Innholdsfortegnelse for 2/22/2023 i Variety

After struggling to re-create the magic of the “Harry Potter” film franchise with the lackluster spinoff trilogy “Fantastic Beasts,” Warner Bros. has finally struck galleons anew with its latest piece of Wizarding World IP: video game Hogwarts Legacy. The action role-playing game, produced by Warner Bros. Games and Avalanche Software, has clicked with Potterheads since its Feb. 10 release. Sales figures are yet to come, but it’s clear from the buzz factor and other measures — including sales charts in Japan, the U.K. and Europe — that fans are engaged. For one, the arrival of the game spurred the highest traffic in the “Harry Potter” community on Fandom in more than seven years. “The player engagement is spectacular,” David Haddad, Warner Bros. Games president, tells Variety. “So far, we have…

Bette Midler had her first professional wardrobe fitting when she made her Broadway debut in 1967 playing Tzeitel in “Fiddler on the Roof.” “I remember the clothes had layers and layers so that they had weight and so they moved when you danced,” the two-time Oscar nominee recalls on this week’s episode of the “Just for Variety” podcast. “They would curl themselves around your feet. It was so beautiful.” Since then, Midler has been transformed on stage and screen by countless costumes. “I’ve worn them all,” she says. “I have been an old lady, a young lady, a witch, a mermaid, a showgirl, a stripper, a bad lounge singer. I’ve run the gamut. And I have to say, it’s been a blast.” Her decadeslong work with costume designers will be…

After two years of virtual events due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Annie Awards are going to be an in-person affair once again. And while the members of the animation community will be toasting the great work they’ve done in the past year, they’ll also be celebrating the awards show’s 50th anniversary. “We’ll be adding a few things that would normally not be in the show,” such as tributes to Tom Woodward, who designed the zoetrope-shaped Annie trophy 50 years ago, and John Billings, “who has made the trophies since the very beginning,” ASIFA-Hollywood executive director Frank Gladstone says. “We’re going to have interstitials about the Annies and people who have been Annie recipients before, people who’ve been hosts or presenters wishing us well,” among other surprises, Gladstone says.…

Before there was “RRR,” director S.S. Rajamouli had box-office smashes like the two-part “Baahubali,” which proved how adept he is at making hits. But among Indian audiences, there is a deep divide between those who applaud that the rest of the world is waking up to his brilliance and those who are horrified that a “dubba” — or hollow film — is being lauded. I’ve heard it from my own Indian friends and relatives who have been reaching out to ask: what are they missing? Reports of viewers dancing at Hollywood’s iconic Chinese Theater to the Oscar-nominated song “Naatu Naatu” horrify these purists. But if you embrace what Rajamouli is doing, “Naatu Naatu” — which is not really the best song in Indian or Telegu films, or even in “RRR”…

FILM REVIEW Director: Rebecca Miller Starring: Peter Dinklage, Anne Hathaway, Marisa Tomei No genre of the past few decades can get on my nerves like the indie quirkfest. You know: those movies that keep poking you in the ribs to giggle at their cutely addled characters with their adorable eccentricities — I’m talking woe-is-us hipster comedies like “Pieces of April,” “Lars and the Real Girl” and the pop-crossover “Citizen Kane” of the genre, “Little Miss Sunshine.” The trouble with these movies is that even as they pretend to be life-size, they’re too conscious about packaging their prefab weirdness; they’re edgy sitcoms minus the laugh tracks. But Rebecca Miller’s “She Came to Me” demonstrates how the indie quirkfest can be resonant and real, with characters who have soul instead of a…

“Party Down” was an underdog show about underdogs — out-of-luck caterers who dreamed of one day rubbing shoulders with Hollywood rainmakers rather than serving them hors d’oeuvres. In the series, which ran on Starz for two seasons (2009-10), an ensemble cast led by Adam Scott and Ken Marino paraded around Los Angeles, working funerals, orgies and everything in between. The scrappy comedy got creative with a small budget, centering episodes around a corporate picnic or a one-man birthday party, which didn’t require hiring extras. Showrunner and co-creator John Enbom says the team wouldn’t pitch a “dog wedding,” for example, because they knew they “couldn’t afford to hire 20 animal trainers.” “Party Down” drew a cult following and critical acclaim — but also low ratings, so it was canceled by Starz,…

