News

Exclusive: Participant and Conduit Films have teamed to produce a documentary on the iconic doll line American Girl created by Pleasant Rowland, who has granted film rights to her story and a behind-the-scenes look at the popular characters she created for the first time.

Directed by Conduit Films’ founder Christy Wegener, All American Girls features a sit-down with Rowland, as well as never-before-seen footage and insights from the American Girl brand’s authors, insiders, enthusiasts and journalists. Stop-motion graphics aid the filmmakers as they venture behind the curtain of the brand, which shaped the lives of generations of Americans in the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s, and maintains cultural relevance today.

The doc illuminates not only the unparalleled influence of American Girl, but also controversies and a radical edge now associated with a historically wholesome brand, as it’s found a new wave of popularity. Nearly four decades since its inception,...

Fox Entertainment has unveiled plans for an upcoming drama series called “Billionaire Apocalypse.” The show will explore themes of wealth inequality and social responsibility. It was created by Jay Carson, known for his work on “The Morning Show.”

“Billionaire Apocalypse” will follow the richest man in the world after a financial crisis causes his wealth to disappear. With his money gone, he loses power and control over his employees and family. The series looks at how this affects the relationships of those who relied on his wealth.

Carson will write and produce the show. He has experience in both politics and entertainment. Previously, Carson worked as a spokesperson in the U.S. Senate and for President Bill Clinton. Later he produced “House of Cards” for Netflix and created “The Morning Show” for Apple TV+.

Hollywood star Hugh Jackman and veterans Lawrence Bender and Kevin Brown will also serve as executive producers.

Fox said late Sunday night that it is developing a drama series tentatively titled Billionaire Apocalypse that hails from The Morning Show creator Jay Carson and counts Hugh Jackman among its executive producers.

The drama, from Fox Entertainment Studios for the Fox network, is written and executive produced by Carson, creator and writer of Apple+’s Emmy-nominated Morning Show. Also serving as exec producers are Lawrence Bender (Flesh and Bone, Pulp Fiction) and Kevin Brown (Flesh and Bone, Trumbo).

The logline for the drama: “The richest man on the planet, 200 of his employees, and his family are forced to flee to his private island in the wake of a global financial collapse, where the employees and family members — who he’s treated as afterthoughts for decades — quickly realize he’s no longer rich and thus no longer in charge.”

The project, which has received a script commitment, is being distributed worldwide by Fox Entertainment Global.

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

Steven Soderbergh's "Contagion" was one of the best films of 2011, but, for reasons that continue to not make a good deal of sense to me, Warner Bros. did not run a vigorous awards campaign for it in what wound up being an unusually uncompetitive year (which is how uninspired tripe like "The Artist" wins the Oscar for Best Picture). The film's baffling lack of a prestige play that year was underscored nine years later when, while in Covid lockdown, people the world over discovered that Matt Damon starred in a movie about a pandemic that was disquietingly true to our then situation. This was a great, prescient piece of work from a master filmmaker. It shouldn't have taken a real-life catastrophe to drive this home.

People are still catching up with "Contagion" three years after the first round of...

Predicting the winner of the Best Documentary Feature Oscar becomes a lot easier on December 17 when the academy announces the 15 films that make the shortlist. Those semi-finalists will be culled from the more than 100 titles that qualified this year for consideration. (Scroll down for the most up-to-date 2025 Oscar predictions for Best Documentary Feature.)

To winnow those down to a manageable number, the academy adds newly eligible documentary feature to a virtual screening room available to all 500-plus members of the documentary branch. While all members are encouraged to watch as many of these as they can, one-fifth of the voters are assigned each title. Each branch member will submit a preferential ballot listing their top 15 choices.

All of these ballots are collated to determine the 15 semi-finalists. Branch members are then encouraged to watch films on that list which they haven’t seen yet before casting another preferential ballot with their top five choices.

Netflix has given a straight-to-series order to a corporate thriller set in Silicon Valley with Rosamund Pike in the lead role.

The series, currently titled “Thumblite,” hails from writer Scott Z. Burns with Scott Galloway executive producing along with Michael Ellenberg of Media Res.

The official logline for the series states that the show “examines the schemes, rivalries, visions and obsessions of the power brokers and their underlings as they vie for control of the most powerful industry the world has ever known.”

Burns is the creator, writer, executive producer, and showrunner on “Thumblite.” Pike will executive produce in addition to starring. Along with Ellenberg and Galloway, Greg Jacobs is also an executive producer, with Lindsey Springer of Media Res executive producing as well.

Pike currently stars in the Amazon high fantasy series “The Wheel of Time.” Her other recent credits include the films “Saltburn,” “I Care A Lot,” and...

2073, writer-director Asif Kapadia’s sui generis feature, is nothing if not ambitious. It offers viewers a numbingly bleak vision of the future 51 years from now, illustrated by a fictional framing device starring Samantha Morton, then explains how things got/will get that bad through actual recent archival footage and original interviews with an assortment of thinkers, journalists and activists. By comparison, George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 looks as jolly as a Peppa Pig picture book.

