The Alamo Drafthouse movie chain looks set to hit $350,000 in ticket sales this November and December from Jon Favreau’s Will Ferrell-starring holiday favorite Elf. The 2003 comedy about a human raised in Santa’s North Pole workshop who returns to New York and saves Christmas is the chain’s top all-time repertory title, with cumulative grosses passing $1.5 million as fans flock to its movie watch-parties with costumed hosts, props, present wrapping and spaghetti-with-maple-syrup eating contests -- Buddy the Elf's favorite food. The chain ordered 30,000 elf hats this year.
Alamo first brought the film back as a holiday special in 2007, four years after its initial release. It became a staple by 2013. The chain ran Elf as it could in Covid-wracked 2020 but without the watch-parties. It held just a few last year. So 2022 is a reunion. Sales from 335 shows are at about 130% of 2019 levels. “This was a good year for it," Alamo Senior Film Programmer John Smith said. "It’s people wanting to get back to something familiar. And people wanting to get back to see movies in theaters." >>>20th Anniversary Next Year |
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NFL Sunday Click-It - After protracted negotiations with multiple companies, including tech giants Apple and Amazon, the NFL and Google have sealed a deal to move the league's Sunday Ticket package from DirecTV to YouTube. The tech company is paying about $2 billion a year over seven years, according to a person familiar with the terms. Customers will be able to add the package to their YouTube TV pay bundle or sign up for it as a standalone via YouTube Channels. >>> League Zooms In On Streaming
Marvel-ous - WandaVision spinoff Agatha: Coven of Chaos, headlined by Kathryn Hahn reprising her role as bad gal Agatha Harkness, has added some big musical theater firepower, with three-time Tony winner Patti LuPone joining the cast of the upcoming Disney+ series, sources tell Deadline. >>>Rumored Role
Big-Screen Prophet - Avatar: The Way of Water producer Jon Landau says that while cinema's obituary has been written many times, not even a pandemic could kill it. >>> “If You Make A Good Movie, People Are Going To Come Back”
Taking Up Armas - Angry Ana de Armas fans brought a lawsuit over the actress' absence in the 2019 Danny Boyle's Yesterday after she was featured in the film's trailer. This week, a U.S. District Judge shot down Universal's motion to dismiss the $5 million action. >>>"At Its Core, A Trailer Is An Advertisement"
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Austin Butler campaigned to play Elvis, prepping from the day he first heard about the film and eventually sending director Baz Luhrmann a self-made tape. “It came out of this detail that I learned about Elvis,” Butler says, “about his mom, who passed away when he was 23. That's how old I was when my mom died, so I ended up filming this tape that came out of a nightmare that my mom was dying again. It was an emotion of such deep pain. It kind of stripped away the icon of him, or the caricature of him, and it just made him so human." This was precisely the depth of Elvis that Luhrmann sought, and Butler was so right for the role that Luhrmann doesn’t even recall offering it to him. “I just remember the moment he walked in,” he says. “Then one day we made the movie.” >>>Read The Interview |
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Castings
Exclusive Megan Fox and Michele Morrone (365 Days) have been set to star in sci-fi thriller Subservience from Millennium Media. The film is about a struggling father (Morrone) who purchases a domestic SIM (Fox) to help care for his house and family until she gains awareness and turns deadly.
Exclusive Jeff Garlin (The Goldbergs, Curb Your Enthusiasm) has joined the cast of Netflix‘s Never Have I Ever for the show’s fourth and final season. Garlin will portray Len, a sweet man who fixes a mean sandwich and who makes Nirmala (Ranjita Chakravarty) reconsider if she really is done with relationships forever.
Exclusive Harvey Keitel and Olga Kurylenko (Black Widow) have signed on to star in an action thriller called Paradox Effect. In the film, an innocent woman (Kurylenko) is forced to confront a dangerous kingpin (Keitel) who has kidnapped her young daughter and is holding her for ransom. She teams up with a corrupt Interpol agent, whose son is also being held hostage, to rip off various criminals to raise the ransom to save their offspring. |
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QUOTABLE
"So much depends on the world. So much in the world depends on you." - Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky, appealing to Americans for help in his speech before a joint session of Congress |
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More News
🍿 Shares in AMC Entertainment plunged after the top exhibitor revealed plans for a reverse stock split and a $110 million capital raise from the sale of its recently introduced "APE" preferred equity units. After flying high as a meme-stock darling in 2021 and earlier this year, AMC shares have skidded to their lowest level since 2020.
