Marvel ‘Diluted’ Audience’s ‘Focus and Attention’ by Making So Many Disney+ TV Shows, Says Bob Iger

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Thirteen years later and Christopher Nolan is still being hounded with questions about the ending of “Inception,” his acclaimed 2010 action thriller about a group of criminals who pull off a dream heist. The ending is notorious. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Cobb has completed his task and returns home to his children, but the film lingers on his spinning totem top as it begins to wobble. Cut to black. If the top spins indefinitely, Cobb is still dreaming. If it falls, Cobb is awake in the real world. Moviegoers have spent over a decade debating whether or not Cobb is awake or dreaming at the end of “Inception,” but Nolan recently said on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast that such debates are missing the ending’s real takeaway: Cobb doesn’t care.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” is now playing in theaters nationwide, but one if its most emotional scenes might not have made it to the big screen had the filmmaker not held her ground against studio executives. In several interviews before the comedy’s theatrical release, Gerwig revealed that it was suggested she cut out the scene where Barbie (Margot Robbie) meets an elderly woman on a bench and tells her she’s beautiful. “I love that scene so much,” Gerwig told Rolling Stone. “And the older woman on the bench is the costume designer Ann Roth. She’s a legend. It’s a cul-de-sac of a moment, in a way — it doesn’t lead anywhere. And in early cuts, looking at the movie, it was suggested, ‘Well, you could cut it. And actually, the story would move on just the same.’ And I said, ‘If I cut the scene, I don’t know what this movie is about.'”

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer Here’s an example of just how chaotic things are in Hollywood these days: Disney CEO Bob Iger’s recent remarks that the company’s linear TV assets “may not be core” to its business were buried under the lede of his comments that SAG-AFTRA and the WGA are not being “realistic” in their contract negotiations last week. But now that a small bit of the initial dual strike dust has settled, sources inside and outside of Disney are asking what reaction Iger was looking to provoke by announcing Disney’s intention to “open-minded and objective about the future of those businesses,” which include broadcast network ABC as well as cablers FX, Disney Channel, Nat Geo and Freeform, among others. (Not ESPN, which is run by Jimmy Pitaro under a separate segment of Disney’s business from its other TV and streaming assets.)

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Samuel L. Jackson told The Times last year that he deserved to win the Oscar for best supporting actor over Martin Landau (“Ed Wood”) at the 1995 Academy Awards. In a new interview with Vulture, the actor said he was robbed of a second chance to win an Oscar just a couple years later with Joel Schumacher’s 1996 legal drama “A Time to Kill,” co-starring Matthew McConaughey and Sandra Bullock. The John Grisham adaptation starred Jackson as a man on trial in Mississippi for killing the two men who raped his daughter. “In ‘A Time to Kill,’ when I kill those guys, I kill them because my daughter needs to know that those guys are not on the planet anymore and they will never hurt her again — that I will do anything to protect her,” Jackson said. “That’s how I played that character throughout. And there were specific things we shot, things I did to make sure that she understood that, but in the editing process, they got taken out. And it looked like I killed those dudes and then planned every move to make sure that I was going to get away with it. When I saw it, I was sitting there like, ‘What the fuck?'”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director While “Oppenheimer” has been touted as Christopher Nolan’s first biopic, that’s not necessarily true. It’s only the director’s first biopic to hit the big screen. Decades ago, Nolan wrote the screenplay for a biopic about aviator and business tycoon Howard Hughes, but the project never took flight because Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes, beat him to it. Nolan told The Daily Beast in 2007 that his Hughes biopic was the best script he’d written, and he even lined up Jim Carrey to star as Hughes. Nolan said Hughes was the role that Carrey was “born to play.” Nolan’s Howard Hughes movie never materialized, but learning how to distill the life of an iconic American figure into a movie script would pay off years later when it came time to penning “Oppenheimer.”

Marvel Studios’ Secret Invasion is coming to Hulu. Ahead of the series’ season finale on Disney+, the first three episodes, “Resurrection,” “Promises” and “Betrayed” will begin streaming tomorrow July 21 through Thursday, August 17 on Hulu.

Disney CEO Bob Iger already made his perspective clear about the ongoing guild strikes last week before the SAG-AFTRA one commenced. Now it’s Netflix CEO’s Ted Sarandos‘ turn.