You can’t help but admire Kapadia’s commitment to feel-bad cinema, his refusal to end on any false note of hope. It’s all part of a deliberate strategy, according to an interview in the film’s press notes, to motivate the audience to do something, anything, to stop all this happening. But given how sinister the forces sowing the seeds of our future destruction are — rising autocracy, unregulated technology and looming climate...

“2073” can’t come soon enough.

The upcoming feature, distributed by Neon and inspired by Chris Marker’s influential “La Jetée” (which was also the basis for Terry Gilliam’s “12 Monkeys”), imagines a bleak future world, using footage and interviews from our present to drive the point home.

You can watch the first trailer for Asif Kapadia’s hybrid feature, combining non-fiction and fiction elements, below:

“2073,” which premieres out of competition (in the non-fiction category) this week at the Venice Film Festival, stars Samantha Morton and Naomi Ackie in a narrative that features time travel, alongside talking head interviews with Maria Ressa, Carole Cadwalladr, Rana Ayyub and Ben Rhodes.

It’s a fascinating (and extremely depressing) conceit that will see director Kapadia, who has helmed documentaries like “Senna” and “Amy” but also narrative projects like episodes of David Fincher’s “Mindhunter,” combine two disciplines in exciting and unique ways.

Prime Video is the place to be in August with an incredible month of new releases. The month kicks off with the premiere of the animated series Batman: Caped Crusader on Aug. 1. The series was produced by J.J. Abrams and The Batman‘s Matt Reeves. We also return to Middle Earth this month with the premiere of The Rings of Power season 2 on Aug. 29.

As far as movies go, the Amazon original Jackpot! arrives on Aug. 15 starring Awkwafina and John Cena. This comedy is set in a world where Lottery winners have to survive until sundown in order to claim their multi-billion dollar jackpot – anyone who kills them before that gets to claim their prize.

The Hobbit trilogy also joins the Prime Video library this month, as do 21 and 22 Jump Street, Superman I-iv, Superman Returns, Night Swim, Drive Away Dolls, and 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Here’s everything coming...

The galactic explorers of the Star Trek franchise have a lot to worry about, from failing weapon shields to unfriendly alien races to the possibility of going on an away mission and getting stranded in a hostile environment. One thing they don’t need to worry about is money: By the time we meet the characters of the original ‘60s TV series, visitors from the planet Vulcan have shared replicator technology with the people of Earth, such that Starfleet exists in the post-scarcity era. To call Star Trek’s vision of the world socialist might be too simplistic, but aspects of its setting align with early 20th century revolutionaries’ futurist theories.

By contrast, Futurama’s vision of the 31st century could never be mistaken for utopian: New New York has suicide booths on every corner; mutants are forced to live in the sewer; and while robots have taken on some...

Paramount has announced the lineup of movies, TV shows, and live sports coming to the Paramount+ streaming service in August. The Paramount Plus August 2024 schedule includes Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the final season of Seal Team.

With new English Football League and Serie A deals, CBS Sports brings even more thrills and drills to Paramount+. And to balance all that team spirit with cutthroat competition, renowned drag queens from 12 countries contend for the crown in RuPaul’s Drag Race Global All Stars.

In August, Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo continue their pizza-fueled antics when Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles premieres. The reimagined animated series—which picks up the foursome’s story after last year’s box-office hit Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem—will delight fans of all ages.

The 2023 film’s main voice cast returns, along with mutants voiced by Post Malone, Rose Byrne,...

Chicago – Michael P. Nash is a filmmaker on a mission. As searing heat bakes the country this summer, with extreme weather like severe tornadoes and the recent Galveston floods in its wake, the realities in Nash’s prescient 2010 documentary “Climate Refugees” is coming to our own shores. The veteran writer/director is currently working on the followup film “Chasing the Truth,” partnering with Leonardo Di Caprio and his father George.

“Climate Refugees” unveils for the first time the human face of climate change, following the stories of millions of displaced individuals worldwide. This this multi-award winning documentary stands out as a portrayal of the present-day consequences of climate change on humanity. While Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” addressed the causes of climate change, Nash’s film concentrated on the immediate effects experienced by individuals and communities worldwide, casting a light on the human face of our changing climate.

On...

The storm-chasing sequel Twisters is racking up positive reviews (currently at 84 percent “Fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes) and continues a much-needed summer of Glen Powell. The film chronicles an unprecedented outbreak of violent storms that tear through the American heartland, with characters spouting plenty of meteorological jargon.

But the one thing Twisters doesn’t have: a reference to climate change.

This is rather surprising. The possible impact of climate change on tornadoes is complicated and still being figured out, but scientists seem to agree tornado patterns are changing (with more tornadoes happening on the same days and more tornadoes happening outside of Tornado Alley, even if the number of tornadoes overall is unchanged). And, in any case, the American Red Cross recent told ABC News that “the climate crisis is forcing the American Red Cross to respond to nearly twice as many large disasters as we did a decade ago.”

