There are skeptics and cynics who will scoff at the whole turn of events around the Lupita Nyong’o and Rihanna movie and wonder where we went wrong. Pay them no mind. They will just end up on the outside looking in, like those poor suckers Rihanna and Lupita are about to scam out of their shorts.
Neil Turitz
Paramount, CEO Jim Gianopulos, and the team are currently facing a challenge to take a once great institution that has fallen on hard times and return it to its past glory. Perhaps the best way to do this will be to find the Next Big Thing, according to Neil Turitz.
In examining the newest Spec Book, Neil Turitz finds that for the second year in a row, there were more specs put on the market and, more importantly, more sold, than the year before. This means there are more opportunities for the writers themselves, and for the companies making the movies to bring fresh voices to their product.
Yesterday, Amazon debuted its Amazon Charts as a sort of competitor to the New York Times Best Seller List, which is a welcome addition to the medium, an egalitarian move, and not unlike the landscape of blockbusters and indie titles in the movie world.
The Studio Series turns to Fox this week to see how its success with the X-Men franchise, beginning in 2000 with Bryan Singer’s initial X-Men film, has allowed the studio to try its hand at other types of fare.
Contributor Neil Turitz takes a look at what has made Amy Schumer a success but whether or not she is ultimately the box office draw execs believed after the success of Trainwreck.
If we’re going to bring something back from the dead, shouldn’t we be given a chance to actually miss it first? One has to genuinely wonder what it is about this new American Idol series that will draw viewers in a way that the original one simply was no longer capable of doing.
There was a time, not so long ago, when Warner Bros. was the model studio in town. They had great filmmakers making excellent movies that earned a lot of money and set box office records and produced some of the most beloved films and television shows ever created. Oh, how the people toiling under the iconic water tower long for those halcyon days of yore.
Netflix was recently hacked and neither them nor the industry at large had much of a response, which was initially puzzling, but upon closer inspection, seems like the best possible response Netflix could have had.
Jimmy Kimmel’s recent monologue gave us all something to think about and gave us a personal prism through which to view it, thus allowing us to truly feel something genuine and true, while also forcing us to ponder how it is we react to such a thing. There’s something refreshing about that,
when entertainment can do more than just entertain.
Neil Turitz brings back last year’s Studio Series for the summer of 2017 to look at the film industry, studios, indies, and any in between. And where better to launch the series than with the biggest and most successful studio in Hollywood? Disney.
The possibility of a second season for the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why shows a possibly larger and more alarming trend at the streaming giant: that it’s not as creator-friendly as it seems and has the same greed as other networks.
We are less than a week away from the Writers’ Guild of America potentially going on strike if they cannot reach a deal with the studios by the time the clock strikes midnight on May 2. Neil Turitz looks back at the last strike to make a prediction about how he thinks the next few days will play out.
In the near future, New York City has been turned into a crime-based amusement park for the rich and privileged. For the right price, they can take drugs, engage in a high-speed chase, or even be mugged in ’70s era Times Square. But when a former gang member working in the park sees something he shouldn’t, it sets off a chain reaction that could take down the whole system.
Neil Turitz is taking a look at the long shots and outsides for the Emmys this year. He examines the shows that have no real chance to be nominated, even though they are doing things that no one else on TV is doing, and doing them exceedingly well.
With Warner Bros. spending most of its time focusing on its larger films, its subsidiary New Line Cinema has fallen by the wayside. Neil Turitz takes the opportunity to figure out what should be done with this company that is consistently producing underwelming content.
Since the inception of the Cinematic Universe, Marvel has been hiring character-driven directors to ensure that its films are lead by its characters and not its plot. This trend was continued as Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck signed on to co-direct Captain Marvel. Neil Turitz evaluates Marvel’s decision in contrast with previous ones along with comparing this hire to many of DC’s hires.
The summer is when fortunes are made and lost, careers are built and destroyed, and audiences escape from the heat in a movie theater for a couple hours. With that in mind, here are five movies this summer that have especially large question marks beside them.
It goes without saying that Stephen King is the godfather of horror, but why is the celebrated author suddenly going through something of a Hollywood renaissance? Neil Turitz previews the upcoming adaptations of his works and ponders why it’s happening now.
Why do studios insist on remaking films that were successful the first time? They most likely will not be as good as the original, which just leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. Neil Turitz proposes that studios should try remaking films that that were great ideas but suffered from poor executions and give them the artisitc realization they deserved.
Even with only having seen one film of The Fast and the Furious franchise, Neil Turitz has observed the power and legacy of these films and examines, from an outsider’s perspective, how and why they’ve done so well and what’s in their future.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences changed the rules to two major categories. Neil Turitz explains how these rule changes could greatly impact who gets nominated in the categories in the coming years.
With both YouTube and Hulu launching their own TV subscriptions, what are the pros and cons of various TV networks working with the subscriptions and are these streaming options really a good thing for viewers?
In recent years, we’ve seen more and more miniseries and anthologies on TV and many of them have been incredibly successful. Neil Turitz takes a look at the efficacy of these eight or six-hour stories and all their exploits that give them a leg up on the traditional 22 episode, season-to-season model.
With Aaron Sorkin entering talks with both Marvel and DC despite having admittedly never read a comic book, Neil Turitz gives his take on how he envisions a Sorkin-written superhero movie to look and whether he thinks the Oscar-winning writer could enhance the quality of these films.
Over the past five years FX has asserted itself as the network with the best programming lineup. In both comedy and drama, FX is consistently putting out the most successful shows that are enjoyed by fans and critics. Neil Turitz examines the network’s rise to prominence and how long he thinks they’ll stay at the top.
As the his series on the state of the comic industry comes to a close, Neil Turitz takes a positive look towards the future of comics to remind us that the industry is on the upswing and has no intentions of coming down anytiem soon.
If you were given the opportunity to pay 30 dollars to be able to watch movies at home from when they hit theaters, would you? With CinemaCon starting today, Neil Turitz examines this potential new development in film watching and how it would impact theaters in the future.
It seems like every film today is one piece in the web of a massive franchise with expectations to turn into a full cinematic universe. Many it times it even seems like the films franchises are being greenlit before the first film is released. Neil Turitz takes a look at this phenomenon and asks why film is going in this direction.
Valiant Entertainment is, in fact, not just surviving in the marketplace, it’s actually thriving. Thanks to a specific strategy to publish a limited amount of books each month, thereby focusing on quality storytelling over quantity of market share, a company that only began its latest run of publications five years ago now averages higher sales per book than any other publisher outside of the Big Two.
