Most of the Millarworld stuff is in active development or even some level of production. They are releasing American Jesus this year, though the new title is “The Chosen One.”

Several anticipated HBO shows seem to be sitting in limbo. Season 3 of How to with John Wilson was said to be coming December 2022, but that came and went and there’s been no news. With all the internal shakeups and changing priorities behind the scenes at WBD, seems like the release calendar has been completely scrapped and is being reworked with whatever guidance the executives have put forth. Just hoping it isn’t studio brass low key purging the series slate. Feels like they haven’t promoted Perry Mason season two much at all, for example.

That would be Steven Soderbergh. HBO told him they were interested in the show but didn’t have a spot in the schedule for it for at least two or three years. He could either wait and see if they could make it then, or he could get it made right then at Cinemax. So they took it to Cinemax.

Okay, let me preface this by saying this is one of those, "I know a guy..." stories, so I don't blame anybody being skeptical of what I'm about to say, but I swear, I do know somebody who was involved with Jack Ryan at Amazon, and they are currently working on another Clancy project elsewhere. Long story short, Jack Ryan was dead before the fourth season was even announced as the final one. Hell, it was dead before they even started filming season three. It was a shitshow behind the scenes and John Krasinski is difficult to work with. They fast-tracked seasons three and four to shoot basically one after another because Krasinski wanted out of the show to focus on his directorial career. The odds of him popping up in any other Clancy-related media as Ryan are pretty low.

As for Amazon owning the Clancy "franchise," I don't think that's really correct considering Michael B. Jordan's Rainbow Six movie is in development with Paramount (who unceremoniously dumped Without Remorse to Amazon in the first place), and the Splinter Cell animated show is going to be on Netflix. The Terminal List was a much bigger hit for Amazon than Jack Ryan, and seems like it probably cost Amazon a good bit less overall, too. Between that and The Boys, I do wonder if Amazon is starting to look more adapting newer IP instead of chasing legacy franchises, since most of their endeavors on that front (Jack Ryan, Rings of Power) haven't really been the shows driving people to their service, despite massive marketing campaigns.

Wasn't Marvelous Mrs. Maisel huge for a couple of seasons? And it got a ton of awards attention. Feels like that is their biggest hit to date, even more so than The Boys, but I'm basing that more off the number of every day people I saw talking about Maisel compared to The Boys, actual data might be a different story.

That's James Cameron money, and I have this weird suspicion the Russos aren't going to give Amazon the bang for their buck that Cameron would.

It’s not a new literary device by any means. Most authors who do alternating POVs do third person limited, though, not first. I think first person is difficult to pull off with multiple POVs as most authors end up inadvertently making different character voices sound the same when constantly writing “I” throughout a whole book. William Faulkner managed to do it very well in several books, though, most famously in As I Lay Dying.

AT&T doesn’t own Warner Media anymore; Discovery does. That’s why Warner is in so much debt; AT&T has been a horribly run company for years and had amassed an insane amount of debt. They decided to redistribute a huge chunk of that debt (~$50 billion) to Warner Media when spinning the company off to Discovery. That’s why there’s been a bloodbath at Warner under the new boss Zaslav - the company is going under if they don’t shed a shit ton of debt in the coming years. AT&T was pumping out tons of content in an effort to make HBO Max a Netflix competitor, but the problem is HBO Max hasn’t really grown much since launching three years ago. AT&T also gutted things like DC Comics, pondered selling off the entire video game division at one point (which Zaslav rightfully sees as a huge potential moneymaker and wants more funding to go towards), and managed to weaken major IP like Harry Potter and DC. That’s not getting into AT&T’s comical business blunders like buying DirecTV while cable is dying. They may be a big company, but AT&T is absolutely inept when compared to major players like Amazon and Apple. If Discovery can’t pay off it’s debts and Warner Media folds with them, then the death of one of the legacy studios is on AT&T’s hands, not Discovery’s. I’m not convinced the company is necessarily going to be in better hands with Discovery, but at this point it has a chance of surviving, at least.

All the trade outlets for the industry have been reporting on how the studios are cooling on streaming and looking at new ways to try and make money on it. Netflix is the only streamer that isn’t setting fire to mountains of cash right now, with Amazon and Apple being the others that look sustainable solely because their movie/TV divisions are small investments offset by their lucrative retail and tech businesses. All of the traditional studios, though? They’re hurting, and everybody in the industry is lost as to what the hell the future looks like. With all the guilds prepping for a possible strike to negotiate for a bigger cut of streaming this year, as well, there’s a crazy amount of uncertainty within the business about the future. Cable is in its twilight years, physical media is now exclusively for a niche audience, movie theaters are struggling to draw audiences, and streaming is unsustainable for most studios. It’s bad news on every front.

