Michael Jackson’s Enduring and ‘Complicated’ Legacy Explored in Podcast Series From Audible, Wondery

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor The Playmaker Munich has signed with producer Ulysses Films to handle international sales for its upcoming family animation project “Pirate Mo & the Legend of the Red Ruby,” which has a planned release of early 2026. Ulysses produced animation box-office hits such as “The Amazing Maurice,” “Niko & the Way to the Stars,” “Rabbit Academy – Mission Eggpossible” and “Tad, the Lost Explorer.” The script for “Pirate Mo,” which is based on Kirsten Boie’s bestselling novel, was written by Richie Conroy, and the director is Florian Westermann, co-director of “The Amazing Maurice.”

EXCLUSIVE: Ryan Phillippe (American Murderer), Emile Hirsch (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) and Mena Suvari (American Horror Story) will topline Kalahari, a new action thriller from Vertical, which has wrapped production.

The death of New York City subway rider and familiar Michael Jackson street impersonator Jordan Neely has been ruled a homicide, the city’s medical examiner said last night.

EXCLUSIVE: LA’s KT Studios is shopping podcast Death Island with Conor Powell as a TV series, as it launches a slate of true-crime shows alongside iHeartPodcasts.

King of Horror 30 years ago. That’s what happened when Michael Jackson enlisted Stephen King to work on a short film tentatively titled “Is This Scary?” In it, the “Thriller” singer would play a man in a mansion who has to defend himself against an angry mob of townspeople accusing him of scaring their children.“People in this town felt that this person on the hill was weird and strange and scary,” says King in “Think Twice: Michael Jackson,” a new podcast available on Audible and Amazon Music. “And the kids were kinda like, ‘Yeah, we sorta dig this guy!’”But in an eerie twist, 12 days into shooting “Is This Scary?” — on Aug.

Joe Otterson TV Reporter Sydney Chandler has been cast as a lead in Noah Hawley’s “Alien” series currently in the works at FX, Variety has learned. Plot and character details are being kept under tight wraps on the project, which was first announced in December 2020. The only detail that has been confirmed is that the show will take place on Earth in the not-too-distant future. The role brings Chandler back to FX, as she previously made her network television debut in the cabler’s 2022 limited series “Pistol” from Danny Boyle, which told the story of the legendary band The Sex Pistols. Chandler starred in the series as Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders. Chandler’s other credits include the film “Don’t Worry Darling” and the Facebook Watch series “SKAM Austin.” She is also set to appear in the upcoming Apple series “Sugar” opposite Colin Farrell.

.The coast-to-coast National Tour is set to launch August 2023 in Chicago, with a West End premiere set for March 2024 at London’s Prince Edward Theatre.Tickets are available at the Neil Simon Theatre box office and at www.ticketmaster.com. 

Dinner will be served at the end of May, and it’s going to be a real drag.

Bubbles, Michael Jackson’s pet chimpanzee, turned 40 and celebrated with a party befitting the King of Pop’s pet.“He did get a cake — but it’s a special ape-healthy cake,” said Patti Ragan, founding director at the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Fla., the “retirement home” where Bubbles has lived since 2005.“We frost it with mashed bananas and add a little bit of blue food coloring … and then we wrote his name in blueberries,” Ragan said. The theme, fittingly, was bubbles.“We had tubs of bubble bath.

EXCLUSIVE: Troian Bellisario (Pretty Little Liars) and Brandon Larracuente (The Good Doctor) are set as the leads of On Call. Originally set up at Amazon Freevee, the half-hour drama, from Wolf Entertainment and Universal Television, will stream on Amazon’s main platform, Prime Video. Amazon Studios has handed an official eight-episode order to the project, co-created by Tim Walsh and Elliot Wolf, which marks Wolf Entertainment’s first streaming series and its 10th current scripted series overall.

Proud fathers! Fatal Attraction is a pretty dark show, but its stars — including Joshua Jackson and Reno Wilson — still found time to bond over how much they love their kids.

