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    ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ Is a Throwback Amid Summer Blockbusters

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    Directed by Greg Berlanti, the film amounts to a Hollywood experiment: Is there still room at the multiplexes for original movies aimed at grown-ups.“Fly Me to the Moon” is the kind of movie that isn’t supposed to succeed in theaters anymore, at least if you listen to franchise-obsessed studio executives.The story is a period piece and completely original: In 1968, a government operative (Woody Harrelson) hires a marketing virtuoso (Scarlett Johansson) to convince the public — and Congress — that a troubled NASA can pull off its scheduled Apollo 11 moon landing. Stylish and devious, she clashes with the rigid launch director (Channing Tatum) and secretly — as a backup, to be used only in an emergency — arranges for a fake landing to be filmed on a soundstage. What’s the harm?Hollywood marketers will tell you that ticket buyers eschew movies that mash together genres. And “Fly Me to the Moon” is part drama, part comedic caper, part romance, part fiction and part true story. Particularly in the summer, studios prefer to serve up mindless popcorn movies aimed at teenagers. “Fly Me to the Moon” is entertainment for thinking adults, the kind that Mike Nichols (“Working Girl”) and James L. Brooks (“Broadcast News”) made in the 1980s.So the question must be asked: How on earth did “Fly Me to the Moon” manage to score a wide release in theaters at the height of blockbuster season? The film rolls into 3,300 theaters in the United States and Canada on Friday.Shouldn’t it be going straight to streaming?In many ways, the film’s unexpected journey to multiplexes reflects the degree to which Hollywood runs on the vagaries of chance. “Fly Me to the Moon” started out as a streaming movie — full stop. Apple TV+ paid an estimated $100 million for the project in March 2022, and the contract called for no theatrical release of any kind.But then Greg Berlanti got involved.It was June 2022, and Mr. Berlanti, the wunderkind television producer, had just turned 50. That milestone prompted a degree of uncomfortable self-reflection, compounded by his mother’s recent death. At the same time, the entertainment business was changing — the streaming-driven “peak TV” era was winding down — and Mr. Berlanti wasn’t entirely sure where to focus his professional attention.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ Review: This NASA Rom-Com Stays Earthbound

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      Greg Berlanti’s movie, starring Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum as only mildly mismatched lovers, is set against the backdrop of the Apollo 11 landing.Speaking of the American moon landing of 1969, which he watched on television, Vladimir Nabokov rhapsodized in an interview, that, “treading the soil of the moon gives one, I imagine (or rather my projected self imagines) the most remarkable romantic thrill ever experienced in the history of discovery.”In “Fly Me To The Moon,” an occasionally engaging comedy set against the backdrop of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the romance is entirely earthbound.The director is Greg Berlanti, a veteran of swoony prime-time dramas like “Dawson’s Creek” and “Riverdale,” whose big-screen pictures include the ghastly 2010 rom-com “Life as We Know It” and the surprisingly (and effectively) earnest teenage coming-out comedy-drama “Love, Simon.” The script is by Rose Gilroy (she’s the daughter of the “Velvet Buzzsaw” auteur Dan Gilroy and the actress Rene Russo) from a story by Bill Kirstein and Keenan Flynn.But the movie lives and dies with its lead actors, Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum. As lovers who are only mildly mismatched, they never seem to falter, no matter what potentially stupefying paces the movie puts them through.Johansson is Kelly Jones, or rather, “Kelly Jones,” a perky, persistent, charmingly dissembling advertising executive whose pitches are often as phony as her name. Her ignoble hidden past is one reason she accepts a pitch from a shady White House operative, Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson, slipping into comedic disreputability like he’s putting on a comfortable smoking jacket), who knows all about her and offers to make that past disappear if she successfully markets the Apollo 11 mission.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Voices of A.I. Are Telling Us a Lot

