Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
Jennifer Lawrence’s Love, Tom Cruise’s Depth
Let’s go!
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Mubi buys Die, My Love starring Jennifer Lawrence for $23-24M at the Cannes Film Festival.
This is the first major buy at the festival, placing Lawrence as the frontrunner in the Best Actress category at the Oscars.
The deal includes distribution rights in North America, the UK, Latin America, and ten other territories. It includes a full theatrical release with 1,500 screens for 45 days.
The film has major talent:
Director/Co-Writer: Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin)
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson
Producer: Martin Scorsese
Lawrence plays a mother facing the disturbing realities of post-partum depression that pushes her into a horrific madness.
In our opinion, Lynne Ramsay is the best living director in their prime, and although her films have never been Oscar-nominated, we feel that with the full force of Mubi, recently valued at $1bn after closing $100M from Sequoia Capital, they will have no problem mounting a significant Oscar campaign to push Lawrence.
They ran a similar playbook for The Substance, which garnered:
Demi Moore’s first Oscar nomination
5 Oscar noms total w/ 1 win
$83M at the box office
Mubi is expanding into an international powerhouse with a plan to release 15 movies/year, budgeted at $5- $25M.
We expect to see many more instances of them outbidding A24 and Neon.
For More:
First look clip of To Die, My Love.
Lawrence’s first Oscar was for her electric, zany work in Silver Linings Playbook (trailer).
THE INDUSTRY TLDR
Charter and Cox merge into $34.5bn cable giant.
Tom Cruise & Ana de Armas team for $200M thriller Deeper.
Sydney Sweeney to star in Split Fiction from Jon M. Chu.
Searchlight acquires Alexander Payne’s Somewhere Out There.
Amazon MGM lands Cannes thriller The Hole starring Theo James.
Netflix acquires Melanie Toast’s Devil’s Rope.
Tilda Swinton stars in David Lowery’s Death in Her Hands.
Ralph Fiennes cast as President Snow in new Hunger Games prequel.
A24’s Pillion sells to Memento.
Flora Birnbaum makes her directorial debut with Self Help, starring Kirsten Dunst.
Vertical acquires The Threesome and Osiris.
Director Sylvain Chomet announces sequel to The Triplets of Belleville.
Paramount Global acquires Peacock’s M.I.A. from Ozark co-creator.
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
$34.5bn merger. Charter Communications (2nd largest cable company) merges with Cox (7th largest cable company, $21.9bn value).
Here’s how the new company, Cox Communications (Spectrum for customers), breaks down:
$104.6bn debt
$92bn Charter
$12.6bn Cox
37.5M customers (broadband)
31M Charter
6.5M Cox
15M TV bundle subs
12.7M Charter
2.3M+ Cox
This will give the new company a larger footprint, though the real impact on carriage negotiations will be limited, as the combined TV bundle subs only increase by roughly 13%. The deal will need to pass regulatory approval before closing.
Cruise and De Armas, a beautiful friendship: Ana de Armas and Tom Cruise have multiple projects in the works together. They are officially teaming up for Deeper, a supernatural thriller directed by Doug Liman and written by Max Landis (Bright). Once attached to Warner Bros. and MGM, the film has cycled through several actors and directors since 2016, but is now moving forward with a $200M+ budget.
The story follows a disgraced astronaut (Cruise) who descends into a newly discovered ocean trench and confronts a mysterious force. Even though we didn’t care for American Made, we love this continued collaboration with Cruise and Liman (Edge of Tomorrow).
Sydney Sweeney will star in and EP a film adaptation of the hit co-op fantasy sci-fi video game Split Fiction, directed by Jon M. Chu (Wicked) and written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (Deadpool & Wolverine). Split Fiction, Hazelight Studios’ new game, has only been out for a bit over a month, but its option has already led to a bidding war between studios Sony and Amazon at the front. It follows two writers thrust into a virtual reality that makes their stories a reality.
Searchlight picks up Alexander Payne’s (dir: The Holdovers) first foreign language film, Somewhere Out There. It stars Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World) and will be in Danish. No plot details, but Searchlight has done well with Payne’s films. The Descendants (2011) grossed $177.2M worldwide on a $20M budget, and Sideways (2006) grossed $109.7M worldwide on a $16M budget.
Tidbits:
Apple and The Walsh Company (Manchester by the Sea) acquire Early Action, an atypical college coming-of-age film. From a spec script by emerging writer Sophie de Bruijn.
Netflix picks up female-led thriller Devil’s Rope from an original spec script by Melanie Toast (Shut In). This script makes for her third original spec after Shut In (2022) and the in-production Atomic Monster short Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit that Toast was able to sell even to the streamer that doesn’t usually take on outside material.
Series ending:
Starz’s Power Book III: Raising Kanan will end after Season 5.
