Michael Moses: Last News

Cynthia Littleton Business EditorIn a world awash in marketing messages and entertainment options, spurring consumers to check out new movie titles at the multiplex is no easy task. And that was before pandemic conditions made everything about going to a theater that much more complicated.“Now there’s an extra step,” said Michael Moses, chief marketing officer for Universal Pictures.

Rebecca Rubin Senior Film and Media Reporter Mattel is being sued for mistakenly printing the URL for a pornographic site on the packaging for special-edition “Wicked” dolls. According to court documents, a South Carolina resident is launching a class action lawsuit after purchasing the toy for her young daughter, who visited the X-rated website that had “nothing to do with the ‘Wicked’ doll.” The toy company mistakenly listed a similarly-titled website for the adult-entertainment site Wicked Pictures, rather than the official page for the Universal Pictures film, starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande.

Rebecca Rubin Senior Film and Media Reporter So if you care to find “Wicked,” look… just about anywhere. You’d have to be flattened by a farmhouse to miss the “Wicked” promotional onslaught. From Starbucks drinks (Elphaba cold brew, topped with green matcha foam, anyone?) to Emerald City Lego sets, “Shiz University” sweaters at Target and OPI’s “Fiyero’s My Mani” nail polish (it’s a shade of cobalt blue), Universal has partnered with more than 400 corporate brands to create scores of products and tie-ins to launch the big-screen musical extravaganza.

an earlier ruling he made in April that temporarily blocked a 2021 state law, signed into effect by Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte, prohibiting changes to gender markers on birth certificates unless an individual provides documentation attesting that they have undergone gender confirmation surgery.Under Moses’s April ruling, the state of Montana was supposed to be barred from enforcing the law until the dispute over the law’s constitutionality can be resolved in by the courts.

signed into law by Gov. Greg Gianforte last year, requires people seeking to amend the gender marker on their birth certificate to undergo a “surgical procedure” but is vague about what type of surgical procedure they must obtain.The law also requires transgender individuals to obtain a court order attesting to the fact that they’ve undergone surgery of some type, and submit it to the Department of Public Health and Human Services, which would then “certify” the gender transition and allow the birth certificate to be amended.Because he could grant a temporary injunction based on the vagueness issue alone, Moses said he did not have to further examine the constitutionality of other aspects of the law, and issued an injunction prohibiting the state from seeking to enforce the law until the case has been fully resolved in the courts.“Plaintiffs provided unrebutted evidence describing that neither gender-affirming surgery nor any other medical treatment that a transgender person undergoes changes that person’s sex,” Moses wrote, according to the Associated Press.