Neil Turitz

In 2016, The Weinstein Company has grossed $54.8 million domestically, but almost $50 million of that came from The Hateful Eight and Carol, which means that the four movies released by the company thus far this year have combined for under $5 million domestically. Yes, things may be down at TWC, but no one in Hollywood dares to bet against Bob and Harvey.

I experimented with cord cutting for the month of July, shutting down my cable account for 30 days so as to see what all the fuss is about and what I could both lose and gain by staying away. Both sides had their pros and cons, the question was, which choice was more worth doing?

You’ve probably heard of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but you may not have heard of Jordan Reid. The story behind her early role in the venerable FX comedy – and why she didn’t become a part of it – can be an inspiration for women in and out of Hollywood.

If there is an ideal situation for a film company to inhabit, it would probably be some sort of self-sufficiency combined with the infrastructure of a larger operation. Basically, the exact situation Focus Features has.

I think Brie Larson will absolutely kill it as Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel. But I also had hopes that she would become a bonafide movie star. It’s still possible she might, but she has just done something that a movie star never does.

While I like San Diego quite a bit and consider it one of our lovelier cities, you will not find me anywhere near it this weekend because Comic-Con has lost all value for the geeks out there. It’s still an event because we allow the studios to tell us it’s an event, because they’ve taken it over to sell their products to an information hungry fan culture.

While Star Trek Beyond could do very well this weekend, last summer the Paramount executives would have scoffed at the idea that the studio’s highest grossing film of 2016 thus far would be a Will Ferrell comedy released on Christmas Day. Of the previous year.

It looks like the clock really is ticking on the career of Quentin Tarantino. He has hinted in the past that his filmography will end after his 10th picture, and last week, during a career retrospective in Jerusalem, he reiterated that — on the heels of his eighth movie, The Hateful Eight, released at Christmas — he’s only got two left in him.

Doing anything in Hollywood is like steering an aircraft carrier. It ain’t turning on a dime, but will, ideally, slowly but surely move into a different direction. This year’s Emmys show that the ATAS voting members are at least starting to evolve.

To say that Sony’s film division has had a bit of a tough go lately might be an understatement. The email hack, the terrorist threat against The Interview, and a failure to clear the billion dollar mark in domestic grosses in 2015. But look a little closer, and it’s not necessarily as dire as it might appear.

When Ubisoft head Alain Corre recently said that he doesn’t expect the company to make money from the upcoming Assassin’s Creed film, but does expect the film to result in higher video game sales, he seemed to be speaking directly to the idea that we’ve entered the next phase of the Hollywood blockbuster as more marketing device than movie.

It was announced last week that Lionsgate is going to spend $4.4 billion dollars to purchase the pay cable network Starz. Here’s why it’s entirely possible that we’ll all be able to look back at this deal as the first in a line of dominoes that changed the shape of the entire industry.

When you’re a smaller studio without the resources of one of the Big Six your attitude and strategy has to be a bit different from the norm. And since Lionsgate is now in the crosshairs, it’s time to talk about that strategy, as well as what happens when it doesn’t work out so well.

Studios, game developers, and tech companies are all racing to take advantage of emerging VR technologies, but the question still remains: can the virtual movie actually become a reality?

Despite the relative failure of Batman v Superman, do not yet abandon hope, all ye who enter. The calendar still holds some possibility that 2016 won’t be a total disaster.

Aaron Sorkin is an incredibly talented guy. He has an inimitable style, which is what got him to where he is. It’s just that his work has gone to a level of sameness and self indulgence that can no longer be ignored.

Twentieth has had an interesting year so far, with highs like Deadpool, not-so-highs like X-Men: Apocalypse, and the announcement that Stacey Snider will be taking over the reins at the studio. With nearly a dozen movies left on the schedule, including this week’s Independence Day sequel, can Fox still pull off a resurgence in 2016?

If you’re not paying attention you’re missing out on one of the most bizarre, entertaining, disturbing, hilarious and all around mystifying case I’ve ever seen. I mean, if it were a movie, or a TV show, you wouldn’t believe it, and yet here it is.

With the launch of the fourth season of Orange Is The New Black, Netflix continues to prove that it has changed the television game forever. But as the streaming giant invests more in original features, the question remains: can Netflix transform the film industry, too?

Disney is primed to obliterate every record out there (it already beat the one for fastest to $1B, which it did in just 128 days), and even with a change in leadership in the offing, there are plenty of reasons to think that upward trend will continue apace for some time. This is part two of our weekly series analyzing the current state of the studios.

We’re nearly halfway through the year, and would you like to take a guess at how many mainstream sequels have hit theaters thus far? From Zoolander 2 and Divergent: Allegiant to Alice Through The Looking Glass and Now You See Me 2, audiences may be coming down with a real case of sequelitis.

Why was the first half of last year so much better than this year for Universal? That’s easy: this year doesn’t have the ferocious combination of Furious 7, Fifty Shades of Grey and Pitch Perfect 2. This is part one of our weekly series analyzing the current state of the studios.

No one, not anyone before or since, ever transcended so much at once as did the man born Cassius Clay. He was bigger than sports, bigger than entertainment, race, politics, you name it. I think most everyone has a Muhammad Ali story, and I’m no different.

The only thing Ghostbusters director Paul Feig owes his audience is entertainment. Other than that, fans of the original movie are entitled to exactly nothing, and the fact that so many people are prejudging it further fuels a much bigger problem in fan culture.

This past weekend saw the first big box office battle of the summer go down between X-Men: Apocalypse and Alice Through the Looking Glass. But it certainly won’t be the last. How are the remaining box office battles shaping up?

Elijah Wood just gave an interview to the Sunday Times, in which he dropped a major bombshell about the fact that there is a pedophilia problem in Hollywood. No, the accusation was not the bombshell, it was that anyone should have been surprised that it exists.

The next actor to play Bond will spend the next dozen or so years of his life doing all the heavy lifting in a beloved, increasingly action-heavy and physical role, while also suffering the slings and arrows of those fans who will judge him simply for playing the part. So, who’s up for it?

The spec market might not be as strong as it was two decades ago, but all things considered, it’s still doing pretty well. With the release of the 2015 Spec Book, let’s take a look at the state of the spec market.

Great shows get killed off prematurely all the time. Still, it stings when a show you like doesn’t get the viewership it needs to be renewed, and you suddenly don’t get to spend any more time with these characters you’ve grown to like so much. That’s especially true with The Grinder, which was cancelled by Fox last week.

There’s something Cannes provides that we don’t get to see so much anymore in an industry that seems like its constantly in flux: tradition. But behind the scenes, the market continues to adapt on the Croisette.