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos addressed Hollywood’s dual SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes alongside the release of the company’s Q2 earnings results Wednesday. Sarandos said: “Let me start by making something absolutely clear: This strike is not an outcome that we want. We make deals all the time. We are constantly at the table negotiating with writers with directors with actors and producers with everyone across the industry. And we very much hoped to reach an agreement by now. So I also want to say, if I may, on a personal level, I was raised in a union household. My dad was a member of IBEW Local 640, he was a union electrician. And I remember his local because that union was very much a part of our lives when I was growing up. And I also remember on more than one occasion, my dad being out on strike. And I remember that because it takes an enormous toll on your family, financially and emotionally. You should know that nobody here, nobody within the AMPTP, and I’m sure nobody at SAG or nobody at the WGA, took any of this lightly. But we’ve got a lot of work to do there. There are a handful of complicated issues. We’re super committed to getting to an agreement as soon as possible, one that is equitable, and one that enables the industry and everybody in it to move forward into the future.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director “Oppenheimer” marks several firsts for writer-director Christopher Nolan. It’s his first outright biopic, and the first movie to be shot on IMAX cameras using black-and-white film stock. It’s also the first Christopher Nolan movie to feature sex scenes. J. Robert Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy, had a steamy romance with physician Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) before his marriage to Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer. His romance to Tatlock continued despite the marriage. “Any time you’re challenging yourself to work in areas you haven’t worked in before, you should be appropriately nervous and appropriately careful and planned and prepared,” Nolan recently told Insider when asked about filming sex scenes for the first time.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director As a producer of “Barbie,” it was up to Margot Robbie to convince a studio that her vision for the film would lead to financial success. No wonder the Oscar nominee flat out said during pitch meetings that she believed a “Barbie” movie could bring in $1 billion at the worldwide box office. Such success depended on landing writer-director Greta Gerwig, Robbie stressed to execs. “I think my pitch in the green-light meeting was the studios have prospered so much when they’re brave enough to pair a big idea with a visionary director,” Robbie said in an interview with Collider. “And then I gave a series of examples like, ‘dinosaurs and [Steven] Spielberg’ – pretty much naming anything that’s been incredible and made a ton of money for the studios over the years. And I was like, ‘And now you’ve got Barbie and Greta Gerwig.’ And I think I told them that it’d make a billion dollars, which maybe I was overselling, but we had a movie to make, okay?”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Ira Sachs’ sexy Sundance drama “Passages” has received an NC-17 rating by the MPA but will be released unrated by MUBI, the distributor confirms to Variety. MUBI called the rating “unexpected” and said it was “deeply disappointed by the MPA’s decision.” “MUBI has officially rejected this NC-17 rating,” the distributor added. “MUBI remains committed to releasing ‘Passages’ nationwide in its original version as the filmmaker intended, with our full backing, unrated and uncut.” “Passages” centers on a love triangle in Paris between a movie director (Franz Rogowski), his artist husband (Ben Whishaw) and a grade-school teacher (Adèle Exarchapoulos, no stranger to NC-17 controversies as the star of “Blue Is the Warmest Color”) he meets out one night. The film includes several sex scenes in which the actors are fully nude, but none of them are salacious or gratuitous. One scene centers on the husbands having sex and is shot in an unbroken long take that runs just over two minutes.

Fran Drescher, the sitcom star turned actors union leader, preferred to evoke the French Revolution, likening SAG-AFTRA’s struggle to the proletariat’s rebellion against an out-of-touch monarchy. “Eventually the people break down the gates of Versailles,” the “Nanny” star said during a press conference officially announcing the strike.

Stephen Rodrick Fran Drescher is on a hero’s journey.  I know because she told me.   We talked on Monday for about an hour as the actors’ strike moved into a second week. So far, it’s been very dramatic. Last Thursday, Drescher gave her version of Shakespeare’s Henry V’s St. Crispins Day speech with “we happy few” replaced by all American workers via “I think that the whole world is looking at us right now, because human beings in all different walks of life are being replaced by robots.” The speech launched a thousand labor-supporting memes and left reporters wondering if “The Nanny” was the new Norma Rae. Drescher carried the mojo into the first day of picketing on Friday when she called Disney CEO Bob Iger a medieval land baron for discourse launched from his Sun Valley Summer Camp. 