So...

Set on a trash-filled, uninhabitable Earth in 2805, Wall-e tells the story of a lonely robot left behind to clean up the mess — and 16 years after the Pixar film’s release, that robot has become something of an environmental icon.

In the film, Earth has been destroyed by corporate greed and consumerism, with humans abandoning the planet and finding solace on spaceships. Trash-compacting robots have been tasked with returning the planet to its former state, but that mission has largely failed, and Wall-e is the only one left. But everything changes when he meets and falls in love with Eve, a sleek robot who’s been sent to Earth to find proof that life is once again sustainable.

At the recent premiere of Pixar’s Inside Out 2, Pixar president Jim Morris — who produced Wall-e — reflected on the film today, insisting the studio didn’t make it “with a message movie in mind” and noting,...

In April, Paramount Pictures senior vp Douglas Rheinheimer, who oversees facility operations for the lot, spoke at the U.S. Department of Energy’s annual buildings summit. It’s a key gathering for C-suite execs, government officials, policy experts and property owners who are thinking seriously about the practicalities of a sustainable future. Rheinheimer’s highly technical presentation about refrigerants — chemicals used in Hvac systems — touched on a point of Paramount pride: How the company had installed an alternative energy plant on its lot which has reduced CO2 emissions by a self-reported 35 percent, saving millions of gallons of water in the process. “It’s been a good thing all around,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter of the implementation. “Financially, environmentally, and also for our workforce.”

These days, there’s little trace of climate denialism among the Hollywood studios. Officially, they’re all in on facing the crisis, including by zeroing out their own carbon footprints.

“I think it’s time to make movies relevant,” said Ali Abbasi to the cheering crowd at the May 20 Cannes premiere of his Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice. “It’s time to make movies political again.”

Hollywood doesn’t seem to be listening. Despite the enthusiastic response to The Apprentice internationally — the film, starring Sebastian Stan as Trump and Succession’s Jeremy Strong as his master-of-the-dark-arts political mentor Roy Cohn, has been sold in nearly every territory — the movie is still struggling to land a U.S. distributor. That’s despite, as Abbasi calls it, this fall’s “promotional event, the U.S. election,” that would seem to provide an ideal launchpad, and plenty of free publicity, for any domestic distributor.

A U.S. deal for The Apprentice is complicated by the fact that Kinematics, the company backed by pro-Trump billionaire Dan Snyder, put up equity for the film against...

The UK’s Documentary Film Council (Dfc) has elected its first national board of representatives, which includes execs such as Storyville lead commissioner Emma Hindley, Doc Society co-director Sandra Whipham and filmmakers Jessi Gutch and Andy Mundy-Castle.

The Dfc was set up last summer just prior to Sheffield DocFest to lobby for the sector and to highlight challenges facing UK documentary.

The Dfc is a co-operative that is owned and run by its membership which comprises 706 people across three tiers. Of these, 264 are voting members.

The election was announced in March and closed on May 31, with 31 candidates putting themselves forward...

Film festivals in North America have launched some of the greatest movies ever – whether nonfiction or fiction. Telluride premiered Free Solo, Slumdog Millionaire, and Argo; Sundance debuted sex, lies and videotape, Napoleon Dynamite, An Inconvenient Truth, and this year’s Oscar winning documentary 20 Days in Mariupol; the Toronto International Film Festival premiered I Am Not Your Negro and Ray.

The importance of festivals to the industry is beyond question, but many of the most celebrated ones on this continent are facing a moment of crisis. Post-pandemic financial struggles are plaguing Sundance, TIFF, and Hot Docs among others, and the situation with the latter festival is serious enough that it may have to fold.

Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast digs into the precarious state of film festivals in our latest episode, examining that vital question with guests steeped in the field: Ken Jacobson, executive director of the Hot Springs Documentary...

Behind the glitz and glamour of film production, there are an increasing number of eco warriors in the industry who are tirelessly working behind the scenes to ensure not only that productions become more environmentally sustainable long term, but are also engaged in educating the sector and promoting climate storytelling on screen.

Emmy-winning and Oscar nominated producer Lydia Dean Pilcher, who founded New York-based production company Cine Mosaic, was one of the earliest advocates for sustainability in the entertainment sector. After becoming a mother, and inspired by Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, the producer-writer-director — whose credits include The Darjeeling Limited, Queen of Katwe and Radium Girls (a climate narrative that she co-directed) — immediately felt compelled to be an ambassador for greener solutions in the industry.

Lydia Dean Pilcher

She trained at Gore’s The Climate Reality Project before co-founding the Producers Guild of America’s PGA Green and GreenProductionGuide.

Ricky Strauss is exiting from his role as head of marketing at Apple TV+ after leading the department for nearly a year and a half. An Apple spokesperson confirmed Strauss would be stepping down from his Culver City-based role.