Michael Appler It’s quiet on the roof of the St. James Theater. Up here, less than 10 stories above 44th Street, the clamor of an opening night on Broadway drifts away. Below, titans of the American theater — actors like Chita Rivera and Joel Grey — are gathering to attend the opening night of a new musical by John Kander and Fred Ebb, a duo who gave Broadway shows like “Cabaret” and “Chicago.” But on the roof — on top of “New York, New York” — the air is still.  Up here, in the few moments of serenity before red carpet interviews, an opening night performance and a long evening of parties, the musical’s two stars, Colton Ryan and Anna Uzele — newcomers to all the fuss below — stop to catch their breath. 

EXCLUSIVE: Fox has given a straight-to-series order to Rescue: HI-Surf, a Hawaii lifeguard drama from John Wells Productions in Wells’ broadcast return. The series, slated to premiere during the 2023-24 season, will be co-produced by Warner Bros. Television, where JWP is based, and Fox Entertainment.

debuted on Amazon Music and Audible on Thursday — details how the King of Pop pored over market research in which people would make harsh comments about his looks and idiosyncrasies.“He wanted to know … I would take stacks of surveys, and some things that you or I would not be able to take as a human being — he took it all in,” said Dan Beck, who, as an executive at Epic Records, began working with Jackson right before the release of his 1991 album “Dangerous.”“At that time, some of the non-musical issues were surfacing, some of the tabloid stuff — you know, plastic surgery, all that stuff. And we were very, very concerned about these things getting in the way of Michael’s music.”“There was a concern that pop radio would turn on Michael because he was just too weird to be a pop star,” added Jay Smooth, who co-hosts “Think Twice” with Leon Neyakh.As sales of “Dangerous” were plummeting — by his lofty standards — at the beginning of 1993, Jackson set out to change “the weirdo narrative,” as Smooth describes it.“Michael and his team wanted to wash all that away and replace it with the idea that he was not just a generational talent but a historic artist in a lineage with the greats,” said Smooth.As part of that concerted “myth-making campaign,” as Smooth describes it, Jackson gave high-profile performances at Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration gala and at the American Music Awards, where he was given the International Artist Award of Excellence — an honor that he personally negotiated for with the producers.

Netflix has greenlit a Keira Knightley-starring thriller, the latest series from The Crown producer Left Bank and a Bank of Dave sequel.

It may have ceded to the BBC, but Elon Musk’s Twitter is back under pressure from the world’s public service broadcasters.

Naman Ramachandran BAFTA-winning “The Last King of Scotland” writer Jeremy Brock will adapt independent studio Wiip and India’s Roy Kapur Films’ series based on the book “The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company” by author and historian William Dalrymple. “The Anarchy” will be mounted as an international co-production between Wiip and Roy Kapur Films to be produced across the U.S., U.K. and India. The book tells the story of how one of the world’s most magnificent empires, the Mughal empire, disintegrated and came to be replaced by the British East India Company – a dangerously unregulated private company based thousands of miles away in a small London office just five windows wide.

EXCLUSIVE: Shout! Factory on Wednesday announced their promotion of longtime senior executive Michael Ribas to Senior Vice President of Marketing and Product Management. 

Holly Jones “The Invisible Ink,” a drama from Uruguay’s Mutante Cine co-founder Fernando Epstein (“Whisky”) and Cannes Camera D’Or winning Guatemalan director César Díaz (“Our Mothers”), was first pitched to international markets at last year’s Conecta Fiction & Entertainment’s Co-Pro Series session, where it won double. It retained its momentum as it swept up a €50,000 Beta Development Award last month at Series Mania Forum’s Seriesmakers strand. “The truth is, when I found out about the award, I was very flattered. We have something strong on our hands,” Epstein told Variety. “I don’t want to fail to mention the excellent program devised by Series Mania and Beta Group, from the virtual talks to each session with our mentors; everything was impressively rich and generous.”

Chrissy Teigen, Tina Fey, Daniel Radcliffe and more are lending their voices for a new adult animated comedy series, , from the producers behind and . The Netflix series will launch Friday, May 12, it was announced Tuesday.picks up «after Earth is destroyed by an alien attack, a rag-tag band of survivors has to start society over from scratch.