Category: Entertainment

Three of the year’s most buzzed-about small-screen stories will receive big kudos at The Hollywood Reporter’s inaugural Sustainability in Entertainment Honors event taking place on April 23 in partnership with the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance.

The invitation-only celebration will be held at the Bel-Air Hotel and highlight three hourlong series for their trailblazing work in crafting onscreen narratives that bring sustainability issues to the forefront, and behind-the-scenes sustainable production practices.

The awards given will include: Legacy of Sustainable Storytelling, presented to ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy; Achievement in Sustainable Storytelling, presented to Hulu’s Paradise; and Achievement in Sustainable Production, to the Duffer Brothers’ upcoming Netflix series The Boroughs, which debuts May 21.

Longtime Grey’s stars Chandra Wilson and James Pickens Jr. are confirmed to present their show’s award to Grey’s executive producer and showrunner Meg Marinis and Shondaland chief content officer Allison Eakle. Paradise executive producer/writer John Hoberg and writer Stephen Markley will accept on behalf of their show from series star Sarah Shahi. And the showrunners, creators and EPs of The Boroughs, Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, will receive their series’ honor. Additional program talent will be announced before the event.

“We are thrilled to partner with The Hollywood Reporter to shine a spotlight on remarkable leaders across film and television who are raising the bar for sustainability, both in how stories are made and in the stories themselves,” says Sam Read, executive director of the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance. “These three series exemplify the unique power of entertainment to connect with broad audiences by reflecting the world we live in, and the one we want to build.”

Says THR editor-in-chief Maer Roshan, “We are proud to once again partner with the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance to celebrate great work being done to help make Hollywood and the entertainment industry more sustainable. And our fourth annual sustainability digital issue, publishing April 22, is the perfect editorial companion to these efforts.”

Former Vice President Al Gore, who narrated and starred in director Davis Guggenheim’s Oscar-winning 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, will appear at the event to mark the film’s 20th anniversary and take part in a conversation on the state of sustainability.

The program will also feature a lively panel discussion among leading Hollywood sustainability-focused executives and creatives.

The Sustainability Honors event marks the next phase in THR’s growing partnership with the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, which kicked off at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.

Writer, director and producer Guillermo del Toro and his 2026 Oscar-winning Netflix film Frankenstein received awards at a special TIFF ceremony for Sustainable Production, while filmmaker Clint Bentley and star-producer Joel Edgerton received an award for Sustainable Storytelling for their 2026 Oscar-nominated Netflix film Train Dreams.

Lionsgate’s Laurel Pecchia is climbing at the Hollywood studio with a promotion to senior vp, corporate communications.

Having joined in June 2022 as vp of corporate communications, Pecchia in her expanded role will work with Lionsgate’s Motion Picture and Television Groups on communications around film and television slates and its 20,000-title library sales.

She will also manage communications for the studio’s AI, live and location-based entertainment, digital media and 3 Arts talent management and production efforts. Lionsgate is the studio behind John Wick, The Hunger Games and other movie franchises. 

“Laurel is an exceptionally talented and versatile spokesperson whose responsibilities have expanded across the full range of our communications activities,” Lionsgate chief communications officer Peter Wilkes said in a statement on Friday. “She combines a strong grasp of our fast-changing business environment with a remarkable work ethic, and she is well liked and highly regarded by her Lionsgate and media colleagues alike.”

Her promotion follows Lionsgate having separated from the Outlander premium network Starz to create two standalone companies and comes as the studio potentially may participate in the current round of industry consolidation in Hollywood.

Pecchia will also work on Lionsgate’s corporate media relations strategy, executive communications, employee communications and preparing quarterly board of directors presentations and earnings calls. 

That follows Pecchia previously handling corporate and client media relations, writing executive scripts and press releases and managing internal communications at WME. Before that, Pecchia handled publicity at CBS Films. She holds a B.A. in Communications and French at Stanford University.

Fox News is sending its morning show on the road to honor the 250th anniversary of the U.S.

The Hollywood Reporter has learned that Fox & Friends will depart on a road trip in a fully-outfitted RV, making six stops from Texas to New Jersey along the way, where the show will originate from local restaurants or bars.

