"After furloughing around 80 percent of the chain's workers at once, and having survived the financial crucible of bankruptcy by selling itself to deep-pocketed backers, the company is poised to make good on its grandest ambitions to date. Such expansion, though, comes with a subtle but undeniable shift in corporate culture." - Vulture
"'We were informed that no political story is allowed,' says Emily*, an RTHK employee who, along with others interviewed for this article, asked for anonymity to speak freely. 'We think it's kind of funny because what isn't a political story now?'" - The Guardian
Billions of dollars are on the table for an industry that has historically been not just hostile but actively damaging to girls and women who wanted to game. Before this, "Girls couldn’t earnestly be gamers, goons maintained. Worse still, their twisted logic went, fake-gamer egirls were stealing views from real-gamer gamer boys." Now, thanks to TikTok and real-world changes,...
Constructing sets has become wildly more expensive: "A sheet of plywood was $20 or $30 in recent years but is now roughly three times as much. And it’s not just lumber: Everything from steel to glass to paint has jumped in price in the past few months." Of course, studios are now looking for other places to save. -...
Up through Disney's previous animated feature, Sleeping Beauty, each cell in a film had to be traced and copied by hand, often more than once, then inked and painted — and each movie used hundreds of thousands of cells. That got expensive: Sleeping Beauty cost $1 million more than it earned in its first release (and in 1959 that...
" has been approaching senior game industry executives about joining it to lead the creation of a subscription games service, according to reports. … One key decision that has not yet been finalised is whether a game subscription service would also require Netflix to develop games itself." - The Guardian
It seems good at first, right? Adding dimension to villains! "In theory, this is a positive shift, Disney’s attempt to offer its young audience lessons that aren’t so dependent on innate goodness, or telegraphing that goodness with physical attributes. But as this novelty has jelled into a house style, the unofficial ban on old-fashioned evil starts to feel a...
And those 17 movies — which include no less than Mystic River (with Sean Penn and Tim Robbins), Million Dollar Baby (Hilary Swank), and American Sniper (Bradley Cooper) — have earned a billion dollars or so all together, not to mention a few Oscars and plenty more nominations. Maybe not every one of the 39 films he's made over...
Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose Hamilton, filmed, made Disney+ a lot of money last year (and ensured musical theatre fans had something to watch over and over and over again while actual theatres were shuttered), says that he really wanted In the Heights to come out as scheduled. "I felt like I was back in my 20s — ‘No, please, let’s...
TV shows, TikTok, live mini-shows, Instagram Stories, and memes - comedy has changed. Even the second Borat movie, though it was made and was fairly popular, only shows that "the form itself is in transit, evolving and branching out into a multiplicity of approaches that reflect the diverse and pulsating world we now live in." - Prospect (UK)
Owen Gleiberman: "To go or not to go? To believe in the primacy of the communal, cathartic big-screen experience or to see it as a stodgy, unhip relic? No one thought this way about the movie theater versus VHS or DVD; the industry wasted no time transforming those technologies into ancillary markets that helped keep movies afloat. But streaming...
"Rather than offering an escapist vision of a world unravaged by pandemic, I've taken reassurance from the way these shows offer an escapist vision of pandemic. They present quarantine conditions as a utopia in which creative laborers, isolated in a single space for an extended period of time, yield art validated through external adjudication. They have 'flourished,' instead of...
Can a producers' union ever work in the biz? They need it. "More than 100 feature film producers ... recently ratified the constitution for a new union they hope will provide the kind of basic healthcare, pay and protections afforded by most other unionized Hollywood workers." - Los Angeles Times
Well, A Quiet Place II's boffo box office seems to indicate that people are sick of their living rooms and, one hopes, fully vaccinated and ready to go to the movies. - Variety
Honestly, among fans, the food is famous. "HBO is aware of the series' reputation, and continues to tweet things like 'The Mare of Easttown food pyramid: fries, peanut butter, spray cheese, vitamins, and beer' while legions of fans have taken to kicking back on Sunday nights with Rolling Rock and cheesesteaks." - Salon
