Updated every Friday 12:00 PM
July 19 - July 25

APPLE TV
With best-ever Emmy showing, Apple TV+ lands nominations across 16 Apple Originals, including Lessons in Chemistry, The Morning Show, Slow Horses, Palm Royale, Loot, Hijack, STEVE! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces, Girls State, The Reluctant Traveler With Eugene Levy, Masters of the Air, Silo, Physical, Hannah Waddingham: Home for Christmas, The New Look, Sugar, and more...

Michael Mann, the iconoclastic director of "Heat," "The Last of the Mohicans," and "Miami Vice," may have just changed the game when it comes to home video special features. Today, Mann launched the Michael Mann Archives, which is described as "a state-of-the-art, interactive website offering unique access into the all-encompassing directing process of one of cinema's most influential filmmakers." The first film to be featured is Mann's passion project, "Ferrari," which he spent decades developing before it was finally released in 2023. For $65 (plus something called a "gas fee" that's present with each transaction since it involves the use of blockchain technology), which must be paid only to the website at michaelmannarchives.com, fans will receive a unique access pass that will let them "enter and explore the Archive's extensive collection at their own pace and in perpetuity." Presumably, there will eventually be sections of the Archives devoted to Mann's other movies, but for now, "Ferrari" is the only film featured...

It's been an up and down journey for the movie business over the last four years — with a great many downs along the way. We’ve already seen signs of exhibitors doing what they can to squeeze the most money out of the customers they have, with the recent glut of collectible popcorn buckets serving as one example. A new strategy has been to charge more for the people who are still coming. The long term problem is that higher costs may only serve to further alienate those who are content to stay home these days. Sony head Tom Rothman recently argued that theater chains would do well to consider lowering ticket prices rather than make things more expensive, pointing out that the "discount Tuesday" strategy works very well. The idea of trying to lower prices to turn it into a volume game rather than raise prices to maximize revenue per existing customer is a compelling argument...

A membership to Hallmark Media’s new streaming-video service, Hallmark+ (another plus!), will come with free greeting cards. The replacement to Hallmark Movies Now will have a higher price tag for its mid-September launch — $7.99 per month vs. $5.99 — but it will also have more content and more perks. Hallmark+ will have hundreds of Hallmark holiday films, but also reality shows and docuseries, the company announced Thursday at the Television Critics Association (TCA) press tour...

Netflix began to notify its Basic plan subscribers that their service would end at the conclusion of their current billing cycle if they did not choose a new option. Netflix warned months ago this was coming, and that it would start during the current quarter with crackdowns in the UK and Canada before coming stateside. In October 2023, Netflix increased the price of its Basic plan for subscribers in the U.S., the UK, and France by two dollars, from $9.99 to $11.99 monthly. At the same time, it eliminated the Basic plan as an option for new subscribers. Basic offered the cheapest non-ad-supported subscription to Netflix. The tradeoffs were its relatively low streaming quality and a strict limit on streaming across multiple devices...

Cirque du Soleil is launching its own film and TV studio with an eye to turning some of its most popular circus stage shows into movies and series. The first Cirque de Soleil Studio project is an adaptation of the group’s longest running show “O.” The circus will have help: Ridley Scott and his Scott Free Productions are on board to develop “O” into a feature film. Cirque du Soleil Studio will be run by Susan Levison, a former executive of the WWE, CBS Television Studios, and VH1. She’ll be tasked with finding ways to adapt all of the circus brand’s shows into unscripted and scripted TV and film, as well as animated projects or documentarie...