Netflix premiers ‘The Unforgivable’. The new drama movie shows Sandra Bullock’s versatility as an actress.
‘The Unforgivable’ is about a woman, Ruth (Sandra Bullock) that murdered a local sheriff in cold blood and served 20 years of punishment on parole.
After her release, Ruth attempts to rebuild her life with her much younger sister, Katie (Aisling Franciosi). Ruth and Katie were evicted (and separated) decades ago after Ruth’s arrest.
Ruth starts looking for Katie, but the girl’s adoptive parents don’t let her see Ruth due to her criminal history.
Nevertheless, nothing stops Ruth from pursuing a life with her sister.
Bullock’s versatility
During this new facet, Sandra Bullock doesn’t represent a loving mother, a charismatic boss, a bold thief, or the lady that everyone wants to date. She’s a cop killer that spent 20 years in prison living a troubled life.
As Sandra Bullock said, “there’s nothing sexy about my character.”
Even when Nora Fingscheidt doesn’t explain or link many things, ‘The Unforgivable’ is an intense drama with a waterfall of emotions.
“There ain’t no better world, there’s just this one…” Sony Classics has unveiled an official US trailer for the indie drama Jockey, an intense look at the pressure of being a jockey in horse racing. This first premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, where it won a Special Jury Award for Acting for Clifton Collins Jr. in the lead role. An aging jockey hopes to win one last title for his longtime trainer, who has what appears to be a championship horse. But the years – and injuries – have taken a toll on his body, throwing into question his ability to continue his lifelong passion. And the arrival of a young rookie rider, who also claims to be his son, who he then takes under his wing, further complicates the path to fulfilling his dream. “Filmed at a live racetrack in Arizona, and featuring real jockeys, Jockey reveals the true rider experience – real life, behind the track.” Clifton Collins Jr. stars with Molly Parker, Moises Arias, Logan Cormier, and Colleen Hartnett. The story is a bit formulaic, but this one is definitely worth seeing just for Clifton’s performance.
Here’s the official US trailer (+ poster) for Clint Bentley’s Jockey, direct from SPC’s YouTube:
An award-winner at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, Jockey stars Clifton in an amazing performance as an aging jockey who is determined to win one last championship. His dream is complicated when a young rookie (Moises Arias Jr.) shows up claiming to be his son. Instilled with an immediately engaging realism by filmmaker Clint Bentley, Jockey takes audiences inside the “backside” of racetrack life in a way no other film has. Filmed at a live racetrack in Arizona, and featuring real jockeys, Jockey reveals the true rider experience – real life, behind the track.Jockey is directed by up-and-coming producer / filmmaker Clint Bentley, making his feature directorial debut after a few short films previously. The screenplay is written by Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar. It’s produced by Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar, and Nancy Schafer. This first premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Sony Classics will debut Bentley’s Jockey in select US theaters (NY LA) starting on December 29th, 2021, with a wide release in January.
Moviegoers were left scratching their heads this spring when Paddington 2, a children’s film about an anthropomorphic bear, overtook Citizen Kane on Rotten Tomatoes, cementing the sequel’s status as one of the best-reviewed films on the site. How is it that a movie featuring a CGI bear — albeit a great movie — overtook one of the greatest films of all time? It seems to be a trend on Rotten Tomatoes; movie review scores on the site have been creeping upward for a decade, according to data compiled by Global News.
“It’s puzzling. I don’t know what to make of it. I really don’t,” says David A. Gross, who runs Franchise Entertainment Research, a movie consultancy.
Films on Rotten Tomatoes are given a “Tomatometer” score out of 100 per cent, based on how many critics give the film a positive review. For example, Cruella’s 74 per cent means that roughly seven out of every 10 critics on the site thought the villainous fashionista’s origin story was at least worth a watch.
In 2009, the average Tomatometer score for all wide releases was 46 per cent, and it was roughly at that level for much of the 2000s. By 2019, that average score had climbed to a high of 62 per cent — an important milestone, since 60 per cent is the dividing line between a “fresh” film and a “rotten” one.
Effectively, the average movie has gone from rotten to fresh in just 10 years.
