Variety 3/9/2022

The latest prediction from our film awards maven Clayton Davis is that coming-of-age drama “CODA” will run away with the best picture Oscar at the March 27 ceremony. I have to say that would be awfully fabulous given that everyone —me included — loves a little-engine-that-could underdog story, and this feel-good, scrappy movie filmed in a short amount of time certainly fits that bill. A remake of an award-winning French film, “La Famille Bélier,” the story, written and directed by Siân Heder, centers on the only hearing member of a deaf family (played by Emilia Jones) who’s torn between pursuing her passion for music and her fear of abandoning her family’s fishing business. “CODA” made history at last month’s Screen Actors Guild Awards, becoming the first film with a predominantly…

Now that omicron is in decline, Broadway optimism is on the rise. After a bumpy holiday season rife with performance disruptions, show closures and hiatuses due to the highly contagious COVID variant, there are signs of recovery in the New York theater industry — and producers are becoming increasingly bullish about a busy spring season. “When there was a bump in the road, people stopped and regrouped, but then we safely went on,” says James L. Nederlander of the Nederlander Organization, which owns nine Broadway theaters and also produces the new musical starring Billy Crystal, “Mr. Saturday Night.” “Right now, I think the more noise Broadway can make, the better.” With the weather getting a little better and attendance going up each week, I think people are getting pretty excited…

It’s a pretty sweet time to be a top executive in Hollywood. A series of high-profile mergers and acquisitions, and the arrival of some tech giants looking to break into the entertainment business, has put a premium on corporate talent. All industry eyes have turned to Discovery chief David Zaslav to see what he has planned once his company’s merger with WarnerMedia is consummated, and speculation is running rampant about who deep-pocketed streamers Apple and Netflix may be planning to hire. All of this jockeying is coming as the industry is experiencing a “once-in-a-generation seismic shift in the power structure of the business,” according to one former studio chief. As major media companies have launched in-house streaming services, their hunger for buzzy shows and movies has become insatiable. At the…

Morally compromised women seem to be everywhere on the small screen, as performers dig into juicy roles full of questionable behavior on the part of reallife characters. Says Jenny Klein, showrunner of NBC’s “The Thing About Pam”: “One of the core questions of the show is, how could something like this happen?” The same might be said about the misdeeds of each of these shady ladies. Anna Delvey Portrayed by: Julia Garner Show: “Inventing Anna,” a Netflix series from Shonda Rhimes that debuted Feb. 11 Misdeeds: Delvey pretended to be a German heiress and served time for swindling New York elites. Backstory: Garner earned praise for her distinctive accent; Delvey awaits deportation for overstaying her visa after being paroled. Elizabeth Holmes Portrayed by: Amanda Seyfried Show: “The Dropout,” a Hulu…

Game creation platform Roblox’s 2021 haul of $1.9 billion in revenue is more than double what the company made in 2020, and the $570 million it earned in the fourth quarter alone is greater than what it brought in during all of 2019. But its vast popularity with kids is proving difficult to sustain: The last two quarters saw users 13 and up — instead of kids under 13 — lead daily active user growth, causing fourth-quarter DAUs to slightly miss analyst expectations. Following Roblox’s fourth-quarter earnings report on Feb. 15, the stock fell as much as 38% before picking up slightly. It goes to show that despite Roblox’s ascent, the long-term success of any metaverse endeavor must rely on establishing and maintaining broad appeal to different age demographics. For…

Is an equity stake the new overall deal? Some of the industry’s biggest talent management firms are setting investment deals with large production entities that extend much deeper than the first-look agreements of years past. The M&A activity reflects producers’ desire to find exclusive expressways to talent, especially the multihyphenates who are defining Hollywood’s vibrant new creator economy. It also advances the ambitions of a breed of managers who want to build on the seller’s market for talent at a moment of unprecedented global investment in content production and talent deals. This month, Range Media Partners, the management startup led by CAA and Entertainment One alum Peter Micelli, sold a minority slice (less than 20%) of the company to A+E Networks — home of cable’s A&E network, History and Lifetime.…