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.

With five films in Cannes' fest lineup, Greece is experiencing its strongest showing in years, and insiders say the current boom is the result of a years-long effort to support the local industry following the financial crisis of the late 2000s. “Greece is a small country, and it’s not a rich country. So the talent we want to support is always far greater than the budget we have,” says Athena Kalkopoulou, the director of Hellas Film, the promotion and distribution arm of the Greek Film Center. “But Greek cinema is once again in a position of growth.” The Greek Film Centre is a vital organ in a vast network of public institutions, private enterprises, universities, film festivals, forward-thinking producers and creatives driving the renaissance happening in the country’s film industry. Founded in 1970 under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture and Sports, the GFC is a robust organization that assists filmmakers with everything from financing to production to location scouting, distribution and promotion. Of the roughly 900 films that the GFC has assisted since 1970, a total of 86 were made in just 2021 and 2022...

Cinema box office this year in North America is poised to overtake theatrical revenues in China, the country that has been the world’s largest movie market for the past two years. Before the latest weekend, gross revenues in the year to date stood at $2.38 billion for the North American compared with $2.43 billion for China, according to data from ComScore. U.K.-based research firm Gower Street Analytics forecast that the North American figure would overtake China’s revenues over the weekend or early this week. That reflects business growth in North America and the current reversal in China, where anti-COVID measures are causing renewed cinema closures. Gower Street says that some 85% of global cinemas are now open for business, compared with pre-pandemic levels...

Italy’s Aurora Vision has joined with Mongolia’s BroSis Pictures and Culture Distributor to co-produce documentary “Round Ger.” The film is among the first to make use of Mongolia’s newly hatched location production rebate scheme. Co-directed by Lia Beltrami and Bolortsetseg Dugardondov, and produced by Andrea Morghen, Beltrami and Tsengel Davaasambuu, “Round Ger” focuses on the relationship between a young mother and her disabled daughter. Production is expected to get under way in July next year. “We are determined that Mongolia become a major new location for productions,” Nomin Chinbat, Mongolian minister of culture, told Variety in Cannes. “For that, it is not sufficient simply to have an amazing variety of locations. We also need to be able to offer a meaningful incentive program.”...

In a historical first, the Cannes Festival and its market, the Marché, hosted the inaugural Venezuela Film Hub (VFH), surprising many international participants by its presence. Spearheaded and fully financed by The Visionist Advisers, a New York and Paris-based creative agency founded by strategic advisor Valeska Hernandez, VFH brought close to a 100 Venezuelan projects to the Marché in a booth that offered a networking platform for Venezuelan filmmakers as well as a chance to promote the country as a filming location and the sampling of Venezuelan products...

The Saudi Film Commission has announced its long gestating incentive for film productions in the kingdom which consists of an up to 40% cash rebate. Ever since it lifted its 35-year-old religion-related ban on cinema in 2017, Saudi has been experiencing a boom in all aspects of film industry activity,  becoming West Asia’s top-grossing territory in terms of theatrical box office returns. Attracting international film and TV productions is clearly a key part of this government-driven effort...

Exactly one week ahead of the release of Joseph Kosinski's "Top Gun: Maverick" — the long-in-the-tooth sequel to Tony Scott's 1986 hit film "Top Gun" — comes a film that is destined to outstrip it in both critical accolades and box office lucre: Glenn Miller's "Top Gunner: Danger Zone," the latest mockbuster from The Asylum. While The Asylum has been releasing concurrent mockbusters to stand as low-budget stright-to-video counterparts to well-known blockbusters since 2005 (their first attempt to draw focus from a big-budget studio feature came with the release of "H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds" within a month of Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds"), this is the first time that The Asylum has gathered the chutzpah to release one of their films theatrically. "Top Gunner" is the very first Asylum film to release in theaters ahead of the film it's emulating. Since 2005, The Asylum's business model has been firmly established: rush a low-budget variant of an upcoming and well-publicized movie into production, acting quickly enough to beat the larger studio to the punch. The larger studio is, essentially, doing The Asylum's advertising for them, and their quick turnaround allows for concurrent releases in most cases...

Del Toro on the importance of filmmaking in the context of COVID-19. "It took one pandemic to shake it all up," he said. "We survived the pandemic because we had three things: food, medicine, and stories. The three things sustained us for so many months and years. We understand we are in the craft of doing a thing that is of primary importance to do." The pandemic isn't over, but back when we were rightly treating it as a matter of life or death, we leaned on entertainment. We cleaved to Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and the rest for stories and memories that recalled a time when we could safely congregate with our fellow human beings. These were experiences that used to await us at the movie theater...