At the end of the trip, the channel will give away the RV in question, which has been wrapped with branding from the show, America 250 and sponsor Camping World.

“As we get ready to celebrate America’s 250th birthday, we’re hitting the open road,” Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt said. “We are hopping in an RV and heading across the country with so many special stops along the way. There’s nothing more American than a road trip and we can’t wait to meet the people and visit the places that truly are the heartbeat of America.”

“I actually got to drive the Freedom Traveler we are giving away and when I got behind the wheel it triggered my inner Clark Griswold. Vacation!” added Steve Doocy. “For some lucky viewer, this RV will make it possible for them to travel the country with their family, making memories that last a lifetime.”

The tour will kick off on April 24 in Houston, Texas, at Armadillo Place; followed by The Bid Biscuit in Lenexa, Kansas, on May 6; Fudpuckers in Destin, Florida, May 15; Tortuga Jacks in Jekyll Island, Georgia, on May 28; Lulus in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on June 5; and the final stop will be at Duffer’s Restaurant and Homemade Ice Cream Parlor in Wildwood, New Jersey, on June 12.

The RV giveaway will happen live on the show on July 3, with Fox also covering the tax bill the winner will face.

Every shark movie owes a debt to the sacred mother Jaws, but the thriller about bitey creatures spreading carnage and mayhem in bad weather that Thrash most resembles is Alexandre Aja’s superior nail-biter, Crawl. (By the way, where is that sequel we were promised?) Instead of voracious alligators preying on Florida locals trapped by a Category 5 hurricane, this time it’s a bunch of aggressive bull sharks and one very hungry pregnant great white cruising into a coastal South Carolina town when the levees break and the floodwaters rise. 

While the title begs to lose the first “h,” Tommy Wirkola’s film is actually kind of fun in its silly, disposable way, and should do decent numbers on Netflix, where it was picked up after Sony dropped plans for a theatrical release. That’s if audiences can get on board with eyebrow-raising plot points like Phoebe Dynevor’s Lisa popping out a baby in surging waters, and almost immediately after, telling the infant: “Mommy’s here. Mommy’s just gotta fight some fucking sharks.”

Wirkola (Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters) appears to want to have it both ways, peppering Thrash with self-aware humor and Sharknado-adjacent absurdity while also crafting a semi-realistic disaster movie that reaches for contemporary relevance by noting the substantial increase in frequency, intensity and duration of Atlantic hurricanes and the deadly threat of the storm surge. The result is a film that’s neither one thing nor the other, though at just under 90 minutes, it’s pacy, pulpy and eventful enough to amuse fans of the shark subgenre.

We meet the appealing main characters as Hurricane Henry picks up speed and onscreen text marks the time remaining until landfall.

Transplanted New Yorker Lisa works in the offices of the McKay’s Meats plant (presumably a winking nod to producer Adam McKay). She’s now pregnant and alone after moving thousands of miles from home for a jerk fiancé who promptly ran off. Her concerned mother badgers her over the phone about giving more thought to a water birth (a joke whose payoff comes much later) while she drives past townsfolk scrambling to comply with the mandatory evacuation order. Learning that the interstate is already closed, Lisa realizes she has left it too late to flee.

Eighteen-year-old Dakota (Whitney Peak) lost her father at a young age and is still traumatized by the recent death of her mother, her anxiety making her agoraphobic. She insists on sheltering in place until marine biologist Uncle Dale (Djimon Hounsou), who’s two hours up the coast by boat, can come to rescue her. When Lisa gets trapped in her car by a fallen tree, Dakota is forced to venture outside or watch the expectant mother drown just as she’s going into labor.

Meanwhile, across town, teenager Ron (Stacy Clausen) and his younger siblings Dee (Alyla Browne) and Will (Dante Ubaldi) are stuck at the mercy of their negligent foster parents, who cash their government subsidy checks and feed the kids dry Wonder Bread while they eat steaks. 

Their redneck adoptive father Billy Olson (Matt Nable) is smugly certain that reinforced glass, waterproof wiring and a home generator will see them safely through the storm. (“Ain’t nothin’ but a little bit of weather.”) But when a wall of water crashes through the windows, turning the living room into a swimming pool that’s soon crawling with dorsal fins, the kids are left to fend for themselves.

