Cameron Diaz is Back
Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
A Cover Story on Cameron Diaz’s return to acting.
In The Industry News: Disney’s Q4. Friday Night Lights reboot. Netflix’s Freedom.
Actor Spotlight: From Sansa Stark to Lara Croft. Pamela Anderson Showgirl. Jeremy Piven fights dinosaurs.
Festivals: Todd Haynes at Berlin. Film Independent Fast Track.
Tech Section: Another AI rant about an edit tool.
Indie Filmmaker Spotlight/International News: Briarcliff Entertainment’s My Dead Friend Zoe, Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl.
Let’s go!
CAMERON DIAZ IS BACK
Cameron Diaz hasn’t acted in a decade.
But this January, she will star in Netflix’s Back In Action with co-star Jamie Foxx. The film centers on the splashy return of a retired spy.
Diaz first burst onto the scene as the electric yet sensitive love interest in the Jim Carrey classic The Mask (iconic entrance scene). Diaz’s character, which could easily have fallen victim to overly simplified 90s typecasting, is surprisingly layered.
But it was her neurotic, frumpy performance as Lotte in Being John Malkovich (1999) that demonstrated immense range.
Sharon Waxman, the author of Rebels on the Backlot, explained how director Spike Jonze helped her realize this transformation:
“Jonze finally asked Diaz not to be Diaz. He kept asking her to subtract elements of her personality; not to pucker her lips, not to perch on her hips—things she leaned on to emphasize her sexuality. ‘We started pushing the character,’ said Jonze. And Diaz was willing. Jonze found that he could see a common thread between Lotte and Diaz. ‘What Cameron is that Lotte is is this very caring person that's very open with herself emotionally. She's not driven by her neuroses as much as she's driven by wanting to make sure everyone’s happy.’”
Diaz's transformation for the role was so profound (still) that she often went unrecognized by the production team and even the studio chief.
But after fifteen years of taking on a range of projects, from Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002) to Bad Teacher (2011) to Annie (2014), she quit acting.
Speaking with Kevin Hart in 2021, she explained the decision:
“When you do something at a really high level for a long period of time, when you’re the person that’s sort of delivering on this one thing, everything around, all parts of you that isn’t that, has to sort of be handed off to other people. Just, the management of me as a human being… Cameron Diaz is a machine. But for my personal, spiritual self, I was realizing that one part of me that functioned at a high level wasn’t enough.”
After a decade-long hiatus, Cameron Diaz, presumably centered, returns to the big screen. And we’re lucky to have her back.
She flourishes through reinvention.
For More:
Trailer for Diaz and Foxx in Netflix's Back in Action. On Netflix January 17th 2025.
Cameron Diaz and Jim Carrey tear up the dance floor in The Mask (1994).
Diaz is nearly unrecognizable in the Being John Malkovich trailer. Blink, and you’ll miss her.
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
Disney Q4 2024 results. And the change from last year:
$10.83 bn entertainment revenue
↑ 14%
$1.1bn entertainment operating profit
↑ $236 M
174 million Disney+ Core and Hulu subs
↑4.4 M
37% ad supported US
30% ad supported globally
52 M subs - Hulu
↑900K
$253 M streaming profit (not including sports)
$321 M total profit (w/ ESPN+)
↑ from $387 M loss
So what’s stopping Disney from hitting the stratosphere? Linear TV.
Disney CEO Bog Iger stated:
“In Q4 we saw one of the best quarters in the history of our film studio, improved profitability in our streaming businesses, a record-breaking 60 Emmy Awards for the company, the continued power of live sports…”
Disney noted that Pixar’s Inside Out 2 and Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine broke numerous box office records and helped drive $316 M in film studio profit.
After the viral success of Hulu’s Tell Me Lies, Emma Roberts and her Belletrist Productions are looking to bring another female driven story to television, in development on One Fifth a series adaptation of Candace Bushnell’s novel One Fifth Avenue. Bushnell is most famously known for her column and book Sex and the City, which would, of course, turn into the hit Emmy winning HBO series as well as the current Max sequel show, And Just Like That. While Roberts is in talks to also star, nothing has been confirmed.
