Good morning: In today’s edition of The Industry, we look at:
Paramount’s Defense, Hulu’s Day, and nothing hurt.
Let’s go!
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THE INDUSTRY TLDR
Paramount Primal acquires medieval fantasy spec Tower Defense.
Netflix greenlights a Keiko/Free Willy doc.
WBD CEO David Zaslav sells $21.7M in stock.
Hulu picks up Kathryn Newton’s YA romance series Just One Day.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day becomes the fastest film to $700M domestic.
Emilia Jones will lead Netflix fertility-center drama The Retrievals.
Amy Sedaris joins Apple’s Protective Custody.
Nava Mau boards indie drama Holy Whore.
NYFF unveils its Currents lineup, including Tala Hadid’s Bardi.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way EPs dolphin-rights doc Freeing Flipper.
Marc Turtletaub & Oren Moverman’s new film: Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt.
Banijay promotes Matt Creasey to Senior EVP World.
Turkey and Switzerland select their International Feature Oscar contenders.
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
Paramount is storming the gates! Ok, not of Rob Bonta’s office, but instead Paramount Primal (new genre label) has picked up Tower Defense, a spec script from Evan Daugherty (wri: Divergent, Snow White and the Huntsman).
The script is like a medieval fantasy version of Assault on Precinct 13 (trailer). So expect a fairly harrowing, fantastical film about rival warlocks or knights trying to infiltrate a safe haven. Some of our favorite scenes in cinema, including in Nolan’s The Odyssey, are storming-the-gate scenes (LOTR clip), so this could be quite fun.
Free Willy the doc! Netflix has greenlit a documentary on Keiko, the real orca who played the orca in the heartstring-pulling 1993 film. The untitled film will trace the star attraction’s rise from a Mexico City amusement park to Hollywood’s spotlight, a journey that sparked a worldwide animal rights movement. Netflix also picked up murder doc Liliana’s Invincible Summer and history doc Marcos. Another World Is Possible.
After going on a horror run with Amazon’s The Devil’s Mouth and the Ready or Not sequel, Kathryn Newton’s upcoming YA series Just One Day has landed at Hulu. Previously set up at Amazon, the series adaptation is based on Gayle Forman’s romance trilogy centered on Allyson (Newton), who, during her three-week post-graduation European tour, meets a free-spirited man who changes her life.
Mini Tidbits:
Spidey is breaking records. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now the fastest movie to cross the $700M benchmark in the U.S. box office, doing so in only 13 days. The big question: does it have enough web to be the first film in history to break $1bn domestically?
Season 4 of Ted Lasso returns to Apple TV with a bang, with its season premiere garnering a record-breaking 296.6M viewing minutes. This was the biggest launch in the streamer’s history. The fourth season of this beloved soccer franchise follows Ted as he returns to Richmond to coach a second division women’s football team.
Google TV Freeplay is stepping up in the FAST wars, with a library that now boasts 10,000 on-demand titles and 300 channels. This is becoming a bigger competitor to Fox’s Tubi and Paramount’s Pluto TV. Full details here.
Charter Communications’ $34.5bn acquisition of Cox Communications has been approved by regulators. This will become the nation’s largest cable and broadband provider. The megamerger will take the Cox name and expand cable and internet services nationwide.
Renewal:
PBS’s Hope in the Water (renewed for S2)
Cancellations:
HBO Max’s Cop Drama American Blue pilot (Not going forward, but pilot will shop around for new home)
Disney+’s live-action Power Rangers series
Trailers:
Warner Bros.’ The Devils 4K Re-Release
Cast: Vanessa Redgrave, Oliver Reed
Release: Oct 16
This is from Warner Bros.’ newly launched Clockwork label, and in keeping with the name, this trailer shares DNA with Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange original trailer.
Well Go USA Entertainment’s Dear You
Chinese Box Office: $223M
Chinese Release: April 30
U.S. Release: Sept 4
Watermelon Pictures’ Traces of Home
Release: Sept 18
Hulu’s Chad Powers S2
Cast: Glen Powell
Release: Sept 3
Paramount+’s MobLand S2
Cast: Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan
Release: Sept 18
FX’s American Horror Story S13
Cast: Sarah Paulson, Evan Peters, Angela Bassett
Release: Sept 24
First look:
Visit Films’ Skintown
Cast: Jack Rowan, Chris Walley
Netflix’s The Altruists
Cast: Julia Garner, Anthony Boyle
Release Date:
Disney+’s Megan and Cupcake Ready for Preschool
Cast: Megan Baptist
Release: Fall 2026
THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT
Emilia Jones is on a mission. She will star in Netflix’s The Retrievals series from Molly Smith Metzler (wri: Netflix mini-series Sirens).
The new series will follow one woman’s fight against a fertility center that operated on her and almost 100 other women without anesthesia.
Jones loves these types of roles, where she gets swept up in an activist film, but finds bliss in a bunch of side missions that bring out her true calling. We saw it in CODA, and if you were lucky enough to catch her in Lionsgate’s Fairyland (trailer), it’s the same story with the AIDS crisis. She’ll do great in this one.
As a bonus, it’ll look great too. Blue Valentine cinematographer Andrij Parekh is set to shoot and direct the first two episodes.
Kingston Rumi Southwick (Matthew Rhys’s son in Widow’s Bay and Jake Gyllenhaal’s son in Presumed Innocent) joins Amazon MGM’s Egg Baby.
From XYZ Films, comedy director Natalia Anderson (Black-ish) directs this new coming-of-age rom-com starring Ariana Greenblatt.
The story follows an angsty teenager (Greenblatt), this time tasked with co-parenting an egg for her health class alongside the precious quarterback.
Southwick has, right now, developed a wonderful niche for himself: the underdrawn teenager with a lot of pent-up anger and resentment. This is right in his wheelhouse.
