A24 Strikes Multi-Picture Deal With Canada’s Sphere Films (EXCLUSIVE)

When she announced that she and Kevin Clifton were having a baby, Stacey Dooley said she was “so bloody delighted”. But a source close to the star has revealed that the presenter hasn’t had the easiest time, telling us: “Stacey has suffered from morning sickness really badly during her pregnancy and has been quite ill. But she is such a determined person and wants to work right through her pregnancy, which we saw when she took part in The Masked Dancer despite being ill.” Stacey, who met Kevin, 39, when they were partners on Strictly Come Dancing back in 2018, has opened up about her sickness and pregnancy cravings on Instagram and referred to herself as a “dancing, preggo prawn” when she posted a picture of herself eating a packet of prawn cocktail crisps backstage at The Masked Dancer.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Singapore-based production group Beach House Pictures has teamed up with executive Raghav Khanna to launch new unit Riverland Entertainment in Mumbai, India. The newly-formed production company will develop a slate of unscripted series and documentaries from India. It will do so by partnering with local Indian talent to create content intended for global and Indian audiences, while also leveraging Beach House Pictures’ international expertise and reach, and with access to Beach House’s post-production facility, Space Lion Studios. Khanna, who is a former head of Netflix’s documentary production in Asia-Pacific, is set as MD of the new operation. He will work closely with Beach House Pictures founders Donovan Chan and Jocelyn Little. 

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent David Zucker and Pat Proft, the veteran American filmmakers behind cult comedy franchises including “The Naked Gun” and “Airplane!,” are set to executive produce a Nordic Noir comedy spoof series called “NoPoFo.” The anthology series is being produced by lkkas’ Creative Studio, a recently-launched Finnish company. BBC Studios Nordics has come on board as a co-producer. Billed as “Nordic Noir meets ‘Police Squad!,‘” the 10-part series follows three elite agents from the Nordic Police Force (NoPoFo) who are tasked with solving the sort of murders that Nordic psychopaths do so well. Each half-hour episode is set in a different Nordic country and features a different cast of supporting characters, including a serial killer who only murders bad heavy rock bands, and an Instagram obsessive who creates ice sculptures out of his victims.

Michael London, the Snowfall exec producer who runs Groundswell Productions, has cemented his relationship with Lionsgate.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Live sports streaming service DAZN has acquired rights to broadcast the English Football Association (FA) Women’s Super League soccer matches and Women’s FA Cup for two seasons across multiple territories including in their key markets of Spain, Japan, and Italy. Under the deal DAZN will be offering live and on-demand access to at least two FA Women’s Super League matches per round, while multiple Women’s FA Cup games will instead be visible for free on DAZN’s UEFA Women’s Champions League YouTube channel for the next two seasons. Coverage of these matches will be available in Spain, Italy, and Japan, which are DAZN’s key markets, as well in as other European countries and territories including Albania; the Balkans; Bulgaria; Greece and Cyprus; Hungary; Malta; Romania; and Turkey.

Naman Ramachandran Prashant Nair, Sundance audience award winner for “Umrika,” and veteran producer Ronnie Screwvala (“Uri: The Surgical Strike”) are teaming up on series “The Support Group.” Nair serves as the director-showrunner on the multi-season series, which follows three characters from very different backgrounds who form an uneasy alliance to escape the consequences of an accidental killing. The series is produced by Screwvala’s RSVP in association with Sidharth Jain’s House of Talkies. While a streaming or broadcast partner has not been revealed yet, typically Screwvala prefers to develop content on his own steam and then negotiate with partners who buy into the show’s vision.

EXCLUSIVE: Christmas has come early for Hallmark Media: Alison Sweeney (The Wedding Veil trilogy) has agreed to a multi-picture overall deal with the channel.

Naman Ramachandran For India in general and the Sikh community in particular, 1984 is a particularly emotive year, including for musician and actor Diljit Dosanjh, the star of Netflix film “Jogi.” In June 1984, the then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered an army operation against separatist militants at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, a holy location for Sikhs, that was criticized by many in the community. In October, Gandhi’s Sikh bodyguards assassinated her, leading to ant-Sikh riots across northern India, with the country’s capital Delhi as its epicenter. The happenings of 1984 left deep and enduring scars on the Sikh community and the events have been depicted in film and television over the years. In “Jogi,” directed by Ali Abbas Zafar (“Sultan”), Dosanjh plays the titular Jogi who takes it upon himself to heroically save his family and neighbors as politically-backed riot mobs in Delhi, including childhood friends from other communities, systematically target Sikhs during the 1984 riots.

