Category: Entertainment

Toni Collette will make her feature directing debut with “The Best Of,” her screen version of Graeme Simsion’s bestselling novel, which is one of 75 projects sharing more than AUD16.9 million ($11.7 million) in production and development money from Screen Australia.

Collette, an Emmy and Golden Globe winner, produces alongside Christopher Simon. The story centers on two ex-lovers who come back into each other’s lives after spending decades apart, only to find old feelings stirring with messy and mixed results. Screen Australia made a major production investment in association with Screen NSW. Kismet handles local distribution and Cornerstone holds international sales.

The round, announced Tuesday, covers features, series and shorts.

“Australian storytellers continue to captivate audiences with their creativity, originality and distinctive perspectives. This latest round of funding supports an exciting range of projects from emerging creatives forging new paths to established voices exploring new creative territory. Screen Currency 2026 found that local stories matter deeply to Australians, and these projects will deliver on the authenticity and ambition that audiences have come to expect,” said Louise Gough, Screen Australia’s director of narrative content.

Brouhaha Entertainment, the company behind “Boy Swallows Universe,” is making “The Dark Lake,” a series based on Sarah Bailey’s award-winning novel. Tonkin plays a detective in a rural town whose investigation into the killing of a former high school classmate forces her to face buried secrets of her own. Troy Lum and Andrew Mason produce, with Becca Johnstone writing and executive producing. Giorgia Stawaruk, Tonkin and Katarina Mandic are also executive producers. Screenwest partners on the major production investment, with additional financing from Screen NSW.

Jeffrey Walker (“The Artful Dodger,” “Fing!”) directs “Bull” (working title), a feature from Infin8 Studios and Total Fiction Films. Drawn from a true story, it follows a smooth-talking prisoner who signs up for a debating team inside Tasmania’s harshest jail, hoping to change course and finally give his mother a reason to be proud. George Pullar stars, co-writes with Taylor Danworth and produces with Michael Lawrence, John Molloy and Suzanne Walker. Richard Roxburgh, Robyn Malcolm, Teresa Palmer, Thomas M Wright and Harrison Gilbertson round out the cast. Screen Queensland is on board, with Kismet distributing locally and Cornerstone handling international sales.

Sooshi Mango’s untitled feature debut follows three obstinate Italian immigrants who mobilize their multicultural neighborhood when a mysterious wellness club puts their cherished social club at risk. Nick Kozakis (“Kick On”) directs from a script by the group’s Joe Salanitri, Carlo Salanitri and Andrew Manfre with Declan Fay. Paul Dainty and Cathy Rodda produce, with Timothy Whiting as co-producer. VicScreen partners, and Roadshow has local distribution.

Rodd Rathjen directs “No Friend But the Mountains,” adapted from Behrouz Boochani’s acclaimed memoir, from a screenplay he co-wrote with Boochani. The Kurdish journalist, fleeing persecution, is intercepted at sea and sent to Manus Island, where he documents the gradual breakdown of the men held there. Gal Greenspan, Sharlene George, Amy Parry, Arkos Armont, Katy Roberts, Boochani and Antony Waddington produce. The New Zealand Film Commission, Screen Queensland and VicScreen are partners, with Madman distributing in Australia.

On the development side, Mithila Gupta’s “Desi Down Under” will turn her coming-of-age Indian-Australian audio series into a romantic comedy feature about three misfits who head from Kerala to the beach at Coogee, where they hope to pick up surf-lifesaving skills they can use to help their compatriots. Gupta writes and produces with Nina Aujla, Smriti Mundhra and Maya Gnyp.

Goalpost Pictures’ series “The Caretaker,” adapted from Gabriel Bergmoser’s bestselling novel by Alexei Mizin and Ryan van Dijk, both members of Screen Australia’s 2026 Talent Gateway cohort, also landed development backing. The thriller centers on a woman hiding out as caretaker of a ski resort out of season, who goes to ever more extreme lengths to hold on to the life she has built.

Among the shorts, BAFTA-nominated Rosie Westhoff (“The Main Part”) writes and directs “Solastalgia,” in which a young girl tries to reassemble scattered memories of the bushfire that destroyed her home while looking for connection in a transformed place. Chloe Brennan (“We Used to Own Houses”), Amanda Browne and Ashlee Russell (both “Mothmama”) produce, with Kitty Green (“The Royal Hotel”) as mentor.

