For many, the huge success of Black Panther at the box office has been seen as a watershed moment in Hollywood, proving that films lead by predominantly black casts can offer mainstream appeal that brings a more diverse audience to the movies. But at least one Marvel alumni doesn’t necessarily agree.
Last week, the New York Times published an article about Hollywood studio executives blaming the influence of Rotten Tomatoes for its failures at the box office. This seemed silly, and it was practically an admission that the movies these execs are making suck. Well, now we have data that shows the critical consensus…
Hollywood is struggling through a particularly rough financial patch at the moment, and it’s throwing blame in every direction. Its favorite target over the last ten years has been technological disruption. Netflix, home theaters, and MoviePass have all been cited as box office grim reapers. The latest target, Rotten…
One of Hollywood’s top contract management firms was sent scrambling this week after informed of a breach involving a wealth of confidential and proprietary data. Contained in the leak was invaluable information about the earnings of some of the world’s biggest musical talent during the era of Now That’s What I Call…
Over the past decade, a clear pattern has emerged in Hollywood: direct a successful, small movie and get a large blockbuster in return. That small movie doesn’t even have to be that successful, either—it just has to be good, and your next film can have a budget up to 200 times the size. And also, you pretty much have…
These days, Hollywood has a reputation for being politically liberal. But you’d be surprised how many conservatives there are in Hollywood. Or, maybe you wouldn’t, if you remember that Hollywood is just like any other major industry in the US. But what about the secret Republicans of the 1950s?
2017 is bound to usher in an assortment of changes to our society. Most of them will be bad—we’re sure to suffer—but some will be good. For example, last night a Los Angeles-based hero vandalized, or rather modernized, the city’s iconic Hollywood sign to read “Hollyweed.”
A lawsuit has failed to get rid of smoking in all-ages movies, ensuring that Hollywood doesn’t need a warning label every time someone lights up.
Today, Ayn Rand is perhaps best known as your virgin cousin’s favorite author to fawn over during Thanksgiving dinner. But back in the 1940s, Rand was better known for helping root out Communists in Hollywood. She testified to Congress and even wrote an entire pamphlet about how to make their movies as pro-America as…
Indiana Jones proved just how useful a good bullwhip can be, both as a tool and as a weapon, but people are still surprised when neuropsychologist Jessica Cail tells them that one of her favorite hobbies is practicing whip-cracking. She talks about this peculiar sideline in the latest installment of the NOVA video…
We’ve all stumbled out of the theater from a true-story movie with a strange sense of disbelief: Could that really be what happened in real life? Well, this series of visualizations charts the accuracy of Hollywood’s true stories, so you can find out once and for all.
Between pay inequality, ageism, limited opportunities, and a laundry list of other problems, being a woman in Hollywood sucks. Thanks to Casting Call The Project, now we know the never ending shit-storm of abuse starts before these actors even set foot on set.
On last night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live, Morgan Freeman was asked to narrate live footage of tourists on Hollywood Boulevard. As one might assume, some of them are holding selfie sticks.
If this year’s Sundance Film Festival is any indication, virtual reality is about to hit the mainstream. Under a program called New Frontier, the festival is promoting eleven independently produced VR films on a smartphone app. The finalists have been chosen from hundreds of entries, and among them are some short…
Screw 360-degree film cameras on drones or Vines on 16-megapixel smartphones. Kodak’s going old school with these little beauties. The design is inspired by the Super 8 fad from half a century ago, and these new cameras that shoot film on, well, actual film.
The Black List is an annual ranking of Hollywood’s most promising yet-to-be-produced screenplays. Past years have highlighted eventual awards-grabbers like Argo, American Hustle, and The Social Network, as well as genre entries like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. This year’s mix is similarly all over the map.
Most robots don’t have IMDb pages. Geminoid F isn’t most robots.
Everybody knows that embarrassing “nope” moment in the movie theater when CGI explosions just don’t look real at all. Fortunately, science has helped Hollywood improve things in recent years — and this video shows how.
The scene was set: a surveillance camera, a safe full of money in a Las Vegas casino, a pair of thieves with lock picking tools and a laptop. I watched in awe as the skinny geeks clipped wires and rewired the feed so that it would loop ad infinitum. Basically, they recreated the climax of Ocean’s 11 before my very…
The ongoing debate about equal representation in movies is more important now than ever—but it turns out we didn’t really realize just how bad the situation really was. It turns out that, according to a new report, if you’re not straight, white, male—or in the case of a Marvel movie, named Chris—in Hollywood, you’re…
