ACORN TV
Programming from several countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Ireland, New Zealand, and UK. AMC Networks chief Josh Sapan told The Hollywood Reporter that Acorn TV has "among the lowest churn" among major services owing to its focus as well as viewers' "dedication and affinity" for its content.

Quentin Tarantino is making the jump to TV! Well, not as a filmmaker. And not really as an actor. Tarantino has signed on to act as narrator for the first season of Showtime’s upcoming anthology series, “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber.” The series comes from “Billions” creators, Brian Koppelman and David Levien, and stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Travis Kalanick, the controversial CEO of Uber who finds himself the subject of a potential business coup...

Demystifying and questioning the very notion of authenticity, Jason Kohn’s informative and oddly riveting, diamond-documentary “Nothing Lasts Forever” is ostensibly about the oft-antagonistic relationship between natural and synthetic diamonds. Yet, diamonds are an in-road as Kohn explores the commodification of such abstractions as love and desire, questioning how exactly a shiny rock — one that isn’t even that rare — became a physical manifestation of commitment. What does it matter if a diamond is naturally mined or grown in a lab if the experts cannot even tell the difference? “Nothing Lasts Forever” may be more interested in asking these questions than providing any answers of its own. Yet, the questions are nevertheless endlessly fascinating...

Village Roadshow, had filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros. over the release of “The Matrix Resurrections.” The bulk of the suit is about how Village Roadshow believes WB sabotaged the release of ‘Resurrections’ by having it debut in theaters and on HBO Max at the same time, leading to low box office grosses...

According to a new report, the pandemic has taken an already expensive “Mission: Impossible 7” and turned it into the priciest sequel in the franchise, maybe one of the most costly films of all time. For context, “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” is hardly an indie film, costing $190 million in production costs. But the new report says that a variety of issues has raised the price of the seventh ‘M:I’ film to upwards of $290 million. The budget is getting hit hard due to various factors, but mostly due to the reported seven (yes, seven) times the film has had to halt production due to COVID. And because the film is shot mostly on location, and exotic locations at that, there is a larger risk of COVID stoppage than there would be for a closed sound stage...

Arizona in the news: Case No. B19294 in the United States District Court of Tempe, Arizona, Judge Joan Kujava presiding. After decades of botched missions to capture and consume his prey the plaintiff, Wile E. Coyote, has filed suit against the retail manufacturer Acme Company for damages sustained in these failed attempts, and for "personal injuries, loss of business income, and mental suffering.” The suit cites some of Coyote's more infamous blunders among a whopping 85 separate incidents, including the Rocket Skates incident. Therein, the plaintiff asserts, poor regard for passenger safety resulted in a harrowing injury: "Mr. Coyote lost control of the Rocket Skates soon after strapping them on, and collided with a roadside billboard so violently as to leave a hole in the shape of his full silhouette."...

Guillermo del Toro on "Pan's Labyrinth.” “We only did what we could afford and we only afforded what was vital. Zen through limitations, you might call it. But it is the duty of the filmmaker to remain unreasonable. To stay ambitious past the printed budget or schedule. It makes no difference if the budget is 190 million or 19 million, your vision must hunger for much, much more and deliver value and artistic worth well above the numbers.”...

The European Audiovisual Observatory estimates 383.2 million movie tickets were sold across the European Union and the U.K. in 2021. That’s 83.8 million more than over the same period in 2020, a 28 percent jump. It’s a hopeful sign for Europe’s battered exhibition industry, which saw box office plunge as COVID-19 lockdown orders shuttered cinemas across the continent. Admissions in the EU and U.K. fell a steep 70 percent in 2020 and admissions for 2021 were still 61.9 percent below pre-pandemic figures from 2019, when cinema attendance in the EU and U.K. topped 1 billion admissions. Of the big territories, the U.K. saw the biggest bounce-back, with admissions jumping by 68.3 percent, or 30 million tickets, to 74 million admissions last year, helped by the blockbuster success of James Bond film No Time to Die. Russia, where a majority of cinemas remained open for most of the year, recorded by far the largest admissions in Europe in 2021, with 145.7 million tickets sold, a 64.2 percent increase on 2020...