This year’s SAG Awards will be a glitzy evening with actors honoring their peers and Sally Field receiving the Life Achievement Award. As usual there will be no host but the proceedings can all be viewed on YouTube. Taking place at 8 p.m. ET/5 PT Feb. 26 at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles, the kudos celebrate the motion picture and television performances of the year, which are voted on by SAG-AFTRA’s diverse membership of more than 122,000 performers, existing as the largest voting body on the awards circuit. Says Jon Brockett, executive producer, Screen Actors Guild Awards. “It’s a star-studded show that’s filled with an overwhelming sense of community. You’ve got the stars and the glam and the fashion, but also a peek into this big family of…

The Motion Picture Sound Editors Golden Reel nominations honor a variety of projects, from broadcast animation to video games, plus of course, narrative features, documentaries and international films. So it’s no surprise that Oscar nominees “Top Gun: Maverick” “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “Elvis” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” all scored nominations with the MPSE, while documentaries using innovative sound also scored noms. “Moonage Daydream” and “Good Night Oppy” are just two doc Golden Reel nominees that received critical acclaim for the immersive environments they built. “Good Night Oppy” director Ryan White called on Oscar-winning sound editor Mark Mangini for the story of the NASA rover’s travels on Mars. While archival footage and interviews pieced the narrative together, White re-created some sequences in space and on Mars. Mangini…

GRAY’S GOLD “Avatar: The Way of Water” is a sequel, but the VFX team had a mandate far beyond supplying “more of the same.” The follow-up to the 2009 original “Avatar” had many new demands — and these jaw-dropping innovations have helped make the film one of the top box-office films of all time. Joe Letteri, heading up his team at Weta FX, tells Variety, “We were working on this film since the last one finished, identifying what we could do better. Then there was a big burst of research-and-development” about six years ago, when writer-director James Cameron delivered the scripts for this and three more sequels; that’s when they realized the full scope of the film, which takes place in water about 60% of the time. For the first…

It’s anybody’s game: this is a rare year when any of the five original-score nominees could win the Oscar. Two of the nominees are previous winners, two more are past nominees; only one is a newcomer, and it’s a threeman ensemble. Four films are period pieces: an admired German-language war film, a character study set against the Irish civil war, an epic of late 1920s Hollywood, and a coming-of-age story for a young filmmaker in the ‘50s and ‘60s; the fifth is a wild, anarchic tale of a Chinese American family that saves the universe. All Quiet on the Western Front For this adaptation of the Erich Maria Remarque classic, German composer Volker Bertelmann used his great-grandmother’s turn-of-the-century harmonium, a pump organ whose carefully mic’d interior noises (“the breathing, the…

Real estate power couple Branden and Rayni Williams, co-founders of the Beverly Hills Estates, have racked up over $9 billion in career sales, and founded their innovative firm in 2020, inviting designers, architects and an elite group of real estate brokers to build a collaborative community. They helped to revolutionize the real estate industry by creating the first brokerage-private-members-club hybrid. In November 2020, the brokerage opened its doors with only eight agents. By the end of 2021, that number increased to 38 team members, who helped to lift income to more than $1.6 billion, with transactions such as the Weeknd’s $70 million Bel-Air acquisition, Madonna’s Hidden Hills home and Eli Broad’s $52 million Malibu house sale. Rayni and Branden have always placed a premium on charity and charitable contributions. Rayni is…

Investigators spent more than a year sorting out blame for the death of Halyna Hutchins, the cinematographer killed on the set of “Rust.” In the end, two agencies came to two sharply different conclusions about Alec Baldwin’s level of responsibility as a producer of the film. Prosecutors charged Baldwin for firing the gun that killed Hutchins, but also for management failures that created a hazardous set. “We believe Baldwin, as a producer, knows everything that goes on, on the set,” prosecutor Andrea Reeb said on Fox News’ “The Five” last month. “There were a lot of safety concerns that were brought to the attention of management, and he did nothing about it.” “They’re trying to grab headlines and sensationalize this for politics. They’re way off base here.”—Dan Lindsey, Clovis, N.M.,…

