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    Sony Gives N.Y.U. $7.5 Million for an Audio Institute

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    A multifaceted new program at the university’s Steinhardt School will train students (on Sony equipment) for jobs in music and audio “that don’t exist yet.”Students at New York University who study the music industry and do research at the frontiers of audio have a new benefactor: Sony.A $7.5 million donation from the Japanese electronics and media giant, made through its personal entertainment business unit, will help establish the Sony Audio Institute, a multifaceted partnership at N.Y.U.’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. It is set to open this spring.N.Y.U. and Sony, which jointly announced their agreement on Tuesday, say that the institute is not a physical space. Rather, it’s an interdisciplinary approach to studying and researching the latest advances in consumer and pro-level audio tech — replete with Sony tools to facilitate. As part of the partnership, a studio space will be revamped with professional equipment from Sony and the institute will offer an array of internships, scholarships and programming, even letting students collaborate with Sony’s engineers and researchers.The institute will not, however, grant degrees. It will be part of Steinhardt’s degree programs in music business and music technology.“To have access to the researchers who are inventing the future of audio, as well as the businesspeople who are managing the introduction of those products, creates a great opportunity and a competitive advantage for our students,” Larry S. Miller, the director of Steinhardt’s music industry program, said in an interview.Miller, a former music executive, will step down from his leadership of the school’s music industry program in the fall to become director of the Sony Audio Institute, which has been established for an initial 10-year run. (It is unrelated to the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, a degree program under N.Y.U.’s Tisch School for the Arts.)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’ 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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      Sony Pictures Acquires Alamo Drafthouse in Lifeline to Cinema Chain

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      The deal is a rare example of a traditional Hollywood studio owning a movie theater chain.Sony Pictures Entertainment is acquiring Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and will manage its 35 locations, a rare example of a traditional Hollywood studio’s owning a theater chain.The deal, announced Wednesday, followed the Justice Department’s decision in 2020 to rescind the so-called Paramount consent decrees — movie distribution rules dating to 1949 that forced the largest Hollywood studios to sell off their theater holdings. Those rules were intended to prevent studios from controlling the film business, from creation to exhibition.In 2019, the Justice Department’s antitrust chief at the time, Makan Delrahim, said changes in the entertainment industry “made it unlikely that the remaining defendants can reinstate their cartel.” Sony’s move could open the door to similar deals by other leading studios. In recent years, Netflix, the leading streaming company, has bought theaters to show films.Alamo, the seventh-largest theater chain in North America, operates theaters in 25 metro areas across the United States and has invested in distinctive programming and food offerings in an attempt to lure in moviegoers away from major multiplexes.The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Sony bought Alamo from Altamont Capital Partners and Fortress Investment Group, as well as the chain’s founder, Tim League. Mr. League said the dine-in movie theater chain was “beyond thrilled” about the deal.It comes at a time of financial trouble for Alamo and for the movie theater business as a whole. Several of Alamo’s franchised locations filed for bankruptcy and closed this month, making Sony’s move a potential lifeline for the struggling chain. Alamo filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2021 before a private equity firm stepped in.The cinemas will still operate under the Alamo Drafthouse brand, Sony said, though they will be managed by a newly formed division at Sony led by Michael Kustermann, Alamo’s chief executive.“Alamo Drafthouse has always held the craft of filmmaking and the theatrical experience in high esteem, which are fundamental shared values between our companies,” said Tom Rothman, the chief executive of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group.The industry has grappled with multiple headwinds in recent years, as the pandemic caused a slump in box office receipts — and, more recently, a dismal start to the summer blockbuster season — while Hollywood strikes chipped away at the number of movies that studios churned out.Ticket sales in the United States and Canada for the year to date total just over $2.8 billion, a 26 percent decline from the same period last year, according to Comscore. More

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      ‘Bad Boys’ Ticket Buyers Toss Will Smith a Career Lifeline

