Patrick Whitesell has found his first deal. The former Endeavor executive chairman is making his first investment through his new Silver Lake backed firm: A stake in Peyton Mannings Omaha Productions. Whitesells firm will be a minority investor in Omaha, joining Peter Chernins North Road as a backer of the former NFL stars media company. Manning and former ESPN executive...

President Trumps takeover of The Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. is coming at a critical moment for the venerable arts institution: It needs to figure out where The Kennedy Center Honors will be televised to millions of viewers across the country. 2025 will be the final year that the Honors are broadcast on CBS under its current rights deal, and...

In a global first, Warner Bros. Discoverys streaming platform Max is partnering with Le Monde and Tlrama, to launch joint services in France bundling Max shows with news content from the French media groups. Le Monde is Frances leading national newspaper, with some 650,000 subscribers and millions of readers, online and off. Tlrama, which specializes in culture and entertainment recommendations,...

Last year, Angel Studios home of the sleeper hit Sound of Freedom predicted to theater owners at CinemaCon that its upcoming film David would be the highest grossing animated movie of all time while announcing the title as a splashy 2025 Thanksgiving release. The Utah-based firm, which has eschewed the Hollywood system and prides itself on catering to faith-based and...

Getting an international TV show made these days is a tough business. Rising production costs are meeting falling budgets and even the deep-pocketed streamers who had turbo-charged the global business with big-budget commissions for the past several years are shifting gears, making fewer shows and focusing more on lower-cost crime shows and less on big-budget drama. But Sabine de Mardt...

A federal judge has rebuffed OpenAIs bid to dismiss a copyright lawsuit brought by The New York Times accusing the tech company of mass theft for using the publications content to train its AI system without consent or compensation. U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein on Wednesday advanced the Times core claims related to copyright infringement while narrowing the scope of...

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), theMotion Picture Associations anti-piracy organization, has expanded its membership to include the influential webcomic platform Naver Webtoon, marking a significant expansion into an area of IP creation thats surged in global relevance in recent years. Naver Webtoon is the first and only webcomic and webnovel company to join ACE to date, as well...

The 2010s changed home entertainment forever. During this decade, power and momentum swung towards global subscription video on demand (SVOD) platforms selling their content directly to consumers. However, the same period may have been a zero-interest rate phenomenon. These subscription streaming giants are here to stay, but their distribution strategy will become increasingly indirect. Deloitte predicts that the industry will...

The Art Directors Guild has elected Joel Cohen as its latest staff leader, replacing outgoing national executive director Chuck Parker. Cohen, who served under Parker for more than two years as associate national executive director, was voted in during the unions latest officer elections, the results of which were announced Wednesday. During his campaign, Cohen promised to fight for the...

Californias program that provides tax relief to film and TV productions is potentially looking at a major revamp amid an increasingly tit-for-tat race to host Hollywood. Lawmakers, in a revised version of a bill that aims to increase the cap on the program from $330 million to $750 million a year submitted on Tuesday, propose vastly boosting the credit to...

Want to feel your movie seat moving, get pelted by wind and snow or even smell a certain scent? If so, the opportunity to do so in the U.S. just increased exponentially if all goes as planned. AMC Theatres and next-generation cinema technology company CJ 4DPLEX are partnering for the first time to bring 65 premium SCREENX and 40 4DX...

The talent and literary agency Innovative Artists is raising outside cash for the first time. The agency, led by founder and CEO Scott Harris, has raised an undisclosed amount from the private equity firm Coral Tree Partners, led by partner Will Wynperle, which invests in media and entertainment companies. It is the first time in Innovatives 42-year history that it...

A federal court has rebuffed a bid from a trio of music publishers suing Anthropic to stop the use of their lyrics to train the Amazon-backed companys AI system. U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee on Tuesday found that Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO didnt prove that the existing licensing market is being undercut by Anthropic pilfering their...