It was a relatively quiet weekend since our Friday End of Week Production Notes with the biggest news on Friday night, June 25, being the handing out of the annual Daytime Emmys by the Television Academy.
The big winners were the long-running soap opera General Hospital, which won for Outstanding Drama Series, while actor Maurice Benard won for playing Sonny Corinthos on the show. The Young and the Restless won a Primetime Emmy for its writing, while The Bold and the Beautiful‘s Jacqueline MacInnes Wood was also honored. Late Jeopardy! host, Alex Trebek, won for Outstanding Game Show Host, while the show won for Game Show. The Kelly Clarkson Show won for Outstanding Entertainment Talk Show and Clarkson won a Primetime Emmy won for host.
But of course, here at Below the Line, we’re more interested in the creative craft people being honored, and those Daytime Emmy winners were: (Note: Unfortunately, the Television Academy doesn’t see fit to release the names of these talented craftspeople, so we only have the show titles.)
Outstanding Makeup
The Real (Syndicated)
Outstanding Makeup for a Drama or Daytime Fiction Program
Dash & Lily (Netflix)
Outstanding Hairstyling
The Real (Syndicated)
Outstanding Hairstyling for a Drama or Daytime Fiction Program
The Letter for the King (Netflix)
Outstanding Costume Design/Styling
The Baby-Sitters Club (Netflix)
Outstanding Costume Design/Styling for a Drama or Daytime Fiction Program
Julie and the Phantoms (Netflix)
Outstanding Art Direction/Set Decoration/Scenic Design
Odd Squad (PBS)
Outstanding Art Direction/Set Decoration/Scenic Design for a Drama or Daytime Fiction Program
Endlings (Hulu)
Outstanding Casting for a Drama or Daytime Fiction Program
General Hospital (ABC)
Outstanding Live and Direct-To-Tape Sound Mixing
The Kelly Clarkson Show (Syndicated)
Outstanding Sound Mixing And Editing for a Drama or Daytime Fiction Program
The Letter for the King (Netflix)
Outstanding Multiple Camera Editing for a Drama or Daytime Fiction Program
Julie and the Phantoms (Netflix)
Outstanding Technical Team
Sesame Street (HBO)
Outstanding Technical Team for a Drama Or Daytime Fiction Program
General Hospital (ABC)
Outstanding Lighting Direction
Odd Squad (PBS)
Outstanding Lighting Direction for a Drama or Daytime Fiction Program
Studio City (Amazon Prime Video)
Outstanding Original Song
“Unsaid Emily”
Julie and the Phantoms (Netflix)
Outstanding Music Direction and Composition for a Daytime Program
The Letter for the King (Netflix)
We learned on Sunday that Cops creator and Executive Producer John Langley had passed away at the age of 78. He died of an apparent heart attack in Baja, Mexico on Saturday, while he was competing in the Coast to Coast Ensenada-San Felipe 250 off-road race.
Cops first aired on Fox in 1989, and it aired continuously as a first-run series until 2020 with versions airing around the world in syndication. (Last year’s George Floyd murder and the growing #BlackLivesMatter made those in charge realize that the idea behind Cops was no longer timely or in tune with public perception of the police.)
Besides exec. producing Cops with his son, Morgan Langley, their Langley Productions also produced Antoine Fuqua‘s crime-drama Brooklyn’s Finest, starring Richard Gere, Don Cheadle, and Ethan Hawke, as well as the non-fiction series, Jail, Vegas Strip and Anatomy of a Crime. Langley received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in February 2011.
Have you been hearing over the years about Miramax wanting to make another Fletch movie, based on the Gregory Mcdonald 1970s mystery novel series, which led to two popular Chevy Chase comedies in the 1980s? Well, that finally seems to be happening with Jon Hamm starring as the title character in Confess, Fletch, directed by Greg Mottola (Superbad), which actually begins filming TODAY. The cast has been joined by Marcia Gay Harden, Kyle MacLachlan, and The Daily Show‘s Roy Wood Jr. The movie is based on Mcdonald’s second novel of the same name as the investigative journalist Fletch gets caught in the middle of a murder investigation in which he is the prime suspect.
Another cancellation at NBC as Good Girls isn’t going on past its 4th season, nor will it be shopped elsewhere, which is just the latest in the long line of NBC cancellations over the past few weeks.
In executive news, Julie Pernworth, who has been the Head of Comedy at CBS for two decades as the network has seen a huge boom in comedy hits like The Big Bang Theory, has left the network.
HBO‘s 6-hour limited series, We Own the City, which comes from The Wire Exec. Producers David Simon and George Pelecanos, have added Darrell Britt-Gibson, Rob Brown, McKinley Belcher III, and Larry Mitchell as leads. They join Jon Bernthal, Josh Charles and Jamie Hector in the project that will begin production in July, which will kick off production in July. It will be directed and executive produced by Reinaldo Marcus Green, based on Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton’s book, We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops and Corruption, chronicling the rise and fall of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force and the corruption and moral collapse that befell an American city in which the policies of drug prohibition and mass arrest were championed at the expense of actual police work. The series was written by Simon and Pelecanos along with The Wire writers Ed Burns and Bill Zorzi. The first three are executive producers, along with Kary Antholis, Nina K. Noble and Green. Zorzi is a co-executive producer, while Dwight Watkins also serves as writer.