Average Tomatometer scores for wide releases by year from 1999 – present. While scores dipped slightly in 2020, a year that saw many hotly anticipated studio releases shelved due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they appear to be rebounding in 2021. The ratio of “fresh” to “rotten” films has nearly doubled over the past decade as well. In 2009 31 per cent of wide releases were fresh (i.e. had a score of 60 per cent or higher). By contrast 57 per cent of all 2019 wide releases are fresh.
Global News / OMDb API
For Gross, who has been following this trend for years, the higher scores fix a longstanding problem with the critic aggregator: it was unfairly critical.
For all of the 2000s, average Tomatometer scores hovered in the decidedly rotten low-to-mid-40s. If 60 per cent is the dividing line between a good film and a bad film, it makes sense to Gross that an unbiased average should fall roughly in the middle.
“Their site is a service for moviegoers,” Gross says. “If you had talked to me 12 years ago, I would have said, ‘What in the world are they doing and why are they just trashing movies?’”
The rising scores can be confusing for viewers who use the site to decide what to watch. This spring’s Godzilla vs Kong, a movie about a giant CGI ape brought out of retirement to battle a giant CGI lizard, had a score of 79 per cent in the lead-up to its opening weekend (it has since dropped to 76 per cent). That’s a higher score than 14 best picture winners, including Forrest Gump (1994): 71 per cent; Gladiator (2000): 77 per cent; and Braveheart (1995); 78 per cent.
“I feel for the movies that are stuck with their scores,” Gross says. “I think it’s unfair to the old movies.”
Are movie studios to blame?
The rising scores come as Rotten Tomatoes has forged close financial ties with the movie industry. The website, launched in 1998 by three recent Berkeley grads, was purchased by Warner Bros. in 2011. And in 2016, Comcast (which also owns NBCUniversal) acquired a 70 per cent stake through a deal that turned Rotten Tomatoes into a division of the ticket vendor Fandango. (These media conglomerates produce many of the movies and TV shows that are rated on the site.)
The company that once revelled in its outsider status now occupies a critical position within the movie industry, its scores appearing across the web on Google, iTunes, DirecTV and Fandango.
While Rotten Tomatoes usage among moviegoers has declined in recent years, according to a survey by the National Research Group, the firm estimates that roughly one in four moviegoers still make use of the website.
“Rotten Tomatoes is very important, there’s no doubt about that,” Gross says.
“Their numbers fly around the internet fast on opening weekend.”
Montreal movie theatre manager Zachary Merovitz says that positive critical buzz can boost ticket sales, especially for highly regarded but under-the-radar films like Nomadland, which may fall out of the general moviegoing public’s purview.
“That one had extra business because it was a well-regarded movie.”
And while the precise effect of Rotten Tomatoes on ticket sales is hard to discern, the site can sometimes tip the balance for customers who haven’t made up their mind at the box office.
On occasion, customers will “look at the score on their cell phones right in front of me,” Merovitz says. “And if they see it has a really terrible review, then sometimes they won’t go see the movie.”
Indeed, the site’s potential as a marketing tool is not lost on film publicists.
“If you’re certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, that’s definitely something that you’re going to pull into your campaign,” says Andréa Grau, founder and owner of the publicity firm Touchwood PR.
The close relationship between the world’s premier review aggregator and two of Hollywood’s largest movie studios has led to some concern over the potential for conflicts of interest. Is it possible that business pressure from the site’s corporate backers could explain the rising scores?
It’s a theory Joel Meares, editor-in-chief at Rotten Tomatoes, is quick to dismiss.
For Meares, it’s not clear how Rotten Tomatoes or its corporate owners could influence the scores that films receive.
“We ingest reviews. They are either fresh or rotten. They go into a pool. The percentage is the percentage and it is what it is.”
By Coolcaesar (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons
But exactly how film reviews are classified as rotten or fresh has never been an exact science.
“It’s this weird Wild West about what counts as fresh or rotten,” says Jason Gorber, a Toronto-based freelance film critic with reviews on the site dating back over two decades.
Roughly half of all reviews added to Rotten Tomatoes are self-submitted, which means that the critic or publication specifies whether their review is fresh or rotten, using whatever criteria they like. Gorber considers any film he rates as a C+ or higher to be fresh. For another reviewer that threshold might be a C, or a B-, or 2/4 stars.
Still, other critics, Gorber says, “have never logged into Rotten Tomatoes at all.”
