Author: rb809rb

WON: Sydney Sweeney: Sure, her cameo was cut from The Devil Wears Prada 2. Yes, she has many media and social media scolds in a tizzy over her racy scenes in Euphoria, which is hot garbage this season. Also, nobody can stop talking about her in the HBO show — even though she co-stars with Zendaya, arguably the hottest actress on the planet right now. And she’s back as the face of American Eagle, in a far more clearly non-racist jeans campaign this time, after boosting their sales last year. Oh, and Christy — her boxing biopic that was mocked by Sweeney’s detractors for bombing at the box office — just hit No. 1 on HBO Max.

LOST: David Zaslav: How is this remotely fair? Warner Bros. shareholders approved the Paramount merger that Zaslav worked tirelessly to put together for so many months, yet 82 percent voted against rewarding the man most responsible with some modest compensation for his efforts. He was only expecting upward of $886 million, one of the largest golden parachutes in history. What more does Zaslav have to do to prove himself? Go to the office of every Warner shareholder and lay them off, too? Do you have any understanding of the costs, crew salaries, and maintenance of your average super yacht?

WON: Curry Barker: You may not have heard of him — yet. But Barker is a 25-year-old TikTok sketch comedy guy who has suddenly become a highly sought-after writer-director — even though his first theatrical release, Obsession, doesn’t come out until next month. Just in the last few days, he landed A24’s reimagining of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and another film he just wrapped for Jason Blum, Anything But Ghosts, sold to Focus Features (Barker also gets to star in that one). Sorry industry veterans reduced to lugging lumber at Home Depot: If AI doesn’t replace us, Gen Z surely will.

LOST: Michael Critics: Critics have been very tough on Antoine Fuqua’s Michael Jackson biopic about a singer who definitely did not molest young boys despite admitting to letting them sleep in his bed as a 40-year-old man. He was just a delicate and sensitive artist, OK? It’s your fault that you don’t understand a powerful pop star’s need to spoon other people’s 10-year-olds. With only 38 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, many reviewers claim that — aside from various omissions about Jackson’s legacy — the film is a boring, paint-by-numbers effort (a few critics, like ours, were much more positive).

Taj Jackson has pushed back online, writing, “Sorry media, u don’t get to control the narrative anymore of who Michael Jackson truly was. The public gets to watch this movie … they will decide for themselves.” If the Jackson family really wanted to let fans decide for themselves about the singer’s legacy, the estate wouldn’t have pushed HBO to de-platform its documentary about Jackson’s alleged sins, Leaving Neverland, on a legal technicality. Speaking to THR, the documentary’s director wearily claimed that fans going to see the feel-good Michael, “don’t care that he was a child molester.”

“Don’t care” indeed: Michael is tracking to earn at least $80 million for a potential record-opening weekend for a music biopic. Its CinemaScore is an A-. This fawning film is going to be huge and critics — and the parts of Jackson’s story that his fans don’t want to think about — can’t stop it.

Akunna Cook’s Next Narrative Africa Fund has spent the past year making the case that African storytelling is a serious global market that the entertainment industry has consistently underestimated. Now the organization has some numbers to back up its pitch.

NNAF released a new report Thursday, produced in partnership with Parrot Analytics, finding that global demand for African and diasporan film and television has outpaced supply over the past five years — and that the imbalance is especially pronounced in non-English-language titles and several of the commercial genres that drive streaming demand.

Titled “From Influence to Investible: Quantifying Global Demand, Travelability & Investment Opportunity,” the study measures digitally expressed demand for African and diasporan content from 2020 through 2025. Its core takeaway is that African storytelling is not simply a cultural niche or an opportunity to boost representation, but a structurally underexploited growth category for the global entertainment sector.

The researchers found that non-English-language African stories account for 28 percent of audience demand within the cohort tracked by the study, but just 16 percent of available supply — “a clear structural gap within the global streaming ecosystem,” according to the authors.

The report also pushes back on the common industry assumption that African screen stories seldom travel far beyond their home markets. The United States is the single largest market for African and diasporan content, accounting for 8.5 percent of global demand, but the top consuming territories span four continents and include Great Britain, South Africa, Canada, France, Brazil and China. Belgium and Portugal emerge as especially strong over-indexing markets, which the study attributes to the role of African diaspora communities as early discovery engines. In the Caribbean, Eastern Africa and Southern Africa, meanwhile, African and diasporan stories account for more than 60 percent of demand relative to the other major global import cohorts tracked in the report.

The study also explores how African content crosses over. It identifies Black American women as the “bridge audience” for Black-led storytelling, consuming such content at roughly six times the rate of the U.S. general population — making them, in the report’s framing, the single most predictive audience segment for crossover success. Black American men, meanwhile, are described as playing a complementary role as early adopters of non-English-language African content, helping titles move beyond the diaspora.

Cook, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer who served in China, South Africa and Baghdad before working on Africa policy in the Biden administration, launched NNAF in 2024 as a $50 million hybrid vehicle combining $40 million in commercial equity with a $10 million nonprofit venture studio. The fund’s first slate was unveiled in March, drawn from more than 2,000 submissions across 80 countries.

In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Cook argued that Hollywood’s top decision-makers — “the Neons and A24s and the Disneys and the Lionsgates” — should already be thinking seriously about their Africa strategy, given the continent’s cultural influence and enviable demographic profile, with more than 60 percent of Africans under 25.

The report’s authors acknowledge that digitally expressed demand is not the same thing as box office returns, licensing fees or audited financial performance. But Cook’s broader pitch to content investors and studios is clear enough: a global audience for African content already exists, cultural momentum around African music and storytelling continues to build, and the industry’s current output falls far short of demand.