Category: media

In the case of the Marvel movie that has chewed up the box office for the past few weeks, the screenwriters have their own ideas as well as keeping true to the arc of a multi-movie narrative. “The screenwriters know some fans are unhappy — Mr. McFeely said, ‘I read a tweet this morning that said, ‘Good morning to everyone, except Markus and McFeely’’ — but that’s O.K.”

The film stars a famous actor from The Walking Dead and is based on a short story by Haruki Murakami – and it got a very high rating at Cannes. But the director left the festival without an award.

Sure, Solo collected almost $84 million in the U.S., which would be big – for a film that wasn’t in the Star Wars franchise. Is it franchise fatigue, or is it the fact that at least three other big franchise movies are in theatres right now? On the other hand, for the movie business anyway, Memorial Day weekend sales are up big over last year.

In the British offices of The Guardian, “around 30,000 images arrive at the picture desk in any 24-hour period. Every one of them is viewed to see if they should make the cut for our daily edit. It can seem a daunting task.”

The three women – stars Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer, and showrunner/writer/producer Phoebe Waller-Bridge – at the center of this prestige show say it’s a matter of chemistry. “As the showrunner and stars tell it, the process of making Killing Eve also felt like a love story. First, Ms. Waller-Bridge fell for Eve and Villanelle; then, she, Ms. Oh and Ms. Comer fell for one another.”

Trailers have their own ratings and metrics now – the number downloaded in the first 24 hours after release, for one thing. “Television plots have become more interesting and complex, with story arcs playing out over seasons instead of a couple hours. To keep up, the trailer business is becoming more creative, with tightly wound teasers targeted to different global markets and attention spans. Some are as short as three seconds on mobile devices.”

This is not your child’s Elmo doll: “It is not the movie’s raunchy depiction of puppets prostituting themselves, cursing or blowing their heads off that caused Sesame Workshop, the educational nonprofit that produces Sesame Street, to file a lawsuit against the film’s creators, STX Entertainment.”

On Wednesday, Netflix’s market cap surpassed that of Comcast, the cable and media giant that’s poised to start a bidding war with Disney to acquire 21st Century Fox assets. Year to date, Netflix shares now have increased more than 80% in value.

Haifaa al-Mansour came to worldwide attention in 2012 with Wadjda, both the first-ever feature by a Saudi woman and the first shot entirely inside Saudi Arabia. Even she was surprised by the idea that her next film would be about the 19th-century English author. “But when she read the script, Ms. Mansour was amazed at the parallels between Shelley’s struggles to publish her masterpiece, Frankenstein, and make a name for herself as a writer, and her own experience as an aspiring artist in a conservative Muslim culture in which women have traditionally been denied the same rights as men.”