NBA Hall of Fame inductee Dwight Howard has signed with Innovative Artists Entertainment. The former NBA champion, Olympic gold medalist and eight-time NBA all-star appeared in films like the basketball rom-comJust Wrightand The Equalizer 2, while also having TV credits like Black-ish, Never Have I Ever and The Odd Couple. Howard also competed on the 32nd season of Dancing With...

As Lesli Linka Glatter departed the top member post at the Directors Guild of America, she gestured toward some of the unions unfinished business. There is still so much to do, the outgoing union president wrote in a final note included in a DGA Monthly issue released Friday. The letter summarized some of the work the Homeland and Mad Men...

United Talent Agency is expanding its entertainment marketing division, bringing on ZoFairbourn to the practice, which advises brand clients on content partnerships and other entertainment opportunities. Fairbourn will be based in Los Angeles and report to UTAs entertainment marketing co-heads David Anderson and Julian Jacobs. She joins from Hello Sunshine, where she had been head of strategic partnerships and branded...

Veteran movie distribution executive Chris Aronson is departing Paramount Pictures. He announced the news in a note to staff early Tuesday. Aronson, an influential member of the entertainment community for decades, has served as president of domestic distribution at Paramount since 2019. Prior to that, he did a long stint at 20th Century Fox before it was swallowed by Disney....

Hamilton continues to lead the industry grosses as the musical brought in $3.7 million last week. While the tally was down $30,000 from the prior week, this is still a massive windfall for the 10-year-old musical, as Leslie Odom Jr. continues his run as Aaron Burr. The average ticket price also dipped slightly but still came in at an eye-popping...

In an effort to cut down on noise pollution from suddenly blaring advertisements on, say, Netflix or Disney+, California legislators have passed a law to mandate that the noise level of commercials is at the same level as the movie or TV series being streamed. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill, SB 576, that had been shepherded bySenator Thomas Umberg...

Cindy Holland is continuing to fill out her team at Paramounts direct to consumer division. PR executive Shannon Buck has joined the company as executive vp and head of communications and public relations at Paramount Direct to Consumer, which includes streamers Paramount+ and Pluto TV. She comes to Paramount from NBCUniversal, where she most recently was executive vp integrated communications....

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While a legal fight over his last media venture continues, Dr. Phil McGraw has locked in a carriage deal that will help his next one reach potential viewers. Envoy TV, a cable and streaming outlet that McGraw announced in July two weeks after his Merit Street Media filed for bankruptcy protection and sued its distribution partner, Trinity Broadcasting has signed...

Verizon Communications has named independent director and former PayPal Holdings chief Dan Schulman as its new CEO, replacing Hans Vestberg, who will stay on with the company through a transition. Vestberg, who came to the CEO post in 2018, will serve as special advisor through Oct. 4, 2026 to in part integrate Frontier Communications, a deal expected to close in...

The first place David Ellison went after closing Skydances $8 billion deal for Paramount Global on Aug. 7 was the offices of CBS News on the west side of Manhattan. In meetings with the journalists and staff there, he praised the legacy of the TV news division, once the home of Edward R. Murrow, and committed to investing in its...

As film, TV and creator-led content continues to ramp up in the New York metro area, the Manhattan-based MCM Studios is merging with Looking4Larry, the creative studio founded by Mitchell Stuart and WWE hall of fame manager and creative Paul Heyman. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Heyman says the deal creates a production and creative firm that will...

Nearly three years after OpenAI kickstarted an arms race with the public debut of its hallucinatory text generator ChatGPT, the Sam Altman-run firm launched a new frenzy with the release of its Sora 2, a video app that allows users to scan their face and place themselves in hyperrealistic clips. But major studio executives and talent agency chiefs have been...