Apple's Flying Saucer
Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
Apple, MTV, and Lizzo.
Let’s go!
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THE INDUSTRY TLDR
Apple acquires Joseph Kosinski and Jerry Bruckheimer's untitled UFO project.
Silver Lake Management has closed a deal to take Endeavor Group private.
Netflix keeps riding along with Kevin Hart in the upcoming film 72 Hours.
Emmy Rossum (Shameless) is in talks to headline a new Hulu series from New Girl creator Liz Meriwether.
Colleen Hoover’s next film adaptation, Verity, scores a release date with Amazon MGM.
Lizzo is set to play Sister Rosetta Tharpe in Amazon MGM’s Rosetta.
David Leitch’s heist film casts Nicholas Hoult.
Jack Reynor will star in The Mummy, the reboot from Lee Cronin (dir: Evil Dead Rise).
Kaley Cuoco is set to lead a new mystery thriller series titled Vanished.
John Lithgow is reprising his role in Showtime’s spinoff series Dexter: Resurrection.
Andrey Zvyagintsev (dir: Leviathan) is in pre-production for his next movie, Minotaur.
Studiocanal has a new gritty family crime drama series, The Corsican Line.
French TV series The Deal wins Series Mania’s Buyers Choice Award.
MTV Doc Films picks up Predators, a documentary on the wild and popular show To Catch a Predator.
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
Apple is not slowing down on the spending. A few days after it was revealed they were losing roughly 1bn/year on Apple TV+, they plunked down dozens of millions of dollars for an untitled UFO project.
Here are the details:
Dir: Joseph Kosinski (Dir: Top Gun: Maverick): 8-figure deal
Producer: Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun 2, F1): mid-seven-figure deal
Writer Zach Baylin (King Richard): mid-seven figure deal
Apple topped every major studio with their bid. Plus, Kosinski, Bruckheimer, and Apple Studios are releasing F1, starring Brad Pitt, at the end of June, which may hit it very big.
If Kosinski can channel his knack for velocity into suspense, this UFO thriller will take off.
Silver Lake Management, a private equity firm, has closed a deal to take Endeavor Group private. The renamed entity, WME Group, includes WME and IMG Licensing.
The top executives score significant financial windfalls:
Ari Emanuel (Endeavor CEO)
$173.8M cash payout
Waived previously disclosed $25M bonus
Owns $290M stake in the private company
Current position: Executive Chairman of WME Group, CEO and Executive Chairman of TKO Group (UFC, WWE), and still an agent (Martin Scorsese, Dwayne Johnson etc.)
Patrick Whitesell (Executive Chairman of Endeavor and WME)
$100M cash payout
Exiting Endeavor to lead a new Silver Lake-backed investment venture where he backs entertainment/sports ventures
Silver Lake now holds approximately 87% of Endeavor’s voting securities. Consolidating TKO with Endeavor results in a combined enterprise value of approximately $25 billion, marking the largest public-to-private private equity transaction in over a decade and the largest ever in media and entertainment.
Tidbits:
Netflix keeps riding along with Kevin Hart in the upcoming 72 Hours. Directed by Tim Story (Ride Along 1 & 2), Hart will play a 40-year-old executive who hopes to save his flailing career when he ends up at a three-day bachelor party with twenty-somethings after being mistakenly included in their group text. The film is being produced by Sony under their first look deal with Netflix.
Shameless star Emmy Rossum is in talks to headline a new untitled Hulu series to be written and EP’d by Liz Meriwether who created shows like New Girl (2011-18) and The Dropout (2022). The new drama series feels more reminiscent of the latter as it is supposedly inspired by the movie Black Widow (1987), which follows an FBI agent who uses the secrets of a female serial killer’s past in order to find her. Rossum is all in on producing with her Composition 8 banner, with acting involvement not yet confirmed.