The thing that’s ridiculous about Benson becoming the centerpiece of the show is that she gets promoted to captain eventually, so her role would be much more administrative and dealing with internal politics. She wouldn’t be showing up at the scene of every crime and doing a lot of actual detective work. Rawlins realistically should have been the protagonist for the show after Benson’s promotion, and while they have her a couple of episodes as the centerpiece each season, it still involves Benson being the focus of drama far too often. And they basically fired Kelli Giddish in the most recent season because she had been on the show so long she was getting too expensive given how much Hargitay costs to keep around.

What falls into the genre is a bit in the eyes of the beholder, but here's some I like:

Thief

Drive

The Nice Guys

Dragged Across Concrete

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

Homicide

Destroyer

Shallow Grave (McGregor's first big role!)

One False Move

Blood Simple

Bound

Cold in July

The Last Seduction

Memento

Brick

The Grifters

Deep Cover

Fifty-one.

It was founded as an alternative to the big two trades, intended to take the piss out of the industry a bit while still delivering exclusives. Over the years, it’s basically become the same as THR and Variety.

Any profile from Variety, Deadline, or The Hollywood Reporter are puff pieces. They are the mouth pieces for the industry.

Edit: Not saying they aren’t worth visiting - probably the best places to get actual industry news. Just saying these specific articles they produce are basically industry propaganda.

Uh, the McGregor-Winstead hook up on Fargo also resulted in both of them ruining their long-term marriages. McGregor’s wife of 25 years left him after finding out about the affair.

Even the legacy brands are struggling. They moved RuPaul’s Drag Race from VH1 over to MTV hoping that it might get some people to actually watch MTV for the first time in a decade.

What are you watching it on? It was the worst streaming service I’ve ever seen on the PS4 app. The app for my smart TV more or less works fine, though. One workaround is subscribe to it as an Amazon channel if you have Prime.

That’s a bit different since it was a young, unregulated industry trying to avoid the government taking an interest in their hustle. The artists were not self-censoring out of fear of being deemed racist/sexist/insensitive/whatever, it was the studios saying you couldn’t have films be too violent/sexual/crass because then the government will come in and start telling them how they can run their business. Basically the same story for the Comics Code Authority. Today’s discussions about self-censorship are quite different, as they are linked more to things like representation and whether the content of the work is representative of who the creator is as a person. It is a fight about who has the right to tell what kind of stories and whether the art can actually be separated from the artist.

Didn’t Ingrid Goes West already do the “King of Comedy but with influencers” premise? I’m more intrigued, but also skeptical, by the comparisons to Haneke’s The Piano Teacher. I just don’t see a studio willing to give money to any project that is truly Haneke-esque, and much as I like Glover, his work has never had that cold, serrated bite Haneke’s does.

Anybody who has seen Lucy in the Sky would not have blind faith in him. It’s bad.

Weintraub is from the days back before Hollywood understood how to use the internet or how to navigate geek culture. He was one of the dudes like Harry Knowles who was in the right place at the right time and was able to leverage “being a nerd” into becoming somebody with industry connections. He seems like a nice guy (unlike Knowles, obviously), but he’s not exactly a top tier journalist, and he also barely writes for Collider anymore due to being the EiC. Collider used to be a pretty good movie site. They reported all the industry news, had some good articles just for the site, and reviews were well-written. Some great people like Perry Nemerioff and a few others came out of that period. Even Matt Goldberg, who often had hot take contrarian reviews or seemed hard to impress, wrote some pretty great retrospectives on things like David Fincher’s filmography. It was a solid alternative to reading the industry trades after Rotten Tomatoes sold to Flickster and fell apart…

… Until Collider sold out to Complex. Almost overnight, the site became unmitigated dogshit. Less and less coverage for non-“nerd culture” topics, cheap listicles like “Top 10 Dog Actors,” and politics inserted into every single article (and I’m not even a “keep politics outta my content!” kinda person, it just got old clicking a casting announcement article and skimming over eight paragraphs about an unrelated hot button issue before reading Tom Holland is going to be Spider-Man). It became such a slog after the merger, culminating in their terrible nerd shows with dorks like John Campea. RLM dunked on them so hard for that shit they had to pull the plug from embarrassment.

Tl;dr: I watched Collider fall apart in real time, the site is indeed awful now.