Latest in Pope Francis

Pope Francis, aka Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the 85-year-old Pope, is alive and well. No thanks to ITV News, which wrongly announced his death on live TV Christmas Day. Announcer Kylie Pentelow was discussing the Pope’s annual Christmas address on Saturday when she made the blunder. Pentelow was reporting on the Pope’s…

EXCLUSIVE: A group of 200 refugees and immigrants, some newly arrived from Afghanistan, attended a special Vatican screening of the discovery+ documentary Francesco Monday night, and later met with Pope Francis himself. "When the movie finished he was downstairs waiting for them," Oscar-nominated director Evgeny Afinee…

EXCLUSIVE: In Their Own Words, the PBS documentary series that aired in 2015, will return for a second season this July with six specials spotlighting Chuck Berry, Jimmy Carter, Angela Merkel, Elon Musk, Princess Diana and Pope Francis. The return was announced today by filmmaker and executive producer Chuck Dalaklis…

The head of Discovery+ is bullish on high-end nonfiction content. "We’re investing in premium documentaries, a genre that we know our subscribers want more of," Lisa Holme, group SVP of content and commercial strategy for Discovery, said Thursday at the streamer's Winter Press Tour presentation. She added, "That…

Netflix has commissioned a four-part documentary series based on Sharing The Wisdom Of Time, the book written by Pope Francis. The show comes from Simona Ercolani and production company Stand By Me, partner of Asacha Media Group. It will be released in 2021. The series will see woman and men aged over 70 from around…

It's the rare documentary film premiere that triggers worldwide headlines, but that's what has happened with Evgeny Afineevsky's Francesco. The film about Pope Francis debuted at the Rome Film Festival today and first the Catholic press and then secular media picked up on something the pope told Afineevsky in the…

Pope Francis has publicly supported same-sex civil unions for the first time while in office, declaring that "homosexual people have the right to be in a family". His comments were made in a documentary, Francesco, which premiered at the Rome Film Fest today. Directed by Russian filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky, the…

Wim Wenders hadn’t entertained the notion of an audience with the Pope when the Vatican wrote him to ask if he’d be interested in helming a documentary on the current incumbent Pope Francis. But the prospect was intriguing, he told Deadline at our Cannes Studio ahead of the film’s festival premiere, especially when…

EXCLUSIVE: Add Pope Francis to Netflix’s continually growing TV and movie roster names. The streaming service is moving forward with the feature film The Pope, with Jonathan Pryce tapped to play the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, and Anthony Hopkins in talks to play his predecessor Pope Benedict. The film will…

Focus Features has acquired worldwide rights to Pope Francis: A Man Of His Word, a documentary feature written and directed by Wim Wenders. In the rare film — it’s only the second co-production the Vatican has made with outside filmmakers — Pope Francis responds to questions from around the world, discussing topics…

Before Silence makes its world premiere at the Vatican on Thursday, pic’s director Martin Scorsese will have a private audience with Pope Francis tomorrow morning at 8:45AM Rome time before the pontiff has his regular weekly general audience. The news was announced by the Vatican press office today. Pope Francis and…

Media moguls can relax, a little, about the possibility of having to compete against Facebook. The social media giant is “a tech company, not a media company,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg  told a student gathering today in Rome, where he visited with Pope Francis, Reuters reports. “We build the tools, we do not produce any…