Prime Video Pacts With Writer-Director Antonio Dikele Distefano, Launches His Film Debut ‘Autumn Beat’ About Second Generation Black Italians – Clip (EXCLUSIVE)

After closing an $8.45 billion deal last year to buy MGM, the longtime home of the James Bond franchise, Amazon has announced that 25 Bond films are heading to Prime Video in the U.S., UK and a few other territories.

Prime Video has set a December premiere date for Season 3 of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. All eight episodes of the series, starring and executive produced by John Krasinski, will launch on Wednesday, December 21, exclusively on Prime Video in more than 240 countries and territories worldwide.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Emmy award-winning Swedish director Johan Renck (“Chernobyl”) and producer Michael Parets (“Spaceman”) have launched a new production company called Sinestra and signed a two-year television first-look deal with Fremantle. Their first TV collaboration with Fremantle will be the TV series “Mouth to Mouth” based on the eponymous best-selling novel by Antoine Wilson about the raucous L.A. art scene of the 1990s. Under the deal, Fremantle will also be the new home for all of Sinestra’s upcoming televisions projects. Selected TV projects will be co-owned, co-developed and co-produced, with Fremantle leading on physical production, raising production finance and international sales, the company said in a statement.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent The life of global porn icon Rocco Siffredi is the subject of a new Netflix original series titled “Supersex,” which has started shooting in Rome. The seven-episode drama is freely inspired by the real life of Siffredi, who has more than 1,500 hardcore films to his name. But, in an interesting career twist, Siffredi has also shot two arthouse pics, Catherine Breillat’s “Romance” and “Anatomy of Hell.” His Budapest-based Rocco Siffredi Prods. is a porn industry powerhouse. Siffredi was also the subject of the documentary “Rocco,” directed by French duo Thierry Demaiziere and Alban Teurlai, which screened at the 2016 Venice Film Festival. 

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italy on Monday took a sharp turn towards the right as Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy party, which has neo-fascist roots, emerged as big winners in the country’s national elections. Final results on Monday showed Meloni and her party winning roughly 26% of the vote and the center-right coalition she leads scoring 44% of parliamentary preferences, while Matteo Salvini’s anti-immigrant League won nearly 9% and former prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia took 8%. Meloni’s closest challenger, with some 19.3% of the vote, is the center-left Democratic Party headed by Enrico Letta, who has announced his resignation. Italy’s anti-establishment 5-Star Movement — which had won the vote in Italy’s 2018 parliamentary elections — saw its support halved to some 15% this time around.

September Mornings” and New York Post readers. If you’re here, chances are you are already hooked on the Brazilian television drama that premiered on Amazon Prime Video back in June 2021. Well, great news! The newest season of “Manhãs de Setembro” is back, streaming on Amazon Prime Video on September 23.

The Black List has finalized the names of the six writers that will be part of their 2022 Feature Lab and will partake in a hybrid workshop that will include virtual sessions culminating in an in-person weekend intensive in Los Angeles.

Amazon’s Hail Mary play to bring the NFL to streaming looks like a touchdown in Week 1.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent The 17th annual Rome Film Festival will fete James Ivory with a career honor, a mini retrospective and the Italian launch of the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s personal new documentary “A Cooler Climate.” Ivory is expected in Rome to receive the award and present the doc about his life as a traveler that takes its cue from boxes of film the director shot during a life-changing trip to Afghanistan in 1960. The film premieres beforehand at the New York Film Festival. Rome’s Ivory mini-retrospective will comprise his films “Maurice”; “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,” starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward; “The Remains of the Day”; and “A Room With a View.”

Japan Latest To Remake Simon Cowell’s ‘Got Talent’

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italian producer Andrea Iervolino (“Waiting for the Barbarians”) has acquired a controlling stake in central London’s Mercato Metropolitano food market and teamed with British music producer David Tickle’s Tickle Entertainment on a doc series set there about global food culture. Iervolino, whose Iervolino and Lady Bacardi Entertainment (ILBE) company produces feature films including Bobby Moresco’s upcoming “Lamborghini,” is also the founder of innovative digital entertainment platform TaTaTu, a social media platform that uses a form of rewards points called TTU Coins. TaTaTu recently acquired a controlling stake in London’s Mercato Metropolitano from its founder Andrea Rasca who in 2016 established this pioneering community market as a space for social exchange and environmental sustainability. The Mercato is now being used as the location for an upcoming docu-series chronicling the journey of four chefs who sought refuge in the United Kingdom respectively from Syria, Namibia, Nepal, and Uzbekistan.

