Sundance Stalwarts Peter Saraf & Eddie Rubin Launch Optimistic Pictures; Awkwafina Pic ‘G’ Among Their Early Projects

Gears Of War designer Cliff ‘CliffyB’ Bleszinski has revealed he once pitched a game similar to Palworld to Epic Games, but was turned down.Released earlier this month in Early Access, Palworld has quickly become one of the most popular games on Steam. Creators PocketPair have reported upwards of 8million copies of the game have been sold in a week while earlier today (January 26), it became only the second ever game to pass 2million concurrent players on Steam, with PUBG being the first.Now Bleszinski has taken to social media to talk about how validating Palworld’s success has been for him.“Palworld‘s success kinda validates my pitch that was turned down at Epic many years ago,” he wrote with his idea revolving around “medieval Pokémon with baby dragons instead.”Responding to a fan, Bleszinski revealed that his pitch for the mobile game “just never went anywhere”.It just…never went anywhere.

Lewis Pullman is the top choice to replace Steven Yeun in Marvel Studios Thunderbolts sources confirmed to Deadline. If a deal closes, he would star opposite o star opposite Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Sebastian Stan and Wyatt Russell, who had been announced as the main ensemble at D23 in 2022.

As the “peak TV” wave begins to crest, artists are again realizing that not every book needs adaptation as a miniseries. There’s value in the concision and prioritization forced by the feature format.

EXCLUSIVE: The Steven Soderbergh-directed and David Koepp-scripted ghost story Presence is being acquired at Sundance by Neon.

Kenough. Ryan Gosling is showing his support for his “Barbie” co-star Margot Robbie and the film’s director Greta Gerwig after they were both snubbed in the Best Actress and Best Director Oscar categories respectively.

Killers of the Flower Moon confirmed today, Martin Scorsese has become the living director with the most Oscar nominations.The Academy included the 81-year-old on their Best Director shortlist, giving him his tenth nomination in total, and overtaking Steven Spielberg’s nine.Scorsese’s nominations go back to 1980’s Raging Bull, but he has only won the prize once, for 2006’s The Departed. His other recent nominations include The Irishman, The Wolf of Wall Street and Hugo.

Before making Past Lives, writer-director Celina Song says with a laugh, she didn’t even know how to read a call sheet. Flash forward a year, though, from the A24 romantic drama’s world premiere at Sundance, and she’s landed an Original Screenplay nom for her debut feature.

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor Women filmmakers hit a milestone with this year’s 2024 Oscar nominations. For the first time in history, three of the 10 movies nominated for best picture — Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall,” Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” and Celine Song’s “Past Lives” — were directed by a female auteur, the most recognized in the Academy Awards’ 96-year history. The other best picture nominees are: “American Fiction,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Maestro,” “Oppehneimer,” “The Holdovers,” “Poor Things,” and “The Zone of Interest.” Before this year’s best picture nominees, 591 movies were nominated by the Academy.

It’s safe to assume that, were one to simply look at the film’s runtime or consider the basic concept surrounding the documentary “Daughters,“ there’s presumably much more to this than a simple film about a Father-Daughter dance organized for one particular group of incarcerated men and their children, separated by prison walls and an ocean of distance both physically as much as emotionally. Such dance events are commonplace; normally held annually as a way for fathers to bond with their young girls within a setting not unlike a homecoming dance or prom, most could be seen as little more than an excuse for a large group of children to burn off energy as they dash around a gymnasium to any number of DJ-provided pop hits, but there are equal parts undeniable connections made throughout the course of the evening as well as a memory both will, in all likelihood, forever cherish.

Early in Yance Ford’s visual essay “Power,” he tells the audience that the film to come either requires “curiosity” or  “at least suspicion” from the viewer. It’s the type of bold claim that might pack a punch as a rhetorical hook, especially for a documentary that dives into the cultural, social, economic, and political history of policing in the United States.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Jodie Foster said at the Variety Studio presented by Audible while at the Sundance Film Festival that the $1.4 billion success of “Barbie” helps prove that Hollywood no longer views women directors as too much of a risk. That wasn’t always the case, as Foster often saw women filmmakers being marginalized during her career ascent in Hollywood. “I’ve had the beauty of being able to be in the business since the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and so on,” Foster said to Variety’s Rebecca Rubin.

