Last month Hwei Loke was upped as the new head of Amazon Prime Video Australia and New Zealand, ahead of perhaps the territorys biggest ever local originals launch, the Aussie version of The Office, which debuts everywhere except the U.S. on Oct. 18. Loke, a 15-year marketing veteran who has had stints at Disney, Australias SBS and Nickelodeon, takes the...

Entertainers and crew members at the Casa Bonita immersive restaurant, owned by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are looking to unionize with Actors Equity and IATSE. The restaurant, based in Lakewood, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, recently reopened after being bought out of bankruptcy by Parker and Stone. The restaurant features cliff divers, actors, puppeteers, magicians and...

Los Angeles film permitting office is ringing the alarm about low production levels after shooting in the region saw another decline. The three-month period from July to September logged the weakest quarter so far this year, slipping five percent to roughly 5,000 shoot days, according to the latest report from FilmLA. The figure falls short of shooting in the area...

If live sports is the dominant form of live entertainment on TV, it is content around sports that seems to spark so much of the conversation around what people are watching. Athletes, after all, have millions of followers on social platforms themselves, and the story behind the event can be as compelling as the game itself. And sports content is...

Its about to get easier to cancel your Netflix (or Hulu or Max or Disney+) subscription. The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday finalized a click to cancel initiative requiring companies to make it as easy to cancel subscriptions and memberships as it is to sign up. Under the rule, businesses must provide consumers with simple cancellation mechanisms to immediately halt...

TNT Sports is getting into the womens basketball business, cutting a multi-year rights deal with the new womens 3-on-3 basketball league Unrivaled. TNT parent company Warner Bros. Discovery is also making an investment in the league, giving it equity. The deal which was brokered by former ESPN president John Skipper and former Turner chief David Levy will see Unrivaled games...

CAA Sports Property Sales, the division of the major talent agency that works on high-dollar naming rights deals for stadiums (i.e. the $500 million-plus pact to name the L.A. Clippers homeIntuitDome), has promoted longtime executives to new leadership roles. Alexa Cook, who joined the Century City-based agency in 2010 and has been focused on business development and sponsorship sales, has...

Former Greys Anatomy scribe and co-executive producer Elisabeth Finch is copping to having lied about so much on the same day that a docuseries about her Hollywood rise and fall is dropping on Peacock. In a statement posted to Instagram on Tuesday afternoon, Finch apologized for what she described as multiple falsehoods that affected friends, family and others close to...

As AI companies hoover up troves of content across the internet, search traffic is positioned as the next front in the tug-of-war between publishers and Big Tech. Media organizations are pushing to shape the tools that create AI-generated summaries of their news stories, sometimes without attribution or citation, allowing users to bypass their articles. The New York Times has sent...

The executives that comprise the Office of the CEO at Paramount Global are getting a sweetened deal to stick around during the limbo ahead of the companys merger with Skydance Media, which isnt expected to close until sometime in the first half of 2025. That Paramount co-CEO trio George Cheeks, Chris McCarthy and Brian Robbins were earlier granted a 2X...

Japanese media giant Toho Co. the studio behind that countrys famous Godzilla movie monster has unveiled a deal to acquire GKIDS, the North American indie producer and distributor. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but GKIDS, launched in 2008 with a focus on animated movies, is set to operate as a subsidiary of Toho under company founder/CEO Eric...

The longtime home of the annual Academy Awards ceremony has been sold. In a newly closed deal, an investment group led by producer Elie Samaha, who also owns the TCL Chinese Theatre, has bought the Dolby Theatre. Avison Young, the real estate firm that represented the buyer, Samahas JEBS Hollywood Entertainment LLC, announced the sale of the 180,000-sq-ft Dolby Theatre...

Broadway grosses shot up close to 16 percent last week, as prices and demand increased leading into the holiday weekend. Wicked and The Lion King, two family-friendly offerings, topped the weekly industry grosses, with Wicked bringing in more than $440,000 than the prior week to reach close to $2.5 million. The Lion King made close to $2.2 million. Hamilton, another...