Tag: Entertainment – Variety

“New Girl” isn’t coming back anytime soon.

Despite recent claims by Max Greenfield, who played Schmidt on the hit Fox sitcom, that he has read “amazing” scripts for a reunion, show creator Liz Meriwether insists, “There are no scripts.”

I caught up with Meriwether at the Season 1 finale screening of her latest hit series “Furious” on Thursday night at the DGA in West Hollywood.

“I don’t even have the scripts written for the things that I need to have scripts written for,” said Meriwether, who is adapting Britney Spears’s memoir “The Woman in Me” for a movie to be directed by Jon M. Chu and produce by Marc Platt.

Greenfield set off speculation about a “New Girl” reunion in late July when he said during an appearance on “Today with Jenna & Sheinelle,” “As far as I know, it’s happening. I’ve seen scripts, they’re amazing.”

Meriwether responded to Greenfield’s claim with a very tongue-in-cheek video on Instagram. “Max told everybody that there’s amazing scripts of a ‘New Girl’ reunion that I’ve written. Um — and just an update on that — the scripts were pretty good until everybody just started giving me notes on every little thing,” she cracked, before listing changes all of the stars of the show requested.

For now, Meriwether told me, “I’ve honestly been enjoying this thing, whatever this is, that’s like this back and forth between the cast and me, and I think this is the show and I feel like maybe in the world of the internet…maybe the show is just this, these little videos, maybe that’s the reunion. I don’t know.”

“New Girl” ran for seven seasons from 2011 to 2018.

Greenfield eventually clarified his remarks exclusively with Variety, joking that he was confused because a reunion of sorts is happening. The cast, including Zooey Deschanel, Jake Johnson, Lamorne Morris, Hannah Simone and Damon Wayans Jr., will reunite at the Chrysalis Butterfly Ball in Los Angeles on Oct. 10 to receive the Rising Phoenix Award. Greenfield serves as host of the gala.

The Rising Phoenix Award will recognize the series’ theme of starting over and people who make starting over possible.

As for the Spears biopic, Meriwether said she can’t say much because it’s too early in the process: “It’s really interesting because I haven’t written a movie in a long time, so that’s been part of the process is just trying to think in a two-hour story as opposed to like an eight-hour story, which is what I’ve been used to doing.”

She has yet to meet the “…Baby One More Time” hitmaker. “I would love to,” Meriwether said.

20th Century’s “The Dog Stars” and Keylight Pictures’ “Coyote vs. Acme” both debuted in theaters on Friday, but Sony and Marvel’s “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” will once again win the weekend.

“Coyote vs. Acme” fared best of the two major newcomers, landing in second place with an estimated $5.2 million domestically on Friday from 3,575 screens. The “Looney Tunes” live-action animation hybrid comedy should gross about $13.5 million by Sunday

From director Dave Green, “Coyote vs. Acme” puts a twist on the classic Road Runner cartoons. After Acme products (think anvils and rocket skates) failed him one too many times, Wile E. Coyote takes the ubiquitous gadget manufacturer to court. Will Forte and Lana Condor star alongside John Cena, Tone Bell, Martha Kelly, Luis Guzmán, P.J. Byrne and John Early.

“The Dog Stars” fell to No. 4 after earning just $3 million on Friday from 3,330 North American theaters. Rival estimates have the Ridley Scott action drama making $7.2 million through the weekend.

Jacob Elordi leads “The Dog Stars” as a lonely man with a canine companion living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. When he discovers a mysterious transmission, he is determined to find its source. Other cast members include Margaret Qualley, Josh Brolin, Guy Pearce, Allison Janney and Benedict Wong.

“Spider-Man: Brand New Day” is still leading the domestic box office through its fifth weekend in theaters. It added $5.5 million on Friday and should pull in $21 million by Sunday. That would notch the North American total for Sony-Marvel superhero epic to $890 million.

Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” continues to show out as it enters its seventh weekend, taking third with $3.7 million on Friday. By the end of the weekend, the sprawling historical drama should earn $14.6 million, pushing its domestic haul to $564 million.

“Insidious: Out of the Further” made $2.9 million on Friday, slotting at No. 5. By the end of its sophomore weekend, it’s expected to make $9.32 million, which represents about a 60% drop from last week’s debut. $9.32 million would bring the horror sequel’s North American revenues to about $42.85 million.

Anup Singh, director of “Qissa” and “The Song of Scorpions,” is directing a new short film, “Lasya: The Gentle Dance,” shot on Mumbai’s streets, produced by Mumbai-based Pretty Pictures.

“The Gentle Dance” follows a father and son, beggars on Mumbai’s roadside, over the course of a day in their lives. Monsoon rains repeatedly destroy their shelter, and the city offers them little beyond hostility and indifference. It is the father’s stories about the boy’s late mother – her boldness and her refusal to let go of playfulness even as she navigated the city and the natural world – that allow the son to see himself as more than a victim, and give him the will to dance among the ruins as she did and rebuild his life.