Another insider familiar with Strauss’ moves indicated that the exec is looking to pursue other creative endeavors. It is unclear whether the now-vacated position will be filled and who will step in if so.

Hired in January 2023, Strauss’ responsibilities included overseeing marketing campaigns, advertising and promotions for Apple TV+ programming, working under Tor Myrhen, Apple’s vice president of marketing communication.

Prior to his time at the tech giant, Strauss had spent nearly a decade at Disney and held the position of president of content and marketing for Disney+, helping steer the launch of the streaming service in 2019. He had also served as president of programming for Hulu and Disney+. Prior to those positions,...

Ricky Strauss is leaving Apple TV+ after a 16-month stint as Head of Marketing.

In his role, he was involved in consumer marketing campaigns, creative advertising, media and promotions across original series and films for Apple TV+ as part of Apple’s Marketing Communications team under VP Tor Myhren. It is unclear whether his position will be replaced.

A 30-year veteran, Strauss joined Apple after spending more than nine years at Disney, most recently as president of content and marketing for Disney+ at launch and president of programming for Hulu and Disney+.

Prior to that, Strauss was president of marketing for the Walt Disney Studios, leading the marketing strategy and campaigns for Disney films.

Strauss joined Disney after seven years as president of Participant Media, where he oversaw such films as Oscar winners The Help, An Inconvenient Truth, The Cove and Waiting for Superman.

As Neil Young once sang, the now shuttered Participant is gone, but not forgotten.

Some of Tinseltown’s leading talents like Regina King, George Clooney, Ava DuVernay, Daniel Dae Kim, Martin Sheen, Regina King, Alfonso Cuaron, Matt Damon, Diego Luna and more have joined up with the National Domestic Workers Alliance to express “gratitude and pride” in the work put out by the Jeff Skoll-created shingle over the last two decades. At the same time, the A-Listers are imploring the ever increasingly conglomerated industry to keep their eyes on the social impact prize.

“As we say goodbye to Participant, we must underscore that values-based storytelling is needed now more than ever; to expand the room for debate, to open our hearts to experiences vastly different from our own, to immerse us in the beauty of humanity’s complexities,” the star-studded letter says. “And in the face of unprecedented change and uncertainty,...

This is not the documentary renaissance we hoped for. Despite its 2023 Oscar win for “Navalny,” CNN pulled back on non-fiction production. Non-fiction programming at Showtime Networks, which produced Oscar-nominated “Attica” in 2022, is no more.

“The New York Times Presents” series, which produced titles like “The Killing of Breonna Taylor” and “Framing Britney Spears,” is being phased out in favor of integrating non-fiction video into the media brand. Hot Docs is on the ropes; Participant, which produced documentaries like “An Inconvenient Truth,” “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” and “American Factory,” closed last month.

And then there’s Netflix, which is still very much in the documentary game under Adam Del Deo, Netflix VP of original documentary films and limited series — and can afford to be with nearly 270 million global subscribers. However, it’s a specific sort of gameplay: For tight, high-quality nonfiction work that’s heartwarming, or thrilling, or stars a celebrity,...

As contractions and cost-cutting continue to hit the nonfiction space, a major producer is changing its documentary strategy: The New York Times.

The Times is restructuring its documentary unit, which is behind its The New York Times Presents series, which has produced nearly four dozen documentaries, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. It is changing the unit with the goal of further enmeshing non-fiction video filmmaking into the company’s existing sub brands and verticals.

Several sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that the Times will be reducing its documentary output. Rumors have been swirling in the nonfiction community about the future of the Times‘ documentaries for some time. The media company released over 20 films in 2019 under their New York Times Presents banner while it released only four films in 2023.

“We just premiered a new film from The New York Times Presents last week, with two additional films presently in production, as...

President Biden on Friday announced that he would be awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 19 recipients, including a handful of names familiar to the world of media and entertainment.

The Medal of Freedom is the highest civilian honor that the President can bestow, and is given to those “who have made exemplary contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the United States, world peace, or other significant societal, public or private endeavors.”

This year’s list of honorees include Oscar-winning actress Michelle Yeoh, who “continues to shatter stereotypes and enrich American culture,” according to the White House.

It also includes Phil Donahue, the journalist whose daytime talk show transformed syndicated TV and become one of the most influential programs of its era.

Other honorees include Bloomberg founder Michael Bloomberg, former Vice President (and the focus of An Inconvenient Truth) Al Gore and Olympic swimmer Katie Ledecky.

You can...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on Twitter and Instagram.NEWSAn Inconvenient Truth.Participant, the socially conscious production company, has closed, which filmmaker Julie Cohen called “devastating news to anyone who cares about documentaries.” Their twenty-year track record includes many nonfiction films, such as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), but also narrative features like Spotlight (2015) and Roma (2018).New data suggests that Hollywood production has gradually rebounded after last year’s WGA and SAG strikes, though not to the levels of the “peak TV” streaming bubble.The Archival Producers Alliance has drafted best practices for the use of generative AI in documentary, cautioning against the “danger of forever muddying the historical record.”In PRODUCTIONMartin Scorsese is reportedly developing a Frank Sinatra biopic, to star Leonardo DiCaprio as the crooner and Jennifer Lawrence as Ava Gardner.