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      What does artificial intelligence sound like? Hollywood has been imagining it for decades. Now A.I. developers are cribbing from the movies, crafting voices for real machines based on dated cinematic fantasies of how machines should talk.Last month, OpenAI revealed upgrades to its artificially intelligent chatbot. ChatGPT, the company said, was learning how to hear, see and converse in a naturalistic voice — one that sounded much like the disembodied operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson in the 2013 Spike Jonze movie “Her.”ChatGPT’s voice, called Sky, also had a husky timbre, a soothing affect and a sexy edge. She was agreeable and self-effacing; she sounded like she was game for anything. After Sky’s debut, Johansson expressed displeasure at the “eerily similar” sound, and said that she had previously declined OpenAI’s request that she voice the bot. The company protested that Sky was voiced by a “different professional actress,” but agreed to pause her voice in deference to Johansson. Bereft OpenAI users have started a petition to bring her back. More

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      What We Lose When ChatGPT Sounds Like Scarlett Johansson

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      OpenAI has good reason to aim for a bot voice à la the one in “Her.” But that film was about relationships. What does this real-world turn say about us?When Spike Jonze’s romance “Her” was released in 2013, it sounded both like a joke — a man falls in love with his computer — and a fantasy. The iPhone was about six years old. Siri, the mildly reliable virtual assistant for that phone, came along a few years later. You could converse in a limited way with Siri, whose default female-coded voice had the timbre and tone of a self-assured middle-aged hotel concierge. She did not laugh; she did not giggle; she did not tell spontaneous jokes, only Easter egg-style gags written into her code by cheeky engineers. Siri was not your friend. She certainly wasn’t your girlfriend.So Samantha, the A.I. assistant with whom the sad-sack divorcé Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) fell in love in “Her,” felt like a futuristic revelation. Voiced by Scarlett Johansson, Samantha was similar to Siri, if Siri liked you and wanted you to like her back. She was programmed to mold herself around the individual user’s preferences, interests and ideas. She was witty, and sweet and quite literally tireless. In theory, everyone in “Her” was using their own version of Samantha, presumably with different names and voices. But the movie — which I love — was less the tale of a near-future society, and more the coming-of-age story of one man. Theodore found the strength to return to life in a brief, beautiful relationship with a woman who fit his needs perfectly and healed his wounds.It was thus a tad jarring to hear the voice of the virtual assistant in last week’s announcement of the newest version of ChatGPT, probably the best known artificial intelligence engine in the very real world of 2024. Among other things, the new iteration, dubbed ChatGPT-4o, can interact verbally with the user and respond to images shown to it through the device’s camera. Those who watched the live demo from OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, were quick to note that she sounded a whole lot like Samantha — which is to say, like Johansson.Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, told The Verge that the resemblance was incidental, and that ChatGPT’s nascent speech capabilities have used this voice for a while. But once you hear it, you can’t unhear it.Those who watched the live demo from OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, were quick to note that she sounded like Samantha.Warner Bros. PicturesFurthermore, OpenAI founder and chief executive Sam Altman has professed his love of “Her” in the past. Following the announcement, he posted the word “her” to his X account. And on his blog post about the news, he wrote, “It feels like A.I. from the movies; and it’s still a bit surprising to me that it’s real. Getting to human-level response times and expressiveness turns out to be a big change.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘SNL’ Riffs on the State of the Union and Republican Response