Netflix dives into a real-life action epic with Six Minutes to Freedom. The film adapts a gripping account of an American expat’s rescue by Delta Force during the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama. Jared Rosenberg (writer: Mel Gibson’s Flight Risk - 2024) is set to write the screenplay. Expect a heart-pounding journey that showcases unparalleled bravery and the relentless pursuit of freedom.
A Friday Night Lights reboot is in the works from original series creator Peter Berg, showrunner Jason Katims and EP Brian Grazer. Currently being pitched as a TV series to the studios/streamers. Watch the trailer for the original series here. Note that this is a fan made trailer, which we rarely post but whoever cut this to the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Immigrant Song deserves credit.
Two projects are moving into production:
Blood on Snow
Dir: Cary Fukunaga
Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Bullet Train), Tom Hardy (Locke)
Status: Now filming in London
Madden
Dir: David O. Russell (American Hustle)
Cast: Nicolas Cage
Status: Shooting in January
Here’s a full break down on these projects:
https://theindustry.co/p/cary-fukunagas-blood-david-o-russells
Mythic Quest Season 4 and DLC: Apple TV's video game workplace comedy Mythic Quest Season 4 returns in January. All cast is planned to return including EP and star Rob Mcelhenney. After finally achieving success the Mythic Quest team will have to work together to check egos and keep the MMO crown. On March 26, as Mythic Quest wraps, the four-episode anthology spinoff Side Quest debuts, focusing on the players most impacted by the game (still). Apple TV+ will premiere Mythic Quest Season 4 on January 29, 2025, with two episodes, followed by weekly releases through March 26.
Here was season 3's trailer.
THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT
From Sansa Stark to Lara Croft, Sophia Turner is set to star as the iconic protagonist in Prime Video’s highly-anticipated video game series adaptation Tomb Raider. From Emmy-winning Fleabag’s creator and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the series was described as a passion project when it was originally picked up by Amazon MGM back in May.
The Do Revenge actress has just dipped her toes in the film world, but has seemed to really excel in TV. Turner currently headlines the British CW crime drama, Joan (trailer), as the titular role she plays a twenty something unpromising mother trapped in a disastrous marriage with a violent criminal.
Turner is already collaborating with Amazon in their upcoming crime drama, Haven, which follows the actress as a FBI agent sent to Haven, Maine.
Best known for her major role as Sansa Stark in HBO’s epic fantasy series Game of Thrones (2011-2019). Playing that part for nearly a decade, it is evident that Turner is fully capable of fully committing and providing the wit, charm, strength, and badassness that also comes with Croft.
There is no official news on the production status of Tomb Raider.
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The evolution of Pamela Anderson is writ large in The Last Showgirl. Here’s the synopsis for the film, directed by Gia Coppola:
A seasoned showgirl must plan for her future when her show abruptly closes after a 30-year run.
The trailer opens with Anderson’s curdled smile. A look she must force as her identity as a showgirl is about to be terminated.
Anderson’s image became seared into the public with her massively popular Baywatch series (trailer) but after the series she struggled to maintain control of her own image, as she explores, evocatively in the Netflix doc Pamela, a love story (2023, trailer).
It seems this new role is a career-best and one that deeply meditates on her condition as someone that has been burned by being in the spotlight.
The Last Showgirl won the Special Jury Prize for the ensemble cast at the San Sebastian Film Festival and is being distributed in North America by Roadside Attractions and Utopia.
It launches December 13th at AMC Century City for one week and picks up more theaters January 10th.
Tidbits:
Sterling K. Brown plays the president’s bodyguard who finds the president dead one morning… and of course is accused of killing him. The new Hulu series Paradise (trailer) will be available on January 28th. Brown has a humble gravitas (e.g. this scene in American Fiction) that is wonderful to see under pressure.
From Lotus to Ponies. Haley Lu Richardson (Jennifer Coolidge’s desperately exasperated assistant Portia in White Lotus S2) co-stars with Emilia Clarke (GOT) in a new espionage series, Ponies, from Peacock.
Synopsis:
In Moscow, 1977. Two persons of no interest (PONIES) work anonymously as secretaries in the American Embassy. That is until their husbands are killed under mysterious circumstances in the USSR, and the pair become CIA operatives.
Richardson excels at playing the meek damsel in distress whose hidden desires become a torrent (best of clips).