The news last week that Participant Media would be shutting down shocked the entertainment industry, but it hit the documentary community with particular force.

Going back 20 years, the production and distribution company has supported premium nonfiction content on a major scale, backing documentaries that took on important social and political issues ranging from climate change to race in America, education, the national security state, the U.S.-Mexico drug war, and much more. Along the way, it earned Oscars for Citizenfour, An Inconvenient Truth and American Factory, and Oscar nominations for a slew of others including Flee, Rbg, The Square, and Food, Inc.

On the latest episode of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, we discuss the developments at Participant and what they mean for a nonfiction field already been reeling from a sluggish acquisition market and slashed budgets at streamers. Our guests are Oscar-nominated filmmakers Betsy West and Julie Cohen,...

Editors note: Filmmaker and producer Davis Guggenheim directed 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth featuring Al Gore. The film won the Oscar and helped put Jeff Skoll’s social-impact-driven production company then known as Participant Media on the map, and also sounded an alarm about climate change that has become more pronounced since the film was released. In addition to documentaries, Participant was also responsible for Oscar Best Picture winners Spotlight and Green Book, and Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, another timely topic. Guggenheim is a co-founder of Concordia Studio and most recently directed and produced Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, which won four Emmys including for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special. He is the only person to direct and produce three distinct films ranking in the top 100 highest-grossing documentaries of all time. Here he penned a guest column for Deadline after learning Participant was shuttering.

Oliver Stone is unveiling his long-awaited documentary “Lula” at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

Stone filmed the documentary about thrice-elected Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva that encompasses the ruler’s incarceration between 2018 and 2019 and his return to power. Stone was in production on the feature in 2021 during which time Lula da Silva contracted Covid while filming in Cuba.

“Lula” is the latest addition to the star-studded Cannes lineup, which also includes new films from Paul Schrader, Francis Ford Coppola, Yorgos Lanthimos, Andrea Arnold, David Cronenberg, Ali Abbasi, Sean Baker, Jia Zhangke, and Paolo Sorrentino.

Stone teased “Lula” to Jacobin earlier this year, saying that the film would be released “hopefully before the end of the year.”

“As you know, I had him in the other films with Hugo Chávez. And of course, he’s gotten a very dramatic story, with his going to jail after his second term. Now...

At first, I was shocked by the news that Participant Media was dying. Such an appealing company. Smart. Mindful. Vibrant. Forward-thinking. The producer of intelligent films like Spotlight and Green Book, with a distinctly progressive message.

How could this be?

Then it finally hit me. Whatever else may have happened—announcing the shutdown, proprietor Jeff Skoll cited “revolutionary” changes in the entertainment business—Participant went under, I believe, because most of high-end Hollywood jumped into the company’s basically sound but modestly sized boat. The purpose-film niche was swamped.

It’s almost hard to remember that 20 years ago, when Participant was founded, the notion of a self-consciously message-oriented, activist film company was actually novel.

But, cinematically speaking, it was a much different world in 2004. The top movie that year was Shrek 2—not much message there. Culturally, the big story was a religious film, The Passion of the Christ. That hasn’t happened since.

The sudden end of Participant Media came as a shock to many in the entertainment industry, but it hit documentary filmmakers particularly hard, with some concerned that backers for serious-minded, issue-driven projects are becoming ever more scarce.

Since its founding in 2004, the company — which sought to bring stories that could spark change to a wide audience — has been a staunch supporter of documentaries focused on social and justice issues, funded by the largesse of a billionaire, ex-eBay president Jeff Skoll.

None of its other nonfiction titles quite achieved the heights of 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth, released just two years after the company was formed: The Davis Guggenheim-directed film about Al Gore’s climate change slideshow rocketed to become the third-highest-grossing doc ever at the time and focused mainstream attention on climate change, inspiring studies about its impact. “That’s why we exist,” Skoll told The Hollywood Reporter in 2006, as Truth became a sensation.

End of an era, end of a business model, end of a gravy train, end of the world. There were plenty of mixed emotions this week in response to the closure of Oscar-winning production company Participant, and at the very least the industry has agreed something has come to an end.

When Variety broke the news Tuesday that billionaire Jeff Skoll’s 20-year-old company will shut down — after fetching 21 Oscars and introducing a business model that prioritized social impact a bit more than profits – many in the industry were rattled. Not just that mid-level, standalone financier and producer had left the market, but what that means for the viability of movies and TV shows that ask vital questions about justice and the humanity’s future.

“The end of Participant Media is devastating news to anyone who cares about documentaries,” director Julie Cohen wrote bluntly on X. She’s the co-director...