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      Mr. Smith’s first wide-release film since he slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars two years ago arrived to a hefty $56 million at the North American box office.Moviegoers sent Will Smith a clear message over the weekend: We forgive you.“Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” the fourth entry in the Sony Pictures franchise — and Mr. Smith’s first wide release since he slapped Chris Rock at the Academy Awards in 2022 — arrived to roughly $56 million in ticket sales in the United States and Canada, according to Sony. That No. 1 result was a career milestone for Mr. Smith: He now has 15 first-place debuts as a leading man on his résumé.“Ride or Die,” which returned Mr. Smith to one of his signature roles, cost an estimated $100 million to make, not including marketing. It received positive reviews, with many critics noting a comedic moment that seemed to refer to Mr. Smith’s behavior at the 2022 Oscars: Mr. Smith is slapped by his co-star, Martin Lawrence, and called a “bad boy.”Ticket buyers gave the R-rated “Ride or Die” an A-minus grade in CinemaScore exit polls. The Rotten Tomatoes audience score stood at 97 percent positive on Saturday.Prerelease surveys that track audience interest had indicated that “Ride or Die” would arrive to about $45 million in North American ticket sales. Sony was hoping for at least $30 million.Mr. Smith’s popularity, as measured by the Q Scores Company, plummeted after his behavior at the 2022 Oscars.Frank Masi/Columbia PicturesHollywood as a whole was unsure what to expect. For a variety of reasons — too few movies, movies that didn’t appeal to wide audiences, changing consumer habits — the summer box office has been in a deep freeze.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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      Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell on How ‘Anyone but You’ Beat the Rom-Com Odds

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      Here are their takeaways after the film, debuting on Netflix, went from box office miss to runaway hit.As Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell promoted their romantic comedy, “Anyone but You,” last year, life appeared to be imitating art: The co-stars posed cheek to cheek while sightseeing in Australia. Powell dipped a gleeful Sweeney in his arms. Sweeney cast longing gazes up at Powell on red carpets. The pair flirted and giggled in interviews.When Powell and his long-term girlfriend broke up, and Sweeney remained engaged to her fiancé, Jonathan Davino (an executive producer of “Anyone but You”), rumors of an illicit offscreen relationship between the two actors took hold.The speculation played out, the stars said, exactly as they intended.“The two things that you have to sell a rom-com are fun and chemistry. Sydney and I have a ton of fun together, and we have a ton of effortless chemistry,” Powell said in an interview. “That’s people wanting what’s on the screen off the screen, and sometimes you just have to lean into it a bit — and it worked wonderfully. Sydney is very smart.”Sweeney, who is also an executive producer through her Fifty-Fifty Films company, said she was intimately involved with the marketing strategy on the Columbia Pictures film, including, perhaps, fanning those headline-generating flames.“I was on every call. I was in text group chats. I was probably keeping everybody over at Sony marketing and distribution awake at night because I couldn’t stop with ideas,” she said. “I wanted to make sure that we were actively having a conversation with the audience as we were promoting this film, because at the end of the day, they’re the ones who created the entire narrative.”The R-rated romance follows Bea (Sweeney) and Ben (Powell), who share a night that ends badly and are then thrust together at a destination wedding in Australia, where Ben’s friend and Bea’s sister are getting married. The film is based loosely on Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” and is full of bawdy zingers, grand gestures and sun-dappled scenery.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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      Sam Mendes to Direct Four Beatles Films

