Neil Turitz

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.

As if Captain America: Civil War’s near record-setting success wasn’t bad enough for Warner Bros., there was also the loss of The Flash director Seth Grahame-Smith over “creative differences.” With at least 10 more DC movies coming out in the next three-and-a-half-years, it’s worth asking: is the DCCU doomed?

In the wake of Will Ferrell’s Reagan debacle, I’ve been wondering: When it comes to comedy these days, what, if anything, is off limits? Have we entered a time when we can’t really laugh about things anymore? Do we take ourselves too seriously?

In this day and age, it’s the concept that’s the star, rather than the performer. With that in mind, it’s also time to recognize that we should also be living in a post-whitewashing world.

When Hollywood tries to push a movie star on us, and we don’t respond, it makes us wonder what went wrong. But as the business itself continues to change, perhaps the larger question is this: does the movie star still matter?

We’re living in an age where people can speculate for weeks about who is going to land which coveted part in a highly anticipated movie, only to have the news broken on Instagram by the person cast in the part or the movie’s producer – which, in some cases, are one in the same.

With the Golden Globes making such sweeping changes in an effort at self-improvement, it made me think that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences could stand to do the same. I won’t hold my breath, of course, but if they do decide to make some changes, I have some suggestions.

CinemaCon comes hot on the heels of March’s SXSW, just ahead of Cannes, and, of course, Comic-Con. There’s no end to the coverage, the competition, and the fact that the studios are desperate to get people to come see their movies – and they’re taking advantage of these events now more than ever.

Injustice towards women is everywhere in Hollywood. But the thing is, there’s one area in which the industry appears to be evolving. There’s one place where the fairer sex is slowly but surely starting to get more of its due: as movie villains.

It seems like we’re starting to see a real shift in what audiences want. A shift backwards in time to a more optimistic era, when movies weren’t downbeat examinations into hearts of darkness, but rather idealistic and hopeful tales of triumph. An era we can call, for lack of a better term, Spielbergian.