Variety 04/17/2024

It’s time to polish up the torch. The Olympics This week’s cover story offers an inside look at how NBCUniversal is preparing to produce a Summer Games for U.S. viewers that will be a big departure from how the Olympics were presented in the television era. Brian Steinberg, senior TV writer, has been gathering string for months on NBCUniversal’s plans to reinvent the Games for the streaming era. Goodbye to anchor teams in matching jackets — hello, Snoop Dogg and Kelly Clarkson. As the story makes clear, NBCU leaders across the company know that they need to innovate to keep this event relevant for a generation that wants everything on demand. The piece also illustrates what a high-wire act the Games are for NBCUniversal, with billions of dollars in rights…

Mark Twain once quipped, “Age is a case of mind over matter. If you don’t mind it, it doesn’t matter.” When it comes to Martin Scorsese, age certainly isn’t making a difference. After landing 10 Oscar nominations for last year’s historical crime epic “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the 81-year-old director has mapped out his next several projects. Sources say he plans to shoot two films back to back: the first about Jesus, the second a Frank Sinatra biopic. The Oscar-winning director who helped usher in the Hollywood New Wave of the 1970s is looking to bypass the studio system and independently finance “Life of Jesus,” based on Shūsaku Endō’s 1973 book. He took the same approach with the 2016 drama “Silence” (which also was adapted from an Endō novel).…

Dan Abrams has enjoyed a tremendously successful career, which currently includes roles as chief legal analyst at ABC News and host of NewsNation’s “Dan Abrams Live.” But he knows it was the O.J. Simpson murder trial almost 30 years ago that put him on the map — and he has complicated feelings about it. “I’ve always had a little bit of guilt about the idea that the murders of two innocent people helped start my career,” says Abrams, who was working for Court TV at the time. “But it was a legal event, and I was covering the legal story.” Abrams obviously wasn’t the only one. There has never been a media frenzy quite like the one that surrounded Simpson, a once-beloved sports icon who was accused of killing his…

For an artist looking to break Coachella, it pays to enlist friends at a cutting-edge production firm. At this year’s festival (which began April 12-14 and repeats April 19-21), L.A.-based Silent House laid claim to designing and executing the elaborate productions for three of the four headliners. While its concepts for No Doubt skewed to a traditional rock-band setup, the studio went wild — and fully cinematic — for Doja Cat’s and Tyler, the Creator’s extravagant shows. The morning after the first weekend, Silent House’s designers unpacked just what went into the performers’ most feature-film-worthy scenes. Tyler’s stage design had the rapper dressed in a ranger uniform, sitting in a trailer in a Monument Valley-style desert. Just your average hiphop scenario, right? A filmed segment inside led to an expectant…

A little over 10 years ago, David Adjmi was on an airplane, listening to Led Zeppelin’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” and picturing Robert Plant recording the vocals. “It’s communicating desire and pain and anguish and torture and lust,” Adjmi says of the song. “I was thinking about all of these conflicting emotions and imagining him singing the raw vocal in a studio — the state he must have gotten into to sing it.” Adjmi then started envisioning the room — what it might look like — in his mind. He was captivated by the thought of using a recording studio as a dramatic landscape. “It felt high concept in a way that my ideas usually are not,” says Adjmi, a playwright best known for “The Evildoers” and “Marie Antoinette.”…

When Wattpad Webtoon Studios was preparing to release the drama “Float” last year, author Kate Marchant asked for a little help from her fans. The Lionsgate film was based on her story, and now she presented three movie posters to her followers, asking them to pick their favorite. “I can feel your readers shifting in their seats,” Aron Levitz, president of Wattpad Webtoon Studios, says with a laugh. “All those creative execs are going, ‘Wait a minute, people knew about it before it went out? Are you sure that’s OK?’” For Levitz, the answer is a resounding yes. His company is shaking up the traditional approach to creating film and TV adaptations by putting the power in the hands of fans. Just last month, the third movie in the “Through…