A Controversial Week in Hollywood: Paramount, MUBI & Executives; Is 'The Naked Gun' a Return to Theatrical Comedy?

0:00Anne Thompson:This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook.

0:36Anne Thompson:Welcome to Screen Talk, IndieWire's weekly podcast bringing you up to speed on what's going on in Hollywood. And this is a time of year heading into sleepy August now, but there's actually a lot going on because not only are we ramping up to the fall festivals and all that stuff, and there's some changes there, but we're also watching Hollywood change in front of us. Right, Ryan?

0:58Ryan Lattanzio:That's right. Yeah, this is Ryan in New York, of course. This week, we're going to preview the latest studio remake, The Naked Gun, as well as horror duo Dave Franco and Alison Brees together, which premiered at Sundance and is finally opened from neon on a Wednesday of all things, but all right. And we also discuss how studios are prioritizing social media reactions. This is nothing new if you've been following any of this for the last year, as well as influencers for movies such as horror and genre movies in particular.

1:28Anne Thompson:Yeah, if they don't care about the critics, they don't invite the critics. We will run through the many shakeups at the studios, plus what to expect from the new Ellison Paramount. And Mubi has run into some political headwinds due to a controversial investor. How will that impact the rising studio, which has a lot on the line this fall?

1:50Ryan Lattanzio:And speaking of fall, we do have some updates on the fall festivals and a new movie that broke into the fold this week, which is Bradley Cooper's Is This Thing On? Which he has a minor role in, but otherwise stars Will Arnett as a comedian going through a midlife crisis in New York. This is going to world premiere at the New York Film Festival. And a lot of people speculated, oh, why is it skipping Toronto or Telluride? Is that a reflection of its quality? and what I have learned is, in fact, the movie was not going to be ready for the submission deadlines and I know it has screened a few times.

2:24Ryan Lattanzio:There's been some audience screenings and there was obviously the New York Film Festival screening and another one for London, so it could end up there, but obviously we're not going to see it internally.

2:32Anne Thompson:Those are always the late-breaking festivals, right? Okay, and then it could go on the circuit, the Middleburg, the follow-up side festival circuit that has a role to play as well. I'm looking forward to seeing that. And Searchlight has that movie. So this becomes their centerpiece entry in the Oscar race. No question. He's apparently written, directed, supervised everything, you know, the way he always does.

3:02Ryan Lattanzio:Camera operator, too.

3:03Anne Thompson:Yeah, yeah. So he's very involved in this movie. It looks good.

3:07Ryan Lattanzio:The other one that Searchlight has is Rental Family by Hikari, which this is a Japanese writer-director. Hikari is getting a tribute award at TIFF along with Guillermo del Toro and some others, and also Brendan Freight. Cody Foster is also in there. As well as Lee Byung-hun, who is in Squid Game, of course, but is also in the Park Chan-wook movie, No Other Choice. And Brendan Fraser is going to be the honorary chair of this event, and he stars in Hikari's movie Rental Family. So that's going to be another one that Searchlight is going to be pushing into the season. What about the roses? They also have that, but that's opening at the end of August.

3:44Ryan Lattanzio:It's not doing festivals. That's not for awards.

3:47Anne Thompson:Clearly, it's a commercial play, and they're not going to even go for awards on it. It looks hilarious to me. Speaking of hilarious, you didn't make it to Naked Gun for various reasons, but I thought it was an incredibly funny movie, and I loved it, and I had a great time, and Liam Neeson is absolutely perfectly cast, and so is Pamela Anderson. He's the bumbling cop with digestion issues who gets a cup of coffee handed to him everywhere he goes magically. And it's a perfect combination of sort of throwback to some old school wishing that he didn't have to play by the rules kind of cop like his father, who, you know, Leslie Neils.

4:29Anne Thompson:The fact that he has an Irish accent doesn't come up. And then and then you have, you know, it's very scatological. It's stupid and silly. but you laugh a lot. The audience was rolling in the aisles. Will it do well? I think it's an 80s movie familiar to a lot of people, but they're older now. This is not a young person's movie. There's nothing in it for young people.