PARK CITY – It’s 2024. Are you ready for a movie set in the pandemic summer of 2020? Or, like September 11th, another historical event that was hard for Americans to stomach on screen for a good while, do you need a decade or so to process? Your answer to those questions will likely, for better or worse, determine your opinion of Theda Hammel’s “Stress Positions” which debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

juggernaut doll movie.The roster instead included prestige favorites such as “Oppenheimer,” “Poor Things,” “The Holdovers,” “Killers of the Flower Moon” and Cannes Palme d’Or winner “Anatomy of a Fall,” all of which are expected to be announced as Best Picture Oscar nominees on Jan. 23.“Oppenheimer,” which was the most-nominated film with 13 mentions, maintains its coveted spot as the movie to beat at the Oscars after big wins at the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards.“Barbie” wasn’t totally given the old heave-ho, though.The film received five nods: Actress (Robbie), supporting actor (Ryan Gosling), original screenplay, costume design and production design.

Brent Lang Executive Editor Not much is funny about those terrifying early days of COVID, when the world was cloaked in an apocalyptic doom and the president was telling us to drink bleach. But in “Stress Positions,” Theda Hammel miraculously finds the funny side of lockdown, mining the masks, Purell and social distancing that defined that unhappy era for physical comedy. “Those gestures are like balloons, and they’re filled with the sense of danger and a sense of peril,” Hammel says of the Sundance-bound film that she directed and co-wrote.

OUTSTANDING DEBUT BY A BRITISH WRITER, DIRECTOR OR PRODUCER “Blue Bag Life” — Lisa Selby (Director), Rebecca Lloyd-Evans (Director, Producer), Alex Fry (Producer) “Bobi Wine: The People’s President” — Christopher Sharp (Director) [also directed Moses Bwayo] “Earth Mama” — Savanah Leaf (Writer, Director, Producer), Shirley O’Connor (Producer), Medb Riordan (Producer) “How to Have Sex” — Molly Manning Walker (Writer, Director) “Is There Anybody Out There?” — Ella Glendining (Director) ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY “Anatomy of a Fall” — Justine Triet, Arthur Harari “Barbie” — Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach “The Holdovers” — David Hemingson “Maestro” — Bradley Cooper, Josh Singer “Past Lives” — Celine Song ADAPTED SCREENPLAY “All of Us Strangers,” Andrew Haigh “American Fiction,” Cord Jefferson “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan “Poor Things,” Tony McNamara “The Zone of Interest,” Jonathan Glazer FILM NOT IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE “20 Days in Mariupol” — Mstyslav Chernov, Raney Aronson Rath “Anatomy of a Fall” — Justine Triet, Marie-Ange Luciani, David Thion “Past Lives” — Celine Song, David Hinojosa, Pamela Koffler, Christine Vachon “Society of the Snow” — J.A. Bayona, Belen Atienza “The Zone of Interest” — Jonathan Glazer ANIMATED FILM “The Boy and the Heron” — Hayao Miyazaki, Toshio Suzuki “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget” — Sam Fell, Leyla Hobart, Steve Pegram “Elemental” — Peter Sohn, Denise Ream “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” — Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Sharon Stone has revealed that she once attempted to pitch a “Barbie” movie to a Hollywood studio during the 1990s and was laughed out of the room. What a difference a couple of decades makes, as Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie’s “Barbie” opened last year and earned a staggering $1.4 billion to become the top-grossing film of 2023 and the biggest earner in Warner Bros.’ studio history.

Martin Scorsese’s epic Killers of the Flower Moon was named Best Picture at the AARP Movies for Grownups Awards, which were revealed today. The pic also took Best Supporting Actor for Robert De Niro. See the full winners list below.

Caroline Brew editor “Killers of the Flower Moon” won best picture at AARP The Magazine’s Movies for Grownups Awards, which spotlights films and TV content that speaks to a 50-plus audience. “It’s been a good year for shows and movies by and for people over 50,” AARP TV and Film Critic Tim Appelo said in a statement.

The Office is still one of the most popular syndicated TV shows on the air today, and fans have been wondering if there will ever be a reboot.

EXCLUSIVE: Annette Bening is joining Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s Frankenstein lore feature at Warner Bros; the studio making it official that this is a go-project. Cameras roll in Q1. This package with its attachments has been out there since it was at Netflix, and the deals have finally closed with everyone.