For these critics, the company employs a team of curators, seven in all, who read hundreds of reviews a week and mark them fresh or rotten based on their interpretation. If the review is on the fence, multiple curators will read it, and if it’s really unclear they will contact the reviewer for clarification.
Are news outlets to blame?
Meares hasn’t crunched the numbers himself, but speculates that if Tomatometer scores have risen, it may be due to broader shifts in the media industry.
“Over the last 20, 15 or even 10 years, the way that criticism has operated in the world has changed.”
When Rotten Tomatoes started in the late-1990s, most professional film critics worked as full-time tenured employees at large publications. Think Siskel and Ebert.
Today, the industry is dominated by freelancers, who increasingly write for independent online publications, and so-called influencers, some of whom have no experience in the industry whatsoever — and a lot of the time no knowledge of film history or trends.
All critics rely on studios for access to advanced press screenings. This is something tenured critics at big publications don’t need to think about. But for freelance critics, press access is by no means guaranteed.
Jason Gorber explains that freelancers may hesitate to pan a film out of fear of drawing the studio’s ire.
“If I continuously slam, for justifiable reasons, a given series of films from a given studio, I may stop being invited by that studio,” Gorber says.
And it’s not just film studios that freelance critics need to be wary of. In the age of social media, angry movie fans have also grown into a force to be reckoned with.
“I panned a film that I saw in Toronto two years ago and I ended up getting death threats,” says freelance film critic Danielle Solzman. “There’s nothing like coming back from a film festival and having to go straight to the police.”
“I think in hindsight, that made me kind of more overgenerous, as far as star ratings for Wonder Woman 1984, because I just did not want to deal with the death threats,” Solzman says. “It definitely makes you think twice when it comes to some films. But at the end of the day, if I don’t like a film, I don’t like it.”
Diversify, diversify, diversify
While movie audiences are growing more diverse, film criticism has long been dominated by white men. Looking at the top 100 films in 2017, a USC Annenberg report found that 82 per cent of the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes were written by white critics, and 78 per cent by men.
Male critics are consistently more harsh than women when it comes to reviewing films with female leads, according to an annual report from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film.
“When I’m on the fence about a film and haven’t seen it yet, the last thing I want to do is read 80 reviews from old white men,” Solzman says.
Shortly after USC Annenberg released their findings in 2018, Rotten Tomatoes overhauled its criteria for approving critics. Over the next two years, the company would add over 825 new critics to its website, more than half of whom were women, including about 20 per cent people of colour. A majority of these were also freelance writers.
In 2020, the company announced similar changes to its Top Critics program.
“It’s about making sure that a diverse movie-going public is reflected in the diversity of the pool of critics we have,” Meares says.
2:09 Oscars change best picture rules to encourage diversity
Oscars change best picture rules to encourage diversity – Sep 9, 2020
Appearing on the website can also be helpful for critics struggling to gain a foothold in the industry.
“Getting on Rotten Tomatoes has definitely helped with regard to press lists,” says Solzman, who notes that gatekeeping is a real problem within the industry.
Gorber believes that the increasing diversity of voices on the site has helped blunt some of its sharper edges.
“We have more and more diverse voices. I don’t just mean in terms of racial and ethnic diversity. I just mean literally different people contributing to this grander conversation,” Gorber says. “Some negative voices will be drowned out in the larger cacophony.”
It’s all about that user base
More critics on the site have meant more movie reviews contributing to each film’s score. The top 10 highest-grossing films in 2009 had an average of 278 reviews per film. By 2019, that number had risen to 445 reviews per film.
If you are feeling particularly studious and want to browse the 541 reviews that makeup Avengers: Endgame’s 94 per cent rating, you’ll notice that many of the critics hail from niche online publications that cater to specific audiences. Some, like SciFiNow, and ComicBookMovie.com, narrow in on one genre. Others, like Movies4Kids, are geared toward a subset of moviegoers.
Meares thinks the growth of internet critics writing for specific audiences could potentially help explain rising Rotten Tomatoes scores.
“When a horror film comes out, it has more genre-specific experts reviewing it,” Meares says. “I’m not saying they necessarily go easy on it, but perhaps they have a different relationship with a third horror sequel than someone at the top of a major masthead, who 20 years ago had to review every film that came out every weekend.”
If you’re a critic writing a review aimed at horror fans, Meares explains, you’re more likely judging the film based on how it appeals to that specific audience.