The shocking news that Participant, a leading producer of specialized/independent features with a socially relevant interest as well many top documentaries, is shutting down immediately hit the industry hard Tuesday. With a profile of co-produced films over the last 20 years that rivals any other company’s slate, this was devastating news.

Founder and owner Jeff Skoll’s decision to shut down his company will impact the production of a certain kind of specialized film, particularly in the documentary field. Never a distributor, and most often collaborating with other production companies, Participant was still a significant force for most of its two decades.

But what’s the real impact of this move? Jonathan Dana, a veteran distribution executive and producer, commented, “It didn’t fail. It just ran its course.” That typifies much of the insider reaction, which relates to the specific purpose and goals of the company.

‘Spotlight’ © Open...

Jeff Skoll, the billionaire philanthropist who launched Participant 20 years ago to champion socially conscious films, is closing down the impact producer-financier behind Spotlight, Roma, and Green Book.

In a memo to staff on Tuesday morning eBay co-founder Skoll said, ”I founded Participant with the mission of creating world-class content that inspires positive social change, prioritizing impact alongside commercial sustainability. Since then, the entertainment industry has seen revolutionary changes in how content is created, distributed and consumed.”

The statement hinted at what may have driven the Canadian’s “very difficult decision”. Studios and streamers are scrutinising their spend more than ever,...

After 20 years, Participant is shutting down.

Founder Jeff Skoll announced the news in a note to staff Tuesday, writing, “after much reflection, I have made the very difficult decision to wind down company operations.” During its run, the company was behind best picture winners Green Book and Moonlight, and docs such as An Inconvenient Truth and Rbg.

EBay co-founder Skoll founded the company in 2004 with a dual mission of making money and inspiring social change through entertainment (the company later moved into television and other ventures). It has helped produce and finance a slew of high-profile awards contenders. Its films won 21 Oscars and its series won 18 Emmys. It earned more than $3.3 billion at the box office. Veteran studio executive David Linde has been running Participant since 2016; previous execs involved in Participant include Ricky Strauss.

It was heavily involved in the nonfiction space, with its shuttering sure to send ripples through that community.

Participant, the media company behind films like “Spotlight,” “Green Book,” “Roma,” and many more, is shutting its doors after 20 years in operation.

Jeff Skoll, who founded the company in 2004, informed the staff in a memo (obtained by IndieWire) that Participant would “wind down company operations.”

Nearly all of Participant’s roughly 100 staffers are being let go with no new content or production in the works. Only Participant’s library of 135 films remaining.

“I founded Participant with the mission of creating world-class content that inspires positive social change, prioritizing impact alongside commercial sustainability,” Skoll wrote. “Since then, the entertainment industry has seen revolutionary changes in how content is created, distributed and consumed.”

Participant’s 135 titles, half of them documentaries and also including five series, have earned $3.3 billion at the global box office. Participant has produced two Best Picture winners and earned 21 Oscars total from 86 nominations, as well as 18 Emmys on 62 nominations.

Financier and producer Participant is shuttering after 20 years. Founder Jeff Skoll alerted staff at 10:30Am, Deadline has confirmed.

The production’s m.o. was to bring content to the world that was socially conscious, read their Oscar Best Picture winners Spotlight and Universal’s Green Book, as well as DreamWorks’ Oscar winner Lincoln. All in Participant counts 135 films, five series, 21 Oscars including two Best Pictures, four Best Documentaries and two Best International Features, 18 Primetime Emmys and north of $3.3 billion in global box office.

Skoll told staffers, as you can read below, that it was a “very difficult decision” and stems from it being “the right time for me to evaluate my next chapter and approach to tackling the pressing issues of our time.” He also mentioned that he hasn’t been involved in the day-to-day management of the studio.

Skoll is a Canadian engineer, billionaire who was the first president of eBay.

Participant, the 20-year-old film and television production company whose mission was to inspire social justice and humanitarian action, is shutting down.

Founder Jeff Skoll broke the news to a staff of roughly 100 on Tuesday. Established in 2004, Participant co-produced or co-financed a number of notable movies including best picture Oscar winners “Spotlight” and “Green Book,” as well as Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” and the breakthrough documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Almost all of Participant’s employees will be dismissed, multiple sources familiar with its plans said, and no new content development or production will be pursued. What’s left will be a skeletal holding company overseeing the Participant library, which represents interests in the 135 films it has made.

“I founded Participant with the mission of creating world-class content that inspires positive social change, prioritizing impact alongside commercial sustainability. Since then, the entertainment industry has seen revolutionary changes in how content is created,...

Documentary filmmaking has never been a profession one enters into to get rich — though for a brief period it seemed possible.

Cable expanded documentary’s reach to wider audiences in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and films like “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “March of the Penguins,” and “An Inconvenient Truth” became legitimate box-office breakthroughs, but nonfiction features on the whole remained something of a stepchild within the larger Hollywood ecosystem until 2017, when Netflix acquired Brian Fogel’s “Icarus” for $5 million.