“This will be a short film,” Singh said. “It is for me an attempt, call it a desperate attempt, to see if in this time of AI, quick and violent action, and celebration of various demogogueries in storytelling, whether there is still a way to reaffirm cinema’s gentle ways of reaching us.”

The film is produced by Pretty Pictures, the Mumbai-based banner helmed by Zeeshan Ahmad and Pretty Aggarwal.

“Anup Singh’s work has always been about people on the margins,” Ahmad said. “His cinema has consistently insisted that their life not be documented only for the pain, but that the joys and the beauty of their life also be affirmed. We would like to support that vision in our work together.”

Following the short, Pretty Pictures plans to begin work with Singh early next year on his next feature film, which would mark the third film he was set to make with Irrfan Khan. The project returns some six years after the actor’s death.

“After this short, we are ready to start working with Anup Singh on his next feature film early next year,” Ahmad said. “Anup Singh is finally ready to return to the film. We are very excited to make this film in homage to Irrfan Khan.”

Tennis champion Naomi Osaka has for years made the tennis court a runway, with her Nike outfits often paired with pieces made in collaboration with designers such as Hana Yagi and Robert Wun. Her next staple piece: one she’s designed herself.

Such is the brand of luxury leather goods Osaka unveiled Friday at the Fame to Fortune Summit, a daylong conference organized by the affluent community-building organization Uncharted that aimed to connect celebrities flirting with potential business ideas with investors eager to fund them. Osaka showcased a prototype of one of her handbag creations during a chat alongside her business partner Mike Cherman, the founder of the Los Angeles streetwear line Chinatown Market, in which she called the brand her “biggest dream” outside of tennis.

“Being a really good tennis player has given me a lot of amazing opportunities to invest and also just to surround myself with some really great people and I feel like that’s gotten me to this point where I want to create my own thing,” Osaka told Fortune‘s executive editorial director Diane Brady during the fireside chat, which also served as a pitch to potential investors in the crowd. “It’s something that I want to pour all my energy into because I believe in it too with all my heart.”

Osaka’s conversation, in between her practice rounds at this year’s U.S. Open, was one of the keynote panels during the daylong confab, held at the sprawling Southampton, New York, shoreside estate of Uncharted co-founder Michael Loeb. Variety was one of the conference’s five media partners alongside Yahoo, Fortune, the New York Stock Exchange and Culture.

Over the course of the morning, guests filtered into the estate’s backyard deck, which included several food stations (including a Mexican spread by the Hamptons native Crispy Taco Co.), a coffee station with Kenyan coffee farmer Margaret Nyamumbo’s brand Kahawa, an opportunity to test drive Cadillac’s CELESTIQ sedan and a mixture of cocktails and mocktails for a crowd where an 11 a.m. Friday morning libation is less an end-of-week reward and more an expectation. Attendees mingling around the house’s pool ranged from finance professionals who flocked from across the country to names familiar among media and entertainment circles, including one-time CNN chief Chris Licht chatting in a small gaggle and former child actor Skai Jackson of the Disney Channel’s “Jessie” introducing herself to a new crowd. 

Jackson, 24, says that while the summit was the first time she’d attended an event so heavily focused on business, it tapped into her entrepreneurial spirit as she batted around three different venture ideas (all of which she declined to share with Variety).

“I feel like you always have to be really ready to start something up — it’s definitely such a huge commitment,” she says. “You have to be all just in with it and full throttle. So now that I have my baby, my baby is old enough, I feel like, OK, I can finally get back into doing what I want to do.”

It’s a goal Loeb and his Uncharted co-founder Justin Barth hoped the Fame to Fortune Summit would achieve for its attendees, with the two using their opening remarks to implore the hundreds of guests under the setup dining tent to break away from the communities they came with and network with someone new to help capitalize on their celebrity as they think about new businesses.

“I don’t think anybody is going to walk out of here today with a $100 million business or a billion-dollar business, but you’re going to come out with ideas, and also some of the enablers that are going to help you do it,” Loeb said.

Though that’s not to say all went according to plan. The temperamental weather conditions stemming from a looming storm had staff quickly setting up plastic coverings around the tent throughout Osaka’s conversation to protect from the oncoming rain. And, after an amusing crowdwork-focused performance by “foodie magician” Josh Beckerman, the keynote conversation that started the day’s programming was not with scheduled headliner VaynerMedia CEO Gary Vaynerchuk, who dropped out, but instead with Kevin Durant agent and business partner Rich Kleiman, who spoke about navigating the music and sports industries and his time working with artists including Jay-Z, Solange and, of course, Durant.

Kleiman tells Variety that he didn’t really know much about the event when he was approached, but Loeb’s involvement and more time to network among the Hamptons crowd helped spur his participation.

“I’m not trying to come offstage and close a deal,” he says. “It’s fascinating to always meet people and see how what we’re working on connects with people. I think we all live in our bubbles … The more you get out of the world, the more you’re outside around people — that’s the best news of what’s happening. Social media can give you a very skewed indication. Real life, and understanding what people are talking about, what they’re wearing, what they’re interested in — that, to me, is the best case study and research that I can do. So I always look at those opportunities.”