All these industry shifts have contributed to what publicist Andréa Grau sees as a more positive attitude amongst critics.
“Rarely do you see film reviews like we used to see 20 years ago, which were just destroying a project.”
She sees a media industry geared more toward celebrating cinema than attacking it.
“We’re all in this industry together and we all want to make sure that we’re still supporting filmmaking. And I think film critics are part of that.”
Scores more stable on Metacritic and IMDb
Global News also looked at average movie review scores for wide releases on Metacritic, a competing online review aggregator, and IMDb, an online database of movie and TV info.
Between 2009 and 2019, average Metacritic scores for wide releases, which are out of 100, increased to 56 from 49, or by 7 per cent. In contrast, Rotten Tomatoes scores rose more than twice that much over the same period.
Films regularly score lower on Metacritic now than they do on Rotten Tomatoes. This spring’s Quiet Place Part II is currently at 91 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes but only 71 on Metacritic.
It may seem odd that two sites that both claim to aggregate critics’ opinions could land on two completely different scores for the same film, but each site uses a different methodology to calculate their scores.
“It’s like comparing apples to automobiles,” Gorber says.
Metacritic converts each review into a score between 0 and 100. It then uses a closely guarded formula to create a weighted average of all the reviews.
On Rotten Tomatoes, by contrast, the Tomatometer score is nothing more than the percentage of critics who thought the film was worth seeing.
According to Gross, Metacritic is also more restrictive about the critics it accepts, relying largely on traditional media organizations. The company was previously owned by the CBS Corp. and was sold to Red Ventures in 2020.
Anyone can cast a vote for a film on IMDb, which is owned by Amazon. Yet despite the potential for misuse, IMDb ratings for wide releases have stayed relatively stable over the past two decades, varying little from their average of 6.2 out of 10. Between 2009 and 2019, scores on the platform rose three per cent.
Rotten Tomatoes also hosts audience scores, but they are not a part of our data.
Average scores on Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and IMDb for wide releases by year from 1999 – present. Average Rotten Tomatoes scores have risen 15 per cent between 2009 and 2019. Metacritic scores rose 7 per cent over the same period, while IMDb scores rose 3 per cent.
Global News / OMDb API
Since Global News conducted analysis independently, Meares of Rotten Tomatoes says it’s hard to comment authoritatively on our findings.
While Meares did not dispute our data, a company spokesperson claims not to have any comparable internal analysis showing that Tomatometer scores have risen for wide releases between 2009 and 2019.
“We do see ups and downs,” Meares says.
Meares acknowledges that 2019 was a strong year for the Tomatometer, but points out that if you go back historically, there are other years with high average scores, such as 1939 and 1982. Global News only looked at data from films released after the website’s founding in 1998.
Even anecdotally, the finding that there are more and more fresh films on the site does not appear to be an item of conversation among staff.
“It’s not necessarily a topic that has come up,” Meares says. “We tend to live in the day-to-day.”
Without a full accounting by Rotten Tomatoes, which has greater access to its own data than any third party, it is impossible to know exactly why the data shows that scores are rising on the site.
It’s more than just scores
Anyone old enough to remember Siskel Ebert the Movies can recall how often the two critics used to disagree with each other. Two critics, five opinions, as the old joke goes.
Now imagine trying to get upwards of 500 critics to reach a consensus. That’s exactly what the Tomatometer attempts to do.
Gorber believes a great deal of nuance is lost when you boil down all these contrasting opinions to a single number.
People often assume that if a film is at “80 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes that means it’s an A movie, and if it’s 70 per cent that means it’s a B movie. And that’s 100 per cent not what it’s like,” Gorber says.
“Some of the greatest films ever made are 50 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, because half the audience really loved it and half the audience hated it. And sometimes those are the most exciting works of cinema ever.”
3:28 Rotten Tomatoes’ best worst movies
Rotten Tomatoes’ best worst movies – Oct 8, 2019
On the other hand, he notes that a mediocre movie can easily score 80 per cent or 90 per cent on the platform, if most of the critics who viewed the film thought it was just fine.
Gorber warns against making viewing decisions just based on a movie’s score. He believes that Rotten Tomatoes is best used as a jumping-off point for exploring the criticism, discussion, and debate around a film.
