Innholdsfortegnelse for 01/26/2024 i Variety

It’s not the best time in Hollywood to be a cinematic universe. DC just flattened its own so studio chief James Gunn can reboot the timeline. Marvel Studios is licking its wounds after streaming busts and box office duds. Each banner only has one theatrical feature (“Joker: Folie à Deux” and “Deadpool 3,” respectively) slated for 2024. Sony Pictures, however, has three lined up, emerging as this year’s leader in the superhero space. But unlike Disney and Warner Bros., Sony isn’t presenting its films as installments in a years-spanning narrative architecture. “There may be some hesitation to emphasize the interconnectedness of these movies,” says Jeff Gomez, an executive transmedia producer and CEO of Starlight Runner. Gomez worked with Sony as a story consultant when the studio rebooted “Spider-Man” in 2017,…

AWARDS CIRCUIT “Oppenheimer” has surged ahead of its competition, potentially becoming one of the most dominant Oscar winners since “Slumdog Millionaire” (2008), which garnered eight statuettes. Looking at the state of the race post-nominations, the Universal Pictures blockbuster could make an even bigger impact. Christopher Nolan’s historical drama about the father of the atomic bomb leads the tally with 13, making it the 11th movie to reach such a gargantuan count. Six of the previous 10 films scored best picture wins, including “Gone With the Wind” (1939), “Forrest Gump” (1994) and “The Shape of Water” (2017). The four that lost — “Mary Poppins” (1964), “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966), “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” (2001) and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (2008) —…

Ask Oregon Film executive director Tim Williams why productions should shoot in the Beaver State, and he’ll spell it out in stark and simple terms. “The locations are diverse, and we have a 25% cash rebate, and it’s payable as quick or quicker than any other state that I know,” says Williams. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes slowed business down in 2023, but Oregon has seen a steady influx of film and TV productions in recent years, including Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning animated film “Pinocchio” (2022); the sci-fi feature “65” (2023), star-ring Adam Driver; director-star David Oyelowo’s “The Water Man” (2020) and Aidy Bryant’s Hulu series “Shrill” (2019-2021). “There have been sizable projects coming through, so I went from traveling a lot to staying at home,” says Ime Etuk, a…

The General 1926 A Civil War tale of a young man’s efforts to rescue his train and his girl from their captors, this silent comedy classic co-directed by and starring Buster Keaton was shot on the Oregon, Pacific & Eastern Railway in the Willamette Valley using three vintage locomotives purchased locally. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 1975 This Oscar-winning adaptation of Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel was filmed entirely on location in the state, primarily at the Oregon State Hospital in the capital city of Salem, a working psychiatric facility, with real patients appearing alongside a cast led by Jack Nicholson. National Lampoon’s Animal House 1978 The University of Oregon in Eugene stands in for Faber College in this profane comedy, with the former site of the Phi Sigma Kappa…

FILM REVIEW Director: Jesse Eisenberg Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin More actors than ever are now stepping behind the camera to take a shot at directing. Most of them are just OK at it, but then there’s that elite tier of actors — Greta Gerwig, Ben Affleck, Bradley Cooper — who turn out to be born filmmakers. To that hallowed company we can now add Jesse Eisenberg. “A Real Pain,” which he wrote, directed and co-stars in, premiered last week at Sundance, and it’s a delight and a revelation — a deft, funny, heady, beautifully staged ramble of a road movie about two Jewish cousins, David and Benji Kaplan (played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin), who are taking what someone calls a group “Holocaust tour” of Poland. The two also…

Jan. 18-21 Sundance Film Festival Park City, Utah Hollywood headed to the snowy mountains of the Beehive State for the 40th edition of the Robert Redford-founded fest. The opening-night gala honored Christopher Nolan and Kristen Stewart along with Celine Song and Maite Alberdi. Stewart was also celebrated by Variety at the magazine’s cover party, presented by United Airlines. “It supports marginalized voices. Voices that aren’t heard anywhere else,” Stewart told Variety about Sundance, where she has premiered more than a dozen movies throughout her career. “It’s a solidifying, communal feeling, and it only makes you stronger to go back into a world of a no and say, ‘I know that there’s a place for me.’”…

The Academy Award nominations were announced bright and early Jan. 23 and, as always, there were a few surprises in both who was and wasn’t included. Here, Variety breaks down the top categories. Picture In what might be the biggest surprise, there were no surprises at all in the best picture lineup, which matched the PGA Award nominations a perfect 10-for-10. As expected, powerhouses “Oppenheimer” (Universal) and “Barbie” (Warner Bros.) were included, along with Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” (Apple Original Films/Paramount Pictures) and “The Holdovers” (Focus Features), the latter of which has been quietly building steam all season. Also expected to make the cut were the Leonard Bernstein biopic “Maestro,” (Netflix), Venice winner “Poor Things” (Searchlight) and Celine Song’s acclaimed “Past Lives” (A24). It’s worth noting that…