Ponies is co-created by Susanna Fogel (The Flight Attendant).
Netflix says Ladies First! The streamer’s upcoming romcom, Ladies First, expands upon its already announced cast of Sacha Baron Cohen and Rosamund Pike with:
Richard E. Grant (Can You Ever Forgive Me?)
Game of Thrones’ Charles Dance
Killing Eve’s Fiona Shaw
Emily Mortimer (Paddington in Peru)
Tom Davis (Wonka)
Weruche Opia (Genius: MLK/X)
Me Before You director Thea Sharrock is directing from a screenplay by Katie Silberman (Booksmart), Cinco Paul (Despicable Me), and Natalie Krinsky (The Broken Hearts).
A release date has not yet been announced.
Jay Baruchel (This Is the End) will star in The Stunt Driver, directed by Michael Dowse, chronicling daredevil Ken Carter's 1970s attempt to jump a rocket car across the St. Lawrence River. Based on The Devil at Your Heels, the film explores Carter's real life account as a stunt man. Production begins in Montreal this spring.
Jeremy Piven fights dinosaurs during the Vietnam War in Primitive War. We’re not sure about it either, but take a flier on this one (BTS Video).
FESTIVALS
Film Independent launches its latest Fast Track. There were 15 projects selected. Here’s one that caught my eye:
Rubber Hut
Writer/Director: Hanna Gray Organschi
Producer: Tara Sheffer, Elizabeth Woodward
Logline: Rhode Island, 1992. An entrepreneurial ex-Pan Am stewardess opens a drive-thru condom kiosk in her Italian Catholic town and overnight becomes the local lightning rod.
Elizabeth Woodward is the founder of Willa, which distributed by my favorite film of the year, La Cocina.
Hanna Gray Organschi served as Antonia Campos’ assistant on The Devil All the Time (2020).
Rubber Hut shares some DNA with Singapore’s official submission for last year’s academy awards, La Luna (2023). That film centered on a woman opening a lingerie shop in a strict town in Malaysia (trailer).
Check out all the Film Independant projects here.
Todd Haynes was just announced as the jury president of the Berlin Film Festival.
The festival director, Tricia Tuttle, stated:
”Todd Haynes is a dazzlingly gifted writer and director with an impressive range; his body of work is at once stylistically versatile but also unmistakably his. Ever since his debut feature Poison won the TEDDY AWARD in 1991, the Berlinale has followed and loved his filmmaking, and we are overjoyed to have him join the festival as the President of the International Jury for our 75th edition.”
Haynes has a sensational body of work (Safe, Far From Heaven, Carol, May December).
Tidbit:
IDFA premieres Bright Future a wild doc about the summer of 1989… in North Korea which saw 20,000 youths from around the world travel to the country to discuss pressing issues of the time (trailer).
The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam is in full swing.
TECH SECTION
This makes my blood boil, but I guess it’s inevitable.
AI editing.
I mean their tutorial looks bad, like really bad. And of course, anyone with an editing background can eclipse the AI’s performance. But what is invariable is the many orders of magnitude better this will be as the tech burgeons.
Picture this. AI is already great at transcribing audio. Chat GPT could presumably cut and paste different lines to create a cohesive story. And then with this tool they’ll be edited together into a seamless story.
That’s Eddie AI. Here’s their video tutorial, partially AI-edited.
Editing is a delicate art form, just listen to James Cameron talk about what happened when he tried to take a single frame out of every second of Terminator 2 after getting studio notes to shorten the movie (Video).
INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT / INTERNATIONAL NEWS
Briarcliff Entertainment’s My Dead Friend Zoe now has a trailer. I’ve been really looking forward to this one. The film won the SXSW Prize Award and stars Natalie Morales (Parks and Rec) as the dead best friend, Ed Harris as an estranged grandfather, and Morgan Freeman as a VA counselor.
That’s a sensational cast and the trailer feels like it’s larger than the sum of its parts. There’s an imaginative nature to the entire enterprise that is both heartwarming and devastating.
The film is set for release on February 28, 2025.
