Latest in Best of 2018

With $41.66B worldwide, movie theater turnstiles spun to another record in 2018. Largely boosted by domestic receipts, the total includes a preliminary comScore estimate of $29.8B from the international box office. That's also a record, though just a 1% increase on 2017 with some offshore markets stung by exchange…

China box office for 2018 rose 9% over 2017, reaching RMB 60.98B ($8.87B), official figures now show. That's a softer increase than the 13.5% we saw from 2016-2017, but is in keeping with the market's target of RMB 60B. Although there was no single behemoth breakout like 2017's Wolf Warrior 2, a handful of local…

Theatrical moviegoing last year hit an all-time record in both the U.S./Canada ($11.85 billion) and around the globe ($41.7B) according to ComScore today, but of course, no major studio is perfect. The industry continues to be lopsided, with Disney reaping all the spoils notching an industry high of $3B stateside and…

It’s been an OK fall for the broadcast networks with a few solid new entries, NBC’s Manifest and New Amsterdam, ABC’s The Conners, CBS’ FBI, Fox’s Last Man Standing and the CW’s Charmed. Besides the two NBC dramas, no other new series probably qualifies as a breakout hit but there were no outright flops either that…

The superhero gene went up, up and away in 2018 finishing with the year’s three top domestic box office releases (Black Panther, The Incredibles 2 and Avengers: Infinity War, with combined box office of $2 billion) and three more tentpoles ranked in the Top 10 (Deadpool 2 at No. 5, Ant-Man and The Wasp at No. 8 and Ven…

Amid the chaos that was 2018, the show business industry lost some major players. There were icons of the big screen (Burt Reynolds) and TV (Penny Marshall, Billy Graham, Anthony Bourdain), along with such legends as Marvel hero Stan Lee, sportscaster Keith Jackson and singer Aretha Franklin, to name just a few of the…

2018 was a wild ride in the TV news business. Shocking reports in the wake of #MeToo forced the industry to vomit out more sexual harassers. Some high-profile programs suffered ratings consequences. Meanwhile, TV news executives licked self-inflicted wounds, and, once again, viewers said so long, for now at least, to…

Each year brings a raft of deaths and exits of our favorite TV characters, but 2018 saw them come at a dizzying pace. While this year's list is numbingly long, Deadline looks at some of the most high-profile and memorable characters who left us in 2018. Some we knew would be exiting, but the question was how, such as K…

What to watch for in the overseas film industry in 2019: 1. Staying alive One of the most common refrains I hear from independent sales and distribution companies is how tough it is just to survive these days. As Netflix soars and studios, theaters and audiences continue to gravitate toward sequels, prequels and spinof…

Anyone working at high levels in Hollywood or the media business understands there is always a trapdoor under their feet. In 2018, however, that door swung open with remarkable swiftness and frequency — a byproduct of how high the stakes are in terms of personal conduct and delivering value to shareholders. Larger…

In 2018, a TV actor gender pay parity still was being debated, a TV journalist thought blackface could be defended on grounds of “Halloween,” and a TV ad campaign featuring a man known for kneeling to protest deaths of unarmed U.S. citizens triggered a national outbreak of gym sock logo cutting. Also, a network fired…

The frenetic pace of mergers and acquisitions that reshaped Hollywood in 2018 is likely to slow in 2019, after media companies spent this year racing to adapt to a new world order in which technology giants have forged direct relationships with consumers and recommend entertainment experiences that are tailored to an…