Green also mentors the team behind a family short from Pasifika-led Mana Film Productions that mixes live action and animation, “My Life as a 12-Year-Old Demon Hunter… With Great Hair!” It tracks 12-year-old Tala over a single day as she fends off demons out to steal her powers – a bigger headache than her homework. AWGIE winner and bestselling author Maria Lewis writes, directs and co-produces, with Shonee Samia co-producing and Herbert Leota animating. Animator Jake Duczynski (“Magic Beach”) joins Green as mentor. Both shorts received principal production funding.

Full lists of production, development and short film approvals are on Screen Australia’s website. The agency will reveal more recently funded projects alongside the ABC Media Showcase on Oct. 21.

Lyrical Games will make its market debut this week with the launch of Soulslike game “Valor Mortis.”

Set in a supernatural reimagining of 19th-century Europe, “Valor Mortis” lets players take on the part of William Dowsett (voiced by James Alexander), a resurrected English soldier of the Grande Armée who wields both Napoleonic-era weaponry and devastating supernatural powers. The game also stars Vincent Cassel as the legendary Napoleon Bonaparte and Jennifer English as The Shrike, a key figure in the resistance to Napoleon’s war.

Developed by “Ghostrunner” studio One More Level, “Valor Mortis” is the first of multiple titles in the works at the Lyrical Media’s indie video game publisher and the game’s ambitious first-person take is setting a high bar for what Lyrical plans to produce from here.

“One More Level specializes in first-person action, so they understood the problem better than anyone,” Lyrical Games chief Blake Rochkind tells Variety. “The core challenge is that Soulslikes are built on reading your opponent: spacing, telegraphs, knowing exactly where you are relative to an enemy’s swing. A third-person camera gives you that for free. In first-person, you lose a lot of that awareness, so the team had to rebuild it. They spent an enormous amount of time on the parry window specifically, plus lock-on, audio cues and hit feedback, so a perfect parry feels as readable as it does in a third-person game. The other hurdle was pace. Ghostrunner is all about speed, and Valor Mortis is deliberately slower and more methodical.”

“Valor Mortis” launches Tuesday for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S and for PC via Steam priced at $39.99. Notably, the title will be available on Day 1 for those with an Xbox Game Pass subscription, though Rochkind declined to share details about striking that deal while still making the game available for purchase across platforms.

See below for more from Variety’s interview with Lyrical Games’ Rochkind below.

What made you feel confident in Lyrical picking this unconventional take as one of its first publishing deals? What do you want this project to say about the direction Lyrical plans to go in?

I knew I wanted to work One More Level within five minutes of playing Ghostrunner when it released in 2020. Strong game-feel is the rarest talent in this medium, and when you play something with truly great game-feel (and you play a lot of games), you know it immediately. It took a while for the stars to align, since they made Ghostrunner 2 before being ready to tackle this. The pitch for Valor Mortis checked every box. You had a proven team with a unique specialization, working in a genre with a huge audience, but with two real twists: a first-person camera and a setting nobody else is touching. That’s Lyrical Games’ thesis in a nutshell: midtier budgets, unique takes on proven genres and genuine partnership with developers. If this game says one thing about us, I hope it’s that we’ll push our chips in on talented teams with a strong point of view.

What was the casting process like and how much did the team prioritize landing big-name talent?

After the announcement of the game went well, we realized we had something here, so it was a question of how we can pour gasoline on the fire. Vincent Cassel was truly the dream casting for Napoleon. He’s not on screen the way a typical character is. He’s a voice in William’s head, speaking to him almost like a father to a son. That role lives or dies on presence, and Vincent Cassel has a kind of controlled menace that’s hard to find. Landing him was a big moment for us. Similar with Jennifer English. We had a very meaty role in The Shrike, and she was the only name on the list for us. It helped in both cases that the game’s announcement had gone well enough that we had some stature to reach out to both. Finally, James Alexander carries the whole game as William and I hope this will put him on the map even more than he already is. For a new IP, a cast like that tells players we’re taking the story as seriously as the combat.

What inspired the team’s interest in a supernatural, cosmic horror version of the Napoleonic Wars for the setting?