More than 12 years later, Shailene Woodley has opened up about her disappointment in finding out that her part in “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” opposite Andrew Garfield didn’t make the final cut.

Woodley, in a recent interview as part of the “SAG-AFTRA Foundation Conversations” series with actors about their craft, revealed that she found out a year after filming for “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” that she would not appear in the movie, which was released in theaters in May 2014.

“That was a fun phone call,” Woodley recalled.

She said that being cast as Mary Jane Watson in the movie by director Marc Webb “was my dream because I really, oh my god, Spider-Man’s my favorite superhero. Mary Jane was my favorite character growing up. So, when I got it, I was like, ‘This is so exciting.’”

Woodley said she filmed “like three scenes together, me and Andrew Garfield. And then like a year later, they were like, ‘So, you’re not in the movie anymore.’ And I was like, ‘What? What do you mean?’ And they were like, ‘We’ve introduced a lot of new characters in this last one, and we’re going to wait for… whatever happens between [Emma Stone’s character, Gwen Stacy, who is Peter Parker’s girlfriend in the film] and Andrew.” (Spoiler: Gwen Stacy dies in “The Amazing Spider-Man 2.”)

Woodley said she was also told, “’Let’s wait for [Gwen Stacy] to die and then we’ll introduce Mary Jane.’ Which made sense. But then they didn’t make that film.”

Apparently, the filmmakers decided to axe Mary Jane from the movie because they thought it was confusing to have the character as another love interest to Peter Parker. “Well, that’s what I was told, you know,” Woodley said. “But again, who knows what the truth is. I could have been terrible and they’re like, ‘We can’t do this.’”

In 2014, at the New York premiere of “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” (which featured a Mary Jane-themed cocktail), producer Matt Tolmach told Variety this about the deletion of Woodley’s scenes: “We bit off more story than we could tell. We had a 148-page script. We were in the middle of that, and we realized this story [with Mary Jane] is not going to be in this movie.”

In Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movie trilogy, the role of Mary Jane was played by Kirsten Dunst opposite Tobey Maguire.

In Woodley’s nearly 90-minute “SAG-AFTRA Foundation Conversations” interview, she also spoke about her performances in “Divergent,” “Dumb Money,” “The Descendants,” “The Fault in Our Stars,” HBO’s “Big Little Lies” and Season 2 of Hulu’s “Paradise.”

You can watch the full interview here:

California lawmakers have agreed on a partial carveout for the film and TV industry from a state cap on tax credits.

The bill, AB 186, was unveiled on Friday evening. It addresses concerns raised in June by the Motion Picture Association and a coalition of entertainment unions, who argued that the cap threatened to undermine the state’s $750 million tax incentive program.

The state budget seeks to stabilize revenues by preventing corporations from claiming more than $5 million a year in tax credits for the next three years. Industry stakeholders argued that the measure had the unintended consequence of hamstringing Hollywood’s recovery by limiting the ability of studios to use state incentives for in-state production.

The MPA and the Entertainment Union Coalition have signed on to the agreement. As Variety reported on Aug. 18, the deal falls short of their request for a complete exemption for film tax credits from the $5 million cap.

Instead, the legislation will accelerate the payback period for studios that elect to refund their credits for cash. Under existing law, studios can choose to get cash back instead of claiming the incentives as a credit against tax liability — but at the cost of a 10% discount, with a payback period of five years. The deal will accelerate that period to just two years and reduce the haircut to 5%.

The agreement also fully exempts credits for independent film — which account for 10% of the $750 million program — from the cap.

“It meaningfully improves the situation,” said Kathleen Thompson, vice president of tax incentives at Cast & Crew, a production services company. “They threw a bone to both the studios and to independents.”

The deal also extends the expiration date of non-refundable tax credits issued prior to 2025 by up to five years. That provision is meant to help studios that are still sitting on millions of dollars of old, unused credits, and were at risk of having them expire after nine years.

The bill is authored by Sen. Ben Allen and Assemblyman Rick Chavez Zbur, who also wrote the bill that increased the incentive program to $750 million last year. In a statement, Zbur said that the fix will provide “greater stability and certainty” for production workers.

“It does not address every challenge facing this highly competitive and mobile industry, and there is more work to do in the coming months, but this is an important step toward ensuring film and television remain a cornerstone of California’s economy,” Zbur said.

The deal is almost identical to an earlier version that circulated in Sacramento last week. A fact sheet accompanying that version said that it would “mitigate some of the impacts” of the tax credit cap. The only significant difference that a provision to make it easier to claim credits against sales tax — which had been sought by studios — was dropped.

The compromise is the result of complex negotiations among industry unions, studios, legislative leaders and the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom. State leaders resisted an industry-specific carveout because it would have led to calls for similar consideration for the tech industry.

The bill must be approved by both houses by midnight on Monday, and is expected to do so.