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Exclusive: Mentorship Matters, a year-long mentorship program created by showrunners to help boost opportunities for emerging diverse writers, has selected 19 scribes for 2024-2025.

Now in its third year, the program, sponsored by Screencraft and Coverfly, includes a year of consistent, in-depth mentorship and creative advocacy from a committed showrunner. It also includes guidance with developing and polishing an original writing sample along with panels and seminars with high-level industry professionals.

The 2024-2025 Mentees were selected by showrunners from over 700 applicants with varying experiences and backgrounds. They include Miida Chu, Casey Seline, Samantha Lee, Mahalia Latortue-Pridgett, Jackie Akiko Cloud, Stephen Nolly, Philippe Bowgen, Renee Cunningham, Taylor Henriquez, Sejal Pachisia, Mike Wells, David Aguilar-Rodriguez, Jamie Holt Aguilar-Rodriguez, Monica Cecilia-Lucas, Cassidy Lee, Joshua Kazemi, Richard Scott, Adriana Ducassi and Nick Ducassi.

“With less shows being made, budgets being slashed, writers rooms getting even smaller, and so many fellowships losing their funding, it’s...

Exclusive: Black Label Media has acquired film rights to The Strange, the 2023 sci-fi thriller novel by Nathan Ballingrud, enlisting Aisha Porter-Christie (Amazon MGM’s Citizen) to adapt the screenplay and J.D. Dillard (Devotion) to direct.

The project reunites Dillard with Black Label Media on the heels of Devotion, his historical war epic for Columbia Pictures, which the company produced.

The Strange is set in New Galveston, Mars in the year 1931. In the desolate frontier of a Martian colony, 14-year-old Anabelle Crisp embarks on a perilous quest through the desert, vowing revenge on the man who doomed her father to the gallows and stole her prized possession — the last known recording of her mother’s voice. The book is said to evoke the gritty, lawless atmosphere of True Grit combined with the raw intensity of Mad Max, following a young girl’s relentless search for justice as she battles ruthless outlaws...

Cyberpunk 2077 is said to be getting several adaptations, including a live-action TV series. So where do things stand now? Its developers have an update.

CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 is surely one of the more cinematic videogames of modern times. Part Blade Runner, part Neuromancer, it features motion-captured performances from the likes of Keanu Reeves and Idris Elba and has already spawned one incredible anime adaptation in the form of 2022’s Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.

While the Polish game studio behind it has now decamped part of its team to America to begin work on a sequel, Cyberpunk 2077 is a world that is ripe for further adaptation and interpretation. That’s why it was exciting to hear a year ago that Cdpr had partnered with Anonymous Content to begin developing twin adaptations of the game – one animated, one live-action.

As first reported by Vgc, CD Projekt joint CEO Michał Nowakowski used a...

Tokyo Vice producer Alex Boden talked about next steps for inbound production in Japan, including the need to expand the crew base, during his MPA/Dhu/Tiffcom masterclass at Tokyo International Film Festival.

And the need for more crew couldn’t be more urgent as Japan’s Visual Industry Promotion Organization (Vipo) revealed that ten projects have already been approved for the country’s new 50% location incentive.

Max/Wowow’s Tokyo Vice, which filmed two seasons in Japan from 2020-2021 and 2022-2023, served as a test case for the incentive, which was officially launched in late 2023. During his masterclass, Boden outlined some of the challenges the production faced when it first came to Tokyo, including securing notoriously difficult locations such as Akasaka, and finding enough experienced bilingual crew.

“But I would say that it’s so important that we’ve established this precedent,” said Boden, whose producing credits also include...

Apple TV+ series’ Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters and Neuromancer, and a feature from Tokyo Vice director Josef Kubota Wladyka are among the latest projects to be granted funding from Japan’s location production incentive programme.

The second season of action-adventure series Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters will qualify for the incentive as it is set to film on location in Japan for several days in November. The series, based around Japanese icon Godzilla, is largely shooting in Australia, having relocated from Canada’s British Colombia where season one was primarily filmed.

Japan’s Toho Co. licensed the rights to Legendary Entertainment...

Briana Middleton and Stella Everett have been cast in leading roles for the feature adaptation of “Ride or Die,” the short film by filmmaker Josalynn Smith.

Smith serves as writer and director for the feature, executive produced by Datari Turner of Foxxhole Productions. Smith will also produce alongside Matthew Keene Smith.

The film follows Paula (Middleton), whose California dreams intertwine with a reunion with her crush Jamie (Everett). A casual errand becomes a cathartic journey through the midwest, where a budding romance is transformed by a plot for vengeance.

Middleton was recently announced as the co-lead opposite Callum Turner in the Apple+ series “Neuromancer,” based on William Gibson’s classic sci-fi novel. She can be seen as the lead role in the Apple+/A24 Feature “Sharper” with Julianne Moore, Sebastian Stan, Justice Smith and directed by Ben Caron. She made her feature film debut in Amazon Studios’ George Clooney-directed adaptation of “The Tender Bar,...

