The film Academy’s annual membership survey hit email in-boxes on Monday.
The film Academy’s annual membership survey hit email in-boxes on Monday.
At first, I was shocked by the news that Participant Media was dying. Such an appealing company. Smart. Mindful. Vibrant. Forward-thinking. The producer of intelligent films like Spotlight and Green Book, with a distinctly progressive message.
I’m not overly fond of politics. Given a choice, I’d rather talk food, or faraway places.
All due respect to Godzilla, but the first quarter of this year was a bust for Hollywood. There’s no getting around it. The news read like an April Fool’s joke without a punchline.
We’ve raised a cheer for the March 10 Oscar broadcast’s audience bump, up 4 percent, to 19.5 million viewers from 18.8 million a year ago. The total should stretch toward 21 million when digital viewers over seven days are finally added in. (Social media presence will also have grown.)
Truth be told, I’m not crazy about Oscar night. The shoes pinch. Security’s a bother. All the red-carpet nattering unnerves me.
I share my colleague Pete Hammond’s fascination with Cord Jefferson’s BAFTA win for his screenplay adaptation, American Fiction. It is no small thing for a self-consciously American story to win a very British award against competition as formidable as Christopher Nolan, especially for a debut film.
It’s a fact of life, people love the Oscars most when the film Academy or its members are doing something dumb. Slapping a host. Naming the wrong winner. Singing about bare breasts. That sort of thing.
I’m trying to stay optimistic. It takes some effort, as just about everyone seems to think the film business is a mess–strike-thinned schedule, cultural chaos, streaming models in flux. But, hey, the Golden Globes audience was up by half, never mind critical reaction to the show. There are still signs of life out there.
Last week, I had another very occasional lunch with a friend who was a power in indie film when that meant something. We worked through the usual stuff—aches and pains, dead colleagues, favorite restaurants closed. Then came that increasingly difficult movie question: “Seen anything you liked?”
As my colleague Anthony D’Alessandro has noted, the domestic movie box office, starved of product by overlapping strikes, will likely be trimmed by a billion dollars in 2024.
Is it too early for a New Year’s wish? Well, I’m going to make one anyway.
Here they come again, those holiday perennials. Movies, both good and bad, that year after year find their way back into theaters, onto small screens and deep into stockings that still get stuffed with digital discs.
Six months in, the strikes are over. Ten days out, the holidays begin. As for the movies—unfortunately, the most exciting part of the year is already behind us.
As actors continue to struggle in negotiations with the entertainment companies, it’s probably worth noting a point that doesn’t get advertised much.
The writers have settled. Actors and companies return to the table this week. The awards season is saved (almost, we hope).
This week, the big story is a presumed return to talks between the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and the striking Writers Guild of America. May things go well.
Everyone’s gone to the festivals. But here on the home front, one thing still leads to another.
You can usually count on bond disclosure documents–assuming good eyesight and infinite patience–for fresh tidbits about the inner workings of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the latest round is no exception.
Whoa, here it comes, just like Hurricane Hilary, an off-kilter, sidewinder of a movie awards season that’s tearing up the rule book even before it starts.
The late film executive Bingham Ray, God bless him, once (over lunch at Orso, in 2009) pointed out something so obvious I had completely missed it. The wiliest movie marketers, explained Ray, try to own a color scheme.
It was a magnificent movie weekend. Barbie, Oppenheimer, Sound of Freedom. All hits, a blow-out!
What was it W. B. Yeats wrote, that line Joan Didion lifted and twisted in her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” about West Coast chaos in 1967? Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
I have just two words for producer Lawrence Turman, who died Saturday at 96. “Thank you.”
There it was in my email, right on the dot, at 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday morning– the digital equivalent of a dreaded question that follows every industry screening. As the old joke puts it: “How did you love my movie?”
Two years ago, during the lockdown, I wrote that I had become addicted to those little bird-box libraries that make walking here something of a literary pilgrimage.
One month into the writers strike, there’s little for a bystander to add about the issues, prospects or relative staying power of the opponents. Deadline’s reporters and contributors have done an admirable job on that score.
For those who treasure a sense of place in movies, the new trailer for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, a film set for release by Paramount in October, brings a flicker of hope. (Pete Hammond’s Cannes review is here.)
Comedy is back; Super Mario Bros has proved that laughs are good for a half billion dollars.
Will there ever be a great book about the film business as it is now?
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