Tidbits:
Nava Mau (Baby Reindeer) joins the cast of director Deborah Kampmeier’s (Dir: Virgin) indie film Holy Whore. The film follows a woman named Carmine who moves from being a sex worker and a drug addict to a sex therapist who helps heal others with a similar past. Mau will star as Alex, a dominatrix and a heroin addict who ends up in the same rehab as the young Carmine (Sophia Adler). Mau was one of the strongest parts of Baby Reindeer, providing the show with a grounded and more mature character while everyone else around her is running around in chaos.
Comedy legend Amy Sedaris is going into hiding. She joins Ben Stiller and Benicio Del Toro in Apple TV’s Protective Custody. Mike Judge (Silicon Valley, Office Space) will direct. This comedic show follows a fallen financier facing major fraud allegations who lands in protective custody. I could very clearly see Sedaris’ off-kilter personality blending well with whatever alchemy Stiller, Del Toro, and Judge have brewing.
Casting Tidbits:
Gayle Rankin (House of the Dragon)
Neal McDonough
And Only Murders in the Building, but the building is full of Doctor Whos
All those and more here.
FESTIVALS AND DOCS
The New York Film Festival is beginning to unveil more of its feature lineup for its upcoming 64th edition.
Some standouts from the NYFF’s Currents Centerpiece section:
Bardi (documentary)
Dir: Tala Hadid
Headlining film
Synopsis:
Filmmaker and photographer Tala Hadid immersed herself in the rugged, fraternal world of a group of horse-riders in central Morocco, as they take part in an equestrian military ritual that dates to the 16th century.
Heil Jupiter!
Dir: Carlos Reygadas (NYFF45’s Silent Light)
Synopsis:
Amidst crashing waves and monumental rocks on a distant coast, two young couples open up a realm of shifting realities. Unbeknownst to them, a mysterious entity watches from high above with godlike judgment.
Overt Listening (documentary)
Dir: Tiffany Sia (A Wet Finger in the Air)
Synopsis:
Hong Kong-born artist Tiffany Sia confronts the Cold War legacy of China in this landscape film shot amidst the serene environs of Taiwan’s Kinmen archipelago, where a major battle took place at the end of the Chinese Civil War.
The festival will also screen a 16mm restoration of the 110-minute, silent film Suicide Note (1976-1984) by critic and avant-garde filmmaker Fred Camper.
To see the full list of titles in the 2026 Currents section, click here.
The NYFF will run from Sept. 25-Oct. 12.
TIFF Market additions:
Freeing Flipper
E.P: Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way (The Revenant)
Int. Sales Rep: Dogwoof (The Rescue)
Dir: Barney Douglas (Warriors)
Synopsis:
The extraordinary story of Richard “Ric” O’Barry, once the world’s highest-paid dolphin trainer, now their most passionate defender, risking his life and liberty to free these remarkable creatures from captivity.
Final Invasion
Int. Sales Rep: Convoke Media (Kill Shot)
Dir: Josh Sternfeld (Fortress: Sniper’s Eye)
Cast: Anthony Michael Hall, Emile Hirsch
Synopsis:
When a mysterious UAP satellite crashes in the New Mexico desert, it unleashes a rapidly mutating extraterrestrial organism that infects all life on Earth, including humans, animals, and the planet’s ecosystems, triggering an extinction-level event.
INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT / INTERNATIONAL NEWS
Little Miss Sunshine (2006) producer Marc Turtletaub and The Messenger screenwriter Oren Moverman are teaming back up.
They’re making an adaptation of the NY Times bestseller Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt.
Turtletaub will direct the film from Moverman’s screenplay.
Book Synopsis:
Travis is Death in the modern world. His job is to offer people comfort in their final hours of life. He’s stoic, gentle, and a little naive. Then Travis meets Dalia, a midwife, and her boisterous eight-year-old daughter. He finds himself wholeheartedly embraced by other people and learns what it means to be truly alive—and what might be irrevocably lost in death.
We like these two exploring life and death. Moverman’s The Messenger was all about the impersonal military machinery through which death is delivered to families. And Turtletaub produced Little Miss Sunshine, one of the best films ever about being yourself and embracing life. So this should be a good pairing.
Their last film together, Borges and Me, just premiered out of competition at the Edinburgh Film Festival.
International Tidbits:
Banijay Rights brings on Matt Creasey as Senior EVP World (minus EMEA). This is an elevation from his previous title, EVP, Sales, Acquisitions, and Co-Productions, Rest of World. This follows the company’s blockbuster merger with All3Media. The deal created an $8bn global TV production powerhouse, responsible for iconic shows like Peaky Blinders, Black Mirror, The Traitors, MasterChef, Big Brother, Survivor, and more. With a library of 265,000 hours of content.
Turkey submits the social drama Like a Limbless Tree as its submission for the Best International Feature Oscar. Directed by Tunç Davut, the film follows a retired engineer whose life changes forever after being diagnosed with a terminal disease. To make matters worse, his Syrian caregiver ran away, making him in charge of her two children. Turkey has submitted films for the Academy Awards since 1964, but never received a nomination. Let’s see if this colorful drama makes history.
Switzerland chooses director Nicolas Wadimoff’s Who Is Still Alive as their submission for the Best International Feature Oscar. The feature is an experimental doc in which Palestinian refugees recreate their escape from Gaza on a stage marked by chalk outlines, much like Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003). Switzerland’s last Best International Film Oscar win was Journey of Hope (1991); let’s see if this daring doc could bring them an Oscar for the first time in 36 years.
ON THIS DAY
1945. Steve Martin born in Waco, Texas.
Written by Gabriel Miller, Madelyn Menapace and Tony Jaeyeong Jeong.
Editor: Gabriel Miller.
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