New Trailers/Clips:
Disney+’s Andor (Season 2) - trailer
April 22nd streaming date
Warner Bros.’ Sinners - trailer
April 18th release date
Mini Tidbits:
Theo Kingma, former HFPA president who championed artistic freedom and boldly navigated Hollywood controversies, unexpectedly passed away on March 21 at his LA home. He was 58.
Dates shuffle:
As the future of the Saw franchise is thrown into doubt, Lionsgate pulls Saw XI off its release calendar, replacing it with The Strangers: Chapter 2, premiering Sept. 26, 2025.
Street Fighter has been yanked from Sony’s schedule. One of their other films, Shiver, a shark thriller starring Phoebe Dynevor (Fair Play) and Djimon Hounsou (Blood Diamond), has set a date for Summer 2026.
Searchlight Picture’s adaptation and a Joe Pesci reboot:
https://theindustry.co/p/searchlight-pesci-hoover
THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT
There’s a little Lizzo in all of us. The Grammy-winning rap artist Lizzo is set to play Sister Rosetta Tharpe in her first big on-screen role for Amazon MGM’s Rosetta (IMDbPro link).
Here’s the synopsis:
A gospel singer's rise to rock n' roll pioneer, Sister Rosetta Tharpe breaks musical barriers while hiding a same-sex romance. Her groundbreaking guitar style and wedding-turned-stadium-concert make history.
Tharpe is considered the mother of rock and roll. And while Lizzo’s on-screen performances are sparse (stripper in Hustlers - clip and Jack Black’s wife in Manderlorian clip) she exudes a rowdy confidence that we can tell is a beautiful veil for immense vulnerability. Just watch her flip from singing to talking in this clip.
Many performers that do music biopics go on to mass success:
Jennifer Hudson – Dreamgirls (2006): won Oscar
Andra Day – The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021): Oscar-nominated
Diana Ross – Lady Sings the Blues (1972): Oscar-nominated
We wish Lizzo all the best with this performance. Here’s a fun clip of Sister Rosetta Tharpe strumming her heart out in 1964.
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David Leitch’s heist film casts Nicholas Hoult.
The team is top-notch:
Studio: Amazon MGM
Prod Company: Imagine Entertainment (American Made, A Beautiful Mind) + Leitch’s 87North
Dir: Leitch (Bullet Train, Atom Blonde)
Writer: Mark Bianculli (upcoming Cliffhanger reboot)
Synopsis:
A group of savvy bank robbers that use social media to document their heists, playing a cat and mouse game with police.
No word on who Hoult will play, but we loved him in Juror #2, as a jury member weighing whether to tell the truth at his own expense.
Tidbits:
Jack Reynor is the next Tom Cruise and Brendan Fraser. Reynor will star in The Mummy, the reboot from Lee Cronin (Evil Dead Rise) from Universal and Blumhouse. Cronin did an excellent job with his Evil Dead Rise reboot, so let’s just say his Mummy should be much less of a family fun romp. For his part, Reynor was quite excellent as the lackadaisical boyfriend in Hereditary. Producing kicks off in Ireland with a release date of April 17, 2026.
The Big Bang Theory’s Kaley Cuoco and Me Before You’s Sam Claflin are set to lead a new mystery thriller series titled Vanished as a couple on a romantic getaway that quickly turns dark after a suspicious disappearance. The series was created and written by David Hilton and Preston Thompson (Kids in Love) with the latter’s brother Barnaby Thompson set to direct. Production on Vanished is set to start at the end of April in Paris.
First, they had to find a young Elle; next was her dad… The Summer I Turned Pretty’s Tom Everett Scott has officially been tapped to play Elle Woods's dad in the upcoming Legally Blonde prequel series Elle. Starring Lexi Minetree in the titular role, Jason Moore (Pitch Perfect) will direct the first two episodes of the show from Amazon Studios and Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine.