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      The Oscar-winning filmmaker Sam Mendes was given full rights to the band’s music and their life stories for the unusual quartet of films, planned for 2027.The British director Sam Mendes has signed on to direct not one but four biopics about the Beatles, each telling the story of the Fab Four from a different member’s point of view.Apple Corps, the guardian of the Beatles’ musical interests, and Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and the families of John Lennon and George Harrison have granted full life story and music rights for the scripted films — a first — which will be financed and released by Sony Pictures Entertainment. The films are planned for release in 2027.“I’m honored to be telling the story of the greatest rock band of all time, and excited to challenge the notion of what constitutes a trip to the movies,” Mendes said in a statement on Tuesday. The announcement teased that the films would be released in an “innovative and groundbreaking” manner, but did not offer details.In recent years Mendes, the Oscar-winning director of “American Beauty,” has helped refresh the James Bond franchise with “Skyfall” and told the story of two British lance corporals in World War I in “1917.” As a theater director, he showed an ability to work with complicated biographical material over a long stretch of time with “The Lehman Trilogy,” a saga about the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers that earned him a Tony Award.Biopics about pop stars have grown popular in recent years: “Bob Marley: One Love” was on track to earn an estimated $33.2 million last weekend, following on the success of films including “Elvis” in 2022 and “Bohemian Rhapsody” in 2018.The Beatles have shown strength with movie audiences since they starred in “A Hard Day’s Night” in 1964, playing versions of themselves. Their fans continue to show an appetite for expansive projects: Peter Jackson’s documentary series “The Beatles: Get Back,” an over-seven-hour project, was released to much acclaim in 2021 on Disney+. More

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      ‘Madame Web’ Review: Dakota Johnson Can’t Save This Spidey Spinoff

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      The actress stars as a clairvoyant in the latest entry to the Spider-Man franchise, using her charm to rise above this flat, predictable movie.The only real bummer about “Madame Web,” the latest installment in the Spider-Man chronicles, isn’t that it’s bad, but that it never achieves memorably terrible status. The story is absurd, the dialogue snort-out-loud risible, the fights uninspired. Even so, there are glimmers of wit and competency. And then there’s its star, Dakota Johnson, who has a fascinating, seemingly natural ability to appear wholly detached from the nonsense swirling around her. Most actors at least try to sell the shoddy goods; Johnson serenely floats above it all.A misterioso clairvoyant, Madame Web is a secondary Spider-Man character who met the web-weaver in the comics in 1980 while regally parked on a life-support system shaped like a round-bottom flask. Blind and plagued by a debilitating autoimmune disease, she had a standard super-type get-up — a black unitard veined with lines that converge in a web — that was offset by a white-and-black hairdo that suggested she shared a stylist with Peter Parker’s editor J. Jonah Jameson. She entered with “a smell of ozone and disinfectant and age,” the classy intro explained, and with “a voice that crackles like ancient parchment.”Johnson’s Cassandra Webb — Cassie for short — is far younger and seems more like a patchouli and cannabis kind of gal, despite the frenetic wheel skills she displays in her job as a New York paramedic. Her powers haven’t yet emerged when, after a preamble in the Peruvian Amazon, she is speeding through the city in 2003. As with many superheroes, Cassie has a tragic back story and so on, a generic burden that Johnson’s palpably awkward charm humanizes. If the actress at times seems understandably baffled by the movie she’s in, it’s because she hasn’t been smoothed into plastic perfection by the star-making machinery. Johnson seems too real for the phoniness thrown at her, which is her own super power.The British director S.J. Clarkson has multiple TV credits on her résumé, including a few episodes of the Netflix series “Jessica Jones,” about the hard boozing, fighting and fornicating superhero. Johnson’s Cassie is sadder and more naturally offbeat than Jones, and like most big-screen superheroes, Cassie doesn’t seem to be getting any noncombative action. Yet she too doesn’t fit easily in Normal World. One of the better scenes in “Madame Web” happens at a baby shower, where Cassie inadvertently wipes the smiles off the faces of a roomful of women by talking about her dead mother. It’s squirmy, funny filler: the guest of honor is Mary Parker (Emma Roberts), Spidey’s soon-to-be mom, who chats with his future uncle, Ben (Adam Scott).Clarkson shares screenwriter credit with Claire Parker as well as with the writing team of Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, whose collaborations include a string of critically maligned box-office fantasies: “Dracula Untold,” “Gods of Egypt,” “The Last Witch Hunter” and “Morbius.” (That’s entertainment!)“Madame Web” hits the prerequisite genre marks, more or less, as Cassie starts developing her second-sight skills and begins shuffling into the near future and back. One of the character’s more attractive attributes is that her powers are mental rather than physical, which seems to have flummoxed the filmmakers. The movie never coheres narratively, tonally or, really, any way; one problem is the people behind it don’t know what to do with a woman who thinks her way out of trouble.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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      Sony Reaches Blockbuster Deal for Michael Jackson’s Catalog

