Latest in La La Land

As the pandemic wears on, New York and Los Angeles have never felt farther apart—and it seems likely that even more distancing, both social and cultural, will be the unhappy drill for years to come. In truth, the two great sister cities have never been as close as you might think, at least in movie and media terms…

Lionsgate, in conjunction with Fandango, YouTube and NATO, is launching Lionsgate Live! A Night at the Movies a four-consecutive Friday night live-stream of movies which kicks off on April 17 with The Hunger Games on the distributor’s YouTube page and Fandango’s Movieclips YouTube page.  Lionsgate's initial donation…

IMDb announced today that its free streaming video channel, IMDb TV, is tripling its content offerings by adding thousands of new titles to the ad-supported service in the coming months. Additionally,the service will launch in Europe later this year. "With IMDb TV, viewers have discovered TV the way it ought to be – a…

Progressing to the upper echelon of film scoring with admirable speed, Justin Hurwitz had a predicament with First Man, setting out to craft music unlike any he'd composed before. Collaborating with director Damien Chazelle since his days at Harvard, Hurwitz had a whirlwind experience with his last project, the…

Building on their collaborations on the scores and soundtracks to La La Land, Hunger Games and Divergent, Lionsgate and Universal Music Group have set a multi-year, first-look television deal. Lionsgate and Polygram Entertainment, UMG's film and television production and development division, will develop original…

The musical team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul won a Grammy tonight for Dear Evan Hansen, which adds the “G” to a foreseeable EGOT in their future. Pasek and Paul won tonight for Best Musical Theater Album for Dear Evan Hansen — which also won for Best Original Score and Best Musical Theater Album at last year’s Tony…

Shortly before winning his first Oscar and an ACE Eddie award for La La Land, absorbed in the limelight of one of the year’s most highly acclaimed films, editor Tom Cross was in a very different headspace as he cut Scott Cooper’s dark, often brutal Western Hostiles, attempting to bring a depth and a psychological…

Coming off a triumphant year with an Oscar in hand for La La Land, Swedish cinematographer Linus Sandgren is back in awards contention this year with a very different project, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ biographical drama Battle of the Sexes. Chronicling a historic moment in the world of tennis, in which world…

Upon cursory examination of the films taken on by Broadway songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, a theme emerges. Oscar winners last year for La La Land, whose P.T. Barnum pic The Greatest Showman bows later this year, the pair are suckers for larger-than-life stories of show business trials and triumphs, who have…

UPDATED 4:50 PM with comments from execs during conference call with analysts: Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer told Wall Street analysts during today’s earnings conference call that developing programming for Starz was the company’s biggest priority for the rest of 2017 and beyond. The company earlier had posted solid…

Fox has cast Maya Rudolph as the female lead of its newest live musical event, A Christmas Story, which will air Dec. 17. A Saturday Night Live alum who also showed her song-and-dance chops on a short-lived NBC variety show, Rudolph will star as the mother of nine-year old protagonist Ralphie Parker. Fox saw a ratings…

I bid farewell to the Toronto International Film Festival last week. For a decade, I was a regular at the giant gathering of a film fleet that has met every fall since 1976. But when the annual demand for last year's clips arrived a few months ago, I was busy and let it go. Then on Wednesday came a sweet, very…