Innholdsfortegnelse for 4/27/2022 i Variety

What a whacked-out couple of weeks this has been! When I began writing this editor’s letter about the onslaught of news, I wasn’t even planning to mention Elon Musk’s pursuit of Twitter because a deal looked dead in the water. Then we got whiplashed this past weekend when suddenly the acquisition appeared imminent. Sure enough, it was announced Monday that the Twitter board had accepted his $44 billion takeover offer. Now we’re trying to process what exactly that will mean. Here’s our digital editor Todd Spangler’s quick take: “The question is whether Elon Musk looks like a white knight for Twitter — or more like an evil overlord,” says Spangler. “He’s talked about his desire to have Twitter take a more laissez-faire approach to regulating speech on the platform, but…

After years of companies spending like drunken sailors on streaming video, some are now suffering hangovers. Netflix, in the first quarter of 2022, lost customers for the first time in more than a decade. It could shed 2 million more in Q2. The streaming giant is scrambling to find new sources of revenue growth, with execs hoping to monetize password-sharing freeloaders and — previously unthinkable at the Big Red N — planning to introduce advertising-supported plans. CNN+, hailed as a bridge to the news cabler’s future, is DOA: It’s getting axed 32 days after launch under new management at Warner Bros. Discovery. The WBD team led by CEO David Zaslav quickly decided to cut their losses with CNN+, concluding the service simply wouldn’t draw enough viewers to sustain a budget…

White Horse Pictures, the production company behind recent documentaries about the Beatles, Lucille Ball and the Bee Gees, is producing another look at a legendary entertainer: Gene Wilder. Library Films’ Chris Smith, the filmmaker behind projects such as “Bad Vegan” and “100 Foot Wave,” is directing the documentary about the star of “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” and “Young Frankenstein,” which will be told from the perspective of Jordan Walker-Pearlman, the late actor’s nephew and a filmmaker in his own right. “Wilder” is being produced in association with Andrew Trapani’s Sobey Road Entertainment and Walker-Pearlman’s Harlem Hollywood banner. It came to White Horse via Trapani, who knows Walker-Pearlman. The latter visited his uncle, married to “SNL” star Gilda Radner from 1984 until her death in 1989, at every film…

April 27 Wednesday • “I Love That for You” stars Vanessa Bayer, Molly Shannon and Jenifer Lewis and producers Jessi Klein, Jeremy Beiler and Michael Showalter walk the carpet at the Showtime series’ premiere. Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood April 29 Friday • Donald Faison, Yvette Nicole Brown, Harvey Guillén, Lou Diamond Phillips, Javier Muñoz and Libby Rue appear at the inaugural Disney Junior Fun Fest. Disney California Adventure Park, Anaheim, Calif. • The three-day Stagecoach Festival opens with performances by Thomas Rhett, Maren Morris, Midland, Brandi Carlile and Tanya Tucker. The weekend also includes sets by Carrie Underwood, the Brothers Osborne, Lee Brice, Margo Price, Luke Combs, the Black Crowes, Orville Peck, Cody Johnson and Smokey Robinson. Empire Polo Club, Indio, Calif. • Rob Lowe and Ken Jeong host…

There were so many unknowns swirling around in the ether when Disney finalized its $71 billion takeover of 21st Century Fox three years ago. One of the biggest questions was how the Fox executives who made the leap from Century City to Burbank would fare at an enlarged Disney. Fox was a famously hard-charging and entrepreneurial culture with a corporate ethos easily summed up as Eat What You Kill. Disney is famously velvet glove, corporate, insular and cutthroat in its own ways. Industry chatter about how the two studio worlds would mesh (or not) was rampant during the 15-month closing period before the deal was completed on March 19, 2019. Dana Walden knew she was part of a historic Hollywood moment when she drove onto the Disney lot the following day…

When the Kentucky legislature made the commonwealth’s 30%-35% film and TV tax credit non-refundable in 2018, it cast a pall over the careers of local industry pros including Louisville native Emily Blevins, who had racked up credits as a production manager or producer on a dozen Lifetime movies shot in the Bluegrass state. Although $428 million in credits had been approved under the old version of the incentive, which paid cash to productions for any credits they earned that were not eaten up by their tax bill, there was no guarantee the projects that had applied for the credits would actually shoot in Kentucky. And once those approved projects were completed, the jobs would be gone, because Kentucky would no longer be able to compete against production hotbeds with stronger…

