Posts

With this week’s drop to standard pricing, the volume of new business for the Ryan Reynolds comedy must be considerable: The Vudu chart calculates by total revenue and favors premium VOD titles, but the now-cheaper $5.99 “Free Guy” topped five titles that cost $19.99. Among debuts, “Copshop” (Open Road/$19.99) with Gerard Butler bested “Dear Evan Hansen” (Universal/$19.99) for initial response. Action-thriller “Copshop” placed on two charts (#5 at Vudu, #9 at Google Play), while “Hansen” failed to make any top 10....

Sorkin delivers a powerful Oscar contender as a great cast runs with his brilliant dialogue that serves witty real-life characters and high-pitched drama. While Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay nods are in the bag, Netflix hasn’t yet decided how to play out the Oscar categories for this wide-ranging cast. It’s likely the awards team will push the most established stars for Best Actor: Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne (“The Theory of Everything”) as Tom Hayden and Original Screenplay Oscar nominee Sacha Baron Cohen (“Borat”) as Abbie Hoffman....

The Inclusion Policy covers four primary areas: Development, hiring and production, reporting and documentation, and meeting goals. Specific goals include casting actors whose identities align with the characters they will play, hiring 30% women and 30% people of color on films and series with three or more above the line creators, including at least one speaking role for a character from stated underrepresented groups, pay equity across cast and crew, and getting bids from women-owned companies as vendors....

“American Gigolo,” the Showtime series, states in its flashy opening credits (set to the film’s hit theme song, “Call Me” by Blondie) that it’s “based on characters created by Paul Schrader,” the writer and director of the original film. Who those characters are, I have no idea. The new show stars Jon Bernthal as Julian Kaye, and it’s not just the added “e” on the end of his surname that demarcates this so-called gigolo from Gere’s....

Yes, you read that right. Our favorite childhood aardvark icon is leaving third grade now that the beloved PBS animated series is coming to a close. The final season will conclude with a four-episode flash-forward to reveal the grown-up versions of Arthur and his friend group. Arthur, potentially married, dealing with taxes, and tired from a real-life job?! We can’t wrap our brains around it, either. Thankfully, audiences will have the chance to relive Arthur’s adolescence as part of a special 25th-anniversary marathon featuring over 250 episodes and movie specials....

Yet it was a breakthrough achievement for Fincher’s go-to cinematographer from “Mindhunter.” Messerschmidt recreated a Golden Age of Hollywood in black-and-white, shooting with the RED Ranger Helium Monochrome, and bolstered by the Cinefade variable depth of field tool to emulate Gregg Toland’s iconic “Pan-Focus” for “Kane.” Crucially, the cinematographer struck a balance between retro and modern, taking advantage of the director’s efficient digital workflow to approximate the look of a movie made around the time of “Kane” in 1940 yet “Photographed in Hi-Dynamic Range....

The $6.99 female-assassin action film, which debuted September 25, placed #1 at the three transactional sites (AppleTV, Google Play, and Spectrum) and second at FandangoNow, which lists by revenue. Other recent titles like “The Outpost,” “The Tax Collector,” and “The Silencing” have thrived for multiple weeks, but none topped the charts for two weeks. Beating out “Ava” at FandangoNow, thanks to its $19.99 price point, is “Antebellum.” In its third week, it’s also #2 at Spectrum....