Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
United Artists’ TV, Lionsgate’s Blair Witch, and a Bucket List.
Let’s go!
If you enjoy today’s edition, please hit the like button or leave a comment.
Replay: John August (Scriptnotes) live event: How to Sustain a Career in the Screenwriting Industry. I loved diving into John’s writing techniques and strategies for success.
Check out the replay here:
https://theindustry.co/p/john-august-scriptnotes-event-how
United Artists is getting into TV.
The storied studio, formed in 1919 by Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith (dir: The Birth of a Nation), Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, which has put out United Artists’ Best Picture winners, including:
West Side Story (1961)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
And some of the greatest American classics of all time, including:
12 Angry Men (1957)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Has brought on Patrick Chu as their Head of TV.
That’s a pretty wild move, given that United Artists has never really made a TV show; all I could find was a handful of obscure credits, like an early 1990s James Bond Jr. short-lived series (hilarious trailer).
Chu is a great hire. He hails from Annapurna, where he oversaw Apple TV’s The Changeling, and earlier in his career, Prime’s Hanna and Prime’s Hunters. Ok, so not the top TV shows, right?
However, I believe they hired him to bring his filmic sensibilities. His film credits include The Testament of Ann Lee, Miss Sloane, and Arrival, more prestige fare in line with UA’s ethos.
We look forward to seeing what they have in store.
THE INDUSTRY TLDR
Lionsgate’s Blair Witch reboot brings back the original creators as EPs.
IMAX, Roku, Apple, and Angel Studios report quarterly earnings.
Amazon develops thriller The Second Lady w/ Jessica Sharzer adapting.
Studios circle Michael B. Jordan & Christopher McQuarrie’s Battlefield package.
Starz develops eight-episode Black rodeo drama from Monkeypaw Productions.
Vice Studios adapts Anika Jade Levy’s art-world novel Flat Earth for TV.
Abel Ferrara joins the Rome-set crime film The Night Burns.
Armando Bo’s Las Malas adaptation begins production w/ Karla Sofía Gascón.
Cannes Market heats up w/ A Waiter in Paris, Atonement.
A24 and Plan B set Molly Manning Walker’s Not Another F**king Wedding.
Roadside Attractions and Saban Films acquire U.S. rights to horror film Crawlers.
Brian Robbins’ Big Shot Pictures adapts The Bucket List Family for animated series.
Yesterday’s correct answer: Editorial department, Jeremy Strong’s first film credit.
18% got it right.
Executive payday time? WBD CEO David Zaslav’s pay shot up 217.9% from last year to an astonishing $165M. More than double the next-highest-paid media CEO.
Full breakdown of all the salaries here. I was surprised by who got paid the least.
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
Lionsgate’s Blair Witch reboot is going back to the beginning. All the original creators of the 1999 horror breakout film that made $248M (w/o inflation) on a $30K production budget have been brought on to EP, including:
Stars: Joshua Leonard and Michael C. Williams
Dir/Wri: Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez
Prod: Gregg Hale
Hopefully, they’ll be involved creatively rather than just getting a check. They were cut out of the last two sequels, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000, $47M WW on $15M budget) and Blair Witch (2016, $45M WW gross on $5M budget).
Obviously, neither of those reached anywhere close to the original. But now that horror is maxing out at the box office, this is a fertile time for Lionsgate, which is trying to open another lucrative horror series as its Saw sequel is on hold.
Blumhouse and Atomic Monster are producing the reboot, and Dylan Clark (Transfigure) will serve as the new director. The budget is around $10M.
Tidbits:
Based on the bestselling novel, The Second Lady lands on Prime. Alongside Universal Television, the thriller sees America’s First Lady abducted and replaced by a Russian double, both forced to survive impossibly dangerous circumstances. Nerve (2016) screenwriter Jessica Sharzer is adapting through her mini-first look deal with UTV.
A bidding Battlefield. The bidding war for Electronic Arts’ Battlefield film continues as studios pursue the Christopher McQuarrie (Mission: Impossible franchise) and Michael B. Jordan package. Warner Bros, Amazon, MGM, Sony, Universal, and Netflix are all in the fight for the biggest bidding war of the year. Read more about the Battlefield film here.