That’s OML’s vision, and it’s one of the things that sold me on the game. Fantasy Soulslikes are everywhere, so the setting immediately made it stand out. The Napoleonic era is also a natural fit for horror. You have this charismatic figure promising a unified Europe, and millions of soldiers who believed in that idea and died for it. Layering a plague and body horror on top of that lets the game ask a pretty dark question: what would you sacrifice for power, and for someone else’s dream? It’s a period most players know in broad strokes, which makes twisting it that much more unsettling. It’s also simply iconic, which has gone a long way in people’s interest.

How would you describe the journey William Dowsett sets out on and how his resurrection carries players through the narrative?

William is a young Englishman who’s disillusioned with the monarchy and volunteers for Napoleon because he believes in the idea of a unified Europe. Then he dies for it. The game opens with him waking on a battlefield with the plague running through his veins, though not fully “turned.” That corruption is both his curse and his power. It’s how he fights, and it gets stronger as he absorbs what he defeats. Napoleon is in his head guiding him, and partway through, another voice joins that pulls him somewhere else entirely. So the journey is really about whose cause William is fighting for, and what’s left of him by the end.

Were there any significant changes made to the game following the Steam demo feedback?

We did an early public playtest shortly after announcing in August 2025. That was a massive boon to the game and significantly influenced One More Level’s development from there. The Next Fest demo this summer was just a few months before launch, and of course One More Level took a lot away from that as well, but the playtest was just transformative for the game and we’re so grateful that so many players have stuck with the game for over a year since then and have helped make the game what it is today. It’s definitely an approach we hope to do again with our games in the future.

British horror icon Hammer Films could be returning to the chilling world of one of its most successful movies.

John Gore Studios, which owns Hammer (bought by theater mogul John Gore in late 2023) has acquired all rights to the works of Dame Susan Hill, who famously wrote the 1983 Gothic horror “The Woman in Black.”

Considered one of the most defining British ghost stories of the modern era, “The Woman in Black” would be adapted into a hugely successful stage adaptation, which ran in London’s West End for 33 years. In 2012, Daniel Radcliffe — fresh out of Hogwarts — fronted a Hammer production of “The Woman in Black” feature, which earned $127.7 million, becoming the highest-grossing British horror in 20 years (and with the biggest U.S. opening for a Hammer film in the studio’s history).

Alongside “The Woman in Black,” Hill’s body of work across a publishing career spanning more than six decades, also encompasses literary fiction, crime writing, children’s books, memoir and radio drama. Among her many accolades, her novel “The Bird of Night” was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1972, while her wider honours include the Somerset Maugham Award, the Whitbread Novel Award and election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

“For any author, it’s heartening to see their stories continue to find new life,” said Hill. “John Gore Studios brings together a genuine respect for heritage with an understanding of how classic stories can reach new audiences, and Hammer has a long and distinguished place in the history of British gothic storytelling, so I’m very pleased that these worlds can come together for the next chapter.”

Gore recently revealed to Variety that, having so far released 4K restorations of Hammer’s library, he was now looking at bringing some of its classic monsters, including Dracula and Frankenstein, back to screen with new adaptations. Hill’s library — including “The Woman in Black” — adds further opportunities. John Gore Studios said it was looking to exploit her portfolio across film and TV while also looking at opportunities in theater where existing rights arrangements allow.

“Susan Hill is one of Britain’s most distinctive literary voices, and it is a privilege to become a custodian of such an extraordinary body of work,” said Gore, founder and executive chairman of John Gore Studios. “Our ambition is to approach these stories with the same care, craftmanship and respect for character, suspense and atmosphere that Susan has brought to them throughout her career. As we explore new ways of bringing her work to audiences across film, television and beyond, Susan’s voice and vision will remain at the heart of everything we do. Above all, we hope that each new interpretation will encourage audiences to discover, or return to, the remarkable writing that inspired it.”

The acquisition was led by John Gore Studios’ Chief Operating Officer, Anouska Spiers. Development will be overseen by Chief Creative Officer Francis Hopkinson and the wider John Gore Studios creative team, while Spiers will oversee the portfolio/franchise management and overall exploitation strategy for John Gore Studios. Hill will remain actively involved in new creative projects and will be part of the ongoing management relationship around the portfolio and development strategy, as well as being an executive producer on new projects.

