Category: Entertainment

Marc Maron plays a great actor in “In Memoriam,” but the comedian and podcaster worried he didn’t have the chops to pull off a key moment in the new movie.

“I had to cry, but I didn’t know if I had that kind of control as an actor — I didn’t know if I can do that,” Maron remembers. “I really freaked out. I went back to my trailer and was full on DiCaprio in ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.’ I’m like, ‘I suck. What am I doing here?’”

It fell to Sharon Stone, Maron’s scene partner, to help him find his way through the emotional gauntlet. When Maron came back to set, Stone grabbed his hand and encouraged him to draw on the grief he feels over the 2020 death of his girlfriend, filmmaker Lynn Shelton.

“Why don’t you do the scene to Lynn, and I’ll make sure she’s here,” Stone told Maron.

It worked.

“Sharon’s kind of a mystical being,” Maron says. “She’s a powerful force. She said that, and it brought me to a space where I realized that Lynn was my biggest champion as an actor. She loved to direct me. I don’t know that I would have continued pursuing acting if it weren’t for her. So by doing it for Lynn, I got to that place emotionally that I think lands.”

“In Memoriam” debuts at this year’s Tribeca Festival, and Stone is thrilled with the experience of working with Maron, whom she first met during a 2018 interview for his podcast “WTF With Marc Maron.”

“We genuinely partnered in a very profound way on the scene,” Stone says. “In my career, I’ve been put up against the big dogs. They would always bring me in to put me up against the biggest, toughest guys, and oftentimes guys who were kind of a handful, but they knew that I could take it. But it was so different to work with someone like Marc, who was so open and so honest in their real feelings and emotions, and so available to be sincere with me. He was available to be my true partner, not my adversary.”

In the film, Stone plays Maron’s ex-wife, a fellow actor whom he met on a film set. Both have terminal illnesses, and their diagnosis has left them reassessing their lives and work in different ways. Maron’s character is obsessed with making it into the Oscars “in memoriam” segment; Stone’s is more reflective and resigned. Their tender encounter takes place in a grand setting with Stone resting in a chaise lounge in her mansion, outfitted in a robe and turban, looking like Norma Desmond.

“It’s a fulcrum point in the movie, because I have to take this moment to snap Marc out of this place he’s in, where he’s not living in reality,” Stone says.

Stone formed a bond with Maron during her spot on “WTF” and kept in touch with him over the years. She wrote him a condolence note when Shelton died of an undiagnosed blood disorder, which touched Maron greatly.

“It was a terrible tragedy,” Stone says. “He lost her so early, and she was so important to him.”

Even though their scene was complicated to navigate, Stone is thrilled with the finished film.

“Marc is remarkable,” she says. “He’s a real contender in this movie. I was completely blown away. Rarely do I see films that are this amazing anymore, that are about the human condition, and are so brilliant and so beautifully made.”

Going forward, Stone, who has shown she can nail a punchline in films like “The Muse,” hopes to do more comedy.

“I don’t know how many more villains I can really spit out,” she says. “I want to go back to my roots…I started in improv, and I did comedies like ‘Irreconcilable Differences.’ Being a comedic actress was my bag, and then I did ‘Basic Instinct,’ and everybody forgot I could be funny.”

Just don’t expect Stone to dust off her ice pick any time soon. She makes it clear she won’t be reprising her role as femme fatale Catherine Tramell in the reboot of “Basic Instinct” that Joe Eszterhas is reportedly writing for Amazon MGM Studios.

“How old is Joe Eszterhas?” Stone asks as she Googles the screenwriter’s age. “Oh, he’s 81. So I bet he’s really an expert on what’s sexy.”

Correspondents at “60 Minutes” in past years have tried to win an interesting challenge: Could they leave the show for a summer vacation with one story already in the can?

Doing so now is no longer a game.

In the wake of a massive ouster of the top staff of the venerable newsmagazine, serious questions have been raised about whether CBS News will be able to launch the 59^th season of “60 Minutes” on time in the fall. Getting the show off to a good start in mid-to-late September is crucial because the program uses the network’s Sunday-afternoon football games as massive generator of audience. “60 Minutes” has for years been the nation’s most-watched news program.

Now the question is whether the show will have enough on-air correspondents and production staff willing to assign, report, write, fact-check and edit three in-depth documentary-style vignettes of 12 minutes to 13 minutes length to show to football fans and news aficionados. Staffers are demoralized by the recent moves and questioning the motives of CBS parent Paramount Skydance, which has been eager to curry favor with the Trump administration as executives work to consummate a deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery.