Starz is beginning development on a drama set in the world of Black rodeo. The 8-episode order follows three siblings in Southeast Texas bound by their parents’ legacy and business. Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions just this past year produced a doc with the same focus, Peacock’s High Horse: The Black Cowboy.
Vice Studios is making a TV series adaptation of Flat Earth. Based on Anika Jade Levy’s debut novel of the same name, the show will follow two desperate young women trying to navigate relationships and careers in New York’s cynical art scene. Levy is attached to the project as a co-creator.
Kaufman Astoria Studios has defaulted on a $359M loan. This puts them in danger of foreclosure. We hope they pull through; they’ve hosted shoots for everything from Goodfellas to Orange Is the New Black.
NBC and the TV Academy have signed Jesse Collins Entertainment for the 4th year in a row to produce the Primetime Emmys.
Greenlit:
Netflix’s Minimum Wage
Prod Comp: American High (Hulu’s Pizza Movie)
Cast: Aidan Micho, Grace Reiter, Hyde Healy
Renewals:
ABC’s Scrubs (renewed for S2)
ABC’s Shifting Gears (renewed for S3)
Pilot pass:
ABC’s Do You Want Kids?
Trailers:
Sony Pictures’ Resident Evil
Dir: Zach Cregger (Weapons)
Cast: Austin Abrams, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis
Budget: $80M
Release: Sept 18
Prime Video’s It’s Not Like That
Release: May 15
Netflix’s Office Romance
Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Brett Goldstein
Release: June 5
Release Dates:
ABC’s unscripted series The Champion’s Edge with Bonnie Bernstein
Cast: Bonnie Bernstein
Release: May 9
Prime Video’s Off Campus S1
Release: May 13
Prime Video’s Every Year After
Release: June 10
Prime Video’s Elle
Cast: Lexi Minetree
Release: July 1
Prime Video’s Sterling Point
Dir: Megan Park (My Old Ass)
Cast: Ella Rubin, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Jay Duplass
Release: Aug 5
Netflix Documentary A Child of My Own
Dir: Maite Alberdi (Oscar-nominated doc The Mole Agent)
Release: August 13
Ratings:
Netflix’s Narnia
Dir: Greta Gerwig (Barbie)
Rating: PG
Cast: Meryl Streep, Daniel Craig, Emma Mackey, Carey Mulligan
THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT
Frequent Safdie brothers actor and master of gritty NY violence director, Abel Ferrara, is stepping back in front of the camera in The Night Burns. No word on his character, but from the first look at Ferrara, he looks to play a low-time gangster of sorts, as the film revolves around a group of young, drug addicted 20-year-olds who party at nightclubs, and commit armed robbery.
Ferrara was recently magnificent as the man with the dog, whose arm gets broken in Marty Supreme. Ferrara goes ballistic when Chalamet tries to extort him. There’s a wildness to Ferrara that just reads well on screen.
It’s not too far from one of Ferrara’s first on-screen roles when he played a rapist in an early film he directed, Ms. 45.
The Night Burns is shooting in Rome.
Mini Tidbits:
Oscar-winner Armando Bo’s (Wri: Birdman) feature adaptation of the novel Las Malas is beginning production next month. Karla Sofía Gascón (Emilia Pérez) leads the film, which follows Aunt Encarna (Gascón), a tough but motherly leader of a group of trans sex workers, as she adopts an abandoned baby without realizing she is putting everyone around her in danger.
Casting tidbits:
India Fowler
Éanna Hardwicke
Evie Templeton
Ulrich Thomsen
All those casting tidbits and more here.
FESTIVALS AND DOCS
Cannes is right around the corner, and the market is heating up with a ton of new projects launching:
A Waiter in Paris
Cast: Leo Woodall, Clémence Poésy (In Bruges)
Dir: Peter Hoar (The Last of Us)
Wri: Ben Hopkins (Fuze)
Worldwide Sales Rep: Cornerstone Films (Pillion)
Synopsis:
Abandoned and broke in Paris, an over-educated British graduate chases belonging in the ruthless world of Parisian waiters.