At the time, the deal was one of the biggest ever for a non-fiction film. And it was followed by even bigger deals: In 2019 Netflix shelled out $10 million for Rachel Lears’ “Knock Down the House.” The following year Apple TV+ and A24 partnered to buy Jesse Moss’ “Boys State” for $10 million, and in 2021 Searchlight and Hulu bought Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s “Summer of Soul” for $12 million.

On the surface it seemed like people,...

Pluto TV, Paramount’s free streaming service, has revealed its April highlights. The Pluto TV April 2024 schedule celebrates the service’s 10th anniversary, highlights star-studded dramas, and marks the halfway point to Halloween with April Ghouls, where you’ll find spooky marathons across its channels.

Pluto TV is the leading free streaming television service, delivering hundreds of live, linear channels and thousands of titles on-demand to a global audience.

The Emmy Award-winning service curates a diverse lineup of channels in partnership with over 400 international media companies. It offers a wide array of genres, languages, and categories featuring movies, television series, sports, news, lifestyle, kids, and much more.

Pluto TV April 2024 Programming

10th Anniversary

Pluto TV is giving the gift of great TV and movies for its birthday.

April 1 at 8 p.m. Et on Action Drama: 10-Hour Seal Team marathon.

April 1 on Pluto TV Spotlight: 2014 Movie Marathon featuring Big Eyes, Noah,...

Optician Juan Solano (seen in his Brooklyn shop Solano Optical Boutique) shares his story (along with Veronica Garcia-Hayes and Peter Dunlap-Shohl) in Laura Green and Anna Moot-Levin’s intimate and informative Matter Of Mind: My Parkinson’s

April is Parkinson’s Awareness Month. At the 95th Academy Awards in 2023, Woody Harrelson presented Michael J Fox the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award Oscar for his career, and The Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. The documentary on Fox’s life, Still: A Michael J Fox Movie, directed by Davis Guggenheim (Oscar winner for An Inconvenient Truth) was shortlisted for this year’s Oscar.

Anna Moot-Levin with Laura Green and Anne-Katrin Titze on Juan Solano: “Juan we connected with because we were very interested in following someone through the process of Dbs [Deep Brain Stimulation] surgery"

Laura Green and Anna Moot-Levin’s intimate and informative Matter of Mind: My Parkinson’s, written by Jason Sussberg,...

Sundance film festival: Captain Marvel directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have made a bizarrely misjudged hodgepodge of gore, needle drops and nostalgia

More often than not, the opening night slot at Sundance has become more curse than blessing, too many films living and dying in just one night, barely to be seen again. Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s sci-fi comedy The Pod Generation anyone? How about the Michelle Williams and Julianne Moore melodrama After the Wedding? Daisy Ridley’s suicide drama Sometimes I Think About Dying? Or maybe that sequel to An Inconvenient Truth that you didn’t even know existed? This year’s sacrificial lamb, the 80s-set anthology Freaky Tales, is nothing if not confident in its ability to make an impact, asserting itself as an experience that won’t easily be forgotten.

Acting as its own hype man, the film begins with a block of narrated...

Six directors of standout 2023 documentary features gathered at The Hollywood Reporter’s Los Angeles offices in mid-November for THR’s annual Documentary Roundtable.

Among them were two revered veterans with Oscars to their name: Davis Guggenheim (2006’s An Inconvenient Truth), who helmed Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, a film about the life and struggles of the beloved actor who was stricken at a young age with Parkinson’s disease; and Roger Ross Williams (2009’s Music by Prudence), director of Stamped From the Beginning, a film about the history of anti-Black racism in America. Meanwhile, a first-time filmmaker, twice-Grammy-nominated producer D. Smith, profiled four Black transgender women who have performed sex work in Kokomo City.

Oscar nominee Nicole Newnham (2020’s Crip Camp) made a documentary portrait of a person once famous but now largely forgotten: The Disappearance of Shere Hite, about the titular sex researcher and her landmark 1976 book about female sexuality.

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie tells the story of Fox’s career and battle with Parkinson’s disease. Director Davis Guggenheim directed the film and interviewed Fox. Though Guggenheim had final cut, he was worried Fox would ask him to remove some archival material that didn’t reflect well on him.

“It was after Back to the Future opened, after Teen Wolf opened,” Guggenheim said at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Documentary. “So he had the top two films in the country which was unheard of, and was returning to Family Ties, the number one comedy. There’s this footage of him shot behind the scenes. He’s being kind of a jerk.”

Fortunately, to Guggenheim’s surprise, Fox was all for it.

“His first question was, ‘That scene where I’m an a**hole, where did you find that? It’s fantastic,’” Guggenheim remembered. “I suspected if I had...

