Innholdsfortegnelse for 10/25/2023 i Variety

It’s been 30 months since Season 1 of “Invincible” — the animated adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s comic book series — wrapped up on Prime Video, but don’t expect the show to spend time catching audiences up on the story when it finally returns Nov. 3. “Almost no consideration was made on that front,” says Kirkman, who also executive produces the show. Instead, Season 2 plunges viewers right back into the tumultuous life of high school senior and titular superhero Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun) — as well as the show’s no-holds-barred violence and cutthroat dramatic intrigue. As Kirkman explains, it’s all meant to keep “Invincible” distinctive in a superhero-saturated landscape. • How did the reception to Season 1 affect how you approached Season 2? It made me willing to push things…

The film business is always an unpredictable industry, but perhaps never more so than in a season where dual strikes have changed the landscape. Still, Variety maintains its yearly tradition of presenting an overview of the Oscar race by highlighting films that could draw two or more nominations in the top categories — picture, director, screenplay, acting and international feature film. With several movies still unseen and and buzz constantly shifting, this is by no means meant to be a complete list, but a snapshot of the moment. AIR (Amazon MGM Studios) “Air” follows Matt Damon as Sonny Vaccaro, a Nike employee that relentlessly pursues a partnership with budding NBA superstar Michael Jordan to birth the company’s now-iconic sneaker line, Air Jordan. Three-time Academy Award nominee and one-time winner Viola…

Industry players treading the floors of Le Meridien Delfina, the American Film Market’s new venue, will be besieged by aggressive funding offers and fliers tubthumping diverse landscapes and state-of-the-art facilities from all around the world — marketing tools promoting incentives and driving the heated battle for productions across the globe. The incentive wars have been raging for decades, with several U.S. states and leading producing nations — such as Canada, the U.K., France, Spain, Australia, New Zealand and Germany — battling over a $177 billion worldwide production pot being spent on film, scripted TV and docs in 2019 alone, according to consultants OlsbergSPI. Given the inherent link between total production spend and automatic funding systems as a crude percentage, that indicates that some $20 billion-$30 billion of tax credits, production…

The push for greater studio capacity and more ambitious large-scale facilities — both in the Paris region and throughout the country — is a key element of the France 2030 plan. As it stands, France is on track to offer more than two dozen studios by 2024, with flagship developments including the TSF Backlot 77. That sprawling installation, built on the site of a one-time airbase 38 miles east of Paris, will offer Parisian street facades and a number of standing sets encompassing different neighborhoods and architectural styles. The backlot will go live next summer, just weeks before the Summer Olympics puts one side of Paris on display to the world while curtailing production in other (often iconic) parts of town. The opportune timing has hardly been lost on municipal shooting…

TV REVIEW Limited series: Paramount+/Showtime (8 episodes; all reviewed); Oct. 27 With: Matt Bomer, Jonathan Bailey Circumstances throughout history have forced people to hide aspects of themselves. Yet, there is a cruelty in denying the truth of one’s being. Based on the novel by Thomas Mallon and adapted for television by Ron Nyswaner, “Fellow Travelers” is a sweeping love story spanning three decades. It’s a narrative about what it means to simultaneously spend a life completely with someone while entirely separate from them. The Washington, D.C.-set drama series is told through the perspectives of two very different men. Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller (Matt Bomer) is a charismatic federal bureaucrat whose hypermasculine charm enables him to tuck his sexuality away. In contrast, Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey) is the boyish new assistant to…

AWARDS CIRCUIT A late-release awards contender can move through Oscar season like a cat. It crouches low, waiting patiently for the right moment to pounce. With the deployment of a skillful campaign, yet-unscreened films waiting in the wings — notably “The Color Purple,” “The Iron Claw” and “Napoleon” — might execute the perfect strike, catching established front-runners like “Oppenheimer” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” by surprise. Throughout the expanded best picture era (post-2009), second- and third-quarter release dates have been the sweet spot for eventual Academy winners. Memorable examples are 2009’s “The Hurt Locker” (May) and last year’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (April). As October draws to a close, few of the contenders initially screened on the fall festival circuit have been critical flops. That means upcoming prospects…

In the fast-paced world of viral campaigns and emerging platforms, digital marketers are constantly refining their approach to draw in consumer engagement. Whether it’s for film, television or gaming projects, Hollywood employs cutting-edge strategies to attract audiences, especially when viewers are more empowered and able than ever to give direct feedback via social media. Leaders in the field, who will be honored at Variety Spotify’s Entertainment Marketing Visionary Awards on Oct. 26, are listening and pivoting when necessary, leading to some of the past year’s most memorable digital campaigns. Josh Goldstine, head of worldwide marketing at Warner Bros. Pictures Group, dared to use the word “hate” in trailers for “Barbie” early on and had tremendous success with it. Negative words are usually avoided in promotional material, yet “Barbie” trailers asserted…

When “Extra” interviewed Harrison Ford at his “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” premiere in June, the show was proceeding as usual: The actor, the reporter, the branded microphone, the cameras. Then suddenly everything changed — “Everything Everywhere All at Once” Oscar-winner Ke Huy Quan bounded into the frame and reunited with his co-star from 1984’s “Temple of Doom.” The moment went viral, and “Extra” had another feather in its cap. Once in a lifetime get? Not if you’re “Extra.” For the past 30 years, the syndicated entertainment news show has made its business chronicling every cultural event. There is the episode with Burt Reynolds, shot in the studio parking lot following a blackout; segments featuring a 19-year-old Taylor Swift singing; and a young Kim Kardashian vacuuming her family’s…

France’s VFX workforce has grown by leaps and bounds over the past three years, with much credit due to a 10% across-the-board tax rebate bonus for international productions that spend more than $2.1 million with local digital outfits. Of course, the fact that American studios could also benefit from the full 40% tax rebate wholly on post-production expenditures has only helped matters further, affording top-trained talent the chance to stay in (or, in many cases, return to) France, proving their mettle on lavish blockbusters shot elsewhere. The local VFX industry is “no longer viewed in the same way,” says the Yard founder and CEO Laurens Ehrmann. “Today, we get more work by word-of-mouth, as producers and editors pass along our name. Whereas before productions might spend the $2.1 million just…

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Without Swift and Scorsese, the October box office would have been a ghost town long before Halloween ever hit. It was thanks to two unconventional releases — Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour” and Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” one distributed by an exhibitor and the other backed by a major streaming service — that anyone went to the movies at all. It may get worse before it gets better. Hollywood hoped SAG-AFTRA and studios would resolve their contract negotiations by the end of October. But the strike drags on, preventing major stars from promoting their new films and adding to exhibitors’ anxieties about the upcoming holiday season. “The lack of any resolution in labor conflicts is bad news for movie theaters,” says Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at Boxoffice…

Oct. 18 Variety’s Hollywood and Antisemitism Summit 1 Hotel, West Hollywood Top Hollywood creatives, comedians, industry experts and leaders from the Jewish community gathered for the inaugural summit, presented by The Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation and Shine a Light Foundation. In her keynote conversation, Julianna Margulies said she’s been “disheartened” by Hollywood’s silence on antisemitism amid the Israel-Hamas war. “I hope I inspire other people to come out and talk and use their voice and use their platform to draw attention to this,” she said. “The West Wing” star Joshua Malina shared his hope to see more “substantively” Jewish stories on-screen. “In my admittedly limited experience, theater is doing a better job than TV and film these days,” Malina said. Oct. 16-19 Mipcom Cannes, France Saved by the strikes?…

In Hollywood, the only thing more fun than setting the status quo is disrupting it. Studios have traditionally released so-called prestige films in the fall and winter so that they would be fresh on the minds of Academy and guild members during voting season. But A24’s Oscar success with “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which debuted at SXSW a full year before it won the best picture trophy in March, has challenged that conventional wisdom. This year’s labor strife has further scrambled awards strategies, keeping talent on the publicity sidelines for many big contenders. Michael Schulman, author of the behind-the-scenes tell-all “Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears,” notes that the summer blockbuster season emerged in the ’70s with the release of “Jaws” and “Star Wars,”…

Shannen Boynton Head of Global Media Spotify Boynton oversees paid media, influencers and integrations at Spotify, which aims to connect with audiences through authentic storytelling and community-driven initiatives. For instance, Spotify’s Fuego Mixtape takeover recently gave users the chance for their selections to be featured as the Fuego playlist of the week. “The challenge is that the world moves so fast,” says Boynton. “What’s cool today is not always cool tomorrow, so it’s always a question of, when do you shift or pivot?” She notes: “Where we show up for the next generation needs to feel like a one-on-one engagement versus an advertisement.” Karen Bronzo Chief Global Marketing Officer, U.S. Networks and News Warner Bros. Discovery Following the $43 billion Warner Bros. Discovery merger in 2022, Bronzo went from leading…

International production spending in France hit record highs in 2022, resulting in 2,220 shooting days that crested above $1 billion in promised investment — and public initiatives had a major role to play. In early 2020, for example, France updated its Tax Rebate for International Production scheme, supplementing a 30% across-the-board rebate with an additional 10% — applicable on all eligible expenses — for productions that spent $2.2 million with local VFX and post houses. Clearly, such initiatives have already borne fruit, with (wholly) locally shot films like “The Nun II” in theaters before big-budget series such as Apple’s “The New Look,” Starz’s “The Serpent Queen” Season 2 and AMC’s “Monsieur Spade” hit airwaves. Local authorities are well into a campaign of internal improvement met with international outreach, all meant…

Everyone knows of France’s deep history and ongoing excellence in the cinematic arts, but the country has been gaining popularity in the last decade as a production hot spot, thanks to incentives, diverse locations and top-notch crew. On Nov. 14, Variety, production promotional org Film France CNC and Villa Albertine, a network for artists and ideas, team up for the French Experience, a day-long event digging into the benefits of production in France. Speakers include “The Nun II” helmer Michael Chaves, who will talk about filming the horror pic in France, as well as producer Denise Di Novi, whose upcoming FX limited series “The Veil” is filming in the country. Fueled in no small part by an across-the-board 30% tax rebate for international productions, with an additional 10% bonus to…