Updated every Friday 12:00 PM
March 13 - March 19

APPLE TV
The Wonder Pets are back with bigger adventures and even bigger hearts. Apple TV has unveiled the season two trailer for the charming musical preschool hit, "Wonder Pets: In The City." Izzy the Guinea Pig, Zuri the Bunny and Tate the Snake return for new, curiosity-driven adventures that celebrate friendship and our unique differences. Produced by Nickelodeon Animation and developed by Emmy Award winner Jennifer Oxley, the new 13-episode season is set to premiere globally on Apple TV on March 20, 2026...

Google is making a big play with some quite literally small news, or more appropriately, "micro" news. Google, along with management firm Range Media Partners, is launching a production initiative that will see the companies make a big push into microdramas, the growing format of vertical video storytelling done in bite size portions. The venture is called 100 Zeros, and it has already announced a slate of scripted and non-scripted projects along with some notable Hollywood talent. Among them, 100 Zeros has microdrama projects from "The Bachelor" creator Mike Fleiss, "Charlie's Angels" director McG, "American Idol" creator Simon Fuller, and "SNL" star Kenan Thompson via his production banner with John Ryan Jr., Artists for Artists. 100 Zeros spans the financing, production, distribution, and monetization of the vertical videos it seeks to create, and it will leverage Range's talent roster and production know-how to make it a more lucrative opportunity. 100 Zeros also intends to release its shows across multiple platforms, including on the Google TV mobile app on Android phones, as opposed to only having them live on a dedicated platform. Content creators will also be able to distribute and monetize their own microdrama content on the app....

Universal Pictures just made a move that will upend Hollywood, thankfully for the better. The studio has revealed it will keep its movies in theaters longer before bringing them to Video On Demand and streaming, reversing a new normal that has been prevalent since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and had a huge impact on the theatrical industry. It's a move that could help the studio court major directors in the future. Universal has extended theatrical runs for its movies in 2026 to at least five weekends for new movies. What's more, beginning in 2027, the studio will guarantee at least seven weekends for its movies...

Welcome to the wild world of casting non-professional actors, a practice that is in the spotlight this year as the Academy inaugurates the casting Oscar. Richie Merritt didn't even know who Matthew McConaughey was when a casting pro waltzed into his high school in the 2010s, intent on finding a teen to co-star with the actor in a film. Then a freshman, Merritt wasn't a movie fan and wasn't considering acting as a career. That is, until the scout told him he bore an uncanny similarity to the character she was casting, a young FBI informant turned drug dealer from Detroit based on the real-life Richard Wershe Jr. Hamilton recalls working on an improvisation with one very early career actor and encouraging her to react to a situation naturally. "During the next take, she picked up a chair and threw it at me," he says. "She should have been a pitcher for the Dodgers." She got the job; his knee still occasionally hurts on cold winter mornings...

Last year, Gen Zers ranged in age from 13 to 28; this year, they will hold even more clout by occupying an even larger share of the two most coveted age brackets in the film business: 18-24 and 25-34. And with Zoomers now occupying the 13-17 age bracket, PG-rated movies are back and studios are reconsidering the hard-won knowledge that PG films repelled millennials when they were 13- to 17-years-old. Gen Zers don't feel that way, helping to explain why four of last year's top movies were all rated PG (Zootopia 2, Lilo & Stitch, A Minecraft Movie and How to Train Your Dragon). And ticket purchases are pre-planned: 40 percent of Gen Z says they bought tickets in advance "within the last week," up from 25 percent pre-pandemic, per PostTrak polling. Last year, Gen Zers ranged in age from 13 to 28; this year, they will hold even more clout by occupying an even larger share of the two most coveted age brackets in the film business: 18-24 and 25-34. And with Zoomers now occupying the 13-17 age bracket, PG-rated movies are back and studios are reconsidering the hard-won knowledge that PG films repelled millennials when they were 13- to 17-years-old. Gen Zers don't feel that way, helping to explain why four of last year's top movies were all rated PG (Zootopia 2, Lilo & Stitch, A Minecraft Movie and How to Train Your Dragon). And ticket purchases are pre-planned: 40 percent of Gen Z says they bought tickets in advance "within the last week," up from 25 percent pre-pandemic, per PostTrak polling....

Two beloved Studio Ghibli classics are headed back to the big screen this spring, as Gkids and Imax continue their effort to give the Japanese animation house's catalog a premium theatrical revival in North America. Whisper of the Heart, directed by the late Yoshifumi Kondo and based on Aoi Hiiragi's manga with a screenplay and storyboards by Miyazaki, remains one of the studio's most cherished coming-of-age stories. The film follows Shizuku, an introspective teenager whose encounter with a mysterious cat leads her to an unexpected artistic awakening. The Secret World of Arrietty, directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, adapts Mary Norton's classic children's novel The Borrowers, imagining a hidden world of tiny people living beneath the floorboards of human homes. The English-language dub features voices including Bridgit Mendler, David Henrie, Amy Poehler, Will Arnett, Moises Arias and Carol Burnett. The remastering work is being overseen by longtime Studio Ghibli cinematographer Atsushi Okui, who has worked on nearly every major production from the studio since Porco Rosso in 1992 and most recently served as director of digital imaging on Miyazaki's Oscar-winning The Boy and the Heron...