When the subject of homegrown Kentucky production companies comes up these days, the first name out of anyone’s mouth is Wrigley Media Group, which is transforming an abandoned multiplex in the city of Lexington into a full-service state-of-the-art art 52,000-sq.-ft. studio complex, dubbed Wrigley Woodhill Studios. Currently, it has a single soundstage, which is hosting the second season of the group’s nationally syndicated courtroom reality show “Relative Justice,” starring Judge Rhonda Wills. But when the second phase of the renovation is finished in early 2023, it will be the largest studio facility in Kentucky, with room to host outside productions drawn to the commonwealth by its revived film and TV incentive, featuring a 30%-35% refundable tax credit. “We developed ‘Relative Justice’ and sold it into most of the country, and…

FILM REVIEW Director: Simon Curtis Starring: Hugh Bonneville, Jim Carter, Michelle Dockery “Downton Abbey: A New Era” is bookended by a wedding and a funeral. In between, a good deal happens: Babies are born and paternities questioned, long-simmering romances clinched and fresh ones set to bloom; an excursion takes a fraction of the family to France while a film crew keeps the rest of them busy back home. It all adds up to rather more than audiences of 2019’s standalone “Downton Abbey” feature must have expected, if only because the earlier film seemed conspicuously uninterested in starting anything new. That movie served as a kind of fan-service coda, contrived to put a neat bow and tassels on the many characters and intrigues that had been seeded over six seasons of…

Asterid Opens on a High Note • Asterid, the new restaurant at Disney Hall from chef Ray Garcia (inset below), comes with a different set of expectations from his previous Broken Spanish. While diners might be on their way to musical performances or plays at the Music Center, there are plenty of other reasons to hang out at the spot. One is the sleek wraparound bar, with inventive cocktails from Chris Chernock. Then there’s the spacious heated patio along Grand Avenue, and the menu that incorporates pops of flavors from across the globe, like short rib with bacon, cactus and chipotle, which could have appeared on a Broken Spanish menu. The former Patina space gets a minimalist black-walled makeover, the better to show off the artfully plated dishes — like…

This past year, “The Bachelor” endured a heavy dose of controversy, the type of drama that even reality TV producers can’t make up — and certainly don’t want to deal with. And yet, the franchise has done what no other dating series — let alone most shows in television history — has, crossing its 20-year mark on the air. With 26 seasons of the flagship, 19 seasons of “The Bachelorette,” eight seasons of “Bachelor in Paradise” and numerous spinoffs to date, ABC’s dating franchise isn’t going anywhere. With an international fanbase that considers “The Bachelor” to be a way of life more than a TV show, it’s entirely possible that viewers will still be watching in 20 more years. Copycats have tried to mirror the formula. Most have failed. Turns…

TIMOTHY BATES ADMINISTRATIVE MANAGER, KENTUCKY ENTERTAINMENT INCENTIVE PROGRAM https://ced.ky.gov/Locating_Expanding/KEI Kentucky boasts locations ranging from contemporary to architectural features that date back 150 years in many of our small towns, attractive production incentives and we’re within a day’s drive of two-thirds of the U.S. population. LOCATIONS: HISTORICAL VS. CONTEMPORARY A good story begins with the right environment and Kentucky has an array of interesting and appealing landscapes, from the beautiful Appalachian plateau where “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” starring Sissy Spacek and Tommy Lee Jones, was filmed, to the rolling farmland and small towns of Central and Western Kentucky, site for “In Country,” starring Bruce Willis; “Elizabethtown,” starring Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst; and “Dreamer,” starring Kurt Russell and Dakota Fanning. Need a river town? We have many that have served as backdrops…

For the first time in two years the Hot Docs Canadian Intl. Documentary Festival is hosting in-person premieres and screenings, after COVID-19 forced the 2020 and 2021 editions of the annual event to unfold virtually. To celebrate, Hot Docs’ programming director Shane Smith selected 226 films from 2,563 submissions to screen in-person and online beginning April 28 in Toronto. The lineup includes 63 world and 47 international premieres. From Lyme Disease (“The Quiet Epidemic”) to Hong Kong’s history of protest (“Blue Island”) to the lucrative world of international pigeon racing (“Million Dollar Pigeons”), the 29th edition of Hot Docs offers up an assortment of titles from 63 countries. “I think of it as a buffet or dinner table that we are setting,” Smith says. “We are looking for as much…

