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April 12 - April 18

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Apple TV+ unveiled the trailer for its new sci-fi thriller “Dark Matter,” starring Joel Edgerton alongside Academy Award winner Jennifer Connelly, Alice Braga, Jimmi Simpson, Dayo Okeniyi and Oakes Fegley. Based on the blockbuster book by New York Times bestselling author Blake Crouch, the new nine-episode Apple Original series will premiere globally on Apple TV+ with the first two episodes on May 8, followed by one new episode every Wednesday through June 26, 2024...

The 97th Academy Awards ceremony in 2025 will take place a week earlier than the 2024 Academy Awards ceremony, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Wednesday. Oscar statuettes will be handed out Sunday, March 2, 2025, as opposed to Sunday, March 10 — although, for the second year in a row, the festivities will begin at 7 p.m. EST/4 p.m. PST, an hour earlier than other recent ceremonies. ABC will broadcast the ceremony, as it has for every year since 1976. It is expected to reach more than 200 countries worldwide...

Universal premiered a new sequence from “Despicable Me 4,” the latest installment in the studio and its partner Illumination’s long-running animated franchise, at CinemaCon in Las Vegas. It features an aspiring villainess (Joey King) as well as a new addition to the Gru family — Gru Jr., who bears a strong resemblance to his beak-nosed namesake — as they attempt a “Mission: Impossible” style heist of a heavily fortified castle. The only problem is Gru’s assistants, the Minions, brought the wrong equipment. Instead of his gear and gadgets, he is armed with only a diaper bag. That means Gru is left to deal with lasers, guards and a vicious honey badger with only diaper rash cream, baby bottles and a pacifier to protect him. It doesn’t help that Gru Jr. keeps crawling around, inadvertently setting off booby traps...

“Peter Kujawski, chairman of Focus Features, explains key lessons learned from the strike-challenged 2023 box office: “The big cultural story of the movies last year was the Barbenheimer effect. Both of those things in their way are unexpected, right? They’re wholly original in terms of conception and execution,” Kujawski says of last year’s summer juggernauts, Warner Bros.’ “Barbie” and Universal’s “Oppenheimer.” “And they were not only embraced but literally devoured by an audience, right? I truly believe — and I realize that it may sound self-serving given the chair I sit in — that we might be coming into the very beginning stages of a golden age of movies that are filmmaker driven, with original visions and original voices being the thing that defines the biggest movies of our era.”...

Tribeca Enterprises, SIC, the Portuguese broadcast company, its streaming service OPTO and the City of Lisbon have unveiled the first-ever European-edition of the Tribeca Festival, which will take place in Lisbon, Portugal from Oct. 17-19. The festival will kick off with an opening night celebration followed by a two-day event on Lisbon’s waterfront. Patty Jenkins, Whoopi Goldberg and Griffin Dunne have already signed on as headline speakers. “At its core, Tribeca is about uplifting a community of artists – whether that community is below 14th Street in Manhattan or across the Atlantic Ocean in Lisbon,” said Robert De Niro, co-founder of Tribeca Enterprises....

Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project “Megalopolis” will officially premiere in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, according to an individual familiar with the project. The film will debut in a gala slot on May 17. “Megalopolis” boasts an all-star cast, including Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Shia Labeouf, Coppola’s sister Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman (Shire’s son), Chloe Fineman, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman, D.B. Sweeney, Baily Ives, Grace VanderWaal and James Remar. Coppola wrote the screenplay in the 1980s and has finally brought the film to fruition, investing over $100 million of his own money into the project. While plot details for the film remain vague, with Coppola often calling it an indescribable enigma, the official logline reads: “The fate of Rome haunts a modern world unable to solve its own social problems in this epic story of political ambition, genius and conflicted love.” The story is reportedly set in an alternate reality version of New York City dubbed “New Rome.”...