🔥 Wednesday generated a massive audience in its opening week. The series landed at the top of Nielsen's U.S. streaming chart with a massive 5.9B minutes viewed. That’s the second-highest weekly viewing total for a streaming title since the beginning of 2020 — just behind Stranger Things.
💔 The New York City Medical Examiner unveiled the cause of death for Charlbi Dean, the South African actress and model who starred in the Ruben Östlund-directed Triangle of Sadness and died suddenly in August at age 32. Per People, the actress died from sepsis after being exposed to the bacteria Capnocytophaga. She was predisposed to the illness after having her spleen removed following a car accident in Cape Town in 2009.
😮 In one of of the biggest TV showrunner agency moves in years, CAA has signed Greg Berlanti for representation in all areas. Berlanti is known for his loyalty; he has only changed agencies once, in the early 2000s, when he left ICM for Endeavor (now WME). The move comes amid sweeping changes at Berlanti’s longtime TV home, Warner Bros. With his blockbuster overall deal coming up, Berlanti is bringing a new team, led by CAA heavyweights Bryan Lourd and Joe Cohen, to plot his next move.
🎄 Mariah Carey just made the holidays for CBS. Her special Mariah Carey: Merry Christmas to All! on Tuesday averaged 3.91 million viewers from 8 to 10 p.m., was the No. 1 broadcast of the evening and helped CBS win the night.
🤝 Sinclair Broadcast Group’s Bally Sports regional networks, which have long been absent from major streaming pay-TV bundles like YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV and Sling, has reached a carriage deal with FuboTV. The deal will see the 19 RSNs added to Fubo’s lineup in the coming weeks. The agreement deepens the ties between the companies, which already have a carriage pact for Sinclair’s local TV stations as well as the Tennis Channel and Chicago’s Marquee Sports Network.
In Brief - Netflix’s Luther movie is now titled Luther: The Fallen Sun…HBO released the first look at Jodie Foster in True Detective: Night Country…Searchlight’s Next Goal Wins from Oscar-winning filmmaker Taika Waititi is jumping from April 21 next year to Sept. 22...Netflix will launch a series of workout videos from the Nike Training Club. It will include 30 hours of sessions beginning on December 30...Sony's Adam Driver-fronted sci-fi movie 65 is moving onto the opening weekend of New Line’s Shazam: Fury of the Gods, March 17-19. |
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BY THE NUMBERS 289 acres - The size of Netflix’s proposed $848M Netflix Studios Fort Monmouth, a former army base in New Jersey, which would be one of the largest fully integrated production facilities in the world and a very close second to Netflix’s biggest U.S. production hub in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which totals 300 acres. |
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Obituaries
🕯 Franco Harris, the Hall of Fame running back who made “the Immaculate Reception” — voted the NFL’s greatest play of all time — and won four Super Bowls with the Pittsburgh Steelers, died early Wednesday. He was 72. His son told the Associated Press that Harris died overnight. 🕯 Diane McBain, whose quick rise to fame as a young Warner Bros. contract player in the early 1960s soon had her starring in the ABC series Surfside 6 and co-starring opposite Elvis Presley in 1966’s Spinout, died of liver cancer Wednesday at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. She was 81. 🕯 See the 400-plus influential figures we've lost this year in Deadline's 2022 Hollywood & Media Deaths photo gallery. |
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Trending  Taylor Swift, Oscar nominee? Buzzy first-time entrants on the Oscar Shortlist for Best Original Song include chart-toppers Rihanna, Selena Gomez and Swift, who have been recognized for their respective contributions to the songs “Lift Me Up,” “My Mind & Me” and “Carolina” from the films Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me and Where the Crawdads Sing.
🔻 Not only does it seem like a fait accompli that broadcast TV is dead, no one seems to be the least bit sad about it — unless you’re a fan of, say, Days of Our Lives and Dancing With the Stars. Otherwise, the current M.O. is to continue moving resources away from broadcast TV. Of the Big Three, only CBS has a dedicated programming executive for its broadcast network. |
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On the Radar
Fri - Babylon premieres
Sat - Santa Tracker livestream on Hulu; It's A Wonderful Life on NBC
Sun - Christmas Day
Mon - Hanukkah ends |
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First-Class Email - It may have been a fairly boilerplate corporate "thank you" email to the D23 masses, but previously surly fans who received Disney CEO Bob Iger's surprise holiday card yesterday seemed cheered by it. They posted reactions online like "this made me smile"; "I saw it at work and it picked up my spirits'; and "a simple gesture that costs nothing but makes us feel appreciated." |
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