News
Paramount's Warner bid has a deadline nobody is discussing
The $31-a-share offer has been reported everywhere. The clock attached to it, which starts running on 30 September, has not.
Marcus Dey2 min2.2K reads
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Box Office
Resident Evil's record is 13% from China. The last one was 51%
Resident Evil reached $320.2m worldwide and took the franchise record from The Final Chapter. Strip China out of both and the new film is 83% ahead; on the usual studio splits, the record is worth about 31% more.
Box Office
Verity fell 64%. Its hurricane Saturday was the day it held best
Verity dropped 64% in its second weekend and Amazon MGM pointed at Hurricane Isaias. Day by day, the stormy Saturday held best, four rival films improved their holds, and the landfall zone is worth about 1.3 points.
Box Office
Other Mommy opened to $27.5m on a D+. History points to $63m
Other Mommy topped the box office with $27.5m and the lowest CinemaScore since Megalopolis. We ran the multiples for six badly graded horror films: the median gives it $63m, the worst case $43m, on a budget of $19m.
Streaming
Ray Gunn took 30 years to make. Netflix gives it 14 days in cinemas
Ray Gunn was shelved in the Turner-Time Warner merger of 1996 and lost its IMAX slot to the fallout from the Warner Bros sale of 2026. It premiered in London on Friday to a 91% Rotten Tomatoes score, and it gets one day on a cinema screen for every 26 months it spent in development.
Streaming
Ben Affleck used AI for lots of things in Animals. He won't say which
Animals landed on Netflix on 9 October with a 36 per cent critics' score and a director who admits the film used AI but refuses to say where. He sold Netflix the tools in March.
Box Office
The Social Reckoning is heading for a quarter of The Social Network
The Social Reckoning took $650,000 in Thursday previews and is projected at $6m, about 27% of The Social Network's 2010 opening. Other Mommy outsold it five and a half times over on a $19m budget.
News
David Zaslav's $606m Warner exit takes 2026's cash-out past $800m
Zaslav received $606.1m when Paramount's $31-a-share takeover closed: $224.4m for shares and $381.7m for options that vested at the close. Add the $114m, $59m and $21.7m sales made while the deal was pending and the year's total reaches about $801m.
Streaming
HBO Max has been renamed twice in six years. Now comes a merger
Skydance closed its $110bn Warner Bros. Discovery takeover on Tuesday and spent Wednesday declining to name, date or price the single app it says is coming. The Max name lasted 778 days. The restored HBO Max name is 455 days old.
News
The day in film and television: deals, casting, production starts and the moves that reshape a slate.
News
David Zaslav's $606m Warner exit takes 2026's cash-out past $800m
Zaslav received $606.1m when Paramount's $31-a-share takeover closed: $224.4m for shares and $381.7m for options that vested at the close. Add the $114m, $59m and $21.7m sales made while the deal was pending and the year's total reaches about $801m.
News
Skydance's Warner debt costs six times what its studios earn
Skydance closed its purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery on 6 October and filed the bond schedule the same day. Multiply each principal by its coupon and the fixed-rate notes cost $3.22bn a year. Warner's and Paramount's film studios earned $132m between them in the most recent quarter either reported.
News
The Batman Part II has slipped 868 days. Now filming has stopped
The Batman Part II is booked for 18 February 2028, which is 2,177 days after the first film opened. No Batman film has made its direct sequel wait that long, and the schedule has now moved three times before a camera stopped rolling.
The Grapevine
What the industry is whispering about — feuds, rewrites, walkouts and the stories behind the official statement.
The Grapevine
Higgsfield's 4-star Trustpilot score rests on reviews it asked for
We counted the 200 most recent Trustpilot reviews of Higgsfield and sorted them by who asked for them. Invited reviewers give the AI video company 4.4 stars. Unprompted ones give it 3.5, and 31% give it one. Archived snapshots show the score climbing from 2.8 to 4.0 in nine months, and when the turn came.
The Grapevine
Higgsfield faces scam claims as 'unlimited' AI renders take hours
Higgsfield launched a 33-day 'unlimited' offer on 7 August with a published average render time under five minutes. Within eleven days paying users were reporting waits of two hours and more. The refund window had already closed. Here is the timeline, the small print and the complaints on file.
The Grapevine
Coyote vs. Acme went from tax write-off to a $15.4m opening
The Looney Tunes film Warner buried for a tax break opened in second place and held third over Labor Day. The numbers are ordinary, which is exactly the embarrassing part.
Box Office
Weekend numbers, breakevens and what a result actually means for the people who greenlit it.
Box Office
Resident Evil's record is 13% from China. The last one was 51%
Resident Evil reached $320.2m worldwide and took the franchise record from The Final Chapter. Strip China out of both and the new film is 83% ahead; on the usual studio splits, the record is worth about 31% more.
Box Office
Verity fell 64%. Its hurricane Saturday was the day it held best
Verity dropped 64% in its second weekend and Amazon MGM pointed at Hurricane Isaias. Day by day, the stormy Saturday held best, four rival films improved their holds, and the landfall zone is worth about 1.3 points.
Box Office
Other Mommy opened to $27.5m on a D+. History points to $63m
Other Mommy topped the box office with $27.5m and the lowest CinemaScore since Megalopolis. We ran the multiples for six badly graded horror films: the median gives it $63m, the worst case $43m, on a budget of $19m.
Streaming
What is landing on the services, what is quietly disappearing, and how the platforms are changing their bets.
Streaming
Ray Gunn took 30 years to make. Netflix gives it 14 days in cinemas
Ray Gunn was shelved in the Turner-Time Warner merger of 1996 and lost its IMAX slot to the fallout from the Warner Bros sale of 2026. It premiered in London on Friday to a 91% Rotten Tomatoes score, and it gets one day on a cinema screen for every 26 months it spent in development.
Streaming
Ben Affleck used AI for lots of things in Animals. He won't say which
Animals landed on Netflix on 9 October with a 36 per cent critics' score and a director who admits the film used AI but refuses to say where. He sold Netflix the tools in March.
Streaming
HBO Max has been renamed twice in six years. Now comes a merger
Skydance closed its $110bn Warner Bros. Discovery takeover on Tuesday and spent Wednesday declining to name, date or price the single app it says is coming. The Max name lasted 778 days. The restored HBO Max name is 455 days old.