A production coming to Oregon with an in-state spend of $1 million dollars or more doesn’t have to hire locally to qualify for the state’s incentive program, but it’s still likely to be staffed largely by Oregonians. “Over the last eight or nine years, in excess of 85% of the crews on larger movies have been locals,” says Tim Williams, exec director of Oregon Film, aka the Oregon Governor’s Office of Film & Television. “We have young members coming in all the time and a lot of them came in within the last few years,” says Portland-based Sierra Bay Robinson, a veteran costume designer who now works fulltime as the southern business agent for IATSE Local 488. But she says it’s hard to accurately measure the increase in membership for…

Even before Nike founder Phil Knight acquired the studio that would be renamed Laika in 2002, it was already a staple of the Oregon filmmaking landscape. Will Vinton Studios spent 30 years creating stop-motion animation staples such as the California Raisins, and that history and legacy permeates both Laika’s work and that of the other studios that make Oregon the stop-motion capital of the U.S. Since its rechristening in 2005, Laika has become one of the prominent stop-motion studios in the world, earning several Oscar nominations starting with the studio’s debut film, “Coraline.” As Dave Burke, COO and CMO of Laika, tells Variety, “The films we’re making are getting more and more complex in terms of the number of characters, shots and sets built.” Even two decades later, the spirit…

A DIFFERENT MAN Distributor: A24 Aaron Schimberg’s thought-provoking fable asks what it means to be “normal,” as a facially distinctive actor (modeled on Adam Pearson) undergoes an experimental procedure that leaves him looking like Sebastian Stan. The kind of oddball satire only A24 would dare to produce, it suggests the bizart-house version of a Woody Allen movie, wherein traditional jokes have been axed in favor of deliciously cringe-inducing scenes between this guy and the playwright next door (Renate Reinsve), who writes him a role he’s no longer right for. — Peter Debruge • THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MAGICAL NEGROES Distributor: Focus Features Kobi Libii’s comedy of racial images is as scandalous as “American Fiction,” only this one follows through on the outrage. Aren (Justice Smith), an aspiring sculptor, gets drafted…

Discovery Channel’s hit franchises, like “Gold Rush” and “Deadliest Catch,” feature plenty of blood and sweat. But where are the tears? That’s something Howard Lee immediately began asking, after taking control of the network at the end of 2022. As head of TLC, Lee helped grow the network to new heights thanks to blockbuster franchises like “90 Day Fiancé,” where emotion was his bread and butter. But Lee felt that there just wasn’t enough of it on Discovery. “I do think that men have a lot of emotions as well,” says Lee, who is now president of Discovery Networks (which includes Discovery, Animal Planet, Science and Travel channels) and TLC. “It is the one thing I do carry over from my DNA of TLC. I asked everybody if we were…

As the 96th annual Academy Award nominations were revealed on Tuesday morning, Martin Scorsese was in New York, the city that shaped his gutsy and gritty style of filmmaking. His latest epic, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” picked up 10 Oscar nominations, although lead actor Leonardo DiCaprio was snubbed. With his director nod, Scorsese has been recognized 10 times in the category, making him the most nominated living filmmaker, edging out Steven Spielberg. (At 81, Scorsese has been nominated at least once a decade since the 1980s, beginning with “Raging Bull” and now with “Killers.”) But as he achieved that feat, his thoughts returned to old friends from “the neighborhood,” those rough-and-tumble streets of Little Italy where he came of age. “The ones I knew are mostly gone, along with…

Oregon signaled it was serious about attracting production in 2022, when Gov. Kate Brown signed into law a bill significantly sweetening its incentives, officially known as the Oregon Production Investment Fund. This bill raised the base cash rebate on Oregon payroll for film and TV projects from 10% to 20%. If the producers are paying an aggregate of at least 6.2% in-state withholding taxes, the rebate gets bumped up to 26.2% under the Greenlight Oregon labor rebate program, established in 2005, which applies to salaries of both resident or non-resident employees, up to $1 million per person or entity. Additionally, projects can now also get a 25% rebate on production-related goods and services purchased through in-state vendors, including loan-out corporations registered to do business in the state. The amendment to…

TV REVIEW Drama: Prime Video (6 episodes; all reviewed); Jan. 26 Starring: Nicole Kidman, Sarayu Blue, Ji-young Yoo In her stunning and unsettling Prime Video limited series “Expats,” creator-writer-director LuLu Wang turns her lens on three American women living in Hong Kong whose lives are transformed into something so warped and raw that they are no longer able to cover the imperfections. As in her acclaimed 2019 feature film, “The Farewell,” Wang explores grief and pain in “Expats,” which is based on the novel “The Expatriates” by Janice Y.K. Lee. However, this series, the director’s first major project since she won the Indie Spirit Award for “The Farewell,” has none of that film’s delightful melancholy. Where “The Farewell” lent humor to its central character’s approach to life, “Expats” poignantly, sorrowfully…