“Ozark” cinematographer Shawn Kim came aboard the show at the start of Season 4 with a good idea of what creators Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams wanted for the look of the dark thriller about a mob accountant and his family who relocate from Chicago to the Missouri Ozarks: A “sense of danger in the shadows,” Kim says. “Ozark” fans have been waiting three months for the second half of the season to find out what happens to the Byrdes — Jason Bateman’s Marty, wife Wendy (Laura Linney) and their two children — as they try to wriggle free from the clutches of the drug cartel that employs him and the FBI that wants to imprison him. But Kim says the final seven installments, which drop April 29 and close…

Elle Fanning has grown up on screen, starring in dozens of movies since her film debut two decades ago. Starting in 2020, she’s gained acclaim as Empress Catherine II in Hulu comedy “The Great.” But two weeks after wrapping production on Season 3, she dove into a much more serious project, Hulu’s “The Girl From Plainville,” playing another real person: Michelle Carter, the teen who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging her boyfriend, Conrad Roy III, to end his life. The case played out in the media when Carter was indicted in 2015. Fanning is also a producer on the eight-part series, now streaming, which takes a deep dive into the relationship between Carter and Roy (portrayed by Colton Ryan) — the side of the story that didn’t make…

Twitter is now in Elon Musk’s hands. What his successful maneuver to buy the company means for its 200 million-plus users — or for media and entertainment companies that use the platform to reach global audiences — is anything but clear. In the space of three weeks, Musk went from disclosing a 9.2% stake in Twitter to clinching a $44 billion deal for the company on April 25. The tech billionaire has promoted the idea that he wants to protect “free speech” on Twitter, which he calls “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” Analysts expect the deal to get shareholder approval and face no regulatory hurdles. When it closes, which is projected to be sometime in 2022, Twitter will become a privately…

Costume designers have ratcheted up their long-running battle for pay equity, using the awards season spotlight and a starry guild video released last month to amplify their message. Backstage following her Oscar victory March 27, “Cruella” costume designer Jenny Beavan pointed to the embroidered guild slogan “Naked Without Us” on her blouse, and assured media that pay equity is still very much an issue in her predominantly female field. “It’s not gone away,” said Beavan, who became embroiled in a dispute with Disney for money from “Cruella” merchandising a year earlier. According to data about artisan pay scales provided by the Costume Designers Guild’s pay equity committee, costume designers earn almost $1,000 less per week than production designers, their closest creative peers. And while it can be risky to speak…

Andrew Garfield (1) is ready to take a break. The actor has been going nonstop for the past year or so with “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” and “Tick, Tick … Boom!” Now, he can be seen in “Under the Banner of Heaven.” Garfield plays a Mormon detective investigating the brutal murder of a mother (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her baby daughter by fundamentalist followers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “I’m going to rest for a little bit,” Garfield, who earned his second Oscar nom for “Tick, Tick,” tells me. “I need to recalibrate and reconsider what I want to do next and who I want to be and just be a bit of a person for a while. Because as you know, that is a washing…

Working on “Our Flag Means Death,” a half-hour comedy now streaming on HBO Max, production designer Ra Vincent was excited for the challenge of crafting “a theatrical play … on the high sea.” A fictionalized account of real-life 18th-century “gentleman pirate” Stede Bonnet (played by Rhys Darby) and his relationship with the infamous Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard (Taika Waititi), the series needed to use its sets in ways that typical movie and television productions do not. “It’s less of a major motion picture and more of a theater sports performance,” Vincent explains. “Who would have an open fire in the library on a wooden boat? Stede Bonnet would, just because it looks right.”— Ra Vincent, production designer At the outset, Vincent says the team decided, “Let’s build an…

MUSIC REVIEW Artist: Miranda Lambert Label: Vanner Records/RCA Records Nashville “Palomino” is Miranda Lambert’s fourth studio album of the past decade, but that number doesn’t quite capture the tear she’s been on. That period also saw her release three albums with her trio Pistol Annies, as well as last year’s stripped-down demo collection “The Marfa Tapes,” on which Lambert and fellow Texans Jack Ingram and Jon Randall traded tunes and banter over a campfire. And she’s hardly been cranking out assembly-line product: 2016’s purgative post-divorce double-album “The Weight of These Wings” seemed strenuously positioned to be her masterpiece — fairly so, because it was — and while 2019’s “Wildcard” was far lighter in tone, it also saw Lambert stretching her sound to accommodate new genres, from new wave to Motör-head-style…