Variety

I felt ill when the news broke May 11 that my go-to cinema, Landmark Theatres’ flagship Westside location on Pico Boulevard, was shutting down at the end of the month. I have been going to this complex religiously — call it my house of movie worship — ever since its founding 15 years ago. For at least the past decade, my partner and I would have date night there nearly every Saturday night after enjoying dinner downstairs from the theater at the now defunct Westside Tavern. It was a weekly ritual I always looked forward to, until the COVID pandemic kept us from going these past two years. There is just so much I cherished about the theater. You could always catch the latest and greatest firstrun indie and foreign films…

1 ‘The Late Late Show’ to Head to London in June James Corden is going home — to visit, as part of a weeklong trip to Blighty for “The Late Late Show” on CBS. This will mark the fourth time “The Late Late Show With James Corden” has filmed from the U.K., but it’s the first major initiative for the show since Corden announced he would depart the franchise next year. The show will broadcast four episodes from Freemasons’ Hall in Central London, its first time in that venue. The episodes will air June 27-30. — Michael Schneider 2 Hallmark Sets London-Based Christmas Movie The Hallmark Channel will be in Britain this Christmas. The network has cast Will Kemp (“The Christmas Waltz”) and Reshma Shetty (“Blind Spot”) in its upcoming original movie “Jolly…

It’s been a brutal year so far for Wall Street — the Dow has dropped for seven weeks straight in its worst performance since 2001 — and most media companies have been harder hit than the broader financial markets amid ongoing gyrations. The stock volatility has been triggered by a range of troubling indicators, including higher interest rates aimed at dousing rising inflation as well as supply-chain disruptions, labor shortages and geopolitical uncertainty due to Russia’s war in Ukraine. With players like Netflix, Disney, the newly formed Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Global in the thick of the streaming wars, there has been a new post-pandemic reset: Investors are more closely scrutinizing the growth dynamics and economics of video streaming. Hollywood’s conventional wisdom has been that streaming will eat the world. But…

George Carlin’s enduring comedic legacy inspired Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio to make HBO’s upcoming documentary about the counterculture icon, whose observations remain eerily topical nearly 14 years after his death. Carlin, who appeared on “The Tonight Show” more than 130 times during his lengthy career, riffed about abortion, the planet, police brutality and organized religion in his stand-up sets and also appeared in movies such as “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” His legendary 1972 routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” is still regularly invoked in media circles. “We were always so surprised that anytime something happened in the news, George would start trending,” says Apatow, who co-directed “George Carlin’s American Dream” with Bonfiglio, a frequent collaborator. “Most comedians’ material ages really badly, but his work was so deep…

The looming closure of Landmark Theatres’ Pico location is a significant loss for L.A.’s independent movie scene, already missing the shuttered ArcLight Hollywood. Getting art-house audiences to return to cinemas has been challenging during the extended pandemic, and now the question is whether the city that makes movies has enough theaters to show them. “Around the country, including in Los Angeles, there are just fewer theaters and fewer screens than there were before the pandemic,” says IFC Films and IFC Midnight distribution head Jasper Basch. “The Landmark Pico’s closure is going to contribute to this problem.” And it could hit Hollywood where it really hurts: Oscar consideration. “It’s going to be a problem for Academy runs,” predicts Sony Pictures Classics co-president Tom Bernard. So without Landmark’s popular Westside location, where’s the ideal place…

The erosion of subscriber numbers for MVPDs isn’t letting up in 2022. The five major traditional multichannel providers reporting subscriptions — Altice USA, Charter, Comcast, Dish and Verizon — lost a combined 3.1 million subs, with numbers falling to 46.2 million versus a year ago. When compared with levels for the same period in 2018, it’s a total decline of 10.1 million subs, or 18%. Still, there’s some good news for the TV industry. The three streaming providers that consistently report paying customers — Hulu, Sling TV and FuboTV — have seen subs climb to 3.97 million cumulatively, showing that not everyone who cancels traditional TV walks away for good. Until all the majors (think DirecTV, YouTube TV) report, we won’t have the full picture of pay TV, but it’s…