Updated every Friday 12:00 PM
January 30 - February 5

APPLE TV
Apple TV has acquired the screen rights to Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere series, one of the most expansive fantasy franchises in modern literature. The deal gives the streamer access to Sanderson's Cosmere books, with Apple TV mainly focusing on adapting the Mistborn novels as films and The Stormlight Archive as a TV series. Stormlight has already been picked up by the production company, Blue Marble, led by Theresa Kang, who was a WME agent...

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that Amy Homma, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures' director and president, will oversee the Academy Collection, which includes some 52 million film-related items held within the Margaret Herrick Library and the Academy Film Archive, ranging from an original script of Citizen Kane to a pair of the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. It's all part of an effort to better organizationally link all aspects of the Academy's history and preservation efforts, the Academy says...

In the future, studios that use synthetic actors in place of humans might have to pay a royalty into a union fund. That's one of the ideas kicking around as SAG-AFTRA prepares to sit down with the studios on Feb. 9. Artificial intelligence was central to the 2023 actors strike, and it's only gotten more urgent since. Social media is awash in slop, while user-made videos of Leia and Elsa are soon to debut on Disney+. And then there's Tilly Norwood — the digital creation that crystallized AI fears last fall. Though SAG-AFTRA won some AI protections in the strike, it can't stop Tilly and her ilk from taking actors' jobs. But it might be able to extract payment for it...

Ever since Sherman Torgan bought Hollywood's New Beverly Cinema in 1978 and turned it into the city's premier repertory house — a tradition current owner Quentin Tarantino has continued since buying the property in 2007 — the theater has been the place to go for an expertly curated mix of Hollywood classics, international art house fare, animation, and cult cinema. For seven years before Torgan's reign, however, the New Beverly was known as the Eros and specialized in a very different kind of entertainment: porno movies. It's a history Tarantino paid tribute to in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood…" when Sharon Tate asked "What's happening at the dirty movie place" while having dinner down the street from the Eros at El Coyote. And this February Tarantino is honoring his theater's past once again by turning the New Bev back into the Eros. Instead of the cinema's usual varied mix of programming, February is all about erotica both high (Ingmar Bergman's "Summer With Monika") and low (Gerard Damiano's infamous "Deep Throat"). And as usual at the New Beverly, there are some must-see obscurities programmed alongside the more famous films. The series kicks off on February 2 with a sexploitation triple feature dedicated to one of producer Roger Corman's most popular franchises, the "nurse" films. The one non-sex film, appropriately, is Tarantino's own "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," which screens every Friday at midnight...

Thessaloniki Documentary Festival's industry arm Agora, which runs March 8 to March 12, has unveiled its lineup of projects. Agora offers a variety of networking and co-production events for the film industry, with around 500 professionals attending. Fourteen projects from 17 countries. participate in the Thessaloniki Pitching Forum for documentaries in development, focusing on Southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean region. Ten projects will join the Agora Docs in Progress for documentaries in post-production focusing on Southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean region. Five projects take part in Agora's newest initiative XR Lab, a workshop dedicated to XR and new media projects in development. Four projects participate in Agora Boost, a hands-on workshop for Greek documentaries in development and/or post-production stage...

While large sections of Hollywood stand against the march of AI, it looks like that has not stopped a new AI-generated feature film about a tech-driven apocalypse from finding a distributor in Artist View Entertainment. According to Deadline, The Great Reset will be shipped out for sale at the European Film Market in Berlin with an eye to gaining interest in a wide theatrical release. The Great Reset is being sold just like any other sci-fi thriller, with the hook being laid out in a plot which focuses on "an AI created by a rebellious hacker, which plans to destroy the world in order to save the only person it has ever loved — the hacker's daughter, Emma. As humanity teeters on the brink of collapse, Emma embarks on a race against time to save the world."...