Salli Richardson-Whitfield Boards Brad Ingelsby’s Mark Ruffalo-Led HBO Task Force Drama Series As Director & Exec Producer

EXCLUSIVE: Streamers are slowly coming around in supplying viewing results, especially when the news is good. Apple has some good news.  

Fabien Frankel (House of the Dragon) and Alison Oliver (Saltburn) have been cast in key roles in Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby’s upcoming HBO crime drama series, starring Mark Ruffalo.

EXCLUSIVE: Raúl Castillo (Cassandro), Jamie McShane (Wednesday) and Sam Keeley (Burnt) have joined the cast of HBO‘s Mark Ruffalo-led series, the Untitled Brad Ingelsby Task Force Project (w/t), currently in pre-production. 

EXCLUSIVE: An international drama series billed as the “Brazilian Succession” is being developed, with Nothing to Lose director Alexandre Avancini attached.

Searchlight Pictures’ Poor Things had a monster of an expansion, sewing up $1.3 million at just 82 theaters for a no. 10 spot at the weekend box office. American Fiction and The Zone of Interest, from, respectively, Amazon MGM Studios and A24, opened nicely as specialty films with original stories of all kinds are seeing traction with ticket buyers.

EXCLUSIVE: BAFTA winner and Emmy nominee Kari Skogland has been set to direct live-action feature The Age of Legends, the first installment in the planned trilogy of films that will explore the origins of Robert Jordan’s bestselling book series The Wheel of Time.

It’s been said a million times already, but it remains true—some of the most interesting stories are being told on TV rather than in films. With the film industry becoming more and more reliant either on franchises and blockbusters or low-budget horror, there’s not a lot of space for the mid-budget adult drama.

BreAnna Bell Tom Pelphrey has been cast in HBO‘s untitled Task Force series from Brad Ingelsby. The drama is currently in pre-production. The “Guiding Light” alum will play Robbie, a sanitation worker and dreamer who has been knocked around by life, but has always gotten back up again.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Mark Ruffalo appeared on “Hot Ones” ahead of the release of “Poor Things” and got asked about the time he accidentally popped Channing Tatum‘s eardrum on the set of “Foxcatcher.” The 2014 sports drama, directed by Bennett Miller, starred the two actors as Olympic wrestlers Mark and David Schultz. Ruffalo played David, who was murdered in January 1996 by multimillionaire John du Pont (played by Steve Carell in the film) after John recruited the brothers to help train them. “[Channing] did ask me to slap the shit out of him, and it was easy to do because he’d beaten the shit out of me so many times,” Ruffalo wisecracked when the topic of Tatum’s popped eardrum was brought up.

EXCLUSIVE: Samantha Bee is joining director Nazrin Choudhary and producer Sara McFarlane as Executive Producer on the film campaign for the Oscar-qualifying short film Red, White and Blue.

Mark Ruffalo is sharing stories while eating some hot wings!

Masters of the Air, a new series set for Apple TV+ from executive producers Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman.The limited series comes to the streamer next year and stars Austin Butler, Callum Turner, Anthony Boyle, Nate Mann, Rafferty Law, Academy Award-nominee Barry Keoghan, Josiah Cross, Branden Cook and Ncuti Gatwa.Apple TV+ will release the first two episodes of its nine-episode season on Friday, January 26, followed by one new episode every Friday through March 15, 2024.Based on Donald L. Miller’s book of the same name, and scripted by John Orloff, “Masters of the Air” follows the men of the 100th Bomb Group (the “Bloody Hundredth”) as they conduct perilous bombing raids over Nazi Germany and grapple with the frigid conditions, lack of oxygen and sheer terror of combat conducted at 25,000 feet in the air. Portraying the psychological and emotional price paid by these young men as they helped destroy the horror of Hitler’s Third Reich, is at the heart of “Masters of the Air.” Some were shot down and captured; some were wounded or killed. And some were lucky enough to make it home. Regardless of individual fate, a toll was exacted on them all.Ranging in location from the bucolic fields and villages of southeast England, to the harsh deprivations of a German prisoner-of-war camp, and depicting a unique and crucial time in world history, Masters of the Air is said to be enormous in both scale and scope.

Emma Stone is celebrating the premiere of her new movie Poor Things in serious style.

Sanford and Son and The Jeffersons. He won five Emmys and was a member of the Television Academy Hall Of Fame.Tributes to the writer have poured in today (December 6). George Clooney said in a statement: “It’s hard to reconcile that at 101 years old, Norman Lear is gone too soon.

EXCLUSIVE: Pop icon Sia has boarded The Journey, a reality series at the junction of music, healing and make-over TV.

Variety‘s “Actors on Actors” series. In a wide-ranging conversation, the duo spoke about the movie-making measures Ruffalo took to pull off a thicker physique in his latest film, “Poor Things.”“Do you know I had an a– pad in?” Ruffalo, 56, asked Robert Downey Jr., 58, about his commitment to the role. “My legs were, like, four inches bigger,” he continued.

Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo are reflecting on their shared history!

EXCLUSIVE: XYZ Films has acquired U.S. and Australia/NZ rights to distribute the TIFF sports drama Backspot, directed by first-time feature filmmaker D.W. Waterson and starring Devery Jacobs (Reservation Dogs) and Evan Rachel Wood (Westworld). 

Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo first met 28 years ago, through their girlfriends at the time, before hunting a serial killer in David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” and well before battling Thanos in Marvel’s “Avengers” movies. The milage on their friendship shows in their shared enthusiasm for their electrifying performances this year: Downey in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” as the calculating U.S. Atomic Energy Commission official Lewis Strauss, and Ruffalo in Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Poor Things” as Duncan Wedderburn, an unscrupulous libertine. Both actors stretched far beyond their well-established movie star personas, and they were eager to ask each other about how they’d done it. Robert Downey Jr.: We really met when Fincher cast us in “Zodiac.” Mark Ruffalo: What a wild ride that was.

EXCLUSIVE: Seven Bucks Productions, the production company co-founded by Dwayne Johnson and Dany Garcia and run by Hiram Garcia, has come on board to co-produce with Nacelle the upcoming RoboForce animated series, inspired by the action figures.