Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
Summer Box Office. Steven Knight’s Shakespeare. And Paul as a sheep.
Let’s go!
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THE INDUSTRY TLDR
The 2025 summer box office is flat vs. last year.
Netflix drops trailer for Steven Knight’s House of Guinness.
Caroline Hollick exits North Road Company (Back in Action).
Disney sets 2026 Thanksgiving release for teen-magic comedy Hexed.
Scott Spiegel, horror legend, has passed away at 67.
Warwick Davis returns as Professor Flitwick for HBO’s Harry Potter reboot.
Prime’s The Chosen Adventures will star Paul Walter Hauser voicing a sheep.
Graham Greene, Oscar-nominated Dances with Wolves actor, has passed away at 73.
Venice’s Calle Malaga sells to 14 territories.
HBO Max Italy’s Portobello lands Beta Film & Mediawan Rights as international sales reps.
San Sebastian opens with Netflix’s 27 Nights.
Cannes title Magellan selected as the Philippines’ Oscar entry.
Polo Menarguez adapts Men Marías’ The Last Dove.
Daniel Monaghan exits Paramount ANZ.
David Wilcox joins Fifth Season as EMEA sales SVP.
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
The summer has come to a close (cue the Wilhelm scream). And that means we have the domestic summer box office numbers for the studios. They’re almost identical to last year’s:
$3.66bn 2025
$3.67bn 2024
$4.09bn 2023
$3.4bn 2022
That’s not a great post-COVID trend. As 2023 could almost be seen as an outlier, with people racing to get back to the theaters.
Of course, we’re still a far cry away from pre-COVID summers:
$4.3bn 2019
$4.4bn 2018
$4.5bn 2016
The silver lining was that Warner Bros. bet big on originals, and they 5x’d what they’d made in 2024. Here’s the breakdown by studio and the gain/drop from last summer:
$1.02bn - Disney + Searchlight & 20th Century
↓32%
$980.4M - Warner Bros.
↑476%
$758M - Universal
Less than 0.5% change
$279M - Paramount
↑12%
$174.8M - Sony
↓66%
$87M - A24
↑160%
$66.5M - Lionsgate
↓-8%
So three studios slipped, three studios gained, and one stayed flat. It's not too surprising, then, that the number of admissions increased by less than half a percent. This equates to 1M tickets for a 275M ticket total.
Scott Spiegel, horror legend, has passed away at 67. He is known for writing Evil Dead II and was a long-time collaborator of Sam Raimi, Eli Roth, and Quentin Tarantino. Spiegel made one of the greatest intros in cinema history. Linking up former ballet-dancer-turned-producer Lawrence Bender with Tarantino. The two would go on to make Reservoir Dogs.
In fact, the 1990s Hollywood history book, Rebels on the Backlot, opens with a story about a famous BBQ Spiegel had at his house (apparently Tarantino was crashing on his couch) and Raimi + Boaz Yakin (dir: Remember the Titans) were in attendance.
Spiegel was a friend to many horror-tilting Hollywood auteurs and would later go on to work with Eli Roth, forming a company that produced Hostel.
The first step to grieving is a Guinness.
Netflix has dropped the trailer for House of Guinness, the newest period epic drama series to come out of the mind of Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight.
To us, it looks a little like King Lear. The series begins with the Guinness beer dynasty getting divided among the owner’s children. Of course, not everyone gets a share, and that ignites a storm of betrayal, ambition, and vengeance.
The series drops on the streamer on Sept. 25th.
Tidbits:
Peter Chernin’s The North Road Company’s Caroline Hollick, Senior VP of International Production and Development, has exited her position after a year. Hollick’s departure comes after the production company struck a first-look deal with Apple TV+ for its Chernin Entertainment (Ford v Ferrari). There is no word on whether her position will be filled.
London-based production company Osun Group (All3Media’s Blue Therapy) is adapting the supernatural fiction novel The Catch as the company’s first book-to-screen acquisition. The story follows two estranged sisters, one who believes she’s found their long-lost mother and the other who suspects it’s a con. The search for a director is underway.
Disney just announced a new original film, Hexed, set for a 2026 Thanksgiving release. Logline: A quirky teen and his overbearing mom discover his weirdness is actually a latent magical ability.
THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT
Looks like Hogwarts will see some familiar faces after all.
Warwick Davis will reprise his role as the passionate Charms professor Filius Flitwick (“It’s leviosa, not leviosaa!” scene) for HBO’s upcoming Harry Potter series after playing the part for all eight of the previous films. Part of the charm of the character was that he never felt overly confident as a teacher, and that makes his lessons to the young wizards endearing.
Davis is, so far, the only actor from the film franchise reprising a role. The new take on the wizarding world of Harry Potter debuts on HBO in 2027.
