Movies

EXCLUSIVE: We hear that Zola Independent Spirit Award winner Taylour Paige and Cyrano actress Haley Bennett are boarding Magazine Dreams opposite Jonathan Majors. The film follows an amateur bodybuilder (Majors) who struggles to find human connection in the exploration of celebrity and violence. The script was on the 2020 Black List, and Elijah Bynum will direct and write.

Covid Puts Paid To Shanghai Fest At Eleventh Hour At the eleventh hour, the organizers of the Shanghai Film Festival have cancelled this year’s event due to the pandemic, which continues to ravage parts of Asia. The festival — China’s most prestigious — was due to kick off later this month. Organizers said: “Given the

Chloe Okuno’s feature debut Watcher recorded the biggest opening weekend grosses ever for IFC Films and its IFC Midnight/Shudder label on 764 U.S. screens — also one of the distributor’s widest ever releases. The genre thriller that world premiered at Sundance then SXSW reported an estimated weekend gross of $815,000 and a PSA of $1,067.

No stranger to hot takes, Paul Schrader has a new target in his sight: his own movie. To be more exact, an upcoming television adaptation for his 1980 movie. Showtime released a trailer earlier this week for American Gigolo, starring Jon Bernthal, Gretchen Mol and Rosie O’Donnell. The director of the original, starring Richard Gere

Universal/Amblin Entertainment’s Jurassic World Dominion stormed into Mexico on Wednesday with $3M worth of previews. That’s the best opening preview performance in the rebooted franchise, overtaking 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom by 53% and 2015’s Jurassic World by 81%. Both of the earlier films had sneaks on a holiday. As we noted yesterday, the Colin Trevorrow-directed Dominion is putting

Paramount/Skydance’s Top Gun: Maverick has grossed $185M at the international box office through Thursday. This puts it on course to cross $200M today in offshore play. Couple that with domestic’s equally supersonic performance and Maverick will reach $400M+ global in less than two full frames of play. On Thursday, Tom Cruise’s return to the cockpit

EXCLUSIVE: Actor-filmmaker Cheryl Nichols (Doula) has signed with Stride Management. Nichols recently directed the comedy Doula, produced by Chris Pine’s company Barry Linen Motion Pictures, which Universal Pictures will release across digital and VOD platforms on June 28. Her third feature starring Troian Bellisario, Arron Shiver and Will Greenberg centers on Deb (Bellisario) and Silvio (Arron

Under current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, 13 of California’s 58 counties moved today into “high” levels of Covid and are supposed to require masks in indoor public spaces. They include some of the state’s most populous counties, like Santa Clara and Sacramento as well as some of its smallest, like Del Norte

Amazon today unveiled the first trailer for Billy Porter’s feature directorial debut, Anything’s Possible, which launches globally on Prime Video on July 22. The film written by Ximena García Lecuona is a modern Gen Z coming-of-age story that follows Kelsa (Eva Reign), a confident high school girl who is trans, as she navigates through senior year. When

EXCLUSIVE: London- and Australia-based film and technology company Fablemaze has partnered with UK science fiction film festival Sci-Fi-London to host the 2022 Short Film Program on its new video hosting and annotation platform. The program has been extended to June 4. Developed in-house at Fablemaze, the platform is designed to bridge the gap between premium

UTA has signed multi-hyphenate Dan Sickles (Dina) for representation. The agency will focus on finding new opportunities for him in documentary filmmaking, screenwriting, acting and digital content, among other spaces. Sickles teamed with Antonio Santini to direct the documentary Dina, which won Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize upon its debut at the festival in 2017. The film focused

Spanish Filmin Buys Lars Von Trier’s ‘The Kingdom’ Trilogy Spanish SVoD Filmin has acquired the entire Lars Von Trier catalogue including The Kingdom trilogy. The deal was struck with Scandi distributor TrustNordisk and includes never-before-seen restored versions of season one and two of The Kingdom, along with the soon-to-launch third. Several territories, including Germany and Austria (Koch

In their first full day of deliberations in Johnny Depp’s $50 million defamation trial against Amber Heard, jurors posted a question to the judge Tuesday about how they should weigh the headline in Heard’s Washington Post op-ed. The headline for the online version of the December, 2018 piece read, “I Spoke Up Against Sexual Violence

The 56th Karlovy Vary Film Festival has unveiled its official selection, which comprises 33 films from five continents screening across three sections. Scroll down for full list. Artistic director Karel Och’s program includes twenty-seven world premieres, three international premieres, and three European premieres, covering five continents. Among the lineup are Jake Paltrow’s drama June Zero about

Jerry Bruckheimer has plenty to celebrate over Memorial Day weekend, literally watching the long-awaited sequel to 1986’s Top Gun, Top Gun: Maverick, beat his previous domestic box office opening record for the holiday previously set by 2007’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.  The Paramount/Skydance co-production easily won the record Memorial Day opening at the B.O. with

Fremantle has appointed a Group Head of Strategy to support growth after striking a range of partnerships and buying up labels over the past year. Gabriella Carriere joins from Sky Italia, where she held the positions of Sky Wifi Marketing Senior Director, Media and Commercial Partnerships Director and Strategy Director since joining in 2016. She

Two premiere screenings of rock documentary Freakscene: The Story Of Dinosaur JR grossed over $19K this weekend with a single Saturday show at iconic music venue The Opera House in Williamsburg, Brooklyn taking in north of $17K. Independent distributor Utopia worked with Murmrr, which produces live music events, and art shingle Mondo, which created a

India’s All That Breathes followed up its victory at the Sundance Film Festival by winning top documentary honors in Cannes. The film directed by Shaunak Sen, which documents a pair of Muslim brothers in Delhi who devote countless hours to restore the health of ailing black kite birds, earned the L’Œil d’or (“Golden Eye”) award

The Cannes Film Festival has a long and distinguished track record of spotlighting landmark works in the history of cinema with its highest honor, the Palme d’or. The festival first gave out its highest honor in 1939, but the award hasn’t always been called the Palme d’or, nor has it always been given to just

After a 36 year wait, the Tom Cruise sequel Top Gun: Maverick finally took off to a massive $19.3M in previews. That’s the highest grossing preview in Paramount Pictures’ history and the highest grossing Memorial Day preview in history. Previous big preview for Paramount was 2009’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen with $16M, which were on a Tuesday