Four top documentary filmmakers will reveal secrets behind their projects when they join Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” Q&a event with 2024 awards contenders. They will participate in two video discussions to premiere on Tuesday, December 5, at 6:00 p.m. Pt; 9:00 p.m. Et. We’ll have a one-on-one with our contributing editor Charles Bright and a roundtable chat with all of the group together.

RSVP today to our entire ongoing contenders panel series by clicking here to book your free reservation. We’ll send you a reminder a few minutes before the start of the show.

American Symphony (Netflix)

Synopsis: Explores a year in the life of Grammy Award winning musician Jon Batiste.

Bio: Lauren Domino was an Oscar nominee for “Time.” Other projects have included “Alone,” “The Earth Is Humming” and “Black Folk Don’t.”

Bobi Wine: The People’s President (NatGeo)

Synopsis: Follows Ugandan opposition leader,...

For the 10th year in a row, the Scad Savannah Film Festival, the 26th edition of which ran from Oct. 21 through Oct. 28, was the place to be for documentary filmmakers and documentary lovers — specifically on Oct. 25, when The Hollywood Reporter presented and your humble correspondent hosted the fest’s Docs to Watch panel that brings together the directors of up to 10 of the year’s finest documentary features.

Over the past nine years, 45 films were nominated for the best documentary feature Oscar, 19 of which were first highlighted as Docs to Watch. And in seven of those nine years, one of the Docs to Watch went on to win the best documentary feature Oscar: 2015’s Amy, 2016’s O.J.: Made in America, 2017’s Icarus, 2018’s Free Solo, 2019’s American Factory, 2021’s Summer of Soul and 2022’s Navalny. (The other two eventual winners — 2014’s Citizenfour and 2020’s My Octopus Teacher — were not screened...

Documentaries have the remarkable ability to open our eyes to the world’s realities, challenge our preconceived notions, and transform our perspectives. In an age where information inundates our lives from various sources, these cinematic works offer a unique and intimate platform to engage with issues that matter.

Related: 7 Best Mind-Expanding Documentaries

Over the years, certain documentaries have left an indelible mark, altering the course of public perception and, in some cases, even driving real-world change. This article delves into ten must-watch documentaries that have wielded the power of truth to reshape the way we view the world around us.

“Blackfish” (2013)

A Deep Dive into Captive Marine Life

This documentary hit me like a tidal wave. “Blackfish” pulled back the curtain on how marine animals are treated in captivity, specifically focusing on orcas at SeaWorld. It’s not all fun and games; the film peeled away the glossy exterior to...

“Coda” stars and Oscar winners Marlee Matlin and Troy Kotsur have been chosen to host the 2023 Media Access Awards on November 7, marking the first time ever that two Deaf performers have presided as hosts over an awards show together. The awards were founded by Norman Lear in 1979 and annually honor artists and film and television projects that are inclusive of disabled characters and actors. This year’s ceremony will be held in Hollywood, airing December 3 at 9 p.m. Pt on Los Angeles public broadcaster Kcet and December 15 at 9 p.m. Pt over PBS SoCal.

Matlin won her Academy Award in 1987 as Best Actress for “Children of a Lesser God,” while Kotsur warned his as Best Supporting Actor in “Coda” starring alongside Matlin.

SEETroy Kotsur wins Best Supporting Actor Oscar for ‘Coda,’ makes history as first Deaf male champion

This year’s honorees were selected by the diversity committees of the...

Exclusive: Amy Israel, the respected Showtime Scripted chief, might be headed to Peter Chernin’s The North Road Company.

There is increased speculation that Israel, whose departure from Showtime after 12 years was just announced at the Paramount Global network, may be reuniting with her former boss, David Nevins, who joined The North Road in July as CEO.

Israel, who has an extensive background in both TV and film, has been in talks with North Road, I hear, but sources stressed that there is no deal in place. A rep for The North Road Company declined comment.

Israel joined Showtime Networks in 2011 as SVP, Original Programming and most recently served as EVP, Scripted Programming, overseeing for the development and creative oversight of original scripted series, including drama, comedy and limited series. She was the highest-level Showtime content executive to remain in her role following the major restructuring earlier this year when...

Seven filmmakers will benefit from one of the most generous grants in the documentary field, as the North Points Institute today announced the recipients of the inaugural Diane Weyermann Fellowships.

The fellowship, named for the late Participant executive and producer who championed the careers of many leading documentary filmmakers and their work, will provide $100,000 and 18 months of mentorship to each of three nonfiction projects and their filmmaking teams.

“The three supported projects were chosen out of 401 submissions from 70 countries, through a 6-month selection process that included the Points North curatorial team and a jury of veteran filmmakers and programmers,” according to a release. “The projects include: The Last Nomads, directed and produced by Biljana Tutorov, co-directed by Petar Glomazić, and co-produced by Quentin Laurent, Rok Bicek and Eva Kuperman. The film is a co-production of Serbia, Montenegro, France, Slovenia, Belgium, and Croatia; The Production of the World, a co-production of Canada and USA,...