Updated every Friday 12:00 PM
December 12 - December 18

APPLE TV
Apple TV was recognized with 14 total nominations across six titles for the 83rd Annual Golden Globe Awards, with top category nods including Cinematic and Box Office Achievement alongside Best Original Score for acclaimed film "F1" following its global release as the highest-grossing sports feature of all time, as well as Best Drama nominations for breakout freshman drama "Pluribus" and Emmy Award-winners "Severance" and "Slow Horses." "The Studio," which recently became the most Emmy-winning freshman comedy in history, received a Best Comedy nod. The winners will be revealed on Sunday, January 11, 2026 in Los Angeles...

Even in today's difficult market, James Cameron's "Avatar" series has proven its box office prowess beyond any reasonable doubt. After "Avatar: The Way of Water" became Cameron's third $2 billion movie at the global box office (alongside "Titanic" and, of course, the first "Avatar"), you'd expect that studio executives would be throwing money at him to make as many sequels as humanly possible. And yet. In an interview with Discussing Film's Andrew J. Salazar, Cameron talked about the moment when he decided to split the planned second "Avatar" movie into two separate films, thus creating a fifth "Avatar" movie. He also revealed that while he told his people about this before notifying the studio and reassured them a fifth film wouldn't be a problem, it turned out that the studio wasn't exactly enamored with the idea. However, Cameron said that he had a perfect response to the executives who were shuffling their feet about committing to an extra "Avatar" film: "My counterargument was, 'Wait a minute. What part of you getting another chance to make $2 billion is in question here?'" "Avatar: Fire and Ash" is in theaters on December 19, 2025...

Hollywood is undergoing an inflection point. As we have all noticed, several major film studios have merged in recent years. Back in late 2009, Disney purchased all of Marvel, setting the Marvel Cinematic Universe into motion. This was successful, so Disney next purchased Lucasfilm. This was also successful, so Disney just went for the whole kit 'n' caboodle and purchased 20th Century Fox, a century-old film studio. And that wasn't the end of it. Warner Bros. and Discovery mushed together, bringing about a horrid dystopia of slate-clearing and film-hating from the widely reviled CEO David Zaslav. Then Skydance/Paramount became a thing. A lot of these panicked mergers have been done to combat the rise of streaming and the fallout from the streaming wars. The rise of reboots and the weakening of vertical integration, along with the fallout of the streaming wars, led directly into where we are today: a bidding war for a larger and larger piece of the pie, fueled not by creativity or a passion for film but by control over moribund I.P. This is only anecdotal, but this Halloween, I saw fewer kids dressed as Superman than ever before. (Courtesy Witney Seibold )...

The 2025 edition of The Game Awards is in the books and debut indie game "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33" took home the coveted Game of the Year award. Along with "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33" (Sandfall Interactive/Kepler Interactive), others in the running for the top honor were "Death Stranding 2: On The Beach" (Kojima Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment), "Donkey Kong Bananza" (Nintendo EPD/Nintendo), "Hades II" (Supergiant Games), "Hollow Knight: Silksong" (Team Cherry), "Kingdom Come: Deliverance II" (Warhorse Studios/Deep Silver). Taking place at the Peacock Theater in downtown Los Angeles, the 2025 Game Awards aired across Amazon's Prime Video, YouTube and Twitch...

There just is something about the Rankin/Bass Christmas specials from the '60s, '70s, and '80s that hit. Rankin/Bass — aka the production company founded by Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass — actually outsourced most of its stop-motion animation and traditional animation production work to vendors in Japan, including Toei, which would then go on to make anime legends "Dragon Ball Z," "Sailor Moon," and "One Piece." Rankin/Bass released some 17 Christmas specials for television, starting in 1964 with "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and ending in 1985 with "The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus." Most of these made-for-TV films were written by Romeo Muller. He was born in New York City but might also have been an elf. That's how adept he was at using the landscape of animation and children's entertainment to actually tackle the mixed emotions that define Christmas: A bittersweet sense of loss and loneliness, and an unquenchable sense of hope and community. Muller's final cartoon, a short from the early '90s called "Noel," is a Christmas special that expresses the sadness of the passage of time. "I think stop-motion is particularly suited for the holidays as these animations feel like little worlds of toys come to life," Baron said. "The handmade nature, intimate scale of the stories and sets, and in many cases a sense of play, lend themselves to a nostalgia, warmth, and coziness — a little bubble of magic." (Courtesy Sarah Shachat)...

Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan praises one of the most memorable scenes from Sinners. The vampire horror action movie shook up the industry early in 2025, and though it may have lost Best Picture to One Battle After Another now, many considered it the best film of the year for a long while. Nolan praised the river dance scene in Sinners (where Jack O'Connell's Remick leads the vampire hoard in singing "Rocky Road to Dublin"), calling it "the most spectacular musical inversion since Kubrick made 'Singin in the Rain' the stuff of nightmares [in A Clockwork Orange]."...