Confidence and power in dealing with people

NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell said execs at the company and parent Comcast are “more confident” than they were a year or two ago that investments in streaming service Peacock will soon yield profits. How soon remains a bit unclear, however. “We’ve been clear from the start that we’re going to see a return on that investment — I think we feel better about that now based on where we are,” Shell said during Comcast’s fourth-quarter earnings call. The company said Peacock had passed 20 million subscribers by the end of 2022, more than double its size at the start of the year. It added 5 million subscribers in the quarter thanks to Spanish-language World Cup coverage as well as original programming, other live sports and the addition of first-window movie titles and NBC and Bravo series that used to go to Hulu. Over the rest of the year, CEO Brian Roberts said, “subscriber cadence will follow content launches, which will fall more heavily in the second half of 2023” than … [Read more...] about NBCUniversal And Comcast Execs “More Confident” Than They Were A Year Ago In Peacock Profit Outlook, Jeff Shell Says

UPDATED with final winners: The Oscar-winning documentary Summer of Soul , Bo Burnham’s Emmy-winning musical comedy special Inside , Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railroad and Raoul Peck’s Exterminate All the Brutes are among the final list of winners of 2022 Peabody Awards . The Peabodys, in their 82nd year, honor the year’s most powerful content across the fields of entertainment, documentary, news, podcast/radio, arts, children’s and youth, and public service programming. The organization based at the Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia wrapped up a a weeklong rollout of all 30 winners Thursday. This year’s awards were presented by the likes of Melissa McCarthy, Morgan Freeman, John Legend, Kevin Bacon, H.E.R., Ethan Hawke, Jon Stewart, Hasan Minhaj, Riz Ahmed, LeVar Burton, Jenny Slate, Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Scott. Newsman Dan Rather and Fresh Air ‘s Terry Gross have already won this year’s Career Achievement Award and … [Read more...] about Peabody Awards: The Complete List Of 2022 Winners

EXCLUSIVE: Netflix has commissioned a second season of its British true crime series My Lover My Killer . The first season was a hit on the service and spent several weeks in the streamer’s top ten charts, prompting a re-up of the FirstLook TV -produced show. Distributor Abacus Media Rights closed the deal on behalf of FirstLook, a factual indie based in the Midlands in England. The returning series will again investigate stories of those who paid the ultimate price for offending an obsessive lover. These include tales of an obsessive soldier with a deadly mission, and a crime scene on a puppy farm. They will be told with interviews from those involved in the cases, which include some of the most shocking British murders. Each episode features testimonies from family and friends of the victims, and investigative police officers. FirstLook said “part of the intention with bringing the series back is to raise awareness of these dangerous relationships and crimes, … [Read more...] about ‘My Lover My Killer’: Netflix Orders Second Season Of True Crime Doc Series

HBO has set Sunday, March 26, 9 PM for the fourth season premiere of its Emmy-winning drama series Succession , which will launch on Sky the following day. We’re also getting a look at the upcoming season in a new teaser trailer. You can watch it above. The teaser picks up following the Season 3 finale when patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) betrayed his adult kids. In the trailer, Siobhan (Sarah Snook) says “This is not about getting back at Dad, but if it hurts him, it doesn’t bother me.” Adds Kendall (Jeremy Strong), “It’s a tightrope walk on a straight razor… 500-foot reputational drop.” Created by Jesse Armstrong, Succession explores themes of power and family dynamics through the eyes of patriarch Logan Roy (Cox) and his four grown children, Kendall (Strong), Siobhan (Snook), Roman (Kieran Culkin), and Connor (Alan Ruck). In Season 4, the sale of media conglomerate Waystar Royco to tech visionary Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) moves ever closer. The … [Read more...] about ‘Succession’ Season 4 Premiere Date Set At HBO & Sky; Watch New Teaser Trailer

Everything Everywhere All At Once announced itself this morning as a serious Oscar threat with 11 nominations , topping off with Best Picture. That includes performing noms for Michelle Yeoh , Jamie Lee Curtis, Stephanie Hsu and Ke Huy Quan . The film also drew noms for Original Screenplay, Costume, Original Score, Original Song, Film Editing and Directing for Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. The overachieving journey of the film is almost as absurd as its parallel universe storyline. It goes far beyond being the rare film to premiere at the SXSW festival and find its way to Oscar almost a year later. The film began with AGBO partners Joe and Anthony Russo seeing Kwan & Scheinert’s Swiss Army Man , the film that starred Paul Dano as a man stranded on a desert island who befriends a dead body — played with flatulent gusto by Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe — as they join forces to return to civilization. The AGBO partners gave a blind deal to “The Daniels,” as the … [Read more...] about Eleven Oscar Noms For ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once:’ It All Started With Admiration For A Dead, Flatulating Harry Potter