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      The Republican rebuttal delivered by Senator Katie Britt already struck many viewers as parody, making Scarlett Johansson’s job look easy.It was inevitable that “Saturday Night Live” would sample heavily from the buffet of satirical potential offered by Thursday’s State of the Union. Perhaps the only question going into this weekend’s broadcast, hosted by Josh Brolin and featuring the musical guest Ariana Grande, was who would play Senator Katie Britt of Alabama, who delivered the much-discussed Republican response to President Biden’s speech.As it turned out, “S.N.L.” did not draw from its own cast for this role, but it didn’t look far to find someone: Britt was played by Scarlett Johansson, the two-time Academy Award-nominated actress, six-time “S.N.L.” host and — yes — wife of Colin Jost, the Weekend Update co-anchor.Following a brief introduction from Ego Nwodim as CNN’s Abby Phillip, the show began with Mikey Day, now the resident Biden impersonator at “S.N.L.,” taking his place in front of Punkie Johnson (as Vice President Harris) and Michael Longfellow (as Speaker Mike Johnson).“Folks,” Day said, “tonight I’m going to cover a lot. There’s going to be a lot of applause. So, Kamala, I hope you didn’t skip leg day, girl. You’re going to be up and down all night.” (Naturally, Johnson stood up and applauded; Longfellow did not.)Day continued: “Tonight, I’m also going to be talking about my predecessor,” he said. “Mainly because every time I say predecessor, Mike Johnson shakes his head, like he just accidentally caught 30 seconds of the show ‘Euphoria.’ Look at that weirdo.”After being booed by Heidi Gardner (who was playing Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene), Day threw to the Republican response: “I think she’s going to help me more than anything else I could say here,” he said. “Enjoy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Wes Anderson’s ‘Asteroid City’ Premieres in Cannes

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      At the film’s Cannes premiere, the director’s customary cast, themes and even camera moves were all on display — well, except one.Wes Anderson’s directorial style is so distinctive and particular — so Wessy — that it’s spawned no end of recent A.I. parodies. But how do those imitations compare with the real thing?Many of Anderson’s signature obsessions are on display in his new movie, “Asteroid City,” a ’50s-set comedy about different sets of parents accompanying their space-obsessed kids to a convention in the desert, where they all must quarantine together after receiving an unexpected visitor from the skies. (Strained family dynamics, nerdy children and whimsical settings … check, check, check!)Critics appeared split on the movie after its Cannes Film Festival premiere on Tuesday: though “Asteroid City” got glowing notices in The Telegraph and IndieWire, Variety deemed it “for Anderson die-hards only.” That suggests this is his Wessiest movie yet, a case that could certainly be made when you consider the following:It’s filled with his favorite actors.The expansive cast includes several Anderson regulars, including Jason Schwartzman as a war photographer and Tilda Swinton as a kooky astronomer, plus Jeffrey Wright, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber and Tony Revolori. Scarlett Johansson, previously called on to do a voice in Anderson’s stop-motion “Isle of Dogs,” gets her first live-action role for the director as a self-absorbed actress who finds herself quarantined