Amazon’s The Bondsman starring Kevin Bacon (canceled after 1 season).
Paramount Release date shuffle:
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem 2
Oct. 9, 2026 → Sept. 17, 2027
The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender
Jan. 30, 2026 → Oct. 9, 2026
Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie
- July 31, 2026 → July 24, 2026
Release date:
20th Century Studios’ Deliver Me From Nowhere
Cast: Jeremy Allen White (as Bruce Springsteen)
Release date: Oct 24th
Mini Tidbit:
Visual effects workers on Marvel, Disney, and Avatar films have ratified their first union contracts, securing wage protections, benefits, AI safeguards, and formalized labor conditions through IATSE.
THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT
Tilda Swinton in a David Lowery film. Swinton stars in Death in Her Hands as a widow who becomes obsessed with a mysterious note she finds in the woods that proclaims, “Magda was killed, but no body is found.” Throughout the film, she will drive herself deeper into obsession and madness.
Swinton finds her best roles when she plays a passionate woman displaced by sorrow and mania. That’s how she creeped into our psyche in We Need to Talk About Kevin as a documentarian who must grapple with the horrific repercussions of her son’s evil. And her Oscar win for her lawyer turned rotten by the sin of the chemical company she represents in Michael Clayton.
Death in Her Hands seems to bend across similar lines. And with Lowery (A Ghost Story) helming the project and with See Saw (Slow Horses, Shame) serving as the production company, she should have no problem shining.
Perhaps one of the only fictional franchise villains more evil than Voldemort is The Hunger Games’ President Snow, and Ralph Fiennes may be one of the only actors to be able to pull off both.
Fiennes will take on the ruthless dictator in the new Hunger Games prequel film. In the original trilogy, the role was terrifyingly portrayed by the late great Donald Sutherland. Author Suzanne Collins’ newest book shows the man at the real peak of his cruelty, with Fiennes’ past work, specifically as the noseless dark wizard, evidence enough that he is more than capable of such a highly anticipated and chilling undertaking.
Production is set to begin this July with Fiennes’ wicked game making on full display in theaters on Nov. 20th 2026.
Elizabeth Debicki is in talks to star opposite Brad Pitt in David Fincher’s The Continuing Adventures of Cliff Booth, set to film this July for Netflix. Debicki is reportedly up for the role of Roberta, a mud wrestling bar manager. Written by Quentin Tarantino, the film continues Pitt’s character from Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. Begins production in July.
Two-time Oscar nominee Judy Davis and Bridgerton actress Florence Hunt lead Butterfly Stroke, a drama acquired by Celsius Ent. for world sale rights. From director Denis Rabaglia (Do Not Panic), the story follows a swimmer with terminal brain cancer who takes control of her life.
Adele Exarchopoulos (Blue is the Warmest Color) hops into another sci-fi Dog 51 (trailer) from StudioCanal. The French actress has recently starred in Planet B ($250K in France) and The Animal Kingdom ($8.8M in France).
Mini Tidbit:
The Butler starring Jean Reno adds Tom Hollander (The White Lotus).
Shane Gillis has joined David O. Russell’s Nic Cage-led Madden at Amazon, playing a new original character close to the Madden family.
Replacements:
Andrew Garfield replaces Matthew McConaughey in Paul Greengrass’s upcoming The Rage. Garfield will play a peasant who leads an uprising in 1381. Focus Features is close to closing an $11M deal for domestic rights.
Riley Keough replaces Kristen Stewart in Albert Serra’s (Afternoons of Solitude, Top Prize winner at San Sebastian Film Festival), Out of This World. No word on her role, but she stars across from F. Murray Abraham.
FESTIVALS
Cannes Film Festival is well underway with a few standouts so far:
Two of the films with the most mixed reactions so far are Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme and Ari Aster’s Eddington.
Cannes Sales/Sales:
Amazon MGM’s Orion Pictures scooped up The Hole for $20M, a Theo James (The Gentlemen) led thriller feature from Korean director Kim Jee-Woon (I Saw the Devil). Alongside James is Squid Game breakout Jung Ho-yeon and Golden Globe winner Christian Slater (True Romance). It follows a successful professor (James) who is left bedridden after a devastating car accident, now under the care of his Korean mother-in-law, who starts to unravel the truth behind his now deceased wife.
A24’s Pillion (Cannes Official Selection) starring Alexander Skarsgård sells to Memento Distribution (The Worst Person in the World) for French Distribution. Memento also picked up Ruben Östlund’s The Entertainment System Is Down.
The Richest Woman in the World (Cannes: Out of Competition) starring Isabelle Huppert in the titular role sells to 12 territories, including Italy.
Frank & Louis starring Bob Marley: One Love star Kingsley Ben-Adir has pre-sold to three territories, including Germany and Austria.
