Media

Production is paused for the role in Rebel Ridge to be recast and reshot. The Small Axe star left for family reasons, he said – The Guardian (UK)

The government review of the planned Discovery-Warner Bros merger could take more than a year, and subscribers are abandoning Discovery’s cable channels (and cable in general) in droves. Then there’s the huge debt – and the companies’ culture clashes. – Los Angeles Times

“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, things are different. – Wired

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. – The Hollywood Reporter

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 was serious money). For Dalmatians, animators used Xerox cameras to copy the drawings for cells, saving so much labor and expense that the studio used the technique for the next 30 years, even though Walt didn’t care for the look. – Smithsonian Magazine

“[The streaming giant] 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 little like an unholy cross between bothsidesism and aggressive branding. After all, why should any Disney characters inspire fear or apprehension, when they can be turned into franchise-friendly dolls?” – Slate

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 50 years is a masterpiece, but some certainly are (Unforgiven), and the overall quality has been impressively high. What’s more, they aren’t just action films, westerns, and war movies: Eastwood, remember, directed The Bridges of Madison County and Jersey Boys. – Variety

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 put on the show!’ Next summer felt like forever away, and I was, like, ‘But it’s good! And the world needs it!’ But I’m grateful that cooler heads than mine kicked the movie down the field a year.” – Yahoo! (Chicago Tribune)

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

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

We don’t avoid telling stories about difficult topics. “There have been numerous movies about slavery, about Jim Crow, about the Vietnam War. There have even been movies about America’s inaction to the genocide in Rwanda, a story whose national footprint is likely much smaller than that of the Tulsa massacre’s. Yet when it comes to the more than 30 race-related massacres that occurred in this country between 1917-1921, even before the one in Tulsa, there has only been one movie made: John Singleton’s 1997 Rosewood, about the 1923 race massacre that destroyed the town of Rosewood, Florida.” We need more. – Slate

Both on Master of None and Solos, even when the pandemic isn’t in the script, it affects everything. New seasons feel “intriguingly defined by current events, and yet similarly handicapped by them.” It’s not easy to make TV during a global pandemic, but, says a critic, “All I want now, watching shows after 14 months of social withdrawal, is to be allowed into people’s lives again, to feel something intense and unfamiliar, to be granted even a fleeting attachment to someone I don’t know. … We’re not supposed to get through this kind of thing all by ourselves.” – The Atlantic

The problem is a new variant: “After delays caused by Covid, the festival confirmed it would take place in early July, but France has announced a seven-day isolation period for visitors from the UK in response to rising concerns over the Covid variant B.1.617.2, first detected in India. The move is likely to affect thousands, both among the press corps and industry delegates, and large numbers of unregistered attendees.” – The Guardian (UK)

Yes, that’s right, the long-running sitcom (still massively popular with Millennials and Gen-Zers thanks to streaming) is useful for English language-learners around the world. “The dad jeans and cordless telephones may look dated, but the plot twists — falling in love, starting a career and other seminal moments in a young person’s life — are still highly relatable.” – The New York Times

There’s a bad review of Paddington 2? Yes” “The new Paddington 2 review slammed the warm-hearted adventure film for having deviated from the spirit of Michael Bond’s children’s books, being ‘contrived and ridiculous,’ with Paddington being ‘over-confident, snide and sullen,’ claimed ‘considerations of race and identity, key to the Paddington character, are not addressed,’ and added that voice actor Ben Whishaw sounded ‘like a member of some indie-pop band coming down from an agonizing ketamine high.'” – The Hollywood Reporter

It’s not common for Italian shows to have mostly Black casts, but the new show Zero does – and makes the invisibility of Black Italians a superpower. – NPR

Amazon desperately needed content, but will the Bond plan work? “Bond is a treasure trove, unexploited beyond the 25 feature films focusing on its star, which Amazon would dearly love to develop into a Marvel- or Star Wars-like ‘universe” ‘The only problem is that Bond is partly owned by Eon Productions in the UK, which is run by Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, who exercise strict control over how the character is used – even down to choosing the actor who plays him.” – The Guardian (UK)