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Disney’s composer-focused podcast debuts this week
This Friday, Disney Music Group will launch a podcast that delves into some of its most beloved scores and the people behind them. For Scores includes interviews with composers who've worked across Disney's various enterprises: Disney, Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox. The series, hosted by journalist Jon Burlingame, will be available via various podcast platforms and smart speakers as well as YouTube.
Movie sanitizing service ordered to pay $62 million in piracy suit
A jury has ordered "family-friendly" movie service VidAngel to pay $62.4 million to Hollywood studios for pirating their content. Disney, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. sued the company over copyright infringement. VidAngel bought retail DVDs of mainstream movies and ripped the video file. It pulled out adult content, cursing, sex and violent aspects and streamed the films to users. It claimed it was legally allowed to do this under the Family Entertainment And Copyright Act, which legalizes tech to censor certain aspects of movies, but the studios and the jury disagreed.
Ryan Reynolds is turning a Reddit short story into a horror movie
A novella which was originally posted on Reddit is making its way to the big screen with the help of Ryan Reynolds. The Deadpool star is set to produce the adaptation of The Patient Who Nearly Drove Me Out of Medicine. The novella has its roots in a popular series of posts writer Jasper DeWitt published on the r/nosleep subreddit starting two years ago.
'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' comes to Facebook Watch
Starting today, you can give in to your nostalgia and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly on Facebook Watch. The show comes to the social network as part of a deal with 20th Century Fox. Every episode of the classic programs from Joss Whedon will be made available for you to stream, including as part of Facebook's recently announce Watch Party feature.
Action-packed ‘Alita: Battle Angel’ trailer shows off some combat
It's a bummer that Alita: Battle Angel was delayed from its planned holiday season launch, but there's good news for fans eager to see more of the film: a new trailer has arrived. Unlike the preview that dropped in July which focused more on Alita finding herself, this one shows a lot more action and sword-swinging. We see Alita fight in a more advanced body, sliding around on a concrete luge track and slicing up bad guys.
HDR10+ support comes to Samsung and Panasonic 4K TVs (updated)
Samsung's upstart HDR10+ format took a big step in its fight against Dolby Vision for HDR supremacy. The group announced that Panasonic and Samsung have deployed HDR10+ firmware to select 2018 4K TVs, and that 20th Century Fox will start encoding new films using the tech. That means if you buy a new 4K TV from Samsung or Panasonic, you'll soon be able to watch programs that look better than those encoded with regular HDR10.
Fox AI predicts a movie's audience based on its trailer
Modern movie trailers are already cynical exercises in attention grabbing (such as the social media-friendly burst of imagery at the start of many clips), but they might be even more calculated in the future. Researchers at 20th Century Fox have produced a deep learning system that can predict who will be most likely to watch a movie based on its trailer. Thanks to training that linked hundreds of trailers to movie attendance records, the AI can draw a connection between visual elements in trailers (such as colors, faces, landscapes and lighting) and the performance of a film for certain demographics. A trailer with plenty of talking heads and warm colors may appeal to a different group than one with lots of bold colors and sweeping vistas.
HDR10+ is one step closer to reaching your TV
Samsung, Panasonic, 20th Century Fox and Amazon are one step closer to giving Dolby Vision a run for its money. Companies now have easy access to the open, royalty-free HDR10+ standard thanks to a just-launched program that lets manufacturers prove TVs, monitors and other devices can handle the upgraded picture format. If the firms pass muster, they can slap an HDR10+ logo on their hardware to guide customers. The alliance didn't immediately line up partners that would go through this process, although it's safe to presume that Samsung and Panasonic will be first in line.
The Predator is coming to Ubisoft's 'Ghost Recon Wildlands'
It's been 30 years since Arnold Schwarzenegger's Dutch headed into the jungles of Central America, only to find himself hunted by a stealth alien warrior nicknamed the Predator. Now players of Ghost Recon Wildlands, Ubisoft's open-world tactical shooter, will fall under the watchful eye of the Predator in an all new special event running from December 14th through early January.
Every ‘Futurama’ episode hits Hulu on October 16th
Starting next week, all 140 episodes and four films of Futurama will be available on Hulu, Variety reports. The streaming service announced in July that it struck a deal with 20th Century Fox to be the exclusive streaming home to Bob's Burgers and would host Fox's slate of animated shows, including Futurama. The show stopped streaming on Netflix entirely at the beginning of July.
Samsung recruits Panasonic to bring HDR10+ to more TVs and devices
Despite corralling the likes of Sony and TCL into using its high dynamic range tech, it seems not everyone is interested in Dolby Vision. In April, Samsung bucked the trend by announcing its upgraded HDR10+ open standard. It also managed to snap up Amazon as its first video streaming partner. Fast-forward several months, and now the tech giant is looking to widen its net. In partnership with 20th Century Fox and Panasonic, Samsung will start licensing HDR10+ in January. Together, the trio will attempt to lure TV, Blu-ray, and set-top box manufacturers away from Dolby, to their fold.