AWARDS CIRCUIT Are the SAG Awards Michelle Yeoh’s last stand in the battle for best actress Oscar? SAG-AFTRA is the final industry group to bestow awards before final Oscar voting begins. With Academy members’ eyes on that Feb. 26 event, all hopes for Yeoh — after losing Critics Choice and BAFTA — are in the hands of the org’s approximately 160,000 members. Her role as Evelyn, a laundromat owner on a quest to save the multiverse, is among the 11 Oscar nominations for the sci-fi comedy “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Multiple pundits predict a big night for the A24 feature, including supporting actor for Ke Huy Quan and original screenplay and director for Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. Yeoh’s main competition is Cate Blanchett, who is nominated for…

Film and television producers are, at the core, accomplished problem-solvers on myriad levels. For Stephanie Allain and Donald De Line, who currently share the presidency of the Producers Guild of America, the prevailing problems for its membership are downright existential. “The biggest refrain is ‘How can we get health insurance?’” says Allain, whose producing projects have included everything from “Boyz N the Hood” and “Muppets in Space” to “Dear White People” and the Academy Awards telecast. “And ‘How do you make a living as a producer?’” adds De Line, the former Touchstone Films exec responsible for mega-hits such as “Pretty Woman” and “Armageddon,” and whose prodigious producorial output includes “The Italian Job,” “Ready Player One” and a forthcoming Billy the Kid limited series. De Line points out that the Producers…

When the NAACP Image Awards returns on Feb. 25 for its 54th annual ceremony, there’ll be plenty of cause for celebration. Not only will artists from television, motion picture, music and literature find themselves feted for their contributions, but it’s also the 20th anniversary of the organization’s Hollywood bureau — and the first time the show will be fully in front of a live audience since 2020. But an Image Awards event isn’t just another reason to hand out accolades. For organizers and nominees alike, the existence of a show that largely focuses on Black entertainers is an achievement in itself. It exists both within the Hollywood bubble and outside of it, with its own rules and perspectives and, perhaps most importantly, own voters. “At its core, the Image Awards…

Costume designer, production designer and producer Catherine Martin and her collaborators helped bring her husband, Baz Lurhmann’s, visually grand story “Elvis” to life, building the iconic sets in Australia, including Elvis Presley’s mansion Graceland. She also built more than 90 costumes, a mix of re-creations and fictionalized outfits, and earned a Costume Designers Guild Award nomination for the work. Here, she talks about how the “Wizard of Oz” impacted her, as did Luhrmann’s respect of crafts. Where did your love for fashion and design come from? “The Wizard of Oz” is such a seminal movie for me. I remember my father explaining to me how revolutionary it was to go from black and white to color, and that it was a real change. So when [Dorothy] opens the door, she’s…

The power of music on screen grows stronger each year. In the past 12 months or so, “Stranger Things” saw ’80s British icon Kate Bush become a superstar stateside as her song “Running Up That Hill” featured in one of the most talked about scenes of the year; “Yellowjackets” reenergized ’90s gems both well-known and temporarily forgotten; “Euphoria” continued to dominate Shazam; and classic artists such as Fleetwood Mac and Marvin Gaye found new audiences through placements on “Our Flag Means Death” and “Atlanta,” respectively. Songs that didn’t connect when they were released did so through appearances on trailers and video games. Ahead of the 13th Guild of Music Supervisors Awards, scheduled for March 5, Variety puts a spotlight on music supervisors who have been shaping the way viewers interact…

After five years of quietly gathering steam within the international TV community, the 2023 edition of the London TV Screenings is poised to be its biggest outing yet. Set to run Feb. 27 to March 3, the event will feature more than 25 distributors and 400 buyers. But how did the confab evolve from a set of casual screenings by rival distributors of the BBC into an event that now rivals MipTV in Cannes? Its genesis goes back to 1976, when BBC Showcase was created from 25 European buyers gathering in Brighton’s Old Ship Hotel to watch episodes of shows such as “Fawlty Towers” and buy such programs for audiences back in their home countries. The showcase then moved to other locations, including Edinburgh and Harrogate, before returning to Brighton,…