next door to Schwartzman. Only two Anderson veterans are missing: Bill Murray, who was originally cast in “Asteroid City” but reportedly had to drop out because of Covid-19, and Owen Wilson.There are big stars in small roles.Actors clamor to star in Anderson’s films, and he takes full advantage: Even the tiniest supporting roles are typically filled with heavy hitters (as in “The French Dispatch,” where Emmy winner Elisabeth Moss is essentially a featured extra). “Asteroid City” welcomes A-lister Tom Hanks into the fold as Schwartzman’s father-in-law, though he’s not as significant a presence as you might expect. Still, at least he’s got more to do than “Barbie” star Margot Robbie and recent Oscar nominee Hong Chau, who each pop in for the briefest of cameos. In future Anderson films, maybe they’ll be upgraded to the main ensemble.It’s got a complicated framing device.Anderson’s films often call attention to their own storytelling by nesting the narrative within another narrative: Perhaps it’s all taking place in a book, or the vignettes are stories in a magazine. In “Asteroid City,” the director indulges in his most complicated construction yet: We’re meant to be watching a TV broadcast (hosted by Bryan Cranston) that dramatizes the story of a playwright (Norton) who wrote an unproduced stage production called “Asteroid City.” Those framing segments are shot in black and white. It’s only when we leap into the idea of his play that Anderson transports us to the gorgeous teals and burnt oranges of the desert, where most of this story within a story (within a story!) unfolds.It all takes place on rigid lines.Though Anderson has become less fixated on placing his actors in the smack-dab middle of the frame, he still blocks his camera movements and choreography in “Asteroid City” so that everything and everybody moves on an x or y axis at all times. (If you want to sneak up on someone in a Wes Anderson movie, do it diagonally. They’d never think to look!)There are deadpan expressions of grief.Schwartzman’s war photographer has something he’s meaning to tell his children: Their mother has died. Or, more specifically, their mother died three weeks ago and he just hasn’t found the right moment to bring it up. The situation is outrageous, but Schwartzman’s performance is classic Wes deadpan, and though most of the cast members give the same steady line readings, that house style is at its best when you can sense real, troubled currents underneath a placid exterior.But it could have been even Wessier …If, after reading all this, you think “Asteroid City” couldn’t get more Wessy … well, it could! At the film’s Cannes news conference on Wednesday, the actor Steve Park said that before shooting began, Anderson created a feature-length, animated storyboard, or animatic, in which he did all the voices himself. “Release the animatics,” Jeffrey Wright intoned solemnly.… especially if it used slow-motion.Later in the news conference, a reporter confronted Anderson about one trademark that’s disappeared: Though he used to use slow-motion sequences fairly often — think Gwyneth Paltrow dramatically exiting her bus in “The Royal Tenenbaums” — recent films like “Asteroid City” have all but dropped the device. “I have a series of ways I like to stage things and I don’t know if I’m in command of them — it’s part of my personality,” Anderson said, before growing concerned. “That’s one of the tools that I’ve used often, and I should look for some spots for that,” he promised the reporter. “I’ll take the note. And I’ll do it!” More

