Endeavor Content Rebrands As Fifth Season Following $785M Majority Sale To Korea’s CJ ENM

Addie Morfoot Contributor “POV Shorts” will kick off its fifth season Nov. 7, with 11 documentaries highlighting topics including art as activism, freedom of expression, Americans with disabilities, intergenerational stories, and connectedness on the way.Packaged into six 30-minute episodes, “POV Shorts” will be available on PBS and will stream on POV.org and the PBS Video app.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief South Korean entertainment leader CJ ENM has invested in U.S.-based virtual reality concert platform AmazeVR. The move is intended to enhance the group’s presence in the metaverse and expand opportunities for K-Pop and unscripted content. AmazeVR claims to be the first and only company using its exclusive and proprietary technology, to capture hyper-real 9K+ live-action footage of artists performing. This gives fans front-row seats in 3D stage environments, making VR concerts easily scalable and faster to produce. AmazeVR has previously put on concerts with Megan Thee Stallion and worked with Korean girl group Aespa on real world and virtual concerts. It recently formalized a joint venture with Korean talent agency SM Entertainment to produce upcoming VR concerts for other K-Pop artists.

Alicia Hannah-Kim’s latest role as the first female sensei in Netflix’s may give observers the false impression that she’s an overnight success.

Selome Hailu Bruna Papandrea’s production company and Fifth Season, formerly known as Endeavor Content, have acquired the rights to “The Wakes,” Dianne Yarwood’s upcoming debut novel, Variety has learned exclusively. “The Wakes,” which will be published in 2023, is described as heartfelt, funny and uplifting story about two failing marriages, two strangers falling in love, two friends embarking on a catering business — and the funerals that connect them all. This is a book about living. After all, the thing about death is that it makes life important. Hachette will release “The Wakes” in Australia, while Orion Publishing imprint Phoenix Books will publish in the U.K. The book was acquired by Hachette Australia and Orion imprint, Phoenix, in a six-figure two-book deal. Rebecca Saunders, head of fiction at Hachette Australia, struck the deal with Catherine Drayton at InkWell Management, with U.K. and Commonwealth rights, excluding Australia, going to Francesca Main at Phoenix.

The Korea Times. “We are preparing a lot as it will be her first meeting with overseas fans.”Prior to this, Park held her first fan meeting in South Korea earlier this month.

LOONA’s Chuu will be absent from the girl group’s upcoming ‘LOONATHEWORLD’ concerts in Seoul.Concert organisers MyMusicTaste first announced the Seoul dates for the K-pop girl group’s ongoing ‘LOONATHEWORLD’ world tour on September 17. LOONA will be performing for two nights on October 15 and 16 at the SK Olympic Handball Gymnasium.MyMusicTaste later unveiled purchasing information for concert tickets and official concert merchandise yesterday (September 21), simultaneously announcing in a brief statement on Twitter that member Chuu will not be participating on both nights.Meanwhile, ticket pre-sales for LOONA fanclub members will begin on September 26 at 8pm and close at 11:59pm KST that same day.

Endeavor Content’s newly-rebranded Fifth Season has signalled major international intentions with the hire of Ben Irving, the BBC’s former Acting Drama Director whose exec producer credits include His Dark Materials, Doctor Who and Gentleman Jack.

K.J. Yossman Film and TV studio Fifth Season (previously Endeavor Content) has appointed Ben Irving to the position of creative director for U.K. television. He will join in November. His remit will be to build on Fifth Season’s reputation for distributing series such as “Killing Eve” and “The Night Manager” and producing “Severance.” Irving will lead the production and development teams in the U.K. and work on U.K.-based developments as well as working with the U.K.’s creative community on new global series. Irving joins from the BBC, where he oversaw all primetime drama as the acting director of drama. Before then he worked as BBC Drama’s head of production and a commissioning editor. Among the projects he has executive produced are “His Dark Materials,” “Doctor Who,” “Happy Valley” and “Sherwood.” Prior to joining the BBC Ben worked at Heyday Films as VP of development and production. He has also worked at Warner Bros Pictures and Qwerty Films over the course of his career.

Rebecca Souw Leonardo DiCaprio could be invited to join the cast of Netflix’s Emmy winning global smash hit “Squid Game” in a future season, series writer-director Hwang Dong-hyuk has said. At a Netflix-hosted congratulatory press conference in Seoul on Friday, when asked if any known Hollywood actor would star in “Squid Game” Season 2, Hwang said: “There will be no known Hollywood actor in Season 2. That’s not in the plan and if the stage changes, maybe in Season 3 – but for Season 2, it is still set in Korea. Leonardo DiCaprio did say he’s a big fan of ‘Squid Game,’ so maybe if time or chances allow, we can ask him to join the games.”

EXCLUSIVE: Joy Gorman Wettels is launching her own production venture and has struck a deal with Fifth Season.