“While we’re still waiting for official Nielsen ratings, our measurement shows that the audience numbers exceeded all of our expectations for viewership,” Prime Video’s top sports exec Jay Marine said today in a note to staff on the “resounding success” of the streamer’s official Thursday Night Football kickoff on September 15.

At this point, we’ve all seen enough documentaries about 20th-century musical geniuses that the average viewer could direct one in their sleep: archival footage of the greatest-hits performances, behind-the-scenes clips showing the snatches of solitary humanity underneath the currents of history, and some interviews with loved ones and collaborators that go beyond the image to a subject’s vulnerable core. Tried-and-true as the template might be, Brett Morgen also finds it fatally boring, and endeavors to chart a less clear-cut path with his films.

EXCLUSIVE: Coming off a main role in Outer Range, Shaun Sipos has joined another Prime Video series. He has been tapped as a major lead opposite Alan Ritchson in the upcoming second season of Reacher.

EXCLUSIVE: Shudder, AMC Networks’ streaming service for horror, thriller and the supernatural announced the start of production on the latest Shudder original film, Birth/Rebirth.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italian director Paolo Virzì (“Human Capital,” “Like Crazy”) is in Venice where his dystopic drama “Siccità,” which means drought in Italian, is premiering out-of-competition. The innovative pic, which features an A-list ensemble cast comprising Monica Bellucci, Sara Serraiocco (“Counterpart”) and Silvio Orlando (“The Young Pope”), is set amid a protracted drought caused by climate change in the Italian capital where the Tiber has dried up. Virzì spoke to Variety about how “Siccità” germinated during COVID-19 and was shot amid tight pandemic protocols. Excerpts. You worked with novelist and screenwriter Paolo Giordano on the concept and the script for this film. How did the collaboration start?

Prime Video has released the first trailer for The Peripheral, the long-gestating sci-fi drama from Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan’s Kilter Films. It’s based on the bestselling novel by William Gibson.

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.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italian director Stefano Sollima, who is known in Hollywood for “Sicario: Day of the Soldado,” “Without Remorse” and TV show “Gomorrah,” is back behind camera on a contemporary Rome-set crimer titled “Adagio.” Shooting started Sept. 5 on “Adagio” which features an ensemble cast of Italian A-listers comprising Pierfrancesco Favino (“Nostalgia”), Toni Servillo (“The Great Beauty”), Valerio Mastandrea (“Perfect Strangers”) and Adriano Giannini (“The Ties”). “I am eager and full of enthusiasm about finally returning to depict my city after all these years. Rome has changed, and so have I,” Sollima said in a statement for Variety. He went on to describe “Adagio” as a dark story of revenge and redemption, which will be the last chapter of my Roman criminal trilogy.”

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Prominent arthouse sales company The Match Factory has closed multiple sales on Italian auteur Gianni Amelio’s Venice competition title “Lord of the Ants” ahead of its Venice premiere on Tuesday. The Match Factory has sealed deals on Amelio’s latest work – which is a biopic of Italian poet, playwright and director Aldo Braibanti, who was jailed in 1968 due to a Fascist-era anti-gay law – that will ensure the film’s theatrical release in: Australia/New Zealand (Palace Films); Japan (Zazie Films); Spain (Surtsey Films); Sweden (TriArt Film) and Greece (Ama Films). Further deals are in negotiation, the company said. Braibanti was convicted after a complaint from his partner’s father, who later forced his son to be treated with electroconvulsive therapy in an ill-conceived attempt to rid him of his homosexuality. The Fascist-era law that punished Braibanti, which made it a crime to lead innocent or unwary people “morally” astray, was repealed in 1981.