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      Why A.I. Movies Couldn’t Prepare Us for Bing’s Chatbot

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      Instead of the chilling rationality of HAL in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” we get the messy awfulness of Microsoft’s Sydney. Call it the banality of sentience.Why are we so fascinated by stories about sentient robots, rapacious A.I. and the rise of thinking machines? Faced with that question, I did what any on writer on deadline would do and asked ChatGPT.The answers I got — a helpfully numbered list with five chatty entries — were not surprising. They were, to be honest, what I might have come up with myself after a few seconds of thought, or what I might expect to encounter in a B- term paper from a distracted undergraduate. Long on generalizations and short on sources, the bot’s essay was a sturdy summary of conventional wisdom. For example: “Sentient robots raise important moral and ethical questions about the treatment of intelligent beings, the nature of consciousness and the responsibilities of creators.”Quite so. From the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea to the medieval Jewish legend of the golem through Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and beyond, we have grappled with those important questions, and also frightened and titillated ourselves with tales of our inventions coming to life. Our ingenuity as a species, channeled through individual and collective hubris, compels us to concoct artificial beings that menace and seduce us. They escape our control. They take control. They fall in love.In “The Imagination of Disaster,” Susan Sontag’s classic 1965 essay on science-fiction movies, she observed that “we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.” As Turing-tested A.I. applications have joined the pantheon of sci-fi shibboleths, they have dutifully embodied both specters.HAL 9000, the malevolent computer in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), is terrifying precisely because he is so banal. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.” In 2023, that perfectly chilling exchange between human and computer is echoed every day as modern-day Daves make impossible demands of HAL’s granddaughters, Siri and Alexa.Our exchanges with Siri and Alexa are everyday versions of the interactions in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”Warner Bros.That example suggests that in spite of terrors like the Terminator, the smart money was always on banality. The dreariness of ChatGPT, the soulless works of visual art produced by similar programs seem to confirm that hunch. In the real world, the bots aren’t our overlords so much as the enablers of our boredom. Our shared future — our singularity — is an endless scroll, just for the lulz.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.The Tom Cruise Factor: Stars were starstruck when the “Top Gun: Maverick” headliner showed up at the Oscar nominees luncheon.An Andrea Riseborough FAQ: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why her nod was controversial.Sundance and the Oscars: Which films from the festival could follow “CODA” to the 2024 Academy Awards.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.Or so I thought, until a Microsoft application tried to break up my colleague’s marriage. Last week, Kevin Roose, a tech columnist for The Times, published a transcript of his conversations with Sydney, the volatile alter ego of the Bing search engine. “I want to do love with you,” Sydney said to Roose, and then went on to trash Roose’s relationship with his wife.That was scary but not exactly “Terminator” scary. We like to imagine technology as a kind of superego: rational, impersonal, decisive. This was a raging id. I found myself hoping that there was no pet rabbit in the Roose household, and that Sydney was not wired into any household appliances. That’s a movie reference, by the way, to “Fatal Attraction,” a notorious thriller released a few years after the first “Terminator” (1984) promised he’d be back. In another conversation, with The Associated Press, Sydney shifted from unhinged longing to unbridled hostility, making fun of the reporter’s looks and likening him to Hitler “because you are one of the most evil and worst people in history.”Maybe when we have fantasized about conscious A.I. we’ve been imagining the wrong disaster. These outbursts represent a real departure, not only from the anodyne mediocrity of other bots, but also perhaps more significantly from the dystopia we have grown accustomed to dreading.We’re more or less reconciled to the reality that machines are, in some ways, smarter than we are. We also enjoy the fantasy that they might turn out to be more sensitive. We’re therefore not prepared for the possibility that they might be chaotic, unstable and resentful — as messy as we are, or maybe more so.In “Her,” the artificial intelligence created is a consumer product, not a government creation.Warner Bros. PicturesMovies about machines with feelings often unfold in an atmosphere of hushed, wistful melancholy, in which the robots themselves are avatars of sad gentleness: Haley Joel Osment as David in “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” (2001), Scarlett Johansson as Samantha in “Her” (2013), Justin H. Min as Yang last year in “After Yang.” While HAL and Skynet, the imperial intelligence that spawned the Terminators, were creations of big government, the robots in these movies are consumer products. Totalitarian domination is the nightmare form of techno-politics: What if the tools that protect us decided to enslave us? Emotional fulfillment is the dream of consumer capitalism: What if our toys loved us back?Why wouldn’t they? In these movies, we are lovers and fighters, striking back against oppression and responding to vulnerability with kindness. Even as humans fear the superiority of the machines, our species remains the ideal to which they aspire. Their dream is to be us. When it comes true, the Terminator discovers a conscience, and the store-bought surrogate children, lovers and siblings learn about sacrifice and loss. It’s the opposite of dystopia.Where we really live is the opposite of that. At the movies, the machines absorb and emulate the noblest of human attributes: intelligence, compassion, loyalty, ardor. Sydney offers a blunt rebuttal, reminding us of our limitless capacity for aggression, deceit, irrationality and plain old meanness.What did we expect? Sydney and her kin derive their understanding of humanness — the information that feeds their models and algorithms — from the internet, itself a utopian invention that has evolved into an archive of human awfulness. How did these bots get so creepy, so nasty, so untrustworthy? The answer is banal. Also terrifying. It’s in the mirror. More

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      Scarlett Johansson Sues Disney Over ‘Black Widow’ Release

