Manchester United want to keep Eric Ramsay as part of Erik ten Hag's backroom staff, despite the coach being on the shortlist to take over as Barnsley's next manager.
20.05.2022 - 18:29 / deadline.com
From the time he stepped in as chairman of Sony’s Motion Picture Group in 2015, Tom Rothman has heard the rumors that Sony would eventually sell because it didn’t have a streaming service or the scale to compete with its behemoth rivals. Universal, Warner Bros., Disney and Paramount battle it out with him at the box office, but Rothman’s studio is the only one that hasn’t spent a fortune building a streaming arm that factors into the decisions he makes.
DEADLINE: You’re a Disruptor by being the only major studio head without the cushion of streaming service subscriptions, and you’re making it work. You’re a throwback to a model you used for decades at Fox, a studio that no longer exists.
TOM ROTHMAN: So, I’m the Last of the Mohicans?
DEADLINE: Why have other studios—and Wall Street—decided your model isn’t a good long-term strategy?
ROTHMAN: To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of the theatrical movie have been greatly exaggerated. Why it happened? There’s a current Wall Street obsession with streaming. The media narrative follows, and it becomes viewed as established wisdom whether or not it’s true. We finished the best year we’ve ever had at the movie company, in the midst of Covid. Our model is alive and well and thriving.
DEADLINE: Why?
ROTHMAN: Cultural impact. If you are going to achieve any sense of permanence, of mattering in the movie content business, you have to make cultural impact. It’s different for series, but the vast forests of movie fodder that exist on the six or eight streaming services don’t make a cultural impact. The vast majority are written in disappearing ink. Because algorithms don’t market. [Streamers] don’t really have to get over the bar of making real cultural impact. Theatrical movies
Manchester United want to keep Eric Ramsay as part of Erik ten Hag's backroom staff, despite the coach being on the shortlist to take over as Barnsley's next manager.
In a surprise move last November, veteran studio chief and CAA co-founder Ron Meyer and former beIN Media Group executive Sophie Jordan were named CEO and co-CEO of European indie powerhouse Wild Bunch AG. Together, the formidable leadership team will help steer the pan-European film, TV and media company into the next era of expansion.
Zeinab Abu Alsamh has only been general manager of MBC Studios Saudi Arabia for a year but with the blazing speed at which the local industry is growing, she says it has felt more like five.
Inspiration can come from the most unanticipated places, like walking the dog in the park or buying a soft pretzel at the mall. For Morgan Cooper, it came in 2019 while driving down Route 71 in Kansas City, Missouri. Heading home after shooting a low-budget beauty commercial, Cooper concocted a plan to turn ’90s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air into a gritty short film, with Will Smith’s iconic character reimagined as an unlucky Philly teen who gets caught with a gun during a playground brawl. Rather than face a certain future behind bars, his Uncle Phil works some attorney magic and arranges for Will to start over in the wealthy Southern California neighborhood where he would attend an elite private school.
When the Cannes Film Festival lineup was announced on April 14, Twitter positively exploded with excitement over the news that Lee Ji-eun would make her Riviera debut with Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Broker in Competition. The Korean actress, singer and songwriter—popularly known as IU—has a legion of fans, including 26 million followers on Instagram, and has been described as a national treasure at home. She may now be well poised for crossover success with her first commercial film.
The emergence of Isabel May as the lead in Taylor Sheridan’s frontier epic series 1883 is such an unlikely discovery story that it still has the actress trying to come to grips with a star-making turn that should factor in the Emmy race.
Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs have been around the media business long enough to resist the temptation to overreact to Netflix’s latest travails. Even though their emerging investment firm, Candle Media, owns two key Netflix suppliers—CoComelon production company Moonbug Entertainment and Fauda producer Faraway Road—they don’t seem too concerned that Netflix may topple from its perch. (And at press time, the previously unthinkable scenario has become a lot more, well, thinkable.)
Special purpose acquisition companies—known as SPACs—have been all the rage in the world of investment for the last two years, and they’ve made a mark in the media space, but is the trend slowing down?
Long before he became a premier storyteller for Paramount+, Taylor Sheridan was a journeyman actor who struggled to support his family. The older he got, the more he found himself descending on the call sheet. What should have been a welcome burst of momentum — playing Deputy Chief David Hale on Sons of Anarchy — turned out to be the final dose of humiliation that led him to change horses. An ask for a decent raise was the thing that compelled Sheridan to begin writing scripts. Sheridan was several seasons into playing what he believed to be a pivotal role in the SAMCRO universe, but the studio suits didn’t seem to share his assessment.
The rise of streamer content has created anxiety for talent and their reps, because of models that require ownership of a project in perpetuity. Because product starts on a streaming site and then never leaves, there is no chance of backend windfalls. Just look at the creators and cast of Squid Game to see what that can mean: a billion-dollar property for Netflix, embarrassingly tiny paydays for the artists who made it, and little hope of making up the shortfall in subsequent seasons.
It has been nearly two years since a group of the best and brightest young agents and partners told their bosses they were stepping away from their million-dollar salaries to follow former eOne strategy officer and CAA television veteran Peter Micelli and be the founding partners of a new management company, Range Media Partners.
With the motion picture business shifting almost exclusively to franchises over the past decades, screenwriters are increasingly put through the wringer as they find themselves replaced and replaced again throughout protracted development processes. It’s a punishing road that can be demoralizing for writers who have often spent months pitching for an open writing assignment. But as more and more streamers look to add content to their film slates, screenwriters are finding new opportunities to flip the script.
If Abigail Disney had listened to her financial advisers growing up, the heiress would have concentrated on one thing above all else: getting even richer.
In 2021, the Cannes film festival programmed movies from an unprecedented number of women and people of color, more than in any other year. Director Julia Ducournau won the Palme d’Or for her film Titane, becoming only the second woman to do so. This win gave people hope that maybe change was coming from the white, male-dominated festival.
Lukas Dhont’s Cannes debut was also his debut feature, Girl, which ran in Un Certain Regard in 2018. A stunning start for the young Belgian, the movie brought him the Caméra d’Or and myriad other prizes down the line. Now, four years later, Dhont is returning to Cannes with his follow-up, Close, which has landed him in the main competition.
A few years ago, as filmmaker Roger Ross Williams contemplated founding his own production company, he experienced a Field of Dreams kind of vision: “If you build it, they will come.”
When Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg left Sony Pictures Television in 2017 to steer Apple’s film and TV fortunes, few doubted they would give the tech giant’s upstart content company a beachhead on the small screen. During their 12 years at Sony, they hatched hits like Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul and Rescue Me.
When Marina Ovsyannikova stormed the live broadcast of Russia’s flagship news program on March 14 to protest Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it was a valiant moment that quickly reverberated across the world. The journalist and editor spent six seconds holding a sign saying, “No war, they are lying to you,” on the Kremlin-controlled TV Channel One where she worked.
Film producers are often used to facing challenging situations but for Denis Ivanov, he never could have anticipated the dramatic diversion his job would take when, on February 24th, Russia launched a full-scale military invasion of his home country.