Taiwan’s Showtime Adds Fleet of ScreenX Theaters – CinemaCon (EXCLUSIVE)

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent French sales powerhouse Charades has boarded Constance Tsang’s migrant drama “Blue Sun Palace” which is set to world premiere at Cannes’ Critics’ Week. WME Independent is representing domestic rights for the movie in North America.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Cinephil has sold Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó’s feature documentary “Agent of Happiness” to a wide range of key international territories ahead of the film’s Hot Docs debut this weekend. Deals are confirmed in the U.K.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Abramorama has acquired North American theatrical rights to Vanessa Hope‘s feature-length documentary “Invisible Nation.” The 85-minute doc investigates the election and tenure of Tsai Ing-wen, the first female president of Taiwan. The docu follows Tsai as she seeks full international recognition of Taiwan’s right to exist.

The fate of TikTok in the United States is even more uncertain as the House today voted on a package that requires that parent ByteDance divest its popular social media platform or face a ban on app stores.

Paramount+ with Showtime has released the trailer and key art for the upcoming second half of season six of The Chi, which will return May 10.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief While multiple Korean TV series have connected with global audiences, Japan’s production committees, terrestrial broadcasters and talent agencies have kept their TV industry tightly focused on a local market. Anime and variety have long remained the Japanese TV industry’s best-known exports, while the premium end of the spectrum has largely escaped Japanese producers.

India–Taiwan co-production “Demon Hunters” will be unveiled at the upcoming Cannes Film Market. The action-horror-comedy film is directed by Chen Mei-Juin (“The Gangster’s Daughter”) and produced by Light House Productions (Taiwan) and Kleos Entertainment Group (India), with the backing of the Taiwan government. The cast is headlined by India’s Arjan Bajwa (Prime Video series “Bestseller”) and Taiwan’s J.C.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor After nearly nine years, Showtime‘s streaming apps are fading to black. The Showtime standalone service will be shut down on April 30, according to notices sent to subscribers. The end of Showtime’s streaming apps comes just less than a year after parent company Paramount Global integrated Showtime’s programming into the top-tier Paramount+ plan.

Carolyn Giardina Belgian cinema tech developer Barco launched its anticipated HDR By Barco theater projector at CinemaCon in Las Vegas with specially graded trailers from movies such as Parmount’s “Top Gun: Maverick,” video testimonials from “Maverick” producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Joe Kosinski, and the launch of the projectors’ pilot program with exhibitors including AMC and Regal. Barco is set to announce on Wednesday that the new HDR laser projectors — what Barco’s Gerwin Damberg called “a premium experience that we want to bring to the mainstream” — will be installed at select AMC Theatres, B&B Theatres and Regal Cinemas in the U.S., as part of a commercial pilot program aimed at bringing its imagery to moviegoers in time for 2024 holiday season.

AMC CEO Adam Aron continued to pour cold water on any notion that his No. 1 circuit is headed for Chapter 11.

Taiwan‘s major awards body Golden Horse will have a consolidated presence at Cannes‘ Marché du Film for the first time, under the umbrella ‘Golden Horse Goes to Cannes’.

Brent Lang Executive Editor “Horizon: An American Saga,” Kevin Costner‘s wildly ambitious, sprawling, risky and quite possibly foolhardy two-part Western rode into CinemaCon on Tuesday. The films, which will premiere this summer, were partially financed by Costner, who mortgaged his ranch to help raise the money for the $100 million epic. “Hopefully the people come and they keep coming and they binge your theaters,” Costner told cinema operators at Warner Bros.

co-DC Chief Peter Safran just told Cinemacon attendees that the Warner Bros Sundance acquisition, Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is getting a September theatrical release.

EXCLUSIVE: CJ 4DPLEX and Cinépolis are expanding their partnership with the launch of four new ScreenX locations in Mexico.

Lexi Carson ‘80s nostalgia is heading back to Netflix’s theaters with Milestone Movies: The Anniversary Collection – 1984. The Milestone Movies collection will screen across three theaters: New York’s Paris Theater, The Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood and The Bay Theater in Pacific Palisades, Calif. Selected films turning 40 this year will play in Netflix’s theaters and the 1984 collection is also available to stream.

The global box office saw some encouraging rebound in 2023, and is off to a better than expected start in the first quarter of this year, but there’s been concern about a downward trend in per capita admissions, and not just because of the strikes’ disruption to the Hollywood theatrical pipeline, but audiences’ moviegoing tendencies have changed coming out of Covid. How to solve?

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Worldwide box office is headed for a marginal decline of 3% in 2024, a setback that follows three years of recovery from a pandemic era low in 2020. Gower Street Analytics, a distribution and exhibition industry consultancy, forecasts that worldwide box office this year will aggregate at $32.3 billion, down by more than $1 billion from the $33.9 billion earned in 2023. “A $32.3 billion global box office in 2024 would represent an approximate 5% decrease year-on-year (a 3% decrease at current exchange rates) from 2023. The 2024 revised estimate is 18% lower than an average of the last three pre-pandemic years (2017-2019),” Gower Street said. The forecast comes on the eve of CinemaCon, the annual National Association of Theater Owners convention, being held in Las Vegas April 8-11. While Gower Street’s forecast is for a marginal decline, it actually represents a more than $1 billion improvement on its previous $31.5 million forecast for 2024.

Annika Pham One of the Nordic region’s biggest providers of premium series, Copenhagen-based REinvent International Sales, will make a splash at this week’s Canneseries festival and MipTV market. For the second consecutive year, the sales, financing and packaging banner has two titles in competition: the Danish drama thriller “Dark Horse”, due to world premiere in the main competition, and the short form Swedish dramedy entry “Painkiller”, which initially bowed at the Göteborg Film Festival. “Last year we had the Norwegian political drama “Power Play” which won best series, and the Swedish romantic dramedy “Out of Touch” in the short form section.

An anchor for Taiwan‘s iNews was live on air relaying a message from the country’s earthquake early warning system when the actual 7.4 temblor hit yesterday.

The CEO of ABS-CBN has lifted the lid on how the media conglom’s first collaboration with former network rival GMA typifies a new era of business for the Filipino company.