The Trinity Killer and former ADA Miguel Prado, two diabolical lawbreakers, are making their troublesome return to the Dexter universe. Trinity’s John Lithgow (Conclave) and Prado’s Jimmy Smits (Sons of Anarchy) are reprising their roles in Showtime’s spinoff series Dexter: Resurrection, which is currently filming.
INTERNATIONAL NEWS
Andrey Zvyagintsev, who wrote and directed Leviantahn (Cannes, Best Screenplay, 2014) and Loveless (Cannes Jury Prize, 2017), is in pre-production for his next movie, Minotaur, a political fable between police thriller and classic tragedy.
Synopsis:
Gleb, a Russian company director about to fire his employees, who discovers that his wife is having an affair.
Zvyagintsev's films are typically characterized by their deep exploration of complex human relationships and moral dilemmas, often set against the backdrop of contemporary Russian society.
Production is set to begin in September.
Family crime dramas almost always do well and Studiocanal’s gritty new series The Corsican Line looks like it will follow suit. Led by Furies breakthrough star Lina El Arabi and Raphaël Acloque (24: Legacy) the show will expose the ruthless mafia underworld in the spectacular setting of Corsica. The eight-episode season will play on Canal+ with no premiere date yet announced.
New Pictures' six-part thriller series Protection, based on real-life experiences, makes a deal with All3Media International, the sales arm of the powerhouse studio behind Fleabag. The witness protection series explores the consequences when the system is unsuccessful. The sale follows the series’ critically acclaimed UK debut with deals made with BritBox for the US and English-speaking territories.
The new high-stakes BBC drama The Cage announces Sheridan Smith (Cilla) and Michael Socha (Showtrial) as its leads. The Element Pictures (Poor Things) crime series was written and created by BAFTA-nominated Tony Schumacher (The Responder).
Also good news for in-house BBC performers who received a 13% increase in episodic fees.
INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT / FESTIVALS
The Sundance acquisitions keep rolling in, with MTV Doc Films picking up Predators, a documentary on the wild and popular television To Catch a Predator.
The film is an investigation into our unsettling obsession with true crime and how that can cross journalistic boundaries, as was the case with the 2004-2007 hit Dateline NBC series To Catch a Predator, which lured child predators into a film set with actresses posing as underage girls.
The co-heads of MTV Documentary Films stated:
“Expos[es] the underbelly and ethical complexities around one of the most watched news shows on television.”
The director, producer, and editor is David Osit (2015’s Thank You For Playing).
MTV, for their part, is going full force on this film, with an aggressive awards campaign and a full theatrical release this fall before it streams on Paramount+ with showtime.
Buffalo 8 (Woman of the Hour, BlackKklansman) is taking on North American distribution for thriller black comedy Don’t Trip written and directed by Alex Kugelman (assist. The Happytime Murders) in his feature debut.
Described as an exposé of the entertainment business similar to The Player (1992) or The Disaster Artist (2017), Don’t Trip follows a struggling writer who befriends a film producer’s eccentric son.
Buffalo 8 will reveal the film’s release date soon.
French TV series The Deal wins Series Mania’s Buyers Choice Award.
Here’s the synopsis:
Geneva, April 2015. During tense US-Iran nuclear negotiations, Swiss diplomat Alexandra Weiss faces complications when her endangered former love unexpectedly arrives.
Gaument, who served as the production company and distributor, is also the sales rep, with hopes of the show making a splash internationally. Check out the project here.
Tidbit:
Quiver Distribution (Daisy Ridley’s Cleaner) has picked up Off the Record, an indie centering on an indie musician living in LA who has it made, except for the herculean task of creating a name for yourself in the music business. Directed by Kirsten Foe (stunts: Showtime’s Twin Peaks). No word on the release date.
ON THIS DAY
1908. David Lean (dir: Lawrence of Arabia) born in Croydon, England.
See you tomorrow!
Written by Gabriel Miller, Spencer Carter, and Madelyn Menapace.
Editor: Gabriel Miller.
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