“If you are deciding not to not watch a film because of its negative Rotten Tomatoes score, I highly encourage you to look and read some of those negative reviews (or at least scan them before worrying about spoilers) and decide to engage with the conversation, rather than simply dismiss it.”
While the company was formed in the dot-com boom of the late-1990s, the name “Rotten Tomatoes” has its roots in the 19th-century theatre.
Ever since aspiring Long Island actor John Ritchie was mercilessly pelted off stage in 1883 by a barrage of rotten tomatoes, previously distributed among the crowd, the food has served as the weapon of choice for disgruntled audiences. And while the Rotten Tomatoes website offers a level of sophistication that this mob of bloodthirsty New Yorkers could scarcely have anticipated, perhaps there are limits to the explanatory power of this delicious, though easily perishable vegetable.
Methodology
Global News downloaded every available film review score since the dawn of cinema from Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and IMDB using the OMDb API. We restricted our analysis to the past 22 years, since Rotten Tomatoes has been around since 1998. It’s possible the website uses a different method for ingesting reviews from older releases that would make pre-1999 comparisons challenging. Based on suggestions from David A. Gross, we also restricted our analysis to wide releases, which we define as any film that was released to at least 1,000 theatres in the U.S., according to Box Office Mojo. We reviewed our data for accuracy and to fill in missing values. Our findings roughly match those of Gross, who has been independently tracking average Tomatometer scores among wide releases for years.
Nintendo has confirmed that it intends to create more movies based on its IP.
The company has been working with Despicable Me studio Illumination on a CG Super Mario movie, which is due to arrive in North American cinemas on December 21, 2022.
During a QA session following a financial results briefing on Friday, Shigeru Miyamoto responded to a question asking if there were more movies to follow by saying that was indeed the plan.
As summarised on Twitter by Japan-based analyst and investment adviser David Gibson, Miyamoto claimed that the Super Mario movie is pretty much done and Nintendo is very positive about it.
However, he also said Nintendo is determined to meet fans’ expectations and so it will continue to work on polishing the film ahead of its release in late 2022.
Miyamoto then confirmed that Nintendo would like to make movies based on other IPs, because people should be experiencing the company’s franchise’s in a variety of ways instead of just video games.
These movies would be tackled one by one, he said, rather than having a number of them in production simultaneously.
Notice: To display this embed please allow the use of Functional Cookies in Cookie Preferences.
Further reading
Movie news site Giant Freakin Robot claimed that the Donkey Kong project has entered production and actor Seth Rogen – who will voice DK in next year’s Super Mario film – has reportedly signed up as the lead ape.
In addition, Anya Taylor-Joy (Queen’s Gambit) has been cast as Princess Peach, Charlie Day (Horrible Bosses) as Luigi and Jack Black as Bowser. Comedian Fred Armisen will voice Cranky Kong.
STORY: Captain Kapil Dev led a team from India, seen as underdogs, to bring home the country’s first-ever World Cup title in the year 1983. Kabir Khan’s ‘83’ encapsulates the journey of this team that taught a nation to believe and to pin its hopes on its cricket players’ by returning home as a set of uniquely gifted world champions.
REVIEW: First few minutes into the film, Kabir Khan uses an intelligently crafted passport sequence to introduce the audience to characters in the film. He also uses dialogue and light conversations to let you in on a fact – Indians didn’t trust India to bring home the World Cup. That’s when you realise this film is not about winning on a world stage, it’s about earning respect.
At every stage in the film, Kabir has juxtaposed real images with the reel ones – making one sit up and take note of the fact that he has heavily invested in research and the recreation (the scenes look as good as the real incidents on the field) of defining moments in Team India’s 1983 World Cup journey. You realise that the film was not all drama or all sport – it made a clear attempt to amalgamate both. And to a large degree, it succeeded in doing so.
India’s love for cricket has a lot to do with the way the team of 1983 went on to knock the wind out of the West Indies, a nearly-unbeatable cricket team of the period, during the World Cup Finals that year. At one point during the tournament, the level of expectation from Team India was low enough for a broadcaster to easily choose a match between giants, West Indies and Australia over a match between India and Zimbabwe. The latter was the match where Indian skipper Kapil Dev created history with the Mongoose bat, and it’s those legendary innings that had not been recorded on camera.
