The Grand Budapest Hotel and Wild took the top film honors tonight in the second annual Location Managers Guild Awards which were presented at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills. The black-tie event honored the most outstanding and creative contributions of location pros in seven…

With the lack of big studio titles at this year’s Oscars, the big question begged is whether Oscar viewership and the overall box-office marketplace is going to take a hit. Typically the old rule of thumb was that big blockbuster movies, whenever they were nominated, such as James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic and 2009’s Avat…

Most people who attended last week’s International CES confab were dazed by the vast array of new gadgets. But one of the most important demonstrations centered on a piece of Hollywood content: Fox impressed some attendees by showing them a specially produced clip that could have been (but wasn’t) taken from its…

The authors and screenwriters of Gone Girl, The Imitation Game, Inherent Vice, The Theory Of Everything and Wild are finalists for USC Libraries’ 27th annual Scripter Award, which honors the year’s best adapted screenplays as well as the author or authors of the written work upon which the screenplay is based. Last…

EXCLUSIVE: Wild star Reese Witherspoon will star with Matt Damon in Downsizing, the next film from Alexander Payne. The pic was scripted by Payne with Jim Taylor, with whom Payne shared the Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Sideways. They partner in Ad Hominem Enterprises, and their scripting collaborations also include Abo…

Jean-Marc Vallee is garnering a reputation for taking unflinching looks at America's quiet, yet often noble, underbelly. But his Hollywood rep is growing just as fast as a director adept at getting celebrities to go downright unflattering. He recently did it with Matthew McConaughey, whose emaciated turn as real-life…

Monday update, 3:20PM: 20th Century Fox’s Exodus: Gods and Kings came in just a tad below its weekend estimate yesterday morning with $24.1M today, but then most of the films in the top 10 were off slightly from Sunday, including Paramount’s Top Five which came in $300K less than its projection with $6.9M…

The main slates were rolled out over the last two weeks but the 2015 Sundance Film Festival isn't done just yet offering a few surprises. Just over a month before Park City becomes Hollywood North, the Robert Redford-founded fest today unveiled a couple more premieres and New Frontier installations plus the second…

Similar to how her Election character chewed up anyone in the way of the high school class presidency, Reese Witherspoon was tenacious in her trajectory from child actress to superstar. Playing easy-to-root-for underdogs in films like Legally Blonde, she became one of the top-paid actresses and won an Oscar for Walk th…

UPDATE, MONDAY, 2:32 PM: Actuals weren’t drastically off from from their Sunday estimates. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 bested yesterday morning’s $21.6M with $22.03M. The only thing that’s down is this stinky weekend overall, which came in at the lower end of projections. Rentrak counts $77.5M, still the…

Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon in the film adaptation of Cheryl Strayed‘s memoir of a life-changing hike, blazed a trail into solid box office territory, opening in 21 theaters over the weekend with a $630K gross. The feature, which Witherspoon also produced under her Pacific Standard label, was easily the weekend’s…

Late Friday night estimates: Decorating Christmas trees, watching light shows, getting into the holiday party scene, or maybe even watching NBC’s Peter Pan Live! on a DVR — these are some of the activities people were doing last night instead of seeing a movie.  Versus Black Friday a week ago, a number of major studio…