“There’s not enough people,” says one person with knowledge of the inner workings of “60 Minutes.” This person says new episodes will provide tangible on-screen evidence of whether CBS News management was able to get production in gear. If “60 Minutes” offers an unusual number of “two parters,” or stories that take up two segments during the show, this person says, it’s a tell-tale sign there’s not enough content in the pipeline.

“I feel badly for the people there,” this person says. “They really don’t have anyplace else to go that’s at the same level, and they have to hang on” in an era of extreme tumult.

The ranks of “60 Minutes” senior leadership have been gutted. Over the past week, CBS News fired correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega; executive producer Tanya Simon; executive editor Dragaan Mihailovich; and two senior producers, Guy Campanile and Matthew Polevoy. A third correspondent, Anderson Cooper, announced his departure in February. The show has been rocked anew by the ouster of correspondent Scott Pelley,  who was fired Tuesday night after challenging Bari Weiss, the editor in chief of CBS News, and Nick Bilton, a former technology reporter and documentary maker who has been installed as the new top producer at the newsmagazine.

The staff “is just unmoored,” says another person familiar with CBS News. “They want to know what’s going on” and how the show will have to change to accommodate Weiss’ vision.

CBS News declined to make executives available for comment. There is a sense that others will pick up some story duties, says one person familiar with the situation. Norah O’Donnell, the former “CBS Evening News” anchor, is expected to contribute stories, and CBS News personnel like Major Garrett have done segments for the program in recent weeks. Such an arrangement would likely help CBS News cut some of the costs of the newsmagazine, which are substantial.

Since Weiss’ arrival last year, information of that sort has been harder to get, according to three people with knowledge of the Paramount Skydance news operation. Weiss, a former opinion writer who left The New York Times to launch The Free Press, a digital site that often pokes at “woke” attitudes. Paramount paid a reported $150 million to acquire the site and has melded it with some CBS News operations, while Weiss holds sway over editorial and newsgathering personnel.

At a town hall meeting held in January, Weiss told CBS News personnel reporting the news that they should stop thinking “about which show will pick it up” or “what hour it will air on linear television,” said Weiss, but rather about: “how can we produce the most revelatory stories for an audience that expects the news immediately and on demand. And for younger generations for whom ‘streaming’ and ‘social” are simply: TV and the news.”

And yet, the TV shows continue to air.

Weiss’ interactions with many producers and reporters since that time have not been frequent, these people say. There appears to be a lot of enmity between the people Weiss has hired to form a CBS News “masthead” and the people tasked with making sure programs like “CBS Evening News” and “48 Hours” run as they should – and generate profits, to boot.

Pelley’s dramatic exit this week will no doubt create a new sense of camaraderie at “60 Minutes,” says one of the people familiar with CBS News. If Weiss and her team could make new outreach to the group and help them understand her vision for the task at  hand, and what Bilton would like to do, this person says, the two sides may find common ground in getting the show ready for the fall.

But many are skeptical Weiss can foment a spirit of cooperation after such a wholescale ejection of top personnel at the newsmagazine, which, despite assertions to the contrary, continues to win massive crowds – even without football – and has a healthy digital presence.

In the fall, says one of the people familiar with CBS News, “we will see pretty quickly how all of this actually affected ’60 Minutes’.”

Jordanian director Zaid Abu Hamdan is set to launch the follow up to his female empowerment drama “Daughters of Abdulrahman,” the gritty crime thriller “Boomah,” set to soon bow from the Shanghai International Film Festival that is becoming an increasingly prominent launching pad for Arab cinema.

Shot in Jordan during an especially challenging period for the war-torn region, “Boomah” segues from Hamdan’s dramedy about four semi-estranged sisters who join forces to contend with the Jordanian patriarchy with what is being described in promotional materials as “a raw, emotionally charged crime thriller about survival, motherhood and the people society leaves behind” that captures a side of Jordan rarely seen on screen.

With “Boomah” the Jordanian helmer continues to explore the female empowerment space with this tale of a notorious and knife-savvy female gang member, the film’s titular character, who becomes embroiled in a power struggle between street thugs and religious extremists while battling the traumas of her harrowing orphaned past.

Leading “Boomah” is Jordanian actress Rakeen Saad, known for her central roles in Netflix hit original series “AlRawabi School for Girls” and “The Giza Killer” and who also has a part in Terrence Malick’s long-gestating biblical drama “The Way of the Wind.” Saad is joined by Majd Eid (“Once Upon a Time in Gaza”), Joanna Arida (“AlRawabi School for Girls”), and Hanan Hilo (“Daughters of Abdulrahman”).

“Boomah was born from very local wounds, but its heart is universal: the need to belong, the pain of being unseen, and what happens when survival and pain become a language,” said Zaid Abu Hamdan in a statement for Variety. “I was inspired by stories of real women in Jordan who were feared, judged, and misunderstood, but rarely truly seen. To have the film meet the world for the first time at the Shanghai International Film Festival is a profound honor,” he added.

