Jennifer Maas: Last News

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterWarnerMedia has been owned by telco giant AT&T for less than four years and it will soon have a new parent company — likely by the end of next month.Discovery’s shareholder vote on the acquisition of WarnerMedia is set for today during a special meeting of stockholders set for 10 a.m. ET. The deal is expected to get an easy thumbs-up given the approval already bestowed by Discovery’s oldest and most influential holders, investor John Malone and Advance/Newhouse Co.

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer“Top Chef,” “Chopped” and “Cutthroat Kitchen” alum chef Antonia Lofaso is the head judge of Food Network and Discovery Plus’ upcoming primetime cooking competition “The Julia Child Challenge.” It’s important to make that title clear up front as, though Lofaso is the vibrant live chef in the room with the contestants, the vibrant Julia Child herself serves as host via a giant screen playing classic black-and-white footage of the food icon hosting “The French Chef” in the center of a kitchen modeled to look just like her own.And if the show didn’t have that literal larger-than-life component at its core, president of Food Network and streaming food content at Discovery Courtney White tells Variety she wouldn’t have picked up “The Julia Child Challenge.” “We had been pitched Julia-centric ideas over the years,” White said. “They always felt like they were very technical focused.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterThe Human Rights Campaign has rejected The Walt Disney Company’s donation to its efforts to protect LGBTQ+ rights, demanding that the company take “meaningful action” to combat Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation.“The Human Rights Campaign will not accept this money from Disney until we see them build on their public commitment and work with LGBTQ+ advocates to ensure that dangerous proposals, like Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay or Trans’ bill, don’t become dangerous laws,” Joni Madison, interim president of the HRC, said in a statement on Wednesday evening. “While Disney took a regrettable stance by choosing to stay silent amid political attacks against LGBTQ+ families in Florida — including hardworking families employed by Disney — today they took a step in the right direction.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterDisney CEO Bob Chapek said Wednesday the company is pledging $5 million to the Human Rights Campaign and other organizations protecting LGBTQ rights following backlash to the company’s initial quiet response to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, as well as a report that the company has given money to all of the bill’s sponsors. Chapek, who is taking his first public stance against the bill, says he will also be meeting with Republican Gov.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterThe bargaining standoff between Major League Baseball and its players that led to last week’s cancellation of Opening Day is a particularly bitter pill to swallow for the local and national outlets that bring games to their most ardent fans — networks that already have experienced two seasons of COVID-driven disruptions.On March 1, MLB took the dramatic step of tabling Opening Day games and activities set for March 31. It also canceled other early games for the 2022 season. The cancellations affect programming and advertising plans for baseball TV partners including ESPN, Turner Sports, Fox Sports, Sinclair Broadcast Group and NBC Sports Regional Networks and team channels like the Yankees’ YES Network and the Dodgers’ Spectrum SportsNet LA.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterWarnerMedia is “pausing all new business in Russia” amid the country’s continued invasion of Ukraine, CEO Jason Kilar announced Wednesday.“I want to share with each of you a number of decisions we have made with regard to WarnerMedia’s business operations in Russia,” Kilar said in a memo to WarnerMedia staff obtained by Variety. “Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, WarnerMedia is pausing all new business in Russia.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterThe “Vikings: Valhalla” team is already hard at work on a second and third season following the launch of the Netflix historical drama series.“Valhalla,” a followup to the History Channel’s original series “Vikings,” previously received a 24-episode series order from the streaming service, which Netflix confirms will now be broken into three, eight-episode seasons. Jeb Stuart will return as creator, showrunner and executive producer for both upcoming seasons, along with stars Sam Corlett (Leif Eriksson), Frida Gustavsson (Freydis Eriksdotter) and Leo Suter (Harald Sigurdsson), among others, reprising their roles.“Vikings: Valhalla” chronicles the heroic adventures of some of the most famous Vikings who ever lived — the legendary explorer Leif Eriksson (Sam Corlett), his fiery and headstrong sister Freydis Eriksdotter (Frida Gustavsson), and the ambitious Nordic prince Harald Sigurdsson (Leo Suter).

