Brock Media Enters Podcast Game; Paramount+ Partners With Virgin In UK; Lesley Land Scholarship Launched – Global Briefs

A wiley police dog managed to track down a missing Scots pensioner with dementia in woodland after the alarm was raised by his family.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor Max will be celebrating Pride Month in June through a series of events, programming and partnerships highlighting LGBTQ+ voices. Among the initiatives will be partnerships with Them and Newfest to help amplify queer voices, stories and content. The streamer has planned an in-app Pride takeover of the LGBTQ+ Voices page which will highlight queer content premiering in June. Among the programs will be the premiere of the HBO documentary “The Stroll,” which tells the powerful and poignant history of transgender sex workers in New York’s pre-gentrified meatpacking district in the 1990s. The Max original documentary reality series “Naked. Loud. Proud.” will stream. HBO documentaries “Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed” and TaylorMac’s “24-Decade History of Popular Music” are set to air.

Jordan Moreau Nearly a year after he was fired from Disney by former CEO Bob Chapek, Peter Rice has set a film and TV production deal with A24, Variety has confirmed. It’s his first major move after he was ousted. A24, hot off a leading nine Oscar wins with “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “The Whale” this year, will co-finance film and TV projects with Rice. The deal is non-exclusive, and projects under the agreement will be backed by Rice via A24’s banking relationships. The projects will be for global distribution theatrically and on major streaming platforms. “I am incredibly excited to be an independent producer and could not be more thrilled to begin that journey in partnership with A24,” Rice said in a statement. “They have built Hollywood’s most vibrant, fearless, and creative studio. The fact that they made it out of whole cloth in a decade is a testament to their exquisite taste, razor-sharp business acumen, and infectious enthusiasm for creativity and artists. I have been blessed to work with so many amazing creators as an executive and cannot wait to start producing provocative, meaningful, and entertaining movies and TV shows with creators I admire and respect.”

Limmy fans have rushed to pay tribute after the Scots comic's dad Billy Limond died following a lengthy illness.

Saudi Arabia’s burgeoning production hub Neom has locked a partnership with the film and digital content production and finance company Telfaz11.

signed a contract with Netflix to produce projects and now his brother, 40, has his own transaction in the works. The Prince of Wales’ environmental charity, the Earthshot Prize, has partnered with YouTube for campaigns, events and creator collabs that will bring more awareness to the global climate crisis.The two-year partnership will unite the Earthshot Prize and the video platform to create content to inspire users to take action against climate change.The alliance will also help grow the Earthshot Prize YouTube channel.Types of content that will be featured on the website include mini-documentaries, Q&As and YouTube Shorts, as well as collaborations with influencers.“At the Earthshot Prize we want to incentivize innovation and change to help repair our planet and partnering with YouTube, one of the world’s biggest platforms, allows us to do that on a truly global scale,” the organization’s CEO Hannah Jones said in a statement.

Thania Garcia Composer Nicholas Britell, who has scored films for Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight,” “If Beale Street Could Talk”) and Adam McKay (“The Big Short,” “Vice,” “Don’t Look Up”), as well as HBO’s “Succession,” has inked a new label services deal with Secretly Distribution. The Emmy-winning composer, pianist and producer collaborated with Secretly to release “Succession: Season 4 (HBO Original Series Soundtrack)” on global streaming services — just hours after the highly-anticipated series finale aired — via the composer’s newly launched Lake George Music Group imprint. “It has long been a dream of mine to release music through my own label, and I’m tremendously excited to have the final season of ‘Succession’ as our label’s first release,” said Britell in a statement. “Lake George Music Group is proud to partner with the team at Secretly.”

Ben Croll Launching out of Cannes Premiere, Valerie Donzelli’s “Just the Two of Us” is a feverish psychological thriller about a woman brought deeper and deeper into a toxic relationship. And if Donzelli had always intended to make the project ever since reading the source novel back in 2014, the lockdowns of 2020 helped push certain elements to the front of her mind.   “It’s really the story of a woman trapped under glass,” Donzelli tells Variety. “She’s confined with her husband, isolated and unable to see anyone, cut off from the world. I really wanted to explore how this hold makes you more and more disconnected from life.”

Lionsgate said today it’s partnered with Quentin Tarantino for distribution rights to three of the director’s iconic films – Kill Bill Volumes I & II and Jackie Brown. 

EXCLUSIVE: New York Women in Film & Television (NYWIFT) and Jordan’s Royal Film Commission (RFC) are teaming up on a training and mentorship scheme aimed at aspiring female filmmakers in the country.

Thania Garcia Lex Borrero and Tommy Mottola’s Ntertain Studios have entered a new multi-year partnership with Audio Up Media to develop and acquire original content. Under the new deal, Ntertain will offer a diverse lineup of original Latin podcast programming, with extensions into music, TV and film development. “Our goal is to be the one-stop destination for any Latin talent wanting to develop a podcast and use their IP for additional transmedia opportunities. This venture allows us to continue to reshape the face of Latin content while continuing to impact with our creativity,” said Borrero in a statement. Today the company simultaneously announces its first few projects, including a kid-friendly series featuring original music from reggaeton artists, and another titled “Anthem,” which pairs professional athletes with their favorite artists to help create their on-field walk-out music.

EXCLUSIVE: Trom creator Torfinnur Jákupsson is turbocharging his quest to place the Faroe Islands on the global film and TV map.

EXCLUSIVE: EST Studios has entered into a partnership with New York and Bangkok-based N8 Studios to represent a slate of Asian films at global markets including the Marche du Film at Cannes. 

Addie Morfoot Contributor The first of three “Vanderpump Rules” #Scandoval reunion episodes will air on May 24, but for fans who can’t wait that long for the fireworks that Bravo has promised, there’s a tailgating opportunity in the form of a documentary titled “The Randall Scandal: Love, Loathing, and Vanderpump.” The 90-minute Hulu doc, which begins streaming on May 22, stems from the Los Angeles Times story, “The Man Who Played Hollywood: Inside Randall Emmett’s Crumbling Empire” written by Amy Kaufman and Meg James. The article, published in June 2022, revealed lawsuits, debts and troubling allegations regarding Emmett’s relationships with women, assistants and business partners.

EXCLUSIVE: AI is in the eye of the storm in LA right now amid the writers’ strike and is also a talking point at the Cannes Film Festival due to the de-aging of Harrison Ford for Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny.

Brent Lang Executive Editor Yellow Veil Pictures has acquired worldwide rights to “The Becomers,” a genre-bending comedy from Zach Clark. The company will launch the film at the Marche Du Film in Cannes this week. “The Becomer” tells the story of a body-snatching alien who comes to Earth, reconnects with their partner, and tries to find their way in modern America. “During the pandemic, I binged the original ‘Star Trek’ series for the first time and then I made this movie” Clark said on his latest film. “It felt like life as we knew it was ending, but then again, it also felt like that might not be the worst thing either. ‘The Becomers’ is a story of love, longing, and alienation. A kitsch-soaked, pathos-laden melodrama about our sad, sad planet. It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever made and I can’t think of anyone better than Yellow Veil to get it out into the universe.”

Naman Ramachandran Entertainment One (eOne) has solidified its collaboration with U.K. independent production company Hardcash Productions through an exclusive first-look agreement. Under the deal, brokered by Kate Cundall, eOne’s VP of acquisitions, and Robin Barty-King, Hardcash’s business affairs consultant, the partnership aims to develop and produce investigative factual content for the global market. eOne will handle international rights for all projects resulting from this collaboration. Previously, eOne and Hardcash worked together on the distribution of award-winning documentaries such as “Inside China,” “Fearless: The Women Fighting Putin” and “Outbreak: The Virus that Shook the World,” which have been sold to over 160 territories worldwide.

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International Steve McQueen looks stressed out. He’s a few weeks into post-production on “Blitz,” his World War II drama for Apple TV+, while starting promotion on his other, long-gestating wartime project, the documentary “Occupied City.” “It’s definitely pleasurable, but this is work,” declares McQueen with the wariness of a filmmaker who’s just been plucked out of the edit suite. “Hard work is always hard work. You can’t avoid it.” The British director, who was Oscar-nominated for “12 Years a Slave,” didn’t set out to make back-to-back movies about the war, but “you plant seeds, and some come to fruition and others don’t,” he explains. “These two happened to blossom fairly close to each other.”

A police watchdog probe has been launched after an 11-year-old boy was tasered by cops during a tense showdown at a Craig Tara.