Another Paramount title, “SpongeBob: Sponge on the Run,” finally made its American debut as a Premium VOD for $19.99. It bested all premium titles and took #1 on the revenue-based FandangoNow chart. It’s the latest breakout success among animated films that includes “The Croods: A New Age,” “Soul,” and “Tom & Jerry.” “Raya and the Last Dragon” also debuted this weekend in theaters and on Disney+ for those subscribers willing to pay an additional $29....

“Cow” opens with the closeup of a gooey calf yanked from the vaginal canal, and follows her all the way through her rough, solitary existence. The small miracle of director Andrea Arnold’s experiential documentary is that it enacts its simple premise in straightforward terms, but assembles them into a profound big picture. Her subject, a dairy cow named Luma, grows up under the tutelage of farmers who seem, for all intents and purposes, looking out for her best interests....

Chosen by the Critics Choice Association, which was formed from the merged Broadcast Film Critics Association and Broadcast Television Journalists Association in 2019 and consists of 525 critics and entertainment journalists (including IndieWire’s own Kate Erbland, Eric Kohn, David Ehrlich, and Anne Thompson), the awards align a bit more with established critical opinion. That differentiates it a bit from the many guild awards this time of the year, as well as the Oscars, which are awards selected by industry members....

The actual story is more complicated. Spice DAO has acknowledged that it does not own any of the “Dune” characters, saying “while we do not own the IP to Frank Herbert’s masterpiece, we are uniquely positioned with the opportunity to create our own addition to the genre as an homage to the giants who came before us.” Instead, they appear to be planning to develop an original property based on Jodorowsky’s unique aesthetic vision for his “Dune” movie....

“[Spike] called me up to congratulate me and I said, ‘Well, man, I’m feeling bad because I thought for sure you guys would get nominated,’” Blanchard told IndieWire, calling from his home in New Orleans. “His response to me was, ‘Onward and upward. You’ve got to represent.’ And he said ‘congratulations,’ and that was it.” Many pundits and other Oscar watchers thought “Da 5 Bloods,” a nostalgic odyssey of four veterans returning to the teeming Vietnam jungle that earned a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for Best Ensemble, would nab at least a few more nominations on Oscar morning....

“It’s with great regret and heart-wrenching sadness for us and million of fans around the world, to announce that our client Dave Prowse MBE has passed away at the age of 85,” Prowse’s agents Bowington Management tweeted on Sunday. Other fans and cast members took to Twitter to pay tribute to Prowse, including Luke Skywalker actor Mark Hamill (“He was a kind man and much more than Darth Vader”) to “Star Wars” superfan Edgar Wright, who wrote, “As a kid Dave Prowse couldn’t be more famous to me; stalking along corridors as evil incarnate in the part of Darth Vader & stopping a whole generation of kiddies from being mown down in street as the Green Cross Code man....

The media company, which owns major television networks ranging from HGTV and TLC to Food Network and the Discovery Channel, reported $3.06 billion in revenue — a 21 percent increase from Discovery’s Q2 results last year. The company surpassed Wall Street expectations; analysts only predicted Discovery to report $2.97 billion in revenue, according to Yahoo Finance data. Discovery announced its Q2 earnings several months after the company rolled out its Discovery+ streaming service in the United States, which features a $4....