World Movie News: The Last 24 Hours
Skydance goes live, the London and Busan Film Festivals open, Artificial gets first reactions, AI films cash in at Astana & composer George Fenton is mourned.
Morning, all. While the dudes at the Paramount–Warner Bros. merger get to work, today the festival season really kicks in, with two of the world’s big ones opening within a day of each other.
Skydance is officially a thing: As expected yesterday, the $110 billion merger closed but only after Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan turned down a last-minute attempt to halt it. The combined company’s shares moved to the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SKYD. Under the settlement, Paramount has promised to produce 30 films in each of the first two years and can’t sell or close the Paramount or Warner Bros. businesses. The honeymoon will be brief. The new company starts out with nearly $90 billion in debt and plans $6 billion in merger savings, and executives confirmed that some of those savings will come as redundancies before long. Billed as a “creative-first home”, it will presumably keep a few creatives on the payroll. As I mentioned yesterday, the new owners also inherit the Digger box office problem, so lots to keep the office lights on late at night.
London Film Festival opens tonight: Although I’ve been attending the pre-festival press screenings, the 70th BFI London Film Festival opens to the public this evening at the Royal Festival Hall with Elsinore: a film I get eyes on first in just an hour or two’s time. Andrew Scott plays Ian Charleson, who played Hamlet at the National Theatre in 1989, months before his death. The LFF runs until 18 October and closes with Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut. This is a fun time to be walking around central London with lots of limos with blacked out windows passing by, making you wonder what A-lister is looking at you from the inside!
First reactions to Artificial: Luca Guadagnino’s OpenAI drama Artificial has had its first reactions, and the word choices range from “provocative” to “downright horrifying”. One critic calls it his best film in a decade. Andrew Garfield plays Sam Altman, with Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati, Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, Mark Rylance as Geoffrey Hinton and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk. Simon Rich wrote the script and Damon Albarn composed the score. It also appears on the London festival’s gala list. I suspect the Barinholtz casting will be the most scrutinised thing at the festival.
Busan kicks off: The Busan International Film Festival opened on Tuesday, running ten days with 247 official selections from 59 countries. Kim Jong-kwan’s The Table: Day and Night opened the festival, and Alfonso Cuarón and Fan Bingbing were among the guests on the red carpet. Michelle Yeoh collected the Asian Filmmaker of the Year award. The bigger news is that Busan has gained “A-list” festival status, and the Academy has made the winner of its Competition strand eligible for the international feature Oscar race. That makes it one of the few festivals with a direct line to the Academy. South Korea’s own entry this year is Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love, a film also showing here in London.
AI films, with a very large cheque: In Kazakhstan, the Astana AI Film Festival wrapped up last week. It drew 8,067 entries from 125 countries and billed itself as the world’s largest competition for films made with artificial intelligence. Its prize fund is $1 million, and Euronews reports that a Latvian filmmaker took home the €400,000 Grand Prix. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that’s the future of cinema or a very well-funded screensaver.
George Fenton, 1949–2026: The composer died on 5 October, aged 76. His family said he died “unexpectedly”, without giving a cause. He was Oscar-nominated five times, for scores including Gandhi, Cry Freedom, Dangerous Liaisons and The Fisher King, and he wrote the music for David Attenborough’s The Blue Planet. His first film credit was the 1971 romantic drama Private Road, and he was photographed at last year’s London Film Festival. Director Nicholas Hytner remembered him with affection on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. His music will keep playing for a very long time.
Birthdays: Mary Badham, Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird and an Oscar nominee at ten, turns 74 today. Also celebrating are Dylan Baker (67), who played Dr Curt Connors in the Spider-Man films and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke (58), who scored Suspiria.
That’s all for today.
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