Author: SD

In mouth-watering casting news, MRC said on Monday that Margot Robbie will star as Catherine Earnshaw opposite fellow Australian Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s upcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights. The film will shoot in the UK. Robbie’s LuckyChap will produce the adaptation of Emily Brontë’s mid-19th century gothic tale of obsession and desire which has fascinated film and television producers for nearly a century. Fennell will write, direct and produce Wuthering Heights, which MRC said on Monday is in pre-production ahead of a UK shoot in 2025. MRC is financing the production. The upcoming feature is heavy on reunion. LuckyChap…

Rank Film (distributor) Three-day gross (Sep 13-15) Total gross to date Week  1. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice  (Warner Bros)  £4.3m £14.4m 2  2. Speak No Evil  (Universal) £1.2m £1.4m 1  3. Lee  (Studiocanal) £674,914 £705,643 1  4. Prima Facie  (NT Live) £554,794 £1.5m 1  5. Despicable Me 4  (Universal) £389,930 £46.3m 10  GBP to USD conversion rate: 1.32 Warner Bros’ Beetlejuice Beetlejuice crossed £14m in a second weekend atop the UK-Ireland box office chart as Universal’s latest Blumhouse horror Speak No Evil opened in second place. Tim…

Mubi horror The Substance leads the new releases at this weekend’s UK and Ireland box office, opening in 521 locations. It is Mubi’s widest-ever release, beating out Priscilla which opened in 295 cinemas in January and the 150 locations How To Have Sex debuted in last year. The Substance stars Demi Moore as a fading star who takes a mysterious drug that enables her to live as a younger version of herself, played by Margaret Qualley. Coralie Fargeat wrote and directed the feature which also stars Dennis Quaid. The film had its world premiere at Cannes in competition, where it won…

Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters spoke on Friday about the company’s local language business, stating: “I think about this as unlocking the creative potential of the human race around the planet.” In a wide-ranging conversation at the Financial Times Business of Entertainment Summit in Los Angeles, Peters said the service is producing content “in 50 countries and 50 languages”. The executive, who just returned from a trip to South Korea and Japan and will visit five countries in Europe next week as the company celebrates ten years on that continent, said: “We’ve got teams around the world that are deeply embedded…

Vue CEO Tim Richards has shared insights into an artificial intelligence model the company has used for close to a decade and said there may be licensing opportunities in light of interest from other exhibitors. Speaking on a panel about AI at the Financial Times’s Business of Entertainment Summit in Los Angeles on Thursday, Richards said its AI model has helped the company punch above its weight in the marketplace and target audiences for whom English is not their first language. Close to 10 years ago Richards and his executive team engaged a group in San Francisco that builds AI models…

Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) CEO Cameron Bailey has said his staff received hundreds of abusive emails and calls including threats of sexual violence from parties opposed to the controversial documentary Russians At War. Speaking on Tuesday to an audience at TIFF Lightbox, which hosted two postponed, post-festival presentations of Anastasia Trofimova’s film, Bailey spoke of the reaction by members of the public against the film, which snowballed after last week’s press and industry screening. On that occasion dozens of protestors bearing Ukrainian flags and placards assembled outside Scotiabank and branded the film Russian propaganda. Filmmaker Trofimova embedded with Russian…

Iranian filmmakers Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha, whose My Favourite Cake premiered in Competition in Berlin, say they have been placed under a new travel ban by Iranian authorities, preventing Moghaddam from attending the film’s premiere in Sweden. The Iranian government had previously banned the co-directors from attending the world premiere in Germany in February. The government recently returned their passports, however Moghaddam posted on Instagram that she was stopped by authorities at Tehran’s airport on the way to Sweden and informed that both filmmmakers were prohibited from leaving the country. Sanaeeha told Screen that he was not traveling, but was with Moghaddam at…

Sheila Fraser Milne, founder and CEO of leading UK completion guarantor company Paterson James, Maria Tanjala, co-founder of digital collections agency FilmChain, and Lee Stone, partner at London-based law-firm and film specialist Lee & Thompson, have joined Screen International’s ’The Future of UK Film’ Summit as speakers. The Summit is taking place at BFI Southbank on September 24, 2024. They will participate in a session called Ask The Experts: Optimising The Value Of Your Production to which delegates will be asked to submit questions in advance. Fraser Milne is one of the UK film and TV industry’s most experienced completion…

Mike Flanagan’s The Life Of Chuck starring Tom Hiddleston is this year’s surprise winner of Toronto International Film Festival’s 2024 TIFF People’s Choice Award, a historically reliable bellwether of an Oscar nomination. Over a sample pool of the last 15 years, all but one People’s Choice winner has gone on to garner a best picture Oscar nomination, and several – like 12 Years A Slave, Green Book and The King’s Speech – have won the top prize at the Academy Awards. Yet The Life Of Chuck presents an anomaly – it currently lacks a US distributor. Buyers had been circling since the world premiere in Toronto and…

Rank Film (distributor) Three-day gross (August 30-Sep 1) Total gross to date Week  1. Despicable Me 4 (Universal) £1.24m £44.6m 8  2. Deadpool & Wolverine (Disney) £1.22m £54.7m 6  3. It Ends With Us (Sony) £1.1m £18.6m 4  4. Alien: Romulus (Disney) £1.08m £10.8m 3  5. Andre Rieu’s 2024 Maastricht Concert: Power Of Love (Piece Of Magic) £700,000 £700,000 1 GBP to USD conversion rate: 1.31 Universal animation Despicable Me 4 rose back to the top of the UK-Ireland box office chart on its eighth weekend in cinemas, boosted by…