Director Kevin Bray is cementing his relationship with FX.

Jennifer Griffin has signed a new multi-year deal to serve as Fox News Channel’s chief national security correspondent.

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

Anna Marie de la Fuente Seattle-based MindRiot Entertainment is teaming up with Panama’s Hypatia Films, an associate producer of Claire Denis’ Cannes Grand Prix winner “Stars at Noon,” on the groundbreaking documentary, “In Search of Atlantis,” based on the findings of Seattle native Dr. Jason Rubin who has used deductive reasoning, the writings of philosopher Plato and the most advanced satellite sonar imagery to pinpoint the location of the fabled lost island of Atlantis.  According to MindRiot co-founder and chief creative officer Jonathan Keasey, Dr. Rubin passed on other Hollywood suitors as he liked MindRiot’s approach to the content and the fact that it had marshalled the support of multiple universities, including deep sea explorer Don Walsh, the honorary president of the Explorers Club, and even European authorities, given the maritime jurisdiction of Rubin’s site in the Atlantic Ocean.

Ethan Shanfeld As “Top Gun: Maverick” continues to dominate the box office more than three months after its release, Jon Hamm, who stars in the movie as Vice Admiral Beau “Cyclone” Simpson, is still celebrating its success. In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, Hamm noted that the Tom Cruise-led sequel is the only film to top the box office on both Memorial Day (when it premiered) and Labor Day. “That’s unprecedented in many ways,” Hamm said. “It’s one of the only top five [films] that doesn’t have somebody in a cape or on a spaceship. It’s a story about real people, it’s got a lot of emotional resonance, people are really responding to it.”

Canadian distributor Sphere Film has signed a multi-picture deal with A24 under which it will handle the release of nine of its titles in Canada.

U.S. indie distribution stalwart Bleecker Street has announced an exclusive output deal with Canadian distributor, levelFILM as it heads into a busy Toronto International Film Festival.

How great does Martika Ramirez Escobar’s surreal, award-winning film “Leonor Must Die” sound? This first feature transports a retired screenwriter of Filipino action films into the story of one of her own unfinished scripts. The film is the official Midnight Madness closing night Film of the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, and it’s already won a ton of awards, including the Special Jury Prize for Innovative Spirit at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.

Zack Sharf Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu does not like superhero movies. The Oscar winner said in 2014 while promoting “Birdman” that superhero movies were a form of “cultural genocide,” adding, “I don’t respond to those characters. They have been poison because the audience is so overexposed to plot and explosions and shit that doesn’t mean nothing about the experience of being human.” Robert Downey Jr. weighed in on Iñarritu’s comment in 2015 during an interview with The Guardian to promote his turn as Iron Man in the Marvel blockbuster “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” but the actor’s retort was somewhat controversial. Downey Jr. noted that he “respects the heck out of” Iñarritu but also mocked Iñarritu’s Spanish roots by saying, “For a man whose native tongue is Spanish to be able to put together a phrase like ‘cultural genocide’ just speaks to how bright he is.”

Brent Lang Executive Editor Momentum Pictures has purchased the North American and U.K. rights to Michael Morris’ “To Leslie,” a drama with Andrea Riseborough that had its world premiere at this year’s SXSW Film Festival. The film will be released in theaters and on VOD on Oct. 7. Riseborough starts as a West Texas mother who wins the lottery and drinks it away just as fast, leaving behind a world of heartbreak. She comes home in the hopes of achieving redemption. Riseborough leads an ensemble that includes Oscar-winner Allison Janney (“I, Tonya”), Marc Maron (“Maron”), Owen Teague (‘The Stand”), James Landry Hebert (“Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood”), Andre Royo (“The Wire”) and Stephen Root (“Barry”).

K.J. Yossman Banijay Rights has set a new returning drama series titled “Runners” with writer John Preston (pictured above, left) and exec producer Ellie Wood (pictured above, right) of Clearwood Films, the team behind “Stonehouse” and “The Dig.” “Runners” tells the story of the world’s first police force, the Bow Street Runners, who were formed in the 1740s in London, which at the time was facing a colossal crime wave. The Chief Magistrate of London at the time, Heny Fielding (who also happened to be a celebrated novelist), decided to take on this criminal underworld by assembling a group of police.“This extraordinary story will tell of how a group of just six police officers, none with any training or experience, set about imposing law and order on a completely lawless society and embarked on solving one of the strangest cases of its time – one with momentous political and social ramifications,” reads the logline.

Malta’s planning authority has approved plans for the construction of the Mediterranean island country’s first interior sound stage to complement its existing exterior tank shooting facilities