Shooting mostly on a studio lot and in a purpose-built tank in Melbourne, Australia, Wirkola handles the hurricane elements confidently, mixing practical effects, stock footage and only occasionally distracting CG as trees fold in the fierce winds, cars are swept up, roofs torn off and walls demolished. He drops in enough secondary characters to provide shark food while the principals battle to survive. A McKay’s Meats tanker truck that gets split in half, disgorging industrial quantities of fresh chum, is a droll touch. 

The Norwegian director balanced horror, humor and action with more panache in the films that put him on the map, Dead Snow and its sequel, which dumped Nazi zombies in mountain woodlands. Jokey moments like Lisa playing Vanessa Carlton on her phone to calm her as contractions get closer seem a tad forced, as do some of the one-liners, like Dee telling her little brother, “Hey Will, bet you never saw this on Shark Week,” after Ron prepares an appetizer of T-bone and dynamite. 

At the height of the tension, Hounsou gets the groan-worthy task of pausing the action long enough to share his back story with a cocky TV newsman (Andrew Lees), tracing his fascination with sharks to a near-fatal hippo attack in Mozambique, when a pair of ferocious bull sharks intervened just in time. Kudos to the actor for delivering those lines with a straight face.

Nothing in Thrash is going to wow Steven Spielberg, and its adherence to plot logic is elastic to say the least. But as bloody, dumb shark thrillers go, it stays afloat, gaining some credibility from the natural disaster element. Compared to shark survival stinkers like The Requin with Alicia Silverstone or The Black Demon with Josh Lucas, it’s more than passable.

An independent review of the BAFTA Film Awards has found a “number of structural weaknesses” in planning, escalation procedures, and crisis coordination before John Davidson‘s Tourette’s outburst.

Davidson, an executive producer on the BAFTA-winning I Swear, dominated headlines for weeks after involuntarily shouting the n-word as Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo presented the award for best visual effects at the 79th British Academy Film Awards on Feb. 22.

The BBC has had its own questions to answer after airing the slur despite the two-hour tape delay, and just this week also ruled the incident a breach of the broadcaster’s editorial standards. Chief content officer Kate Phillips has maintained the breach was “not intentional,” though former director-general Tim Davie was unable to say why the ceremony remained available to stream on BBC iPlayer 15 hours after the event.

On Friday, a review commissioned by the BAFTA board and carried out by RISE Associates concluded its findings on what happened and what must change. Sent to The Hollywood Reporter, the review identified “a number of structural weaknesses” across the British Academy’s planning and crisis management.

“However,” said a note from the BAFTA board, “it did not find evidence of malicious intent on the part of those involved in delivering the event. We accept its conclusions in full.”

The board continued: “We apologize unreservedly to the Black community, for whom the racist language used carries real pain, brutality, and trauma; to the disability community, including people with Tourette Syndrome, for whom this incident has led to unfair judgement, stigma, and distress; and to all our members, guests at the ceremony and those watching at home. What was supposed to be a moment of celebration was diminished and overshadowed.”

The statement added: “We have written to those directly impacted on the night to apologize.”

The review is clear that while it is “not a failure of intent,” BAFTA’s planning and processes “have not kept pace with its diversity and inclusion goals.” The board also admits they did not “adequately anticipate or fully prepare for the impact of such an incident in a live event environment and as a result our duty of care to everyone at the ceremony and watching at home fell short.”

Work is already underway to address the specific areas of improvement recommended in the review to reduce the risk of this happening again. This includes improving the escalation process and the chain of information sharing around BAFTA Awards ceremonies, strengthening how they plan for and deliver access, inclusion, and support at their events, and addressing any internal cultural gaps or lack of knowledge that “may prevent BAFTA from meeting its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion across all our work.”

The BBC, too, has vowed to learn from their mistakes and prevent history from repeating itself. The corporation has set out measures to improve event planning, live production, and the iPlayer takedown processes.

The backlash from the incident lasted weeks. Davidson claimed he was “deeply mortified” if anyone thought his tics were “intentional.” It became a topic of discussion at the NAACP Image Awards, as well as the subject of a bad-taste SNL sketch that had The Hollywood Reporter asking: Is there a U.S.-U.K. gap on Tourette’s education?