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      The star said making the film available on Disney+ at the same time it opened in theaters “dramatically” lowered box office revenue, which could cost her tens of millions of dollars.Never cross a super-assassin: Scarlett Johansson, who has played the Marvel character Black Widow in eight blockbuster films, sued the Walt Disney Company on Thursday over its pandemic-era streaming strategy. The lawsuit marked a sharp escalation in a festering standoff between movie actors and media companies over compensation in the streaming age.The complaint, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, claims that Disney breached her contract when it released “Black Widow” simultaneously in theaters and on Disney+ earlier this month. Ms. Johansson’s suit said that Disney had promised that “Black Widow” would receive an exclusive release in theaters for approximately 90 to 120 days and that her compensation — based largely on bonuses tied to ticket sales — was gutted as a result of the hybrid release. Simultaneous availability on Disney+, where subscribers could watch the film instantly (and have permanent access to it) for a $30 surcharge, “dramatically decreased box office revenue,” Ms. Johansson said in the suit.“There is no merit whatsoever to this filing,” Disney said in a statement.Over its first three days in theaters, “Black Widow” collected $158 million at theaters worldwide and took in about $60 million on Disney+ Premier Access. Total ticket sales now stand at $327 million, the lowest total for a Marvel Studios release since 2008, when “The Incredible Hulk” collected $265 million (or $341 million in today’s dollars). Disney has not given a running total for Disney+ sales of “Black Widow.”Making “Black Widow” available on Disney+ could cost Ms. Johansson more than $50 million, according to two people briefed on her contract, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private agreement. That is how much Ms. Johansson would have made if “Black Widow” had approached $1 billion in global ticket sales; “Captain Marvel” and “Black Panther” both exceeded that threshold in prepandemic release.Films released during the pandemic — including those that have received exclusive theatrical releases — have largely disappointed at the box office, with many consumers demonstrating a reluctance to return to theaters. The entire film ecosystem has been hurt as a result: cinema chains, stars, studios.Disney has cited the coronavirus as a reason for releasing movies like “Black Widow” simultaneously in theaters and on Disney+ Premier Access.Jay Maidment/Marvel Studios, via Disney“First, Disney wanted to lure the picture’s audience away from movie theaters and towards its own streaming service, where it could keep the revenues for itself while simultaneously growing the Disney+ subscriber base, a proven way to boost Disney’s stock price,” the suit, which was first reported on by The Wall Street Journal, claimed. “Second, Disney wanted to substantially devalue Ms. Johansson’s agreement and thereby enrich itself.”Disney’s statement called the lawsuit “especially sad and distressing in its callous disregard for the horrific and prolonged global effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.” The company added, “Disney has fully complied with Ms. Johansson’s contract and furthermore, the release of ‘Black Widow’ on Disney+ with Premier Access has significantly enhanced her ability to earn additional compensation on top of the $20 million she has received to date.”“Black Widow” was initially scheduled for exclusive theatrical release in May of last year. Disney ended up postponing the film’s release three times as the pandemic dragged on.Disney, citing the ongoing coronavirus threat, ultimately decided to release several major movies simultaneously in theaters and on Disney+ Premier Access. It used the strategy in May for “Cruella,” which starred Emma Stone and took in $221 million worldwide. (Disney has kept Disney+ revenue for “Cruella” a secret.) On Friday, Disney will give the same treatment to “The Jungle Cruise,” a comedic adventure that stars Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson. It is not known if Ms. Stone, Ms. Blunt or Mr. Johnson renegotiated their contracts with Disney as a result.In December, WarnerMedia kicked a hornet’s nest by abruptly announcing that more than a dozen Warner Bros. movies — the studio’s entire 2021 slate — would each arrive in theaters and on HBO Max. The decision prompted an outcry from major stars and their agents over the potential loss of box office-related compensation, forcing Warner Bros. to make new deals. It ultimately paid roughly $200 million to thwart the rebellion.The deeper question is this: If old-line studios are no longer trying to maximize the box office for each film but instead shifting to a hybrid model where success is judged partly by ticket sales and partly by the number of streaming subscriptions sold, what does that mean for how stars are paid — and where they make their movies?The traditional model, the one that studios have used for decades to make high-profile film deals, involves paying small fees upfront and then sharing a portion of the revenue from ticket sales. The bigger the hit, the bigger the “back end” paydays for certain actors, directors and producers.The streaming giants have done it differently. They pay more upfront — usually much, much more — in lieu of any back-end payments, which gives them complete control over future revenue. It means that people get paid as if their projects are hits before they are released (or even made).Ms. Johansson’s suit also took direct aim at Bob Chapek, Disney’s chief executive, and Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chairman, by citing the stock grants given to them as rewards for building Disney+, which has more than 100 million subscribers worldwide. “Disney’s financial disclosures make clear that the very Disney executives who orchestrated this strategy will personally benefit from their and Disney’s misconduct,” the complaint said.According to the suit, Ms. Johansson’s representatives approached Disney and Marvel in recent months with a request to renegotiate her contract. “Disney and Marvel largely ignored Ms. Johansson,” the suit said. More

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      ‘Black Widow’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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      Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More