If you’re paying to watch this film, that sequence alone will make the trip paisa vasool. Kapil Dev’s innings not only saved the day for India, but they earned the team a spot at the table and a large amount of respect which it had been lacking from every corner until then – the cricket control board back home, Indians living in India and abroad, from the international and domestic press and also from those who had already made a mark in the game. The fact that no one took the captain’s intention to win the world cup seriously plays out at different points in the film which reiterates what drove the team eventually to put its best foot forward. Little joys, sorrows, glorious wins, painful defeats, internal upheavals that each player experienced, their individual journeys, and the journey of becoming a team that could trust itself to defeat the mightiest men in the gentleman’s game, is what Kabir Khan’s dramatic ‘83’ is all about.
When you hear Ranveer Singh nailing Kapil Dev’s unmissable style of talking, perfectly recreating his Natraj shot on the ground, his bowling action and his body language, you know you’re in the thick of a sports drama revolving around cricket. But when you hear him talk about why he thinks, believes and feels the way he does for the sport, you hear a man telling you what makes him a distinguished name in the game. We’ve all seen the iconic picture of Kapil Dev holding up the world cup; the film delves into why we tend to feel emotionally charged each time we see it.
At the surface, ‘83’ is about an underdog team’s win. As you go deeper, with each actor effortlessly presenting himself as an iconic cricketer from the 1983 team, you tend to feel that this picture has been crafted with a skillfully written narrative, supported by nuanced and internalised performances, and each department lending its technical brilliance to it. While Ranveer does play the captain’s innings here, Saqib Saleem, Tahir Raj Bhasin, Ammy Virk, Hardy Sandhu, Jatin Sarna, Pankaj Tripathi and Boman Irani are among those who add sheen to this film.
A special mention must be made for the way the iconic moments in Team India’s journey in the 1983 World Cup were recreated for the film. They were blended in beautifully with drama and emotions. The film’s writing team must be credited for weaving it all in, almost seamlessly. The film is based on real events and there’s little scope for one to take cinematic liberties. In the course of its run, you will realise that at the end of the day, it was an internal journey of a group of underdogs, who were fighting odds internally and externally – the factor that as Indians we’d all relate with, especially in the context of the sport 83 is based on and the period in which the chain of events took place.
Yes, 83 does play on the nationalism rhetoric, way more than was required. The film’s own spirit would have driven home the point that the rhetoric scenes were trying to make. ‘83’ had scope for some good music which could have added better tempo to the narrative. But that said, with this, Kabir Khan does set a high benchmark for himself, once again.
To produce Spider-Man movies, Disney-owned Marvel Studios has had to spin a complex web of licensing agreements with Sony Pictures Entertainment. Contracts between the two companies helped produce the “Spider-Man: Homecoming” series, as well as feature Spider-Man alongside The Avengers and Captain America.
But on social media, some claim that collaboration is over.
A meme published Aug. 18 on the Marvel News Feed Facebook page claims Disney has purchased Sony Pictures, gaining exclusive rights to Spider-Man in the process.
In the meme, one person asks, “How did you manage to buy Spiderman from Sony?” Another person labeled as Disney says, “I bought Sony.”
The meme, which is similar to a popular thread in the r/memes subreddit in late May, accumulated more than 15,000 shares within 10 days. Some commenters interpreted the meme as a joke, while others questioned whether the claim was true.
It’s not.
Fact check:‘Beetlejuice 2’ movie poster circulating online is not official
Disney doesn’t own Sony Pictures or the film rights to Spider-Man. However, Disney has had Spider-Man merchandising rights since 2011.
USA TODAY reached out to the Marvel News Feed Facebook page for comment.
Sony Pictures owns film rights, Disney owns merchandising rights
Sony Pictures owns the film rights to Spider-Man, while Disney owns Spider-Man merchandising rights. None of Disney’s recent agreements with Sony have changed that agreement.
Sony Pictures is a subsidiary of the Sony Group Corp. In May, Sony Group CEO Yoshida Kenichiro told the Financial Times that Sony wasn’t considering selling its film and television arm.
However, Sony and Disney have struck several Spider-Man-related deals over the years.
In 1999, Sony bought the film rights to Spider-Man from Marvel Studios, according to the Wall Street Journal. The deal stipulated that Marvel would earn 5% of movie revenue and the companies would split profits from Spider-Man merchandise.
