Neil Turitz

There’s been a lot of talk over the last week about a certain video that came out, on which we heard and saw some pretty vile stuff. The aftermath hasn’t really shaken out the way I initially thought it would, although it has led to major career issues for one of the participants. I’m talking, of course, about Billy Bush.

You all know the slogan, as it’s one of the best known of any in the world of television. “It’s not TV, it’s HBO.” Home Box Office started out as a second-run movie network, and slowly became the most respected broadcaster of original content on television. While it has some challenges, it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t continue to hold that spot.

One of the things that has caught my attention of late, and that of others’, obviously, is the growing power of the foreign box office to the overall success of not just a given movie, but also the studios and distributors that put them in theaters. That is especially true of the fastest growing audience in the world, the one in China.

The father of Millie Bobby Brown, star of this summer’s Netflix sensation Stranger Things, has been looking for representation for his progeny since she left Paradigm’s kids division earlier this year – and he wants a signing bonus. I mean, actually asking people for money to work for you? That’s… genius, is what it is.

The main job a television network has is to draw viewers and achieve good ratings. It has always been this way, as long as there has been television and the networks that appear on it. Except, of course, when it’s not. Take, for instance, The CW.

The way media is consumed these days is forcing advertisers to adapt and change how they market products to ever evolving audiences.

It’s tough to get too excited about a TV show, much less a season, after just a couple weeks, but this one feels different. This one feels like there are some real and genuine keepers in our midst.

There’s no real easy way to climb the ladder, other than to keep trying to innovate. Yes, there is plenty of the familiar on the horizon, but one of the things that Fox has always been willing to do more than its competitors is take the big swing.

Over the years, the whole idea of being a movie star has changed. Whereas there used to be genuine stars whose very presence in a picture could almost guarantee a sizable audience, that’s not really the case anymore. At least, that’s what the major studios would probably have you believe.

Celebrity gossip has been around as long as there have been celebrities and the appeal is fascinating — there’s an escapist aspect to it, of course, along with the idea that people can feel both joy and schadenfreude at the news that their favorite famous people have problems, too.

Since the start of the century, ABC has been the top-rated network only once (all the way back in the 2000-01 season) and since then, they’ve been losing millions of viewers as their shows and ratings have stagnated or dropped. Channing Dungey and her team have their work cut out for them, and a fairly difficult road to maneuver to get back on top.

The long and short of it is that, like it or lump it, awards season has begun. Unofficially, perhaps, but begun it has. The good news is that this now means there are a whole lot of good flicks in our collective future. The bad news is that this is pretty much all we’re going to be hearing about for the next half a year or so.

 Mel Gibson has directed a movie that is hitting theaters in November, the World War II drama Hacksaw Ridge, which is getting glowing reviews and has an enormous amount of buzz. I have spent a fair amount of time over the years judging Gibson — I am Jewish, after all, and have a certain sensitivity to anti-Semitism — but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate his films. Or does it?

All in all, things are pretty good at NBC. They could certainly be worse, and in fact were, quite recently. Under Greenblatt’s guidance, the network has steadily climbed the ladder over the past few years, the question is, can it overcome the strength of CBS? For that to happen, a lot has to go right, and that’s sort of a risky place to be.

For a while now, I have taken a certain pleasure in keeping track of the lesser-known categories of the Emmys, the ones that don’t necessarily make the main broadcast. And when you start to dig into it, you realize that the Creative Arts Emmys tend to be more interesting than the actual Emmys themselves.

Lately I’ve been confronted with the possibility that my tastes don’t run with that of the mainstream. I was thinking of this after I finished watching The Night Of, which has all kinds of people welcoming it as the best thing on TV in a long while. Except, of course, for me.

Not so long ago, CBS was a last place network. A bad joke that was hemorrhaging viewers, and giving the impression that those it kept were all senior citizens. But two things occurred that changed things. The first was the rise of Les Moonves, and the second was achieving an understanding of what its viewers really wanted.

Reflecting on the first two-thirds of the year in film, I came up with a few bouquets, a few brickbats, and some other pertinent scraps that might put a bow on everything that has happened up to now, right before we head into the Important Part of the Year.

To break into the film distribution business on the higher budget side seems like a fools errand. But if you’re Robert Simonds and Adam Fogelson at STX Entertainment, and Jeff Robinov at Studio 8, then you’re not thinking in exactly those terms. On the contrary, you’re thinking you can take on the system and win.

Last week, the BBC came out with its list of the 100 best films of the 21st century thus far, and Inception was on it. So were a lot of other films that were … um … questionable choices.

Some recent articles have suggested that the 2016 box office is on pace to be the second-best ever. The thing is, there’s a lot more to this than the surface numbers might suggest, but that’s the great thing about numbers: more often than not, you can make them work to your advantage and tell a story that you want them to tell.

This week, we’re going to take a look at three of the more successful smaller distributors, Roadside Attractions, A24, and Open Road, the latter two of which won the top prizes for feature films at this year’s Oscars, Best Documentary Feature and Best Picture, respectively.

If we really want the studios to once again start making the kinds of movies that made us fall in love with the movies in the first place, we need to start supporting films that are based on original ideas, because otherwise, they’re going to keep doing the same thing they’ve been doing that has ticked us off so much.

With the release of Paramount’s Ben-Hur remake this week – a film that is already suffering from negative reviews and low box office predictions – I found myself asking once again, “who thought this was a good idea?” But thinking more broadly, when is a remake worth making?

Winning a Best Picture trophy doesn’t happen very often. Even rarer is winning two in a row, and yet that’s what Fox Searchlight just did in 2014 and 2015 with 12 Years a Slave and Birdman. Consider, also, that the company has either released a Best Picture nominee or a film that won another major Oscar each year since 2006, and in several years, it has done both. That’s a nice run, but it might very well end in 2016.

Shortly following the frenzy over this week’s Rogue One trailer, Universal announced a release date for Fast 8 – the trailer, that is, not the movie. Has the blockbuster hype-machine finally gotten out of hand?

I was excited about Suicide Squad, too. It looked great, it felt like DC and Warner Bros. were finally getting one right. But then the reviews started trickling in, and people started talking about it, and it was clear that the whole thing was a giant misfire, and then you all went to see it, anyway.

For the past couple months, we’ve been meeting here once a week to take a look at each of the major studios, with concrete box office numbers that tell a story. With today’s installment, it’s going to be a little different, out of necessity, because we’re discussing Netflix and Amazon Studios.

It’s been four years since Weeds left the air, three since the end of Breaking Bad, which means there has definitely been a dearth of television shows dealing with controlled substances. Good thing, then, that there are so many on the horizon.

Now that viewers have been able to get themselves a taste of such privileges like binge-watching and having access to older episodes of TV shows, they’re demanding it across the board, and the networks are scrambling to find ways to cost-effectively deliver.