“Boomah” is about people at the very bottom of the food chain, the ones society ignores until it needs them, uses them or punishes them,” noted the film’s producer Gianluca Chakra. “These are people surviving on the margins, trying to force their way into a system that was never built for them.”

“Crime here is not glamour. It is labour, currency and survival. What drew us to the film was not the violence, but the humanity underneath it. Beneath the crime thriller is a story about motherhood, belonging and people fighting to carve out a place for themselves in a world that has already decided they don’t matter. That is why the film travels beyond Jordan. These people exist everywhere,” Chakra continued.

“Boomah” was produced by Chakra’s Front Row Productions, the production arm of Front Row Filmed Entertainment, in collaboration with Bounce Productions. The film received support from the Red Sea Fund and the Royal Film Commission – Jordan. Front Row Filmed Entertainment holds global rights to “Boomah” and place to release the film across the MENA region in the fourth quarter of this year.

Sam Reich isn’t expecting an Emmy nomination this year. He isn’t expecting to lose, either.

For the CEO of Dropout, the indie comedy streamer’s first-ever FYC event at the iconic Laugh Factory was never about a single outcome. It was about getting in the room.

“All we’re trying to do is get a little better every year,” Reich tells Variety.

The venue seats roughly 150 people. Dropout’s RSVP list topped 900. But the biggest surprise of the night wasn’t the turnout. It was the appearance of former “Dance Moms” doyenne Abby Lee Miller.

“She told me she’s a ‘Game Changer’ fan,” Reich says. “My wife, Elaine, almost fell out of the bathtub when I told her she came.”

That balance between intimacy and ambition sits at the center of Dropout’s current moment. With 11 Emmy submissions spanning “Game Changer” and “Very Important People,” Reich is mounting a modest campaign in a landscape dominated by billion-dollar media companies.

“Streamers are trying to be everything to anyone,” Reich says. “We’re trying to be something for someone. When you’re paying seven bucks a month for Dropout, you’re probably hardcore about us.”

That loyalty has helped turn “Very Important People” into one of the platform’s defining shows. Hosted by comedian Vic Michaelis, the prosthetics-heavy interview series thrives on improvisation and absurd character work. Season 3 featured performers including Frankie Quinones and Chelsea Peretti, along with other Dropout cast staples.

Reich says Michaelis possesses an unusually rare comedic skill set, managing to be “both straight man and funny person in a way that I’ve never seen juggled in another comic.”

The hilarious show enters the revamped outstanding variety series race at a moment when the Television Academy is increasingly opening to internet-native programming. Reich points to creators like Sean Evans of “Hot Ones,” Brittany Broski and Michelle Khare as part of the same broader movement. A breakthrough for any of them, he argues, benefits all digital creators trying to break into traditional awards spaces.

Nonetheless, for Reich, the Emmy push also functions as a larger branding exercise. As he describes it, Dropout is evolving, moving from “unscripted alt comedy” to simply “alt comedy,” with ambitions that may eventually stretch into animation, horror and scripted storytelling, especially for its flagship Dungeons and Dragons-inspired series, “Dimension 20.”

“We’ve been loosely or vaguely threatening a ‘Dimension 20’ animated something for a while,” he teases of the tabletop RPG comedy show hosted by fan favorite and game master Brennan Lee Mulligan. “We have a couple of irons in that fire that are ‘medium’ to far along at this point.”

Still, Reich resists anything that would ever be deemed as “traditional.”

“I hope that we never produce something that’s recognizable because I always want what we do to be just that little bit avant-garde,” he says.

Most of Dropout’s Emmy hopes rests on “Game Changer,” the competition series Reich hosts himself. The show’s blend of elaborate game mechanics and psychological humor has turned it into a cult phenomenon, particularly after an episode orchestrated by Mulligan turned the tables on Reich himself and became one of the year’s most talked-about installments online.

Season 8, which premiered in May, includes what Reich describes as some of the show’s strongest episodes yet. “Roulette 2” revives a format he felt was too elegant to abandon, while an upcoming episode, titled “Count the Rice,” ranks, in his estimation, among the series’ top five best.

“If you’re asking me if it involves counting rice,” Reich jokes, “it surely does.”

He also exclusively teases to Variety a future episode titled “What’s the Catch,” loosely inspired by the classic game show “Let’s Make a Deal,” saying it’s a “top five”-ever episode of the franchise and one of his personal favorites of the series.

Then there’s the matter of “Survivor.” Reich is a longtime obsessive about the CBS reality franchise, enough so that Dropout once devoted an entire “Game Changer” episode to it.