In 2009, Disney purchased Marvel Studios. Two years later, the company bought 100% of Spider-Man merchandising rights back from Sony and gave up its 5% stake in box office profits. The deal gave Sony financial and creative control of Spider-Man films, while Disney made millions from Spider-Man toys and Disneyland rides.
Additional agreements between the two companies laid the groundwork for profit-sharing and other collaborations on standalone Spider-Man and Marvel films.
More:Disney+’s ‘What If…?’ reimagines the Marvel movie universe
The companies’ most recent agreement, announced April 22, grants Disney temporary streaming rights to Spider-Man films. However, the deal didn’t transfer ownership of Spider-Man film rights.
Our rating: False
The claim that Disney bought Sony and Spider-Man is FALSE, based on our research. The Sony Group owns Sony Pictures Entertainment, which has owned the exclusive film rights to Spider-Man since 1999. Disney-owned Marvel Studios has owned merchandising rights for Spider-Man since 2011. None of the companies’ recent deals have changed that agreement.
“There is still a lot of truth that has yet to be revealed.” 1019 Pictures has released another UFO film titled The Observers, this one from “controversial and visionary” director Roger R. Richards. The descriptions for this are wild. “If you have ever questioned the possibility of time travel, extraterrestrial life, advanced top-secret technology, or alternate dimensions, The Observers is a nonstop, must see, mind bender. Awaken to the possibilities of an unimaginable reality, where UFO Disclosure triggers a quantum leap in human evolution.” I don’t know about that, but uh sure, let’s see what you’ve got! Richards brings together top UFO researchers, whistleblowers, witnesses, abductees and experiencers, in his 5th doc dedicated to unpacking the complex nature of our collective reality. Pretty much everyone they show in this trailer seems dubious and none of them seem like they have any credible details to offer, but this will be fascinating for conspiracy theorists anyway. Please don’t lose your mind down the UFO rabbit hole by watching this. Be careful, folks.
Here’s the official trailer for Roger R. Richards’ documentary The Observers, from 1091’s YouTube:
Filmed during the release of the much anticipated 2021 UAP (Unidentifiable Ariel Phenomenon) report, The Observers documentary film is a comprehensive and timely conversation that plumbs the depths of the UFO phenomenon and asks the hard questions at the heart of this global enigma. An in-depth exploration, into the at times horrifying, yet equally fascinating abyss of modern day “UFOlogy”. Director Roger R. Richards brings together top UFO researchers, whistleblowers, witnesses, abductees and experiencers, in his 5th feature documentary film dedicated to unpacking the complex nature of our collective reality.The Observers is directed by UFO conspiracy doc filmmaker Roger R. Richards, director of the films Above Majestic, The Cosmic Secret, A Thousand Pieces previously, and The Deep Rig also this year. 1091 Pictures already debuted The Observers doc direct-to-VOD on October 27th, 2021 last month. Watch it right now.
A movie starring Oscar-winner Regina King is set to start filming in Cincinnati this week, the latest major motion picture to be filmed in the Queen City.
The Oscar-winning actress, who has ties to Cincinnati, will produce and star in the film titled “Shirley.”
The movie will tell the story of Shirley Chisholm, America’s first Black congresswoman.
The movie is written and directed by Oscar-winning writer/director John Ridley, from “American Crime” and “Needle in a Timestack.”
“We are thrilled to help bring this incredible motion picture to Cincinnati because of the jobs and economic impact it has on the region,” said Kristen Schlotman, executive director of Film Cincinnati. “Cincinnati continues to be a world-class destination for production.”
“Shirley” follows the dynamic presidential campaign launched in 1972 by Shirley Chisholm. The feature is based on her life story rights through an exclusive agreement with the Chisholm estate, and the movie will provide an intimate, behind-the-scenes portrait of the ground-breaking political leader during a seminal period in modern American history.
Casting calls have already been put out for extras to star in the film.
D. Lynn Meyers Casting will be in charge of the casting for the feature film.
“If you’re interested in seeing yourself on the big screen, send us an email with photos, contact info, and clothing sizes to lynnmeyersextras2021@gmail.com,” D. Lynn Meyers Casting wrote on Facebook.
Cincinnati has been a destination for movie makers for a long time and the head of the film commission tells WLWT 2022 is set to be an amazing year for the industry.