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      The richest music catalog deal to date would give Sony half of Jackson’s recorded music and songwriting rights, valuing the total collection at $1.2 billion or more.Sony has agreed to acquire half of Michael Jackson’s catalog from the star’s estate, in what is likely the richest transaction ever for a single musician’s work, according to two people briefed on the agreement.The deal, which has been gossiped about in the music industry for months, is said to involve Sony purchasing a 50 percent stake in Jackson’s recorded music and songwriting catalogs. That includes not only the estate’s share of megahits like “Beat It” and “Bad,” but also the music publishing assets that are part of Jackson’s Mijac catalog, among them songs written by Sly Stone and tracks made famous by artists like Ray Charles and Jerry Lee Lewis.The deal is said to value Jackson’s assets at $1.2 billion or more, according to the two people, who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about it. Even so, it leaves some of the estate’s interests in other lucrative Jackson-related businesses off the table, like the Broadway musical “MJ,” Cirque du Soleil’s Jackson-themed shows, and a biopic in the works that is set to star Jaafar Jackson, a son of Jackson’s brother Jermaine.The transaction is said to leave the estate a significant degree of control over the catalog. That contrasts with many other blockbuster catalog deals in recent years, like those with Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Paul Simon. While those sales sometimes include finely negotiated parameters over how an artist’s work can be used in the future — say, in commercials or political endorsements — they generally hand over management of songs to a buyer.Representatives of Sony and the Jackson estate declined to comment on the deal, which was first reported by Billboard. When asked about the news of the deal, John Branca, who was Jackson’s entertainment lawyer in life and has been the co-executor of Jackson’s estate, said: “As we have always maintained, we would never give up management or control of Michael Jackson’s assets.”Primary Wave, a music company that owns a minority stake in Jackson’s music publishing interests, was not a party to the transaction; a representative of Primary Wave declined to comment.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 Woman King’ Surprises With $19 Million at the Box Office

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      The Gina Prince-Bythewood historical drama, starring Viola Davis, did at least 25 percent better than analysts had expected.It doesn’t have to be all sequels and superheroes.“The Woman King,” an original war drama starring Viola Davis, collected a strong $19 million in ticket sales for Sony Pictures Entertainment over the weekend, at least 25 percent more than analysts had expected. It was the best September opening for a similar film — pedigreed, awards-oriented, based on historical events — since Clint Eastwood’s “Sully” in 2016.Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood from a screenplay by Dana Stevens, “The Woman King” focuses on the Agojie, an all-female warrior troop in Africa in the 1800s. The trailer and other preview materials for the film prompted calls for a boycott on social media over concerns that it glossed over or ignored aspects of the slave trade. But “The Woman King” received rapturous reviews. More important, ticket buyers gave the PG-13 movie an A-plus grade in CinemaScore exit polls, which bodes well for “you’ve got to go see it” word of mouth.With little competition for older ticket buyers in the weeks ahead, “The Woman King” could ultimately generate in the vicinity of $100 million in the United States and Canada, box office analysts said. “These movies play to healthy multiples during their holdover weeks,” said David A. Gross, who runs Franchise Entertainment Research, a film consultancy.“The Woman King” cost roughly $50 million to make, not including marketing, with Sony and eOne joining to pay for it.About 58 percent of the audience for “The Woman King” was over the age of 35, according to Sony, with 39 percent over 45. Black moviegoers made up 59 percent of the audience, with white ticket buyers the second-largest group.The R-rated “Barbarian” (from 20th Century Studios, a Disney division) was second at the domestic box office over the weekend, with about $6.3 million in ticket sales, for a two-week total of $20.9 million. The low-budget slasher prequel “Pearl” (A24) arrived in third place, collecting $3.1 million. More