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterParamount Global CEO Bob Bakish says Disney Plus’ decision to launch a cheaper, ad-supported version later this year is “validation of the strategy,” which Paramount (recently rebranded from ViacomCBS) itself uses for a tier of its streaming service Paramount Plus.“They’re 100% right,” Bakish said during Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media & Telecom Conference Tuesday, when asked about Disney’s announcement last week to roll out an ad-supported subscription plan for Disney Plus, to launch first in the U.S. in late 2022.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterIMDb TV is keeping Judge Judy Sheindlin in session. Amazon’s free streamer has renewed “Judy Justice” for a second season after the first batch of episodes drew 25 million hours viewed by users to date.Sheindlin’s second act after the end of the long-running, iconic daytime series “Judge Judy,” “Judy Justice” launched on IMDb TV last November.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterDan Abrams’ true-crime channel Law & Crime has struck a carriage deal with Dish Network, Variety has learned exclusively.Live trial and 24/7 true-crime network Law & Crime, which recently aired national coverage of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial and the trial of Brett Hankison, a former police officer charged in the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor, has now launched on Dish and is available to customers on Channel 252. The new distribution pact between Law & Crime and Dish increases the channel’s reach to more than 27 million households across the U.S., the Bahamas and Virgin Islands.“We’ve had a deal with Sling for a number of years now and have always been aspiring to also be included in Dish,” Law & Crime founder, ABC News chief legal affairs anchor and NewsNation host Abrams told Variety. “And so this has been a number-of-years effort to add Dish to our roster of partners.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterAmazon Prime Video is in talks to pickup a “God of War” live-action TV series adaptation from Sony Pictures Television and PlayStation Productions, Variety has learned.No deal has closed yet for the project based on the popular Santa Monica Studio-produced PlayStation game. The potential series hails from “The Expanse” creators Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby and “The Wheel of Time” showrunner Rafe Judkins.Per PlayStation’s officially description for “God of War,” “Staring with the release of ‘God of War’ in 2005 on PlayStation 2, Santa Monica Studio has created seven games across multiple platforms.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterJennifer Lopez’s “Marry Me” is the most-streamed day-and-date movie on Peacock and Will Smith’s gritty “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” reboot “Bel-Air,” which debuted after the Super Bowl last month, is the platform’s top series, Comcast CEO and chairman Brian Roberts said during a Morgan Stanley conference Monday.More to come…

