Category: media

Univision has billions in debt left from its leveraged buyout a decade ago, and is struggling with the same headwinds facing all linear operators. The company also made an aggressive play for millennials by acquiring the former Gawker Media sites, which are now known as the Gizmodo Media Group, a subsidiary of Fusion.

Once upon a time — specifically, from the dawn of the “talkie” in the 1920s until just a few years ago — Hollywood’s calculus regarding how sequels got made was simple. A movie came out, did big business, won over fans, and the captains of industry in the studio C-suite called out for another one: the same again, only different. These days, however, the forces dictating which films get sequelized and which don’t has become a much weirder science.

“It’s ironic, then, that Wayne LaPierre and the NRA’s other spokespeople blame Hollywood’s glorification of violence whenever there is a mass shooting. What they ignore is that nearly every American film involving weaponry might as well be an NRA infomercial. On the big screen, guns rarely kill innocent bystanders, they don’t go off by accident, and they aren’t used to slaughter children in classrooms. Pick any action movie at random, and I’d wager it could be advertised using LaPierre’s catchphrase: ‘The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.'”

“Thirteen black film companies were operating by the end of World War I, although most of them released only one film. … Black producers and directors founded their own film companies out of a desire to counter racist images and enable blacks to see themselves on the screen as they really were.”

Cannes earlier banned any films without theatrical distribution in France from its Palme d’Or competition. That essentially rules out Netflix movies, which are released either day-and-date — on Netflix and in some theatres — or simply go straight to Netflix. In France, it’s a law that films can’t be released on home entertainment platforms until 36 months after their theatrical release.

“The virtually nonexistent relations between the United States and Iran extend to their copyright relations. While many countries have agreed to international standards such as the Berne Convention, which affords foreign artists the same copyright protections countries offer to their own artists, Iran has not. And this is how the Iranian director Dariush Mehrjui – one of the premier auteurs of Iran’s New Wave cinema – seized the opportunity that no Western filmmaker could. In 1995, Mehrjui released his film Pari, a composite of Franny and Zooey and ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish,’ from Salinger’s Nine Stories.”

“I no longer believe that the Internet can be saved: it’s too late. The arguments that it can be saved by a bill of rights-style Magna Carta or through more specific regulation are too little too late. That is because calls to save the Internet are based on the false assumption that it is a neutral system. The Internet’s central design features – protocols, domains, networks, servers, data, codes – and its governance structures are deeply political and embedded within political and economic structures.”

Today, recommendation engines are perhaps the biggest threat to societal cohesion on the internet—and, as a result, one of the biggest threats to societal cohesion in the offline world, too. The recommendation engines we engage with are broken in ways that have grave consequences: amplified conspiracy theories, gamified news, nonsense infiltrating mainstream discourse, misinformed voters. Recommendation engines have become The Great Polarizer.

In Sign Gene, the first feature by deaf filmmaker Emilio Insolera, “the plot centers on an international band of deaf people, who, thanks to a genetic mutation, can channel superpowers through their use of sign language. The independent film is a fast-paced, genre-bending romp, shot on three continents with a cast made up entirely of deaf actors and CODAs (meaning children of deaf adults).”