Variety 01/18/2024

CO-EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Cynthia Littleton Ramin Setoodeh Congratulations to HBO, “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong, team “Beef” and to all the hardy souls who worked the line on “The Bear.” It was worth the extra-long wait for the 2023 Emmy Awards to see great shows feted and stars including Quinta Brunson, Niecy Nash-Betts and Ali Wong land meaningful wins. The pileup of awards shows and January events such as CES and the Sundance Film Festival have made for a busy start to the new year. The fact that the Emmy Awards were handed out on Jan. 15, instead of the usual mid-September, is a reminder of all the tumult of 2023 and the strikes that upended Hollywood’s traditional calendar. The hustle and bustle of the first few weeks of the year has given…

Business editor Todd Spangler collaborated on this week’s M&A cover story. As a follower of media and tech megadeals going back to the ill-fated AOL Time Warner combo, nothing would surprise him. TV editor Michael Schneider would like to remind everyone that as the delayed 2023 Emmys finally wrap, we’re just days away from the 2024 Emmy campaign season. Howard Stern recently shouted out senior editor Marc Malkin’s “very energetic” red-carpet reporting. “The guy is into his gig,” the king of all media said. “I dig that.” Malkin digs it too. Associate art director Doug Thomson designed our Emmy arrivals and party coverage this week. “It’s fun going through pics the day after and hoping that someone wore or did something crazy,” he says.…

About a decade ago, Zack Snyder developed a storyline for the DC Extended Universe that involved Bruce Wayne impregnating Lois Lane. The subplot in which Batman cuckolds Superman was poised to unfold in “Justice League,” with Batman dying in the sequel and Lois raising their spawn with Superman. Snyder’s vision for Wonder Woman was equally unorthodox, with visuals featuring a superheroine who brandished the decapitated heads of her conquered enemies like an ISIS jihadi. Warner Bros. and DC Studios — which hold a firm grip on their intellectual property — rejected Snyder’s ideas, which were deemed “super creepy,” according to a source familiar with the back and forth. (DC declined to comment for this story.) But in the next decade, artists and rival studios won’t need permission to create their…

WINNIE-THE-POOH The beloved character became fair game to use in the 2023 slasher film “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” after A.A. Milne’s 1926 classic entered the public domain in 2022. “FRANKENSTEIN” (1818) Mary Shelley’s novel can be adapted by anyone. But Universal has a stranglehold on the imagery most associated with Dr. Henry Frankenstein’s creation thanks to its series of movies beginning in 1931. “THE WIZARD OF OZ”(1939) Any producer outside of MGM looking to remount the classic won’t be able to use Dorothy’s ruby slippers, which are not in L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel. In 2013, Disney released “Oz the Great and Powerful,” a prequel that had to avoid infringing on the film’s copyright and was instead based on the Baum books. CINDERELLA Sony made a 2021 film starring pop…

The future of media, tech and advertising — both their promise and peril — was the topic of the day at the Variety Entertainment Summit at CES 2024, held during the technology industry’s huge annual confab in Las Vegas. Speakers at the all-day summit included Roku Media president Charlie Collier; Reddit CEO Steve Huffman; Rita Ferro, Disney’s president of global advertising; John Harrison, EY’s Americas leader for media and entertainment; and TikTok star Leenda Dong. Here are key takeaways from the Jan. 10 event. STREAMERS TAKE BIGGER BITE OF AD PIE Netflix advertising president Amy Reinhard revealed that the company has more than 23 million monthly active users globally on its ad tier (up from 15 million two months ago). “Scaling our business is absolutely our biggest priority right now,”…

You’d be forgiven if you thought butter was a carb — just like it’s totally understandable if you didn’t know the new “Mean Girls” is a musical. That’s intentional. Paramount, which is releasing the movie, chose not to explicitly market it as a song-and-dance spectacle, according to the studio’s president of global marketing, Marc Weinstock. “To start off saying musical, musical, musical, you have the potential to turn off audiences,” he says. “I want everyone to be equally excited.” Despite the cultural prominence of Tina Fey’s 2004 comedy, which propelled Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried to stardom, Weinstock’s job — selling the masses on (and clearing up any confusion about) “Mean Girls” — is trickier than trying to make fetch happen. The story is the same. Cady Heron,…