Atonement
Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Hiam Abbass (Succession)
Prod: Star Thrower Entertainment (The Post, Fair Play, Eternity)
U.S. Sales Rep: CAA and WME
International Sales Rep: The Veterans (Emilia Pérez, Queer)
Synopsis:
A troubled Marine seeks to reconcile with the survivors of an Iraqi family he and his unit fired on back in 2003.
Full list of Cannes market projects here, including new ones with Sam Worthington, Mark Eydelshteyn (Anora), Awkwafina, Ken Jeong, Heather Graham, IFC’s Good Boy director Ben Leonberg, and an animated film with Guy Pearce.
Mini Tidbit:
Leah Nelson has the starriest cast at Cannes for her first feature, an animated film titled Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me. Voice cast: Bryan Cranston, Seth Rogen, Julia Louis-Dreyfus (who also produces), Sarah Silverman, Wanda Sykes, and Bowen Yang. Playing out of Competition in Cannes Première. And now UTA and CAA are the sales reps for domestic and global, along with Charades.
INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT / INTERNATIONAL NEWS
Cannes award winner Molly Manning Walker’s anticipated second feature is set as Not Another F**king Wedding for A24 and Plan B (F1: The Movie).
While neither the plot nor the genre has been disclosed, if Manning Walker’s debut portrayed the confusion of youth, her new film may shift the focus to the heightened stakes of adulthood and commitment.
That’s because the director won the Cannes Un Certain Regard prize in 2023 for her film How to Have Sex (2024, trailer), a coming-of-age drama exploring the blurred lines of both friendship and consent during a post-exam girls’ trip gone wrong. With a background in cinematography, Manning Walker’s debut impressively showcased her immersive filmmaking, bringing the audience directly inside her characters’ heads, making it both a visually and narratively impactful movie.
From Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights to another A24 project, The Drama, weddings seem to have taken over the film industry.
Spiders crawling up your back. Roadside Attractions (Kiss of the Spider Woman) and Saban Films just acquired the U.S. rights to the spider-horror film Crawlers. Written by Jayson Rothwell (Silent Night) and starring Matilda Lutz (Revenge), the film follows a manager of an apartment complex who realizes that her building has a terrible infestation of venomous spiders. This is also the first feature from Badlands production company, founded by Basil Iwanyk (Prod: John Wick franchise).
Mini Tidbits:
Outsider Pictures acquires U.S. distribution rights of the Spanish film Sundays. Alauda Ruiz de Azúa directed the film that won both the highest prizes in the San Sebastián International Film Festival and the Goya Awards. The film follows a teenage woman pondering the possibility of joining a cloistered convent.
Trinity CineAsia is taking Hong Kong social drama We’re Nothing at All (trailer) to British and Irish theaters. The film is directed by Herman Yau, the Hong Kong icon behind cult exploitation films like The Untold Story (1993) and Ebola Syndrome (1996). It won the Audience Choice Award at the Hong Kong International Film Festival and follows a forensic expert investigating a Valentine’s Day bus explosion.
Brian Robbins’ (Ex-co-CEO: Paramount) Big Shot Pictures is making an animated series based on The Bucket List Family, a family of five who traveled to more than 100 countries and gathered millions of followers on YouTube.
ON THIS DAY
1941. Citizen Kane premieres in NYC.
Written by Gabriel Miller, Madelyn Menapace and Tony Jaeyeong Jeong.
Editor: Gabriel Miller.
Follow us on: Facebook | Instagram
Want to advertise with us? Email: clarke.scott@theindustry.co
Thank you for acknowledging Hollywood history by naming the incredibly talented and visionary founders of United Artists: Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith! Very few people today remember that these Hollywood legends created UA to gain artistic control of their work as writers, actors, directors and producers, to distribute their own films and to improve profits. In 1919, this was a bold and radical venture. Without these pioneers, United Artists would not be here today.