John Carpenter's 1981 sci-fi action flick "Escape From New York" is a hugely influential dystopian cult classic that inspired everything from the "Metal Gear Solid" video games to William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk novel "Neuromancer." It's a fantastic showcase for everyone involved and went on to spawn a less-successful but cult-appreciated sequel, but making "Escape From New York" was a unique challenge for co-writer and director John Carpenter, who had a very specific vision in mind. That meant that unfortunately, some sequences ended up on the cutting room floor. One of the most famous examples is an opening sequence with a bank heist that showed Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken trying to help his fallen comrade and getting arrested in the process, but Carpenter felt that it humanized the almost inhumanly stoic Snake too much.

Some of the footage has been found and fans have gotten a peek at Snake's lost partner and the extended,...

The Streaming Wars are over and there is a clear winner — surprise, surprise, it's Netflix. Joining the pile of companies reconsidering this whole streaming thing is Apple TV+, which is now vowing to stop throwing so much money at shows no one watches. Apple TV+ is watched and used about as much as U2's "Songs of Innocence" was listened to when it got released on iTunes for free, with Bloomberg reporting that Apple TV+ "generates less viewing in one month than Netflix does in one day."

When every studio and company began launching its own streaming service, there was an outcry over the return of cable but worse, which is something no one liked and is the reason so many of us flooded to Netflix in the first place. However, the overabundance of streamers also came with the opportunity for variety and specialization. Just as Hulu had long been...

Corpse Crusaders: "In the popular imagination, zombies are scary, decomposing corpses hunting down the living. But since the 1930s, there have also been other zombies shambling across the panels of comic books—zombies that aren’t quite what most people think zombies should be. There have been zombie slaves, zombie henchmen, talking zombies, beautiful zombies, and even zombie heroes.

Using archival research into Golden Age comics and extended analyses of comics from the 1940s to today, Corpse Crusaders explores the profound influence early action/adventure and superheroic generic conventions had on shaping comic book zombies. It takes the reader from the 1940s superhero, the Purple Zombie, through 1950s revenge-from-the-grave zombies, to the 1970s anti-hero, Simon Garth (“The Zombie”) and the gruesome heroes-turned-zombies of Marvel Zombies. In becoming immersed in superheroic logics early on, the zombie in comics became a figure that, unlike the traditional narrative uses of other monsters, actually...

Forty years ago, author William Gibson brought the world a cyberpunk novel called Neuromancer – and an adaptation of that story has been trudging its way through development hell pretty much ever since. Versions of a feature film adaptation have passed through the hands of directors like music video maker Chris Cunningham, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and The Blob‘s Chuck Russell, Torque‘s Joseph Kahn, Cube‘s Vincenzo Natali, and Deadpool‘s Tim Miller. An adaptation of Neuromancer is currently moving forward as a 10-episode series that’s set up at Apple TV+, and we’ve previously heard that BAFTA Award-nominee Callum Turner of Masters of the Air and The Boys in the Boat will be playing the lead character, Henry Dorsett Case. Now Deadline reports that Briana Middleton of Sharper and The Tender Bar is taking on the role of Case’s partner Molly,...

Briana Middleton, who starred alongside Julianne Moore and Sebastian Stan in the 2023 Apple TV+ film Sharper, has been tapped as the female lead in Neuromancer, the streamer’s series adaptation of William Gibson’s classic sci-fi/cyberpunk novel.

First ordered to series in February and spanning 10 episodes in its first season, Neuromancer follows Case (to be played by Masters of the Air‘s Callum Turner), a damaged, top-rung super-hacker who is thrust into a web of digital espionage and high-stakes crime with his partner Molly, a razor-girl assassin with mirrored eyes, aiming to pull a heist on a corporate dynasty with untold secrets.

Exclusive: Briana Middleton (Sharper) has been tapped as the co-lead opposite Callum Turner in Neuromancer, Apple TV+’s new sci-fi drama based on the award-winning novel by William Gibson.

Created for television by Graham Roland and Jd Dillard, Neuromancer follows a damaged, top-rung super-hacker named Case (Turner) who is thrust into a web of digital espionage and high stakes crime with his partner Molly (Middleton), a razor-girl assassin with mirrored eyes, aiming to pull a heist on a corporate dynasty with untold secrets.

A co-production between Skydance Television, Anonymous Content and Apple Studios, Neuromancer will also be produced by Drake’s DreamCrew Entertainment, with Roland serving as showrunner and Dillard set to direct the pilot episode.

Roland and Dillard executive produce alongside David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, and Matt Thunell for Skydance Television; Anonymous Content; Drake, Adel ‘Future’