Some new project news… (And considering that L.A. restaurants reopened to have full capacity over the weekend, we’re surprised that more deals weren’t made, but standby…
Saturday Night Live alum Rachel Dratch and Ana Gasteyer have teamed to write, exec. produce, and star in the holiday movie parody, A Clüsterfünke Christmas, for MTV Entertainment Studios. It’s being described as “a celebratory parody of the corny and ubiquitous traditional TV movie holiday romance genre,” and the cast also includes Vella Lovell (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), Cheyenne Jackson (American Horror Story) and Ryan McPartlin (L.A.’s Finest). Production has already begun in Vancouver with Anna Dokoza directing, and it will debut on a ViacomCBS platform to be announced later. This film will premiere on one of the ViacomCBS platforms to be announced later.
In a press release statement, Dratch and Gasteyere said, “It feels like a Christmas miracle to work together to create the ultimate holiday TV movie homage. We’re whipping up a punchy seasonal cocktail with insider insight from holiday film vets Danielle von Zerneck and Michael Murray, the keen eye of Anna Dokoza, and brimming with ribbons, townsfolk, and tropes – all against the classic festive backdrop of Vancouver in July!”
From Deadline comes word that Columbia Pictures and Roy Lee‘s Vertigo Entertainment are teaming with actor Masi Oka from Heroes and the upcoming Bullet Train, to adapt Akihito Tsukushi‘s manga, Made in Abyss, into a feature film, with Kevin McMullin adapting.
The Japanese comic was previously adapted into a 2017 anime TV series and a sequel film that premiered in Japan in January 2020, as well as a role-playing game and digital publication. It follows an orphan girl named Riko, who looks for her presumably dead mother, who has descended into a giant hole in the earth called “The Abyss,” along with her robot friend, Reg. McMullin wrote and directed the feature, Low Tide, which was released by A24 after premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival, while his next feature, First Harvest, appeared on the 2019 Blacklist, and he’s writing an original monster movie for Amazon Studios.
Vertigo and Oka’s Mobius Productions previously teamed on adaptations, Deathnote 1 and its sequel, and Promised Neverland, while Oka is producing adaptations of Attack on Titan and Akira separately.
The Hollywood Reporter got the scoop that Freaks directors Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky have signed on to direct the rock-climbing thriller, Deadpoint, for Spyglass Media Group.
That movie is being produced by Good Fear‘s Chris Bender and Jake Weiner, who produced last year’s My Spy and Mulan. Freaks was picked up by Well Go USA in a bidding war after it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2018. The duo since developed a Freaks TV series at TNT with Kennedy/Marshall producing, and has written features for Universal and Disney+ as well as directing the live-action Kim Impossible movie for Disney Channel and received an Emmy nomination for directing Disney’s Mech-X4.
The script by Paul Haapaniemi follows “a young woman who sets out to complete the treacherous mountain climb that claimed her father’s life. Mid-journey, she stumbles upon a murder and becomes the target of a ruthless band of criminals that want to eliminate the only witness to their crime. Alone in the unforgiving wilderness, and clinging to a sheer rock wall, her only escape is…up.”
In the first major deal of the Cannes Virtual Market, MGM has picked up the global distribution rights to the previously-mentioned Zoe Kravitz-directed P*ssy Island, which will star Naomi Ackie and Channing Tatum. The film is written by Kravitz and E.T. Feigenbaum, and will be produced by Bruce Cohen, Kravitz, Tiffany Persons and Tatum’s Free Association with Garret Levitz overseeing for Free Association.
If you want to keep track of all of the above, subscribe to our daily-updated Production Listings.
We saw the best week at the box office since the pandemic began as Universal Pictures finally released F9: The Fast Saga, the ninth movie in the 20-year street racing series starring Vin Diesel, into North American theaters. It was always expected to do well, although taking in an estimated $70 million over the three-day weekend puts F9 back into the type of pre-pandemic box office openings we would normally have before movie theaters shut down. In fact, it was the biggest opening for a movie since Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker way back in December 2019.
Universal Pictures released the latest action movie in the franchise into 4,179 theaters for Thursday night previews where it took in a solid $7.1 million, which contributed to the movie’s Friday take of $30 million, more than A Quiet Place Part II‘s Memorial Day weekend Friday of $19.3 million a month back. It was a great start for a movie that held up well over a non-holiday weekend and showed that movie theaters raising capacity limits last week contributed to individual theaters bringing in more business.
F9 has now grossed nearly $400 million worldwide, solidifying its lead for a movie that opened during the pandemic. It should be able to lead the way through the upcoming 4th of July weekend, although Marvel Studios will be opening its first movie in two years with Scarlett Johansson‘s Black Widow on July 9, and at that point, all bets are off.
Paramount Pictures’ A Quiet Place Part II continues to be the other dominant movie in theaters, retaining second place with $6.2 million, down just 32% in its fifth weekend. During normal times, a movie like this would open big and then drop each weekend as new movies would take over, but the John Krasinski-directed thriller has brought in $136.4 million domestically in five weeks, which shows that it could eventually hit $150 million. Overseas, it has grossed $112 million and may have a few other markets in which to open.
No new trailers today, probably because we had so darn many of them on Friday, so that’s about it for today, and we’ll be back on Wednesday for the weekly “Hump Day News Update.”