4:57Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah. Gen Z does not know this property at all. It's not a familiar brand, really. And so I don't know that they're necessarily the target audience, but that's of course people you want to get into the movie so i'm curious if it is going to hit also did you see that liam neeson and pamela anderson are apparently dating yeah and that was in people magazine and usually they are trustworthy when it comes to dating announcements like oh no

5:22Anne Thompson:they have plenty of video i went and looked online i mean there's plenty of red carpet video with them staring it into each other's eyes and holding hands and stuff like that they they're it's happening

5:32Ryan Lattanzio:apparently also Ana de Armas and Tom Cruise are happening

5:38Anne Thompson:that's disturbing

5:39Ryan Lattanzio:you know what that means they're grooming her as the next ascendant actually I don't want to talk about Scientology on this podcast because every time I've mentioned it in a story I get an ominous message from their headquarters so I hope they're not listening to this

5:56Anne Thompson:so anyway just as our friend David Ehrlich wrote We do need more comedies and we need more comedies like this. Akiva Shaper from SNL did really well with this. He got it. He captured the essence of the old movies while bringing it into, you know, it is a modern movie. It is he's he's running up. There's a very funny gag where, you know, the obviously the villain, very well played by Danny Houston, who I really like. He's a tech billionaire, of course. And so he gives an electric car to Frank Debbins. And he pulls out of the lot while the car is connected to a series of electric portals, and it destroys the whole building.

6:45Anne Thompson:It's that kind of pratfall kind of thing. It's funny. You have to be there.

6:50Ryan Lattanzio:Well, yeah, I'm excited to see it with the regular folks this weekend, hopefully. So the other movie I was going to talk about that premiered at Sundance is Together, directed by a first time feature filmmaker named Michael Shanks. And this stars real life couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco. It's funny, I interviewed them together at Sundance and you can tell they're really in love with each other. You just get, you know what I mean? That's nice. but anyway they are a couple who they're living in Australia they relocate from Melbourne to somewhere rural and basically supernatural circumstances force them to the point where they're trying to break up I think or she's trying to leave him but one thing leads to another and they end up hermetically sealed to each other literally sexually physically and otherwise so it's a really on the nose body horror metaphor for codependency.

7:45Ryan Lattanzio:I like the movie, but it's interesting. It premiered at the Eccles at Sundance, and you know, it's at those midnight crowds. If you're tired and everybody is cheering and freaking out and you're kind of not on their wavelength, you do feel sort of left in the lurch, but it's a good movie. And Neon is really pulling out wildly ambitious stops in terms of the marketing. They're offering a chance for free couples counseling from Alison Brie and Dave Franco. I don't know if they should be giving mental health advice, but then also a free wedding in Las Vegas, a trip to Vegas, among many other things.

8:21Ryan Lattanzio:We kind of saw this with Neon and Long Legs really taking on ambitious marketing for a horror movie. But the other consequence of that is that, as you were saying earlier, a lot of critics and journalists, they can't get into these screenings. One that I'm having a little bit of trouble with right now is Weapons, which...

8:39Anne Thompson:No, I wrote Warner Brothers an email. You were copied on it. And I said, hey, what's going on? Can we get a screening? And they did not respond.

8:47Ryan Lattanzio:I have written them five times. And then they had layoffs this week. So I'm definitely not seeing it now. So obviously, you know, Warners with this movie Weapons, directed by Zach Kregor. It's opening next week, Friday, August 8th. There's been a junket screening. All these TikTok people and influencers have seen it. those are the pull quotes that are being used in the marketing now it's not the critics names that insignia that you're familiar with it's the some user who i don't i don't know who that person

9:16Anne Thompson:is they can make that choice i mean that's fine you know to to who they want to you know if they don't want to legitimize a movie like this but they're obviously afraid they're going to get negative reviews what they did on superman was just wait until the last minute and hold people off, you know, but we're not getting anything here.

9:36Ryan Lattanzio:No. And it's frustrating because Zach Kreger, he's a filmmaker, director of Barbarian, hugely successful sleeper horror movie, one that we really, all the critics really championed. And they're excited for this one. And I don't really quite understand what's going on here. But it seems like they believe in the movie, like the early wood is really good. So in the case of Superman, the reviews ended up being quite good.

10:01Anne Thompson:Yeah, they did well with it. Okay, so the other thing that's going on is a lot of different changes around the industry. So let's just run through some of them. The big story, of course, is the$8 billion Ellison family acquisition of Paramount Global, which is expected to close shortly. They got the necessary approvals from the FCC. It cost them$16 million paid from having to do with the 60 Minutes issue. Ellison and his son, David, are going to take over. And David has been financing and producing movies for some time through Skydance, including the Mission Impossible stuff and Top Gun Maverick.