Zack Sharf Digital News Director James Cameron has no intention of using artificial intelligence to write a film script. In a new interview with CTV News, the Oscar winner expressed doubt over AI bots being able to write “a good story.” According to Cameron: “I just don’t personally believe that a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said — about the life that they’ve had, about love, about lying, about fear, about mortality — and just put it all together into a word salad and then regurgitate it…I don’t believe that’s ever going to have something that’s going to move an audience. You have to be human to write that. I don’t know anyone that’s even thinking about having AI write a screenplay.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) seized on the SAG-AFTRA strike in an online conversation with President Fran Drescher on Tuesday evening, as they both bashed Bob Iger and other CEOs, and made the case for why the actors’ walkout should be of concern of all workers.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Antonio Banderas celebrated the 25th anniversary of “The Mask of Zorro” in a recent interview with Yahoo Entertainment. The Martin Campbell-directed adventure movie was produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and grossed $250 million at the worldwide box office in 1998. Spielberg was hand during the film’s 1997 production, and Banderas said the Oscar-winning director correctly warned him about the future of practical vs. CGI filmmaking. “Steven Spielberg said to me once when we were shooting, ‘This is probably going to be one of the last Westerns shot in the way the Westerns were shot in the old days, with real scenes with real horses, where everything is real, [real] sword fighting, no CGI,'” Banderas remembered. “Everything was [practical].”

Editor’s note: Jesse Andrews is author of the novel Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, which is one of five books pulled from the library shelves of high schools within the purview of Tallahassee, Florida-based Leon County Schools superintendent Rock Hanna, after the Leon County chapter of the conservative group Moms for Liberty petitioned the schools to remove the book because of the frank depiction of sex and gender identity issues. The others include Push, the Sapphire-penned book that inspired the film Precious;Doomed by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk; Lucky by Alice Sebold; and Dead End by Jason Meyer. Still being scrutinized is an autobiography of tennis great Billie Jean King, because it discusses her sexuality. This has been an ongoing theme precipitated by policies passed by Gov. Ron DeSantis and legislative Republicans. DeSantis is running for president and probably figured to ride his brawl with Disney into the White House, until Bob Iger began pushing back in ways that have cost revenue and investments it planned for the state of Florida, where Disney is its largest taxpayer and employer. What’s it like to see your book banished for, as Moms for Liberty argued in its email to the school board, violate state law and subject school district personnel to potential felony prosecution and litigation? Here, Andrews — also a screenwriter whose credits include co-writing with Mike Jones Pixar’s Luca — explains it all.

Star Wars’ Lando Calrissian show starring Donald Glover will not be happening anytime soon it seems. Even the writers are saying that they have “no clue” what is going on. The last update that writer Justin Simien got about the show was in the year 2020.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Christopher Nolanrecently told the “ReelBlend” podcast (via CinemaBlend) that he understands Quentin Tarantino’s decision to retire from feature filmmaking after his upcoming 10th directorial effort, titled “The Movie Critic.” Tarantino has spoken for years about his plan to retire, saying he wants to leave behind a consistently strong and tightly curated body of work. “And do you believe him?” Nolan asked the podcast hosts regarding Tarantino’s planned retirement. There’s no reason not to believe Tarantino at this time. Every time he’s dropped details about his next movie, “The Movie Critic,” he has reminded fans it will be his last directorial feature while also stressing that just because he is retiring from filmmaking doesn’t mean he can’t write books, plays, television series and more. Tarantino bringing his filmmaking career to an end in his 60s is a contrast to a filmmaker like Martin Scorsese, who is releasing “Killers of the Flower Moon” at age 80 later this year.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” has already received a handful of strong first reactions, but now comes a huge claim from “Taxi Driver” writer and “The Card Counter” director Paul Schrader. The Oscar nominee attended the New York premiere of Nolan’s atom bomb epic and took to social media afterwards to hail it as “the best, most important film of this century.” “If you see one film in cinemas this year it should be ‘Oppenheimer,'” Schrader added in a Facebook post shared widely across social media. “I’m not a Nolan groupie but this one blows the door off the hinges.” “Oppenheimer,” based on the 2005 book “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, tracks the creation of the atomic bomb during World War II through the eyes of theoretical physicist and Manhattan Project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer. Cillian Murphy stars in the lead role. The film also features Matt Damon as Manhattan Project director Gen. Leslie Groves Jr. and Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh and Benny Safdie also star.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Cillian Murphy said during an interview on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast that Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” was made on a relentlessly fast schedule. “We made the movie unbelievably quickly. We made it in 57 days,” the actor revealed. “The pace of that was insane.” By comparison, Nolan’s World War II survival thriller “Dunkirk” shot for 68 days, and his massive spy movie “Tenet” shot for 96 days. Murphy is front and center in a majority of “Oppenheimer” scenes, making the shorter shooting schedule all the more intense for the actor. “The sets are huge, but it feels like being on an independent movie,” Murphy added about working with Nolan, which he has been doing for over 20 years now. “There’s just Chris and the cameraman — one camera always, unless there’s some huge, huge set piece — and the boom op and that’s it. There’s no video village, there’s no monitors, nothing. He’s a very analog filmmaker.”