With more than a decade in the making, beloved indie filmmaker Alex Ross Perry’s anticipated Videoheaven, an homage film to the culture surrounding VHS tapes, is premiering early next year at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
Videoheaven is said to celebrate video stores in traditional Hollywood cinema and is being featured at Rotterdam as one of four films in a Focus strand entitled “Hold Video in Your Hand”. Described as a three hour video essay narrated by actress Maya Hawke (Do Revenge), this film is compiled of scripted moments, interviews, and found footage going back to the 80s showing the progression and unfortunate demise of “your neighborhood video store.”
Perry’s musical fiction/documentary hybrid film Pavements (trailer) premiered earlier this year at Venice to great reviews starring Stranger Things’ Joe Keery and Wes Anderson regular Jason Schwartzman (who loves himself an experimental indie movie).
Videoheaven will be running at Rotterdam from January 30th to February 9th, 2025.
Rungano Nyoni’s A24 film On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, which played TIFF, NYFF and Cannes (where it won the Best Director at Un Certain Regard) now has a trailer
Nyoni, a Zambian-Welsh director, was inspired to tell the story after a particularly intense funeral of her friend.
The film follows Shula, who finds her uncle dead in the middle of the road one dark night driving. As she connects with her family over funeral arrangements, the collage of reactions ranges from apathetic to performative, revealing the uncle’s dark past of sexual abuse.
Nyoni discussed her writing process:
“I think anger and depression often trigger my writing. It’s never a happy space. I don’t know why. Something triggers something and I want to express it in a way. I don’t usually know what it is, but I allow it to shape itself. My story is always changing.”
She continued:
“I always think I’m an anthropologist with my own culture, I’m always outside looking in. I can code switch, but I feel it. I see all the beauty in it, and also the downsides.”
The trailer is wonderfully absurdist while also being hyper-grounded.
The film currently has no release date.
Nyoni’s first feature, I Am Not a Witch (trailer), is nothing short of excellent.
Tidbits:
And the crowd goes Mild: HBO's newest music documentary explores the sit down sounds of Yacht Rock, focusing on the career trajectory of Michael McDonald, Steely Dan, Kenny Loggins and more. Music Box: Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary explores the growing scene out of 1970's LA. Streaming on HBO November 29th, a perfect way to recover from a Turkey induced coma.
Check out the smooth sounds, the rise, the fall: Trailer
The prolific filmmaker behind the star studded political satire, Don’t Look Up, Adam McKay is producing You Need This, a provocative documentary that dives deep into the rise of consumerism and hyper-captialism in our world.
Producing via his Yellow Dot Studios, McKay shared:
“Just as the film delves into the bleak impact of global consumption; it captures something remarkable: a growing awareness as people begin to wake up to the reality of the system we’ve been trapped in.”
You Need This is expected to head straight to streaming sometime in 2025.
Hollywood’s newest gladiator, Paul Mescal, is adding producer to his growing repertoire.
The Irish actor is officially credited as an EP for his upcoming LGBTQ romance drama, The History of Sound which he also stars in opposite Challengers’ Josh O’Connor. Now in post production this project directly preceded the filming of director Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II led by Paul Mescal that is in theaters everywhere next week.
Official Synopsis:
Two young men - Lionel (Mescal) and David (O’Connor) in the shadows of WWI are determined to record the lives, voices, and music of their American countrymen. As they begin to log the events, the two fall in love.
Directed by Oliver Hermanus (Moffie) and from a script by Ben Shattuck based on his award winning short story of the same name, The History of Sound is expected to premiere sometime next year.
Martin Scorsese produces Disney+ documentary Beatles ’64, directed by David Tedeschi. The film chronicles The Beatles’ first U.S. visit, featuring restored 4K footage, new interviews, and remixed performances. Alongside the film, seven U.S. Beatles albums will be reissued on vinyl. It Premieres November 29 on Disney+. Check out the trailer here.
Mubi’s Cannes acquisition, The Girl With the Needle has a trailer.
Synopsis:
Copenhagen 1919: A young worker finds herself unemployed and pregnant. She meets Dagmar, who runs an underground adoption agency. A strong connection grows but her world shatters when she stumbles on the shocking truth behind her work.
Trailer. It’s a nightmare.
ON THIS DAY
1989. Batman film is released on video tape.
That’s all for the week. See you Monday!
Written by Gabriel Miller, Spencer Carter, and Madelyn Menapace.
Editor: Gabriel Miller.
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