10:42Anne Thompson:And so he's familiar with Tom Cruise, at least. These are conservatives. David promises, quote unquote, unbiased storytelling at CBS News, and we wonder how they will operate. And Hollywood is looking at them also. There's a lot of word on the street that they may not want to make deals over there. Now, usually money talks. If you're offering somebody money to make something and they want to make it badly enough, they'll overlook the politics. But Hollywood is in general a liberal place. We'll see how much Hollywood cooperates with them in the wake of outgoing Sherry Redstone's CBS$16 million bribe to Trump, as well as Colbert's untimely firing.

11:25Anne Thompson:You saw the South Park thing, right?

11:29Ryan Lattanzio:Yes, of course. Well, yeah, we talked about this last week that there is an ombudsman being installed, basically, to sort of look at issues of bias or content or whatever. It's a mode of censorship, right? Like, that's really what this is about. But there's really not much an ombudsman can do about Comedy Central's, you know, their flagship show, South Park, had a raucous send up of Trump's tiny penis while in bed with Satan. And I'm not a big South Park watcher. I haven't watched it in many years, but obviously this was a viral moment. And that first episode of the new season that finally aired after delays as South Park and Comedy Central wrangled over a$1.5 billion deal.

12:10Ryan Lattanzio:As soon as it was resolved, wham.

12:13Anne Thompson:No, it's fun to think about Colbert for the next 10 months. You know, he's not going to hold back. It'll be fun. And neither will South Park. So Cindy Holland, who made her name as a TV czar with Taste at Netflix, will run the Paramount TV side and CBS and everything. And she will need to prune some fat as she spends on new productions. Chris McCarthy, who runs the Taylor Sheridan Empire, will leave. He's expected to leave, along with motion picture chief Brian Robbins. David Ellison will run film. And Paramount, which has been low in the rankings at the domestic box office, this year was just like 7 % of ticket sales in the U.S.

12:55Anne Thompson:and Canada, according to the numbers. since the pandemic. The company has had some hits like Top Gun Maverick and Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and a couple of singles and doubles like Bob Marley, One Love. So we'll see. We'll see what they come up with as there's new. Here's the thing. These guys are wealthy. These guys have deep, deep pockets. So if they want to invest in all the different elements of Paramount, they can.

13:20Ryan Lattanzio:And obviously there's going to be continued emphasis on AI, actually unrelated to Paramount. I don't know if you saw this, but Amazon is investing in something called Showrunner, which is an AI-generated streaming service. It's very disturbing. It lets people type in prompts that generate scenes or full episodes for their own new ideas or based on existing IP. And apparently Disney and other studios are also in talks to be licensing IP for the service. And this was reported in Variety. And that's disturbing to me because you know that the studios are going to be harvesting this content for their own IP.

13:56Anne Thompson:The whole thing is out of control. And it's not going to be stopped because all of Silicon Valley is invested in this. So it's just going to continue to go forward. You know, these tech titans are going to put in a lot of cloud computing and other digital technologies to streamline production and everything, streaming. they're expected to hang on to Paramount Plus and invest in it. And they're going to try to reduce costs too. That's what this technology is supposed to do. And we'll see if they spin off their traditional TV businesses, similar to what Warner Brothers Discover and Compass are doing with their cable channels.

14:36Anne Thompson:But that's where most of their revenue comes from, especially at Paramount. So that's an issue. And meanwhile, over at Sony, Josh Greenstein, as expected, will move from his co-president spot at Sony to Paramount Global. Peter Kang will replace him as head of production and Sanford Panitch will be sole president of the film group under Tom Rothman. I love Tom Rothman. He's been on the show. He's the eminence grease in Hollywood, you know, still running a studio.

15:05Ryan Lattanzio:You're really keeping up with your executive musical chairs. I just got whiplash from that. So good job. All right.

15:13Anne Thompson:You're going to tell us what's going on with two companies, Metrograph and Mubi.

15:18Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah. I mean, this has been a rough week for internet discourse. It's like Ben Mankiewicz is the horseman of the AI apocalypse because he's endorsing this Wizard of Oz thing at the Sphere in Vegas. AI has been used to augment the movie at the Sphere in Las Vegas to create, And you know what the sphere is. It's like a screen the size of four football fields to make it more of a not interactive, but more of an experiential film, which that involves manipulating the footage and altering it. And then you have someone like Ben Mankiewicz, who is the TCM czar.