Updated every Friday 12:00 PM
September 27 - October 3

APPLE TV
To celebrate the holiday season, Apple TV+ will provide special free streaming windows for nonsubscribers to enjoy the iconic Peanuts holiday specials from Mendelson/Melendez Productions and Peanuts Worldwide. Don’t miss “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” available Saturday, October 19 and Sunday, October 20; “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving,” available Saturday, November 23 and Sunday, November 24; and “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” available Saturday, December 14 and Sunday, December 15. Subscribers can watch these specials anytime, all season long...

Taking to Letterboxd to give his 100% unbiased opinion, Francis Ford Coppola rated Megalopolis 5 STARS! Coppola joined the fan review app in 2023. While fans and writers are joking about Coppola's self-awarding use of Letterboxd, on the app the director has shared a list of 19 movies that inspired Megalopolis. Greatly expanding on his answers to the increasingly popular "Four Favorites" (the interview format used by Letterboxd), the list features a mixture of unequivocal classics and underrated gems. Among the entries in the list are certified Hollywood classics like Ben Hur, The Red Shoes, and Citizen Kane. The list also features (slightly) more contemporary influences, like Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, the Coen brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy, and Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express. The list is then rounded out by more obscure movies, like Cabiria (1914), Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête (1946), and Raise the Red Lantern (1991)...

It seems that in 2024, if movies are not going to save movie theaters, novelty popcorn buckets will have to do it. Though popcorn buckets with specific movie themes have been around for years (and many have been great), it really seems like it was this year that kickstarted a new trend and made these buckets reach new levels of popularity. It all started when the "Dune 2" popcorn bucket was unleashed on unsuspecting audiences who did not expect such an, um, explicit popcorn bucket that took the internet, and "Saturday Night Live," by storm. Now we have the latest contender in the novelty popcorn bucket wars, and it is all about "Venom: The Last Dance," the latest entry in what is, so far, the only successful Sony Spider-Man movie not starring Spider-Man (no, "Morbius" was not it). But where some buckets have gone too far, this one actually doesn't go far enough. The popcorn bucket is simple enough, following the recent trend of having users reach their arms into characters' mouths. But for a bucket meant to be about a character as gnarly as Venom, not including the character's extremely long tongue — maybe even in a position that could provide plenty of its own innuendo opportunities — feels like a missed opportunity. (Courtesy Rafael Motamayor)...

Last month, Amazon vowed it would put 16 films in theaters, annually, by 2027. Today, the company’s Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios put their money where their mouths are as (collectively) the seventh member of the MPA (Motion Picture Association). The Amazon companies will formally join the MPA on October 1, when together they will make up the first addition to the group since Netflix came aboard five years ago. The other current MPA members are Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Universal Studios, The Walt Disney Studios, and Warner Bros. Discovery...

SAG-AFTRA has filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to represent intimacy coordinators in bargaining with the major studios. “We have no protections,” said Marci Liroff, who has worked as an intimacy coordinator in film and TV. “And we have no health insurance. We have no pension.” HBO requires intimacy coordinators for filming sex scenes, but there is no such requirement industrywide. In a statement, SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher said that intimacy coordinators create a safety net for performers in vulnerable situations...

Runway, the generative AI company that recently inked a first-of-its-kind deal with Lionsgate, will dole out grants of up to $1 million to filmmakers working on AI-powered projects. Runway is launching The Hundred Film Fund, an initiative to help produce and fund as many as 100 short films and feature-length movies that use generative AI technology to tell their stories. The funding grants will range from $5,000 to $1 million and decisions on applications will typically be made within 14 days of submission, according to Runway. New York-based Runway, founded in 2018, has raised about $250 million in funding to date from investors including Google, Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures. The company’s last publicly reported post-money valuation was $1.5 billion...