Stream 'Glee,' 'NYPD Blue' and older Fox shows on Hulu
Hulu's close connection to Fox just got a little closer. The streaming service has unveiled a deal with Fox that adds every episode of dozens of well-known (if also well-worn) shows, including some that aren't necessarily obvious picks. Relatively recent hits like Glee and How I Met Your Mother are available alongside shows that have been off the air for a while, such as NYPD Blue, M*A*S*H and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Thankfully, there are a few outliers -- you can watch both seasons of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, for instance.
Fox hopes you'll binge-watch at theaters like you do on Netflix
Let's say you run a movie studio and notice that people would rather stay home and plow through the latest Marvel series on Netflix than pay through the nose for a trip to the theater. What do you do? If you're Fox, the answer seems simple: offer a taste of that marathon viewing experience at the theater. Hollywood Reporter understands that Fox wants to release three film adaptations of RL Stine's Fear Street books within three months -- a given movie would still be fresh in your mind when its sequel is hitting theaters. You'd be "bingeing movies" (as one tipster puts it) just about as quickly as the big screen format allows.
‘Deadpool’ and ‘Logan’ Comic-Con editions pair Blu-ray with vinyl
San Diego Comic-Con runs from July 20th through the 23rd and today, Fox Home Entertainment announced it will have some exclusive merch available in limited quantities. New editions of five of its films will include vinyl copies of their soundtracks along with Blu-ray, DVD and digital HD copies of the films themselves. Logan, Deadpool, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Rise of the Planet of the Apes are the films getting special treatment and their packaging features brand new cover art.
The 'Futurama' crew returns today in a new mobile game
Good news, everyone: after no small amount of hype, you can revisit the Futurama universe on your phone. Jam City's TinyCo has released Futurama: Worlds of Tomorrow for free on both Android and iOS. It's clearly another not-so-subtle attempt to cash in on a much-loved TV series, but this title promises to do more than trade on a familiar name. It has a relatively rich story created by Matt Groening, David X. Cohen and a writing team from the show, and the original show cast is on tap for dialogue. However, the most intriguing part may be its extremely varied gameplay -- it's more ambitious than many console or PC titles in some ways, even if it's not necessarily as deep.
Get ready for a wave of TV mergers and buyouts
20th Century Fox is reportedly looking to buy Tribune Media, potentially sparking a wave of consolidation in the TV business. The news comes via Bloomberg, which believes that the media giant has entered into secret talks to buy the broadcaster. Tribune Media is a potentially prize asset, owning 39 stations in 31 markets, including affiliates for all of the big five TV networks.
'Avatar' sequels start arriving on December 18th, 2020
James Cameron has spent years drumming up hype for his Avatar sequels with little to show for it (the first sequel was originally due this December). However, his team is finally ready to commit to specific release dates -- for all the new movies. The production team has revealed that Avatar 2 should arrive on December 18th, 2020, with the rest staggered throughout the next few years. The third movie is slated for December 17th, 2021. There will be a 3-year gap between that and the fourth movie, which debuts on December 20th, 2024. The fifth and final (?) title will appear on December 19th, 2025, 16 years after the first.
Fox tests auto-downloading movies onto your phone
Wouldn't you like it if newish movies trickle-downloaded onto your phone when you weren't looking so you could watch them later? That's the concept behind an experiment being carried out by 20th Century Fox over the next month. The studio has partnered with Australian mobile network Telstra and Ericsson to test a mobile app that quietly pulls down flicks for watching, offline, later on. Assuming, at least, that you pay the requisite fee to unlock the film that's quietly occupying space on your smartphone.
'Alien: Covenant' preview evokes original's nostalgic last supper
While the first official trailer for Alien: Covenant showed us terrifying images of a colony ship gone horribly wrong, this new preview gives us a full, uncut scene. It's a stunning glimpse at the titular ship's crew relaxing together with a final meal before readying themselves for a long cryogenic sleep.
'The Martian' VR experience comes home
It's been a long time coming, but The Martian VR Experience is finally ready. Fox has released its virtual reality take on the stranded-on-Mars movie (plus Andy Weir novel) for the HTC Vive and PlayStation VR, with Oculus Rift support coming soon. Spend $20 and you can fill the boots of astronaut Mark Watney as he struggles to survive and make it back to Earth, both in 3D sequences and 360-degree videos. As Fox explains to Variety, this isn't just a polished version of the demo we saw at CES in January -- there are many "technical and narrative improvements" that could make it feel fresh.