My Friend Eva (dir: Cesc Gay - The People Upstairs) has sold to Italy and Germany.
Latvian, rotoscope animation in Dog of God playing at the Escape from Tribeca section gets scoped up for distribution in France by ESC Films (The Ugly Stepsister). First look photo.
Eli Roth’s The Ice Cream Man sells to StudioCanal’s new genre label Sixth Dimension for 7 territories, including the UK.
XYZ Films has acquired worldwide sales rights (excluding Japan) for Never After Dark, a Japanese supernatural horror film from Signal181.
Medieval zombie horror Rapture, starring Warfare buddies Will Poulter, Kit Connor, and Manu Ríos, has secured U.S., U.K., and Canadian pre-sales at Cannes.
True Brit Entertainment has acquired U.K. and Irish rights to The Creep, a Gen Z reimagining of Christopher Smith’s 2004 horror cult classic.
Tidbits:
Wagner Moura (Civil War) stars in Cannes' Official Selection of The Secret Agent. We now have a clip.
TIFF’s new market has a name: TIFF: The Market and $16.5M of funding from the Canadian government. It runs Sept 10 - 16.
A secret Red Hot Chili Peppers doc (IMDbPro link) screened at Cannes. Submarine Entertainment (distributor: Becoming Led Zeppelin) serves as the sales rep. Ben Feldman (Superstore) directs.
Cannes Market:
Jacob Elordi and Lily-Rose Depp star in a new project. Plus, Brie Larson teams with J.J. Abrams: https://theindustry.co/p/cannes-market-2025
INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
Flora Birnbaum will make an impressive directorial debut with Self Help. Here’s the line-up:
Dir/Wri: Birnbaum
Cast: Kirsten Dunst
Prod Co: Will Ferrell’s Gloria Sanchez
Domestic Sales Rep: WME and UTA
Worldside Sales Rep: MK2 (Anatomy of a Fall)
Synopsis:
Sage, a burned-out LA sound healer, investigates a hit-and-run that connects to citywide fires. Her amateur sleuthing puts her between a suspicious real estate mogul and sketchy actor as deaths mount.
Birnbaum previously served as a writer (3eps) on FX’s American Crime Story (2021) and Netflix’s Russian Doll (1ep). Her latest directorial work was the digital series about a French Juice cleanse gone wrong (trailer), so her new work feels like familiar territory pushed darker.
Tidbits:
Frequent collaborators, Brazilian triple threat Bárbara Paz and four-time Oscar nominee Willem Dafoe, are teaming up again for Paz’s fiction feature debut, Cuddle. The actress turned director’s ode to her late husband, the doc Babenco: Tell Me When I Die (2019, trailer), was both the Brazilian selection at the 93rd Academy Awards and was produced by Dafoe. In her upcoming near-future drama, Dafoe is set to play a professional cuddler who offers platonic comfort to strangers craving connection. Sounds sweet.
Vertical has acquired North American rights to two new genre features. Chad Hartigan’s SXSW-premiering romantic comedy The Threesome, starring Zoey Deutch, Jonah Hauer-King, and Ruby Cruz, hits theaters September 5. It follows a complicated love triangle born from an impulsive threesome.
&
Sci-fi thriller Osiris, starring Max Martini and Linda Hamilton, arrives later this summer. Directed by William Kaufman, it follows a Special Forces unit abducted by aliens aboard a spaceship.
INTERNATIONAL NEWS
Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague premiered at Cannes to a rapturous screening, celebrating both the filmmaker’s love of cinema and the legacy of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which the film chronicles the making of.
Shot entirely in French and in black-and-white 4:3 format, the film stars Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg, and dramatizes the making of the 1959 classic.
The film was less of a love letter to French Cinema and more of a peek into the mind of a man obsessed. There are little nods and references all over.
French writer/animator Sylvain Chomet is making a spin-off sequel to the formative, fatalistic, Oscar-nominated, tragically constructed, and heart-achingly impressionistic comedy The Triplets of Belleville (2003, trailer). This time, there will be a cat, no bicycles, and more focus on the triplets.
Anatomy of a Fall producer Marie-Ange Luciani's next project by the Cannes-winning director Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake, Miséricorde). The film is an adaptation of Robert Merle’s L'Ile, a fictionalized adventure novel about the true story of the Bounty rebels in Polynesia back in 1789. Production is tentatively scheduled to begin early next year.
Paramount Global picks up Peacock’s M.I.A series from the co-creator of Ozark, Bill Dubuque.
ON THIS DAY
1989. Do the Right Thing premieres at Cannes.
See you tomorrow!
Written by Gabriel Miller, Spencer Carter, and Madelyn Menapace.
Editor: Gabriel Miller.
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