Prime Video has gone biblical: Partnering with the team behind the Jesus-centric series The Chosen, for a new animated spin-off, The Chosen Adventures. Prime has ordered a 14-episode animated comedy starring, among others, Paul Walter Hauser as a talking sheep.
The series follows 12-year-old Abby, Joshua, and Hauser as their aforementioned talking sheep in ancient Capernaum.
Hauser hasn't had a ton of voice acting roles, but he has a great voice for it. Not only was he the soft-spoken embarrassment in Inside Out 2, but he also played Dark in Netflix's Orion and the Dark -clip
The series builds on Amazon MGM’s first-look deal with Chosen showrunner Dallas Jenkins’ 5&2 Studios. Prime, like many studios (A24’s Heretic included), has seen strong profit in religious-leaning media.
Tidbit:
Graham Greene, the magnetic Canadian First Nations actor, passed at 73. He gave a scene-stealing breakout performance opposite Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves (1990, scene), as the wise medicine man Kicking Bird, a showing so impressive he received a supporting Oscar nomination. From Maverick (1994) to The Green Mile (1999) to FX’s Reservation Dogs (2021), his career spanned decades of trailblazing work. He leaves behind a legacy and helped reshape how Indigenous stories and voices are seen in mainstream cinema.
FESTIVALS / INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
Telluride Film Festival has concluded. The Venice Film Festival has entered the second half. And TIFF is starting this week.
These festivals are major Oscar engines for Best Picture nominations. The trio of festivals has generated over 50% of the Best Picture nominees in the past quarter-century.
What’s starting to emerge is a few titles that will likely earn Oscar nominations:
Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia
Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet
Netflix’s Jay Kelly
Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice
More to come as the week rolls by. We’ll be on the ground at TIFF with updates.
Venice Sales:
Venice Spotlight’s Calle Malaga has been sold to 14 territories, including France. The film follows an aged Spanish woman (evocative first look still) in Tangier who resists her daughter's decision to sell her home. Sol Bondy (producer: Holy Spider, Köln 75, and Co-P: The Secret Agent) co-produces.
HBO Max Italy’s first series, Portobello, which screened at Venice out of competition, has been picked up for international sales by Beta Film (Sales Rep: Starz’s The Couple Next Door) and Mediawan Rights (distributor: Jeremy Irons’ The Count of Monte Cristo). The series trailer shows an Italian TV presenter going from extreme fame to falling into the clutches of a fraught justice system (trailer).
Venice Critics Week’s Waking Hours has a teaser. There’s something absolutely terrifying about it.
San Sebastian’s opening film will be Netflix’s 27 Nights.
Synopsis:
When a woman is admitted by her daughters to a psychiatric clinic for her carefree ways, an expert must judge if she is ill or simply wants to enjoy life.
San Sebastian’s closing film will be Winter of the Crow.
Synopsis:
A British professor witnesses a student's murder by secret police in 1981 Warsaw under martial law. She becomes a target while running through the city's streets, eventually forced to stop and take a stand.
One of our favorite sales reps HanWay Films (La Cocina, Bucking Fastard) has worldwide sales rights.
More info on the festival here. Begins Sept 19th.
INTERNATIONAL NEWS
Cannes title Magellan (clip) has been selected as the Philippines' official Oscar entry. Directed by the multi-hyphenated Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz (From What Is Before), it tells the 16th-century story of the legendary navigator (played by Gael García Bernal) in his final months before death.
The film will have its North American premiere at TIFF next week. International film contenders must be selected by Oct. 1st in order to be considered for the shortlist.
The director of Spain’s The Plan (2019) Polo Menarguez, is directing a race against time in new period drama series The Last Dove (La última paloma) based on a novel by Men Marías. In addition to directing, Menarguez is adapting the screenplay for the series that will be produced by Spanish production company Capitán Araña (The Plan, Ozzy).
Shanghai YC Media and Film has acquired distribution rights to the Bollywood romantic drama Love in Vietnam (trailer) from Zee Studios, whose film Secret Superstar (2017) became the second-highest-grossing Indian movie in the Chinese market. The new musical love saga is now tapped for a theatrical release in 10,000 theaters across China this December.
Paramount ANZ (Australia/New Zealand) is losing Daniel Monaghan, their SVP of content and programming, who is exiting the company to join the Foxtel Group, Australia’s leading pay-TV provider. While at Foxtel, Monaghan will lead the Entertainment content team.
ITV Studios alum David Wilcox has been brought on by Fifth Season’s Television (Severance) distribution division as the new SVP of sales for its Europe, Middle East, and Africa regions. Wilcox will help to expand Fifth’s global outreach and identify new commercial opportunities across digital and co-productions.
ON THIS DAY
1949. The Third Man is released in the UK.
Written by Gabriel Miller, Spencer Carter, and Madelyn Menapace.
Editor: Gabriel Miller.
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