Variety 6/21/2023

When you’ve got DJ Khaled on the cover, you’ve gotta come out swinging. As we pay tribute to Khaled with our “Music Mogul of the Year” issue, we also want to take a moment for a victory lap for Team Variety. May marked our 12th consecutive month atop the leader board of the entertainment business news pack as measured by digital traffic. May is always a busy time for Variety, between the Cannes Film Festival and the New York upfronts and, as of May 2, the first Writers Guild of America strike in 15 years. Our site averaged 27.29 million unique visitors in the U.S. for the month, according to ComScore, with a significant margin against our major competitors. Not bad for a nearly 120-year-old brand, and a testament to…

Senior entertainment writer Adam B. Vary, who profiled “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” director James Mangold, considered becoming an archaeologist as a kid, but was scarred for life by “The Temple of Doom” and that was that on that. Associate art director Tarryn Silver worked on Variety’s Emmy Extra editions. “Planning these issues starts months in advance, so it’s satisfying to see all that hard work in print,” she says. “Big thanks to the #DreamTeam for making the process fun!” Visual director Jennifer Dorn, who wishes she were in Miami rather than gloomy Los Angeles, had the pleasure of working with photographer Devin Christopher for the first time on our cover shoot with DJ Khaled. “Photographing Khaled was a coming-of-age moment for me,” says Devin Christopher, who captured…

In the climax of “The Flash,” Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) watches helplessly as his timeline-hopping escapades cause several other superhero universes to careen into each other and become obliterated in the process. Ironically, Warner Bros. is facing almost an identical dilemma — and the stakes could be nearly as existential. “The Flash” is the second of four mega-budgeted DC adaptations the studio is set to release this year, starting with “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” in March, and followed by “Blue Beetle” and “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” in August and December. Yet these movies were conceived and greenlit by an executive team that all have departed the studio; in their place, new DC Studios chiefs James Gunn and Peter Safran have announced they will reboot the DC franchise in…

It’s hard to remember a time when fashion and beauty commentary were not ubiquitous. When red carpet pre-shows for the Oscars or the Met Gala were not the norm, or before anyone with a TikTok or Instagram account could be an obsessive pundit on celebrity style. Steven Cojocaru was there, however, at the beginning of this sartorial saturation. The Canadian writer and TV host, now 50, hustled tirelessly in his early career to get legacy media to take style as seriously as he did. He became People magazine’s first West Coast fashion editor in 1997 and was the first out gay fashion correspondent for NBC’s “Today” during the highly watched Matt Lauer and Katie Couric era. His persona was so vivid that Jimmy Fallon parodied him on “SNL” in 2001.…

“She’s 100% a professional,” said the actor Juliet Mills as she accepted Glenda Jackson’s first best actress Oscar on the winner’s behalf at the 1971 Academy Awards — an apt description of a newcomer who had markedly more interest in being a professional actor than in being a movie star. Jackson opted out of the fuss and frippery associated with A-list status, and when she tired of acting altogether, she quit as unassumingly as she arrived. She entered British politics as a Labour Party MP, with a sense of liberal-minded duty uncommon in the ranks of celebrities-turned-statesmen. Jackson’s ingénue years were spent in repertory theater before the Royal Shakespeare Company took her on. Her intensity onstage in “Marat/Sade,” as revolutionary Charlotte Corday, was repeated in the 1967 film version. She…

At the end of Boots Riley’s 2018 debut feature, “Sorry to Bother You,” Cassius (LaKeith Stanfield) gets stretched and mutilated beyond recognition until he becomes a horse — all in service of the film’s cutting narrative about how capitalism is crushing us all. In “I’m a Virgo,” Riley’s new Amazon Prime Video series, that stretching comes before the story begins: 19-year-old Cootie (Jharrel Jerome) is 13 feet tall, and he ends up under attack when the city of Oakland learns about the giant living in its backyard — again, all in service of a cutting narrative about how capitalism is crushing us all. “I believe that people should democratically control the wealth that we create with our labor,” says Riley, 52. The writer-director has identified as a communist since before…