Amazon Prime Video and Freevee Merge Unscripted Units Under Veteran Alternative TV Exec Chris Castallo (EXCLUSIVE)

Amazon has unveiled its 2022-23 German originals slate as it up investment in the country, with new Prime Video comedy shows and the latest All or Nothing soccer doc among the highlights. At the same time, Prime Video Channels will soon offer Discovery+ and Paramount+ as add-ons.

Selome Hailu Amazon Prime Video has canceled “Paper Girls” after one season. The series was produced by Amazon Studios and Legendary Television in association with Plan B. It is based on the graphic novel series of the same name written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Cliff Chiang and published by Image Comics. “Paper Girls” begins in the early morning hours after Halloween 1988, when four newspaper delivery girls — Erin (Riley Lai Nelet), Mac (Sofia Rosinsky), Tiffany (Camryn Jones), and KJ (Fina Strazza) — are out on their route when they become caught in the crossfire between warring time-travelers, changing the course of their lives forever. Transported into the future, they must figure out a way to get back home to the past, a journey that will bring them face-to-face with the grown-up versions of themselves. While reconciling that their futures are far different than their 12-year-old selves imagined, they are being hunted by a militant faction of time-travelers known as the Old Watch, who have outlawed time travel so that they can stay in power. In order to survive, the girls must to overcome their differences and learn to trust each other and themselves.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Amazon will bow a new laugh lead-in for its exclusive “Thursday Night Football” NFL games package, enlisting “Saturday Night Live” alum Taran Killam as the host of “The NFL Pile On” — the league’s first official comedy show. “The NFL Pile On” will premiere Sept. 14 at 7 p.m. ET on Prime Video, airing each Wednesday throughout the NFL season one day before Amazon’s “Thursday Night Football” coverage. In the half-hour show, Killam will riff on “funny and unexpected moments” from the across the NFL the week prior, from mic’d up players during pregame warmups to postgame press conference zingers, and from epic fumbles to off-the-field blunders — according to Amazon, “everything from studio shows, social media and fashion faux pas will be fair game.”

Qurate Retail Group, the John Malone-backed owner of video screen shopping mainstays QVC and HSN, has installed former Amazon exec Soumya Sriraman as president of streaming.

Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans in Prime Video’s holiday-themed action comedy “Red One.”Information about the actors’ roles are being kept under wraps. The plot has been described as “a globe-trotting, four-quadrant action-adventure comedy, imagining a whole new universe to explore within the holiday genre.” Shipka previously starred as Sabrina Spellman in “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” which ran for four seasons on Netflix.

EXCLUSIVE: Kiernan Shipka (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) has signed on to star alongside Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans in Prime Video’s holiday event film currently titled Red One, from director Jake Kasdan (Jumanji franchise).

record with 10 million viewers in its premiere last month and boosted its viewership by 2% for its second episode. “The Rings of Power” is led by showrunners and executive producers Payne and Patrick McKay.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is the biggest thing Amazon Prime Video has ever done, and it looks like the TV series based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing has delivered big time.

Amazon Prime Video quietly introduced a new 72-hour delay for all user reviews posted to Prime Video, a representative for the streamer confirmed to Variety. Each critique is then evaluated to determine whether it’s genuine or a forgery created by a bot, troll or other breed of digital goblin. The practice caught notice after the premiere of the first two episodes of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” Prime Video’s monumentally scaled fantasy series based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. The series appears to have been review bombed — when trolls flood intentionally negative reviews for a show or film — on other sites like Rotten Tomatoes, where it has an 84% rating from professional critics but a 37% from user-submitted reviews. “The Rings of Power” has been fending off trolls for months, especially ones who take issue with the decision to cast actors of color as elves, dwarves, harfoots and other folk of Tolkien’s fictional Middle-earth.

“Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” which is a prequel based on the work of J.R.R. Tolkien that’s set thousands of years before the events of “The Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings.” Several new 2022 films will be available on the streamer as well: including Channing Tatum’s “Dog,” Michael Bay’s “Ambulance,” Zac Efron’s “Firestarter,” Dylan O’Brien’s “The Outfit,” and more. Noteworthy library titles arriving this month include “Fight Club” (1999), “Legally Blonde” (2001) and “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991).

Today (September 1) sees the launch in the US of Amazon Prime Video ’s highly anticipated series, The Rings of Power. This epic drama, set thousands of years before the events of Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, is thought to be the most expensive TV series ever made.

Once upon a time, there was a stigma between film and television, and when you were a big movie star, you never dared appear in a lowly TV series, and if you were a TV star, crossing over into movie stardom was unheard of and barely ever happened unless your name was John Travolta or George Clooney. And yes, thanks to prestige TV and the Age of Streaming, those days are long gone.

EXCLUSIVE: Emma Roberts (Madame Web) will exec produce and star in Space Cadet, a new rom-com from Stampede Ventures, which enters production this month. Also now aboard the film from writer-director Liz W. Garcia (The Lifeguard) is Prime Video, which will distribute it internationally.

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While audiences anxious await Anne Hathaway‘s next performance in James Gray‘s “Armageddon Time,” in theaters this October, there’s news about one of her upcoming roles. Deadline reports that Hathaway will team up with “The Eyes Of Tammy Faye” director Michael Showalter for a new project for Amazon Prime Video.

K.J. Yossman “Clarkson’s Farm,” the break-out British Amazon Prime Video hit starring former “Top Gear” host Jeremy Clarkson attempting to run a farm in the Cotswolds, has just wrapped and is already in the edit suite, confirmed Amazon Studios’ U.K. head of originals Dan Grabiner. “Because it’s farming and it’s authentic it’s so linked to the seasons and the farming year and the weather and things like that,” Grabiner said at the Edinburgh TV Festival on Wednesday morning. “Season 2 has just about wrapped filming. It looks amazing, I think that’s fair to say.” Grabiner also promised fans more of the show’s break-out stars Kaleb Cooper, a farming contractor, and experienced farmer Gerald Cooper, who tries to guide Clarkson in his thick West Country accent.

Manori Ravindran International Editor Soumya Sriraman, the former BritBox CEO who joined Amazon to lead its Prime Video Channels business in the U.S., is stepping down after two years at the SVOD. Sources indicate the executive is still at Amazon but will be leaving imminently for another role elsewhere. Sriraman is best known for her work pioneering the best-of-British streaming service BritBox in the U.S., where she is based. The SVOD launched there in 2017 and quickly reached 250,000 subscribers in one year. By the time Sriraman departed, in October 2020, the service had more than 1.5 million subscribers. The successful U.S. launch allowed joint operators BBC Studios and ITV to expand the brand to other markets, including Australia and Canada.

Ariana DeBose has landed a new leading role!

The Western genre waned in popularity in the 1980s, but 21st-century cinema still has the occasional film that harks to its heyday. Most of these are genre hybrids, like Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” or S.

Amazon Prime Video’s ‘The Lake’ Producer Amaze Signs COO & Business Affairs VP