“Susan Hill’s extraordinary body of work represents exactly the kind of timeless storytelling that sits at the heart of John Gore Studios’ creative ambition,” said Spiers. “The success of ‘The Woman in Black’ proved the power of her storytelling on screen, but that is only the beginning. Susan Hill’s catalogue offers a rich world of gothic horror, psychological suspense and unforgettable characters and we look forward to expanding that legacy, creating interconnected opportunities for iconic stories, new adaptations and worlds that can captivate audiences for years to come.”

Susan Hill is represented by Peters Fraser and Dunlop (PFD). Caroline Michel, literary agent and CEO of PFD, was instrumental in bringing the transaction together, and will continue representing John Gore Studios as owner of the works.

Germany’s leading broadcaster RTL Deutschland unpacked its recent partnership with YouTube at Mipcom Cannes, revealing that its long-running action series “Cobra 11” has thrived on the platform.

On stage alongside Pedro Pina, YouTube’s VP for EMEA, RTL Deutschland chief executive Stephan Schmitter said the broadcaster uploaded more than 200 full episodes of the series to YouTube a year ago, and was able to draw 30 million views — a major feat for a show which has aired since 1996 and previously sold to more than 120 countries worldwide.

RTL is the latest broadcaster to partner up with YouTube, following Channel 4 and BBC in the U.K., and France Télévisions in France.

While linear broadcasters, like streamers, are still perceiving YouTube as a major disruptor and challenger, a number of them have started working more closely with the platform to tap into younger demographics and generate new advertising revenue. The appeal of YouTube has also grown due to the fact that it’s now being consumed on TV screens which makes it a straightforward competitor to traditional outlets.

Schmitter pointed out “Cobra 11” had little commercial value left for RTL after being extensively rerun on linear and streaming, but have found a new audience on YouTube, where 83% of viewers are men with an average age of 30. It also translated into a 123% increase in first video views for the series on RTL+ and a 26% rise in subscriptions linked to the show.

“Our theory was that young men today also love big stunts, flying cars, big explosions and the German Autobahn, where there are no speed limits. That is the key. They discover, or rediscover, the show. And if they want new episodes, more flying cars and explosions, they have to go to RTL+,” Schmitter said.

The YouTube partnership on “Cobra 11” has also been lucrative on the advertising side. RTL’s advertising sales arm Ad Alliance has been in charge of packaging inventory across the broadcaster’s linear channels, RTL+, Sky and YouTube.

“Now we can go to the advertisers, to our huge portfolio of advertisers, and offer them a 360-degree proposition. And this really works out, especially on the big screen, because it’s only one switch away,” said the exec.

“This combination makes sense to advertisers, and they’re very interested in what we are doing with YouTube and how the inventory is shared. In the end, we get additional money, and our revenues are significantly up this year,” he said, citing near “double-digit millions” in revenues.

Earlier this year, France Télévisions struck a deal to bring about 20,000 hours of content a year to YouTube, including national and local news bulletins plus its flagship current-affairs and investigative magazines. It’s already paid off. The broadcaster’s news channel franceinfo hit 110 million YouTube views in September, eight times more than a year earlier.

Pina argued that traditional broadcasters should stop looking at YouTube solely as a threat to their business.

“All in all, it is a self-reinforcing partnership that can only produce value. But again, the value that it produces, interestingly and importantly, is feeding into the IP that is already successful and breathing new life into stuff that was already successful before. And that is so energizing,” Pina said. “And it is the model of creators. So back to your point initially, Evan, of thinking like a creator.”

Like France Televisions, RTL has also made its news channel, NTV, available on the platform alongside shorter videos and content produced with digital creators.

As younger audiences increasingly turn to YouTube and TikTok for information, Schmitter said the move is particularly important at a time of political polarization in Germany, with the far right party AFD on the rise.

“I think for us it’s important, and also for our role in the democratic system, to reach everybody,” Schmitter said.

Pina echoed Schmitter’s argument, pointing to the growing presence of legacy news organizations like BBC and France Télévisions on YouTube.

“The more traditional players start leaning in on YouTube, the more a cross-section of voices can be heard, and that can only be good for democracy,” Pina said.