SPOILER ALERT! This story contains details from the Season 2 finale of HBO Max’s Gossip Girl . It was never supposed to end this way. HBO Max ‘s Gossip Girl took its final bow on Thursday as the Season 2 finale hit the streamer. Since news of the show’s cancellation broke last week, the episode now also serves as a series finale. Showrunner Josh Safran told Deadline that he’s holding on to a glimmer of hope that the series might land at a new home, but he’s had an inkling for months that this might happen, considering the growing number of streaming cancellations and Gossip Girl ‘s hefty price tag. “I asked HBO Max if I actually could go back in [to the episode]. I had the idea to take some of the cliffhangers out, because there were a lot of cliffhangers,” Safran said. “We got the editorial team back together. I went in and I lifted a bunch of stuff, I changed as much as I could. I couldn’t do as much as I wanted, because I couldn’t re-shoot anything, … [Read more...] about ‘Gossip Girl’ Boss Josh Safran Explains How He Re-Shaped The Season 2 Closer As A Series Finale & What He Had Planned For Season 3

Streamers such as Netflix, Prime Video and Paramount+ are “perplexed” by government threats to the UK’s Public Service Broadcasters (PSB), according to Sherwood scribe James Graham . Graham, one of Britain’s foremost TV and theater writers, flagged the example of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who broke through the theater system to create the BBC ’s Fleabag before being snapped up by Amazon in a ‘Golden Handcuffs’ deal. He was reflecting on the BBC’s funding struggles due to the government’s freezing of the licence fee for two years, along with threats to Channel 4’s position as a public broadcaster, although this was recently reversed. “We’ve got the best of both worlds [in the UK],” said Graham, in conversation with Banijay UK Chair Patrick Holland at today’s Freeview Outside the Box 2023 event. “Streamers benefit from PSB development. The likes of Amazon would be utterly perplexed by the threat to that pipeline.” Graham said his hit BBC One drama Sherwood set … [Read more...] about ‘Sherwood’ Writer James Graham: Streamers Are “Perplexed” By UK Government Threat To BBC & Channel 4

The Berlinale ’s European Film Market was the last major physical market to take place in 2020 as the world began shutting down because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The virus would force the event online in 2021 and 2022. The EFM’s traditional home of the Gropius Bau looked strangely empty last February, playing host to an exhibition by South African artist Zanele Muholi, as the event unfolded online alongside a scaled-down physical festival. Its vast atrium and halls are set to be packed with hundreds of stands and thousands of professionals once again this year for EFM’s 2023 edition, running February 16-22. Both the Gropius Bau and the market’s other key exhibition space of the Marriott Hotel are already fully booked. “The good news for us is that we are completely at the same level in terms of accreditations as we were at this time of the year in 2020. This means that we are forecast to reach the same amount of market participants,” EFM director Dennis Ruh . As … [Read more...] about Berlin’s EFM Boss Reveals Size Of U.S. & Asia Contingents, Talks Growing Importance Of TV

Stubborn and iconoclastic as always, Jean-Luc Godard has passed to another realm –and by his own choice–at age 91. Ever impudent and exasperating, forever pushing boundaries but remaining elusive, and an artist in every fiber of his being, Godard always did exactly what he wanted to do; for a few years many followed him ardently, and for lots of us in the 1960s he led the way into a vastly exciting and personal form of cinema. Thereafter he went entirely his own way, losing most of his audience but remaining at the forefront of exploring what cinema is, could be, and, sometimes, what it absolutely shouldn’t be. The official obituaries and tributes will certainly convey Godard’s importance and influence through the 1960s, the way he helped liberate cinema from its literary and orderly appearance to something far more energized, unexpected, jarring and often exhilarating. Although Godard consumed and brilliantly wrote about the existing cinema as a young critic, he … [Read more...] about Godard Is Gone: A Remembrance Of The Stubborn & Iconoclastic Film Director

Well, the mostly predictable Oscar nominations arrived Tuesday morning with no disasters or truly egregious missteps. Even the snubs were fairly routine: no female directors, though women won the directing award in the past two years ; James Cameron and Joseph Kosinski, both with Best Picture nominees , were left out too. Such normalcy is too bad. And I mean that in the nicest possible way. It’s a weird but undeniable fact of Hollywood life that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and its pet awards ceremony feed on their own mistakes. Let things go well or follow an expected path, and the Oscars turn into a yawn. But screw something up, and suddenly it’s the Greatest Show on Earth all over again — back on the pedestal, just waiting to be knocked off by the howling crowd. Errors are an asset. Gaffes are gold. The Academy is never so interesting as when it is just, plain, obviously wrong. This is not a casual mechanism. By and large, average … [Read more...] about The Film Academy And Its Oscars Manage To Feed On Their Own Mistakes