Director  JD Dillard says he grew up hearing all about his own father’s  experiences as the second African American Blues Angels pilot, so naturally when Adam Makos’ book, Devotion came out he was instantly intrigued about adapting to the screen. The book tells the story of the friendship and, yes, devotion (where the title comes from in part) of two elite US Navy fighter pilots who made a big difference in one of the Korean War’s most intense battles in the early 1950’s.  But the story has great significance as it really tells the extraordinary tale of Jesse Brown who became the first Black  aviator in Navy history, and together with his unique friendship and working relationship with Tom Hudner the pair became legend as authentic Navy wingmen heroes.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Following the world premiere of “My Neighbor Adolf” on the Piazza Grande in Locarno, Beta Cinema has sold the dark comedy to Vendetta Films, which will bring the Udo Kier and David Hayman starrer to cinemas across Australia and New Zealand in the first quarter of next year.  Prior to Locarno, Beta Cinema sold the film to Hungary (Cinetel) and Switzerland (Praesens Film), while deals for North America (Cohen Media Group), U.K. and Ireland (Signature Entertainment), Italy (I Wonder), South Korea (Lumix Media) and Japan (Tohokushinsha Film) had been revealed before. The film is set in Colombia in 1960, just a few days after the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann was caught by Mossad agents in Argentina. Polsky, played by Hayman, is a lonely and grumpy old man, living in the remote Colombian countryside. He is a survivor of the Holocaust. He spends his days playing chess and tending his beloved rosebushes. One day, a mysterious old German man – played by Kier – moves in next door, and Polsky suspects that his new neighbor is… Adolf Hitler. Since nobody believes him, he embarks on a mission to uncover the evidence. In order to gather it, however, he will need to come closer to his neighbor than he would like – so close that the two could almost become friends.

Patsy Kensit is set to walk down the aisle for the fifth time after secretly getting engaged to her boyfriend, property tycoon Patric Cassidy. The former Emmerdale star, 54, met her new beau through mutual friends and following a whirlwind five-week romance, he romantically popped the question earlier this week. A friend of Patsy's told The Sun: “This has been a whirlwind romance.

Super Junior’s Siwon and actress Lee Da-hee are set to star as the leads of ENA’s upcoming romance K-drama, Icy Cold Romance (literal title).Icy Cold Romance follows two close friends who start to develop feelings for each other after an unexpected meeting on the set of a reality dating show. According to South Korean media outlet TenAsia, Siwon will be playing Park Jae-hoon, a plastic surgeon who signs up to star in the reality show Kingdom of Love as a favour to his best friend.Lee (Search: WWW), meanwhile, is set to play Goo Yeo-reum, a producing director who obsesses over Kingdom of Love after repeatedly helming programs that have been discontinued.Icy Cold Romance will be helmed by Choi Kyu-shik, best known for his work with Rude Miss Young Ae and the second and third seasons of Let’s Eat.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Make no mistake: CJ ENM is on the move. The South Korean conglomerate that has done as much as any company to build out the nation’s entertainment ecosystem is actively looking to expand its “production capability and competency.” That’s the word from Kang Ho-sung, CEO of the cluster of film, TV and music companies that now share the CJ ENM banner. Kang gave a rare, extensive interview to Variety on Aug. 21 in downtown Los Angeles on the sidelines of CJ ENM’s KCON LA pop culture convention, which brought in close to 100,000 fans from across the U.S.

Endeavor Content, the film and TV production company and distributor behind shows like “Severance” and the Sundance darling “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” is rebranding, changing its name to Fifth Season, effective Wednesday. Launched as Endeavor Content in 2017, Fifth Season earlier this year spun out from Endeavor and also finalized a transaction with Korea’s CJ ENM that valued the company at around $1 billion and gave CJ an 80% majority stake while Endeavor retained the remaining 20%.

Disney+ has announced the cast for its forthcoming K-drama Third Person Revenge (literal translation).On September 7, the streamer unveiled its full cast line-up for the upcoming original series Third Person Revenge via a statement to Daily Rian. Described as a “teen revenge thriller”, the plot unfolds when Ok Chan-mi – who is looking to uncover the truth behind the death of her twin brother – and Ji Su-heon, who begins exacting his revenge on behalf of bullying victims at school, are entangled through a shocking incident.Shin Ye-eun (Yumi’s Cells 2, Rookie Cops) will star in the new series as Chan-mi, while Park Solomon (All Of Us Are Dead) has been cast as Su-heon.

Little Women is already a big hit.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief South Korea’s leading entertainment group CJ ENM has appointed Steve W. Chung as its global chief growth officer. He will be based in Los Angeles. Previously, Chung served as chief growth officer at Fox Corporation. Prior to that Chung was the founder and CEO of Frankly, a publicly-traded media tech company based in San Francisco. He was also a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley and an executive producer in China.  Chung currently serves as a board member of the non-profit National Asia Pacific Center on Aging (NAPCA) and received his B.A from Harvard College and an M.B.A. from Stanford University.