And of course, how could we not talk about “Survivor,” Reich’s longtime obsession to which he dedicated an episode years ago? Asked about Aubry Bracco and her Season 50 win, he praises her timing:

“Aubry for sure would have been my vote of the final three. She peaked at the exact right moment. It’s so key to strategy; not emerging as clever too soon.”

For a comedy executive navigating the rise through the Emmy ecosystem, the observation is perfect.

Big TV is putting it all out on the field.

A number of top TV networks and streamers are making aggressive efforts to get advertisers to pay top dollar for sports even as Madison Avenue trims back the sizable sums it has given in the past to the usual fare, like dramas, comedies and reality programming. These negotiations take place as part of the industry’s annual “upfront” market, when U.S. media companies try to sell the bulk of their commercial inventory ahead of their next cycle of programs.

Sports is of paramount importance this year, according to five executives familiar with current negotiations, because advertising budgets are down noticeably from last year’s haggle and games from leagues like the NFL and the NBA are one of the few things in which marketers see growing value. “There is not as much money as media companies wanted,” says one media-buying executive, who works on behalf of advertisers to secure commercial time. Another media buyer says many clients have cut upfront budgets by at least 10%, and in some cases by as much as 30% to 40%.

“There is really only one category that is up. All the others are either flat to down,” this buyer says. “Pharma is the only one that’s up — and not as up as everybody thinks.”

If the media companies want more dollars, they may have to offer concessions. Ad buyers say they are, once again, pressing for significant “rollbacks” on rates, particularly for streaming inventory that is supposed to represent the future of the medium. The supply of streaming ad time is huge, particularly with Amazon and Netflix in the market, the executives say, and much of it is not seen as high value to advertisers because consumers watch movies and shows on demand at times of their own choosing, That means the audiences at any given time are usually quite diffuse.

That is not the case for sports, which still bring large, live audiences all watching in a single block of time. Disney went to market this year initially seeking $10 million for a 30-second ad in its coming 2027 broadcast of Super Bowl LXI, a significant jump up from the price NBC initially sought last year for its broadcast of Super Bowl LX. Disney has since agreed to some deals for lower prices, according to the executives.

Amazon and Netflix have also grown bold about asking for top sports prices, according to buyers. Both companies are “overly aggressive on their sports,” says one buying executives.

Netflix, Amazon and Disney all declined to make executives available for comment.

“Sports are the darling of everything,” says one buying executive. “Where networks have sports and scarcity in supply, those are conversations we are having first. Places where there is no sports or less urgency and scarcity in supply, those conversations are slower.” Fox Corp., which has a large sports and news portfolio, but only a smaller amount of scripted entertainment, is likely to do well, buyers indicated, while owners of traditional cable networks focused on scripted fare may have a longer negotiation ahead of them.

NBCUniversal, Paramount Skydance, Fox Corp. and Warner Bros. Discovery declined to comment on the status of their upfront discussions.

Sports represent one of the few areas where the TV companies and streamers have leverage. The media companies have been able to strike deals for sports that typically call for mid-to-high-single-digit percentage increases in CPMs, a measure of the cost of reaching 1,000 viewers that is central in these annual discussions between TV networks and Madison Avenue. The higher increases are for NFL games, executives say, with other sports tucking in underneath the rates set for professional football.

Meanwhile, the rate increases for other types of programming are noticeably less. Networks have been able to notch deals for broadcast TV that call for CPMs that are flat with last year’s or up as much as 5% mid-single-digit percentage. Streaming inventory is in many cases going for CPMs that are flat with last year’s or down as much as 5%, according to the executives — and in some instances, more.

Advertisers and TV sales executives may be at an impasse over cable networks focused on entertainment. These networks are viewed with less enthusiasm in the age of streaming, because more consumers are abandoning their cable subscriptions in favor of streaming services. Media buyers have pressed for rollbacks in cable, and the media companies have resisted.

Their reasoning? New data added to Nielsen earlier this year has suggested that more people are watching cable than previously expected. With that as ballast, TV companies have refused to accept cable “rollbacks,” telling media buyers they will be happy to negotiate with them again later in the year in what is known in the so-called “scatter” market, when advertisers buy ad time much closer to when it needs to run.

No matter how they haggle, the media companies are fighting over a shrinking pile of money. Dollars committed to broadcast primetime in 2025 fell 2.5% to about $9.1 billion, according to Media Dynamics, an advertising consultancy, compared with $9.34 billion in the year-earlier period. Dollars committed to cable fell 4.3% to nearly $8.68 billion, compared with nearly $9.1 billion in 2024. Meanwhile, dollars earmarked for streaming rose 17.9%, Media Dynamics said, to $13.2 billion, compared with $11.2 billion in the 2024 upfront.

The companies are counting on sports to help them eke out something they can call a victory.