura, a big-screen historical fantasy that cost $113 million, did such lousy box office that it was pulled from theaters after three days; meanwhile, Dying to Survive, a dark comedy about smuggling low-priced medicines into the country because they’re so expensive inside the People’s Republic, “is on track to become one of China’s highest-grossing productions of all time.”

Numbers are not specified in the company-wide memo, but a source close to the company tells Deadline 7% of jobs will be eliminated. Before the reductions, the company had a workforce of about 4,000 people.

Emily Nussbaum: “It’s informational, but it doesn’t mind that you don’t know everything, because it gets that nobody does. This openheartedness makes it educational television in a broader, emotional sense — it’s like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, or Schoolhouse Rock!, if those shows had more orgies and Nazis.”

“One is to come up with shows that are more expansive than her ABC fare. The other is to turn Shondaland into an enduring company that will live within Netflix in the same way that Marvel exists inside the Walt Disney Company. ‘It would be really amazing to me at some point down the line — not now — if somebody said, ‘There was a Shonda for Shondaland?” Ms. Rhimes said. ‘It needs to be bigger than me.'” (includes summaries of her first eight series for the streaming service)

TV is marginally better than movies, but both are still pretty bad. “‘There’s a huge conversation around this issue, a lot of social media, press, but the statistics haven’t really changed,’ said Kirsten Schaffer, executive director of Women in Film.”

Daniel Wu, now starring on Into the Badlands on AMC, is from the Bay Area and attended architecture school at the University of Oregon. Then he visited Hong Kong, and was spotted by a talent scout. He says, “As a kid growing up in the ’70s, ’80s, as a person of color, I didn’t see a future for that. In my field, there was a roadblock. And so, I basically had to go to Asia and get successful there in order to come back here to have success here.”

Whew, yeah, the extravaganza Asura, which cost more than $100 million to make, has tanked rather spectacularly. “It aimed to spawn a trilogy based on Tibetan mythology by following a classic Hollywood playbook: pair a time-tested story with sumptuous visual effects, big-name actors and industry veterans.” Instead, it made $7 million last weekend – and was yanked immediately.

One of the key pieces of info: “The non-primetime deal with the networks includes language limiting auditions in hotel rooms and private residences. Those limits are part of the initiative announced earlier this year by SAG-AFTRA leaders in response to the industry’s sexual harassment scandals that came to light in October with the revelations about disgraced mogul Harvey Weinstein. It’s the first time the union has included those specific provisions in a master contract.”

Filmmaker Zamo Makhwanazi: “We’re all stuck in the same writer’s rooms, where we’re worked to death. … How is it that we’re carrying the industry on our backs, we are the creators, we are the hardest-working people in the industry, but we have the least power?”