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterTech-centric holding company Ballantyne Strong has launched Strong Studios to create content under the company’s Strong Entertainment division. David Ozer, formerly CEO of Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment’s Landmark Studio Group, will serve as president of the new studio.Based in New York, Strong Studios will develop and produce original feature films and television series, as well as acquire third party rights to content for global multiplatform distribution.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterSPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not watched “One Plus One Equals Two,” the finale of the first season of “The Boys Presents: Diabolical.”Amazon’s animated anthology “The Boys Presents: Diabolical” launched Friday, just under two months out for the third season premiere of its parent series, “The Boys.” While the majority of the bite-size shorts that make up the adult cartoon’s first season serve mainly as “a bloody amuse-bouche for Season 3” of the OG show, per “The Boys” showrunner Eric Kripke, there are pieces of the third-season plot that will be served up straight from the delicious chaos in “Diabolical.”First, there’s the finale episode, titled “One Plus One Equals Two,” written by “Diabolical” showrunner Simon Racioppa, which centers on Homelander’s (played by Antony Starr on “The Boys,” and voiced by him in this animated episode) introduction into the Supes of the Seven and the bond he forged with Black Noir (played by Nathan Mitchell on “The Boys” but voiced by no one in this because he’s always silent) out of working together to cover up a mostly accidental massacre on Homelander’s part. (Starr was arrested for alleged assault after these interviews were conducted.) “The finale is canon, yeah,” Kripke told Variety.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterThe Scott Foley-led drama “The Big Leap” has been canceled after just one season at Fox, Variety has learned.A modern tale about second chances, chasing your dreams and taking back what’s yours,”The Big Leap” revolves around a group of diverse, down-on-their-luck characters attempting to change their lives by participating in a potentially life-ruining reality dance show featuring a modern reimagining of “Swan Lake.”“The Big Leap” starred Scott Foley, Teri Polo, Piper Perabo, Simone Recasner, Kevin Daniels, Ser’Darius Blain, Jon Rudnitsky, Mallory Jansen and Anna Grace Barlow.The drama from creator/executive producer Liz Heldens (“The Passage,” “Friday Night Lights”), director/executive producer Jason Winer (“Modern Family,” “Perfect Harmony”) and executive producer Sue Naegle (“Soundtrack,” “The Plot Against America”) premiered as part of Fox’s fall lineup. It averaged a 0.4 rating among the advertiser-coveted adults 18-49 demographic and 2.8 million multiplatform viewers throughout its 11-episode run in Nielsen’s Live + Same Day data, which counts a week’s worth of delayed viewing where available.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterSPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not watched “Laser Baby’s Day Out,” the first episode of Amazon Prime Video’s “The Boys Presents: Diabolical.”Longtime buddies and producing partners Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have been “obsessed” with Buster Keaton and Jackie Chan for the past few years, and the idea of “doing something that had no words, no dialogue and purely physical humor.” Enter the offshoot of “The Boys,” which they executive produce, Amazon’s animated shorts anthology series, “The Boys Presents: Diabolical,” which launched Friday with all eight-episodes: the first being the Rogen and Goldberg-written “Laser Baby’s Day Out.”“We’d been messing around with some live-action movie ideas,” Goldberg told Variety. “And then when the idea to make the ‘Diabolical’ show came around, we were like, this is perfect.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterKal Penn has joined the “Santa Clause” limited series at Disney Plus, Variety has confirmed.The series, which was announced on Jan. 14, will see Tim Allen once again play Santa Claus/Scott Calvin and Elizabeth Mitchell reprising her role as Scott’s wife, Carol Calvin, a.k.a. Mrs.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterTurning a comic book into a live-action TV series is not a revolutionary idea in the current TV landscape — but turning a comic book into a live-action TV series that is then itself turned into an animated series set in the same universe is not a pitch studio and network execs get every day.That’s what “The Boys” executive producers Seth Rogen, Eric Kripke and Evan Goldberg set out to do when they came up with the idea for the very adult cartoon shorts “The Boys Presents: Diabolical,” while they were simultaneously working on the upcoming third season of the mothership Amazon Prime Video series and its recently ordered untitled superhero-college spinoff.“We were deep in the pandemic and we were looking to get something from what we’re calling the VCU on the air go before Season 3,” “The Boys” showrunner Eric Kripke told Variety, citing the show’s Vought Cinematic Universe. “And with all the shooting restrictions, it was just impossible to even do a small live-action thing.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterSelwyn Seyfu Hinds has signed an overall deal with UCP, which will see him adapt the Civil War graphic novel series “The Sixth Gun” into a TV series for the Universal Studio Group-owned studio.Under the pact, Hinds will produce projects across various platforms through his production company Mad Massive Entertainment. First up is “The Sixth Gun,” based on the graphic novels from Oni Press by Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt.Per UCP’s description for the potential show, “During the darkest days of the Civil War, vile men unearthed six pistols of otherworldly power.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterMary J. Blige’s iconic ’90s song “Real Love” is being turned into a Lifetime movie, with the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul executive producing the made-for-TV film.One of her most beloved and memorable tracks, “Real Love” was Blige’s first song to hit the Top 10 and was certified gold two months after its release in 1992.Per Lifetime, in the coming-of-age romantic drama “Real Love,” Kendra sets off on her own for the first time to a college in upstate New York, determined to focus on her studies.

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer“Hightown” has been renewed for a third season at Starz.The crime drama starring Monica Raymund aired its 10-episode second season between October and December of last year. In the second season of “Hightown,” the picture-perfect version of summer on Cape Cod clashes with its off-season reality.