‘Mulan’s’ Ming-Na Wen to Narrate Annecy-Bound 2D Animation Documentary ‘Pencils Vs Pixels’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Joe Otterson TV Reporter An “Among Us” animated series is in the works at CBS Studios, Variety has learned exclusively. The studio, via CBS Eye Animation Productions, has partnered with Innersloth, the independent game studio behind “Among Us,” to develop the series. Owen Dennis will serve as creator and executive producer on the project under his overall deal with CBS Studios. Per the official logline, the series is based on the premise of the game, namely, “Members of your crew have been replaced by an alien shapeshifter intent on causing confusion, sabotaging the ship, and killing everyone. Root out the ‘Impostor’ or fall victim to its murderous designs.”

At the start of the writers strike, The Animation Guild, an entirely separate union to the WGA, came out in support of the labor action, pledging to “stand in solidarity” with WGA members.

Ozzy Osbourne.The name of the 33foot (10metre) tall sculpture was announcwed yesterday (June 22) after a public vote was revealed.The bull, Ozzy, was originally meant to be dismantled, but after a public outcry it will now move to a permanent home at Birmingham New Street railway station.“I’m absolutely blown away,” said the Black Sabbath frontman, who performed at the closing ceremony (via BBC).“Thank you for all your votes. And Birmingham forever,” he added..

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic A movie, good, bad or indifferent, is always “about” something. But some movies are about more things than others, and as you watch “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy,” Nancy Buirski’s rapt, incisive, and beautifully exploratory making-of-a-movie documentary, what comes into focus is that “Midnight Cowboy” was about so many things that audiences could sink into the film as if it were a piece of their own lives. The movie was about loneliness. It was about dreams, sunny yet broken. It was about gay male sexuality and the shock of really seeing it, for the first time, in a major motion picture. It was about the crush and alienation of New York City: the godless concrete carnival wasteland, which had never been captured onscreen with the telephoto authenticity it had here. The movie was also about the larger sexual revolution — what the scuzziness of “free love” really looked like, and the overlap between the homoerotic and hetero gaze. It was about money and poverty and class and how they could tear your soul apart. It was about how the war in Vietnam was tearing the soul of America apart. It was about a new kind of acting, built on the realism of Brando, that also went beyond it.

wrote that it “takes us into the intimate, inner circle of family ties to tell a larger story of our time.” The picture concerns the story of Tunisia’s Olfa Hamrouni and her daughters, detailing a family history through interviews and reenactments to deconstruct how the two eldest kids were radicalized to the point of joining ISIS.  “We were immediately captivated by Kaouther Ben Hania’s powerful documentary Four Daughters, a riveting piece of filmmaking that takes an innovative and provocative approach to nonfiction storytelling,” said Kino Lorber SVP of Theatrical Distribution and Acquisitions Wendy Lidell.

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the newly elected Board of Governors for the 2023-2024 year. Elected to the board for the first time are acclaimed actor Lou Diamond Phillips, screenwriter Dana Stevens, executive Hannah Minghella, costume designer Daniel Orlandi and more. Among the newly elected is technology executive Wendy Aylsworth, who will represent the brand new Production and Technology Branch. Aylsworth, who also serves on the Board of Governors for the Television Academy, spent more than two decades at Warner Bros. and became the first woman president of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.

“Wish.” Meant as a celebration of Walt Disney Animation Studio’s legacy, with nods to its illustrious past, it also marks a bold step forward visually for the studio, incorporating a painterly art style that sets it apart from virtually every other computer-animated movie in the library.Originally announced at D23 Expo in 2022, back then what exactly “Wish” was remained fuzzy. During that presentation, it was mentioned that the movie would make nods to the company’s past but that it would be an original musical fairy tale, full of characters both dashing and devilish.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic When you see a documentary about a game-changing pop star, you assume you’re going to get the story of the music, and also a good look at the life, and that there’ll be enough (on both counts) to go around. I was eager to see “Let the Canary Sing,” a documentary portrait of Cyndi Lauper, because it’s directed by Alison Ellwood, who made “The Go-Go’s” a few years back, and that movie had everything: the drama, the trauma, the saga of a total pop-music reset, as we watched the Go-Go’s bust down doors that had been too tightly shut for too long. Cyndi Lauper was no less revolutionary a figure, arriving in the early ’80s, along with Madonna, to announce that we were in the midst of a seismic new definition of what it meant to be a female pop star. The definition was: a star who could rule — and change — the world.

Naman Ramachandran Illumination founder and CEO Chris Meledandri was presented with the Annecy International Film Festival’s lifetime accreditation Golden Ticket on Wednesday. In a surprise appearance, two-time Oscar nominee and Grammy-winning global superstar Pharrell Williams presented Meledandri with the festival’s honor. Meledandri is the creative producer behind “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” the Despicable Me, Minions, Sing and The Secret Life of Pets franchises, and the upcoming action comedy, “Migration.” Williams, a longtime creative partner with Illumination, earned his first Academy Award nomination for his blockbuster song “Happy” from the studio’s “Despicable Me 2.”

Marta Balaga Disney Branded Television and Disney Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) looks set to reveal a slew of new titles at France’s Annecy Animation Festival. Apart from “Disney Junior’s Ariel,” a new series inspired by “The Little Mermaid,” pre-school adventure series “Magicampers” has also been greenlit.  Set at a day camp for magical creatures – its protagonists, Darly and Loomis, are half-pig and half-Pegasus, and half-donkey and half-unicorn – and created by Obie Scott Wade, it’s set to premiere globally on Disney+ and Disney Junior next year.

Awkward. Gwendlyn Brown revealed that one of her former teachers had a special interest in her dad, Kody Brown.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic It’s one of the inside-out realities of our era that scandal, if you give it enough time, turns into myth. So it is with the story of Milli Vanilli, the German-French R&B pop duo of the late ’80s and early ’90s who, having sold close to 50 million records, were revealed to be a fake: a pair of lip-syncing Euro pretty boys who hadn’t sung a note on any of their hits or at any of their concerts. Once they’d been unmasked, the rise and fall of Milli Vanilli played out on two levels. The first was the spectacular embarrassing bad joke of it all — though it was never just a joke, since Milli Vanilli’s fans felt a tremendous sense of anger and betrayal at having been fooled. (The joke was on them.) The second level recognized a crucial and obvious truth: that the scandal wasn’t only about Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan, with their teenybop dreads and break-lite dance moves, getting up onstage and singing to prerecorded tracks, as if it had all been their idea. No, the brazen fakery of Milli Vanilli echoed, or at least rhymed with, various other kinds of fakery that were embedded in the music industry (the packaging of boy bands, the use of lip-syncing by established stars). This was certainly more extreme, and worthy of being called on the carpet for, but it wasn’t a stand-alone sin.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic There’s a moment in “Stan Lee,” David Gelb’s lively and illuminating documentary about the visionary of Marvel Comics, that’s momentous enough to give you a tingle. The year is 1961, and Lee, approaching 40, is burnt out on comics. It’s a form he has never taken all that seriously, even though he’s been working at it since 1939, when he started, at 17, as a gofer for Timely Comics. (Within two years he’d become the company’s editor, art director, and chief writer.) The comics he creates get so little respect that he tries to hide his profession when asked about it at cocktail parties. In 1961, though, Lee receives a directive from Martin Goodman, the publisher of the company that’s about to be renamed Marvel. He is ordered to devise a team of superheroes that can compete with DC’s Justice League (who have become the fulcrum of the so-called Silver Age of Comics). Lee, weary of superheroes, is ready to quit the business. But his wife, the English-born beauty Joan Lee, suggests that he create the kind of characters he has always been talking about — a more realistic brand of comic-book figure, one that ordinary people could relate to.

It’s officially Filipino Heritage Month and we’re highlighting Filipino celebrities who have shattered boundaries and left an indelible mark in the entertainment industry.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Andy Serkis, the award-winning actor (“Lord of the Rings”) and filmmaker, is set to narrate the mixed reality game “Monstrorama” ahead of its world premiere at Tribeca. The experience, slated to compete in Tribeca’s immersive category, takes players on a tour of a secret museum called Monstrorama that’s located thousands of miles underground. The museum is filled with monsters, from the Kraken to the Vampire, the Werewolf and the parasitic Tingler. “Monstrorama” is produced by Atlas V (“Madrid Noir”) and is represented in international markets by its distribution vehicle Astrea.

Corus Entertainment has announced a robust lineup of premium specialty programming for the upcoming 2023-24 television season for its roster of specialty channels, including Showcase, W Network, Food Network, History, Slice and more.

Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD) Jamie Cooke is supercharging “original documentaries that push the boundaries” from his Central & Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Turkey region by greenlighting around 10 docs per year.

K.J. Yossman Showtime is not moving forward with Caroline Suh’s documentary on disgraced comedian Louis C.K., Variety has learned. The feature-length doc was announced by Paramount Global exec David Nevins at the Edinburgh TV Festival in Scotland last summer. Nevins stepped down in October following internal restructuring. Suh, who previously directed Netflix documentary “Blackpink: Light Up the Sky,” about K-Pop superstars Blackpink, was set to helm the project about C.K., which was billed as examining the comedian and his downfall as well as the wider #MeToo movement over the past six years.

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor On New Year’s Day, Peacock dropped the first three episodes of its true crime series “Paul T. Goldman,” a documentary loosely based on Paul Finkelman’s semi-autobiographical self-published book. The show, utilizing reenactments and behind-the-scenes shots, has the eccentric Finkelman telling the story of his relationship with his second wife, whom he believed was living a double life as a prostitute, dating her pimp and running an international sex trafficking ring. It was directed by “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” director Jason Woliner, who brought an ambitious use of satire to the streaming platform. Finkelman’s unique delivery and distorted facts and his attempt to set the record straight in the form of a movie that he directs and writes himself, starring himself, creates an unconventional type of nonfiction storytelling. Still, Peacock and Woliner saw it as a documentary and decided to submit it for Emmys consideration in outstanding documentary or nonfiction series. However, not everything works out the way you hope.

Naman Ramachandran The first clip has been unveiled for “Chasing Chasing Amy,” which will have its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival. In the feature documentary, Sav Rodgers takes a journey of self-discovery while making a documentary about Kevin Smith’s 1997 film “Chasing Amy” and its polarizing reputation among LGBTQ+ people. The film explores the transformational impact of the rom-com on a 12-year-old queer kid from Kansas, coming of age and to terms with his identity. For young Sav Rodgers, the cult classic became a life raft. As Rodgers examines the film and its making as a cornerstone of LGBTQ+ cinema, he finds himself at a complicated crossroads.