Japanese Buyer Wowow Makes Pandemic Thriller ‘Songbird’ Its First Theatrical Acquisition

Mark Schilling Japan Correspondent“Demon Slayer the Movie: Mugen Train,” the animated film that has become the Japanese entertainment world tsunami of 2020, pushed its cumulative earnings to $313.7 million (JPY32.5 billion) over the Dec. 26-27 weekend.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau ChiefNetflix has announced the greenlight of a second series for Japanese thriller series “Alice in Borderland” barely two weeks after its online debut. The show is a live-action adaptation of a popular manga.The eight-episode sci-fi fantasy is the story of a dissatisfied unemployed man (played by Yamazaki Kento) who follows a mysterious light source and finds that, but for himself and two friends, the population of Tokyo has seemingly disappeared.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers and John Malkovich will star in a pandemic-inspired thriller, The Survivalist, which recently wrapped production. The movie, which takes placea year and a half after the fall of civilization due to a viral outbreak, follows a former FBI agent (Meyers) who is forced to protect a young woman immune to the disease from a dangerous gang leader (Malkovich) hunting her.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers and John Malkovich are co-starring in a pandemic thriller titled The Survivalist and they already filmed the entire movie!

EXCLUSIVE: Jonathan Rhys Meyers and John Malkovich are starring in pandemic thriller The Survivalist for Yale Productions, with the project have recently wrapped in the Tri-state area.

Coldplay surprised fans with the unexpected release of new pop ballad, “Flags” which was cut from the group’s original Everyday Life album.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau ChiefJapanese police on Wednesday formally charged 42-year-old local man Shinji Aoba with murder relating to the arson attack in July last year at Kyoto Animation.The blaze, set using gasoline, killed 33 people on the scene and three more in hospital.

Vice president-elect Kamala Harris sat down with Good Morning America co-host Robin Roberts for her first solo interview since the election, and while there wasn’t a whole lot of news to come out of the sit-down, there was a focus on the history that will be made.

Super Mario manga is available in English for the first time, going on sale in North America.The English language edition is an anthology collection, made up of the best stories which have been regularly printed in Japanese since the 1990s.

Todd Spangler NY Digital EditorReddit announced the acquisition of Dubsmash, a TikTok-like short-form video app whose mission is to “elevate underrepresented creators.”Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

The legend of “The Karate Kid” continues.

Tokyo-based pay TV company Wowow has acquired theatrical distribution rights in Japan for Songbird, the pandemic-set sci-fi thriller produced by Michael Bay and former Paramount president Adam Goodman. The pickup is Wowow's first major acquisition through the new theatrical distribution division the company set up earlier this year.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief“Songbird,” the Michael Bay-produced pandemic thriller that is headed straight to streaming in North America, will be given an in-cinema release in Japan. The rights pickup was the first acquisition by the newly-formed theatrical distribution arm of Japanese pay-TV leader Wowow.The film takes place years in the future, in which a mutated strand of coronavirus, called COVID-23, continues to wreak havoc on the world’s population.

You have to hand it to WarnerMedia, the studio isn’t lying when it says that HBO Max is a priority. The fledgling streaming platform that launched earlier this year has been growing steadily since its debut but has yet to capture the tens of millions of subscribers that Disney+ has earned or anywhere near as many as Amazon Prime Video or Netflix.

Mark Schilling Japan CorrespondentThe period action animation “Demon Slayer The Movie: Mugen Train” has passed “Titanic” at the Japanese box office to become the territory’s number two all-time hit, according to figures announced on Monday by distributor Aniplex.Based on Gotoge Koyoharu’s hit comic that has sold more than 100 copies in all formats, including digital, the film had earned $264 million from 20.5 million admissions as of Nov. 29, some 45 days since its opening on Oct.

On Thursday, Netflix debuted the full trailer for Ryan Murphy’s “The Prom”, a new musical starring Meryl Streep, James Corden, Kerry Washington, Nicole Kidman and more.

Studiocanal confirmed Wednesday that it has pre-sold the world, apart from the U.S.