Updated every Friday 12:00 PM
May 16 - May 22

APPLE TV
Preschoolers will get to imagine beyond the ordinary as Apple TV+ announces the all-new animated preschool series “Not a Box,” premiering globally on Friday, June 13. The series is inspired by the beloved, award-winning children’s picture book of the same name by the New York Times bestselling author and illustrator Antoinette Portis...

Christopher Nolan‘s The Odyssey, the Oppenheimer director’s epic take on the classic Greek myth, will shoot entirely on Imax film cameras, a first for a commercial feature. Nolan is a fan of the big-screen format, which he’s used on Dunkirk, Interstellar, the Dark Knight movies and Tenet, as well as extensively on Oppenheimer. But shooting an entire feature film on the famously big, loud and unwieldy Imax film cameras (unlike the lighter, quieter digital Imax cameras, used in recent films such as Thunderbolts* and the upcoming Superman) was unworkable. Until now. After the success of Oppenheimer, which earned more than $190 million on Imax screens, some 20 percent of its total gross, Nolan challenged the company to improve its cameras, to make them lighter and quieter, and to solve issues with scanning and processing the cameras’ 70 mm film stock, to allow him to easily watch dailies as he shot. “Chris called me up and said, ‘If you can figure out how to solve the problems, I will make [Odyssey] 100 percent in Imax.’ And that’s what we’re doing,” said Imax CEO Rich Gelfond, speaking at the company’s annual press lunch in Cannes on Thursday. “He forced us to rethink that side of our business, our film recorders, our film cameras.” The new Imax cameras are reportedly 30 percent quieter — so those infamous muffled dialogue scenes in Nolan films could be a thing of the past — and substantially lighter. Gelfond said new film scanning and processing techniques will allow a faster turnaround for dailies...

Film-focused social media platform Letterboxd plans to launch a curated TVOD (transactional video-on-demand) service, targeted at its 20 million-strong cinema-obsessed user base. The company said the service will also explore opportunities to host titles that have not yet secured widespread distribution, presenting this as a “potential new path to audience connection for filmmakers and sales agents seeking visibility and momentum.” The company said details on territories, titles, and launch dates will be announced in the coming months...

Tom Cruise has some key advice for the next wave of actors. As one of the biggest movie stars in the world, he didn’t attend film school or have a technically trained background. Instead, Cruise told the audience on Monday while receiving the British Film Institute Fellowship honor that he learned his skills by watching movies. And Cruise encourages the next generation of talent to focus on what goes into making a movie. “It is important to understand the tools around you. There is tech,” he said. “It is like understanding the stage as an actor but for a lot of artists it is not taught in film school: how to understand the lens and what it can do, and why there is eye movement and recognize the effect it has.” “I always tell actors, ‘Spend time in the editing room, produce a movie, study old movies, recognize what the composition is giving you, know what those lenses are, understand the lighting and how to use it for your benefit. Understand the art form to that degree.’ Brando absolutely understood lighting — all the greats did.” “Understanding the tools, the camera, the story structure … the conveying of emotions,” is essential for Cruise. He also noted how one of the people he studied was studied was Jack Nicholson. He said, “Nicholson and those guys who came up with him understand that lens.”...

Since Donald Trump announced plans, via a caps-lock post on May 4, to impose a 100 percent levy on “foreign-made” movies, it’s been all the film industry has been able to talk about. The (unprecedented) idea of a movie tariff system threatened to disrupt, maybe destroy, the global system of financing, producing and distributing films. Trump’s tariffs might still be on the table — it’s hard to know with the easily distracted POTUS — but within the industry, the discussion has already moved on. In a letter to the president on Monday, May 12, Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone, two of Trump’s “special ambassadors” to the entertainment industry, along with a lengthy list of industry players including the Motion Picture Association, producers’ groups and top industry labor guilds, called for Washington to expand and extend tax incentives to help bring film and TV production back to the U.S....