Innholdsfortegnelse for 01/18/2024 i Variety

AWARDS CIRCUIT Oscar nominations are upon us: Expect the unexpected. Every year, Oscar voters prove awards prognosticating is more of an art than a science. There’s always someone whose morning is ruined when noms are announced, and a fair number who didn’t expect to be popping Champagne. So what surprises are in store? I predict four movies will earn more than 10 nominations each: “Barbie” (11), “Killers of the Flower Moon” (10), “Oppenheimer” (13) and “Poor Things” (10), marking the second time that many films have surpassed double digits in one year. The first was in 2019, when “The Irishman,” “Joker,” “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” and “1917” achieved the feat. Interestingly, all lost best picture to “Parasite,” the first non-English language victor. Does that bode well for the…

FILM REVIEW Directors: Samantha Jayne, Arturo Perez Jr. Starring: Angourie Rice, Reneé Rapp, Auli’i Cravalho When you see a movie-to-musical transformation that really works, a surprising alchemy occurs. It can feel as if that story was always made to be told through song and dance; when you think back on the non-musical version, it can now seem like it’s missing something. That’s the sensation I’ve had at movies-turned-Broadway-musicals like “Hairspray,” “School of Rock” and “Back to the Future,” and the same dynamic works, in a clever if less spectacular way, in “Mean Girls,” the movie adaptation of the 2018 Broadway musical version of the classic 2004 screen comedy. Will the new movie replace the original film in anyone’s affections? That might depend on how old you are. (For some, the…

TV REVIEW Dramedy: Hulu (10 episodes; 8 reviewed); Jan. 16 Starring: Violett Beane, Mandy Patinkin, Lauren Patten Hulu’s “Death and Other Details” is a murder mystery about powerful families and generations of secrets. Fast-paced and complex, the series ebbs and flows between delightful chaos and complete bewilderment. Yet, despite the uneven pacing and other missteps, the whodunit of it all should keep audiences interested. The show, which was created by Mike Weiss and Heidi Cole McAdams, opens two decades in the past. Rufus Coteworth (Mandy Patinkin), the “world’s greatest detective,” arrives at the Collier estate to speak with 10-year-old Imogene Scott (Sophia Reid-Gantzert) about her mother’s suspicious death. From there, the series zips forward to the present. Imogene (Violett Beane), now 28, arrives at a Mediterranean port to board the…

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,”…

June Squibb insists on doing her own stunts. “I never think of myself as being old,” says the 94-year-old Oscar-nominated actor as she heads to Sundance for the premiere of her new film “Thelma.” It’s an adventure movie that proves kicking ass isn’t just a young person’s game. In it a grandmother loses $10,000 in a phone scam, prompting her to set out on a treacherous quest to get her money back. It’s fitting that Squibb, who gets the first starring role of her seven-decade screen career, was willing to perform action scenes that could have left her with titanium hips, because “Thelma” cheekily references and riffs on the gravity-defying sequences of “Mission: Impossible.” “Tom Cruise jumping out of a plane is as dangerous as my grandma getting onto a…

Jan. 9 Governors Awards The Ray Dolby Ballroom, Hollywood Angela Bassett, Mel Brooks and film editor Carol Littleton received honorary Oscars at the 14th annual gala, while longtime Sundance exec Michelle Satter was presented with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. “I was looking around my house and said, ‘Oh, the living room? No, I don’t go in there enough,’” Bassett told Variety when asked where she’ll keep her gold statuette. “So it’s going to be in the kitchen! We spend a great deal of time in there.” “Origin” director Ava DuVernay said she’d love to direct Bassett someday: “It’s got to be a drama, and because of the physicality, it has to be a swashbuckling, globe-trotting adventure. I would put her in boots, and I would give her a map,…

When trying to predict best picture Oscar winners, the guilds can provide guidance. Last year’s victor, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” started its march to the Dolby Theater stage on a path laid out by guild wins, including Producers Guild, DGA, SAG and Makeup and Hair trophies. All four of those guilds have unveiled their nominees, and “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” dominated, as they seemingly have everything movie related since their simultaneous release last summer. If you drill down deeper, there are some interesting developments, such as the first two international film nominees for the main PGA trophy (“Anatomy of a Fall” and “The Zone of Interest”), plus a female director among the main DGA film nominees (Greta Gerwig for “Barbie”) and four women securing nominations in the first-time category after…

FILM REVIEW Director: Lila Avilés Starring: Naíma Sentíes, Mateo Garcia, Iazua Larios Presented largely from the point of view of two children, Mexican director Lila Avilés’ intimate, emotionally rich “Tótem” immerses audiences in a boisterous family gathering, where a handful of adult siblings have gathered to celebrate the birthday of their brother, a painter named Tonatiuh (Mateo Garcia). “Tona” is barely seen for most of the movie, confined to a back room where he refuses visitors. Naturally, this confuses 7-year-old Sol (Naíma Sentíes), who spends the day wandering the house alone, building a pillow fort in the living room or collecting snails in the garden. “Sometimes I feel like my dad doesn’t love me when he says he doesn’t want to see me,” Sol confides to her father’s trusted nurse,…

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…

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,…

Not much is funny about those terrifying early days of COVID, when the world was cloaked in an apocalyptic doom and the president was telling us to drink bleach. But in “Stress Positions,” Theda Hammel miraculously finds the funny side of lockdown, mining the masks, Purell and social distancing that defined that unhappy era for physical comedy. “Those gestures are like balloons, and they’re filled with the sense of danger and a sense of peril,” Hammel says of the Sundance-bound film that she directed and co-wrote. “And as soon as the urgency drains away, these behaviors seem ridiculous.” “Stress Positions,” which follows a 30-something gay man named Terry (John Early) who is trying — and largely failing — to look after his injured Moroccan nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash) when the…

IT’S A FUNDAMENTAL BUSINESS PRINCIPLE: When hard times hit, leaders of struggling companies feel the urge to merge with stronger rivals. As the new year begins, Hollywood’s largest media conglomerates are hip-deep in a cycle of merger-and-acquisition mania after years of disruption in traditional TV and film, and a particularly chaotic year in 2023. But in the present climate, is getting bigger really the answer? It’s becoming clear to many that dealmaking to bulk up on content and distribution assets is no longer the cure for the industry’s problems that it’s been since the 1990 nuptials of Time Inc. and Warner Communications; the threat to Hollywood’s old ways of making money posed by the rise of streaming platforms is too dire and too fundamental. Yet old habits die hard. The…

The 75th Emmy Awards were a genuinely heartfelt celebration of television — which sounds like it should be a given for an awards show honoring TV, but hasn’t been put in practice in the show’s recent years. But during the Jan. 15 program, the Emmys’ night of nostalgic tributes worked from start to finish, and the winners’ sincere speeches felt like a breath of fresh air. The day after the ceremony, Variety’s TV critics convened to hash out the show’s highlights. ALISON HERMAN: The Emmys were never supposed to be in January, but because of the actors strike, the ceremony was pushed from its standard September air date. The delay led to some awkwardness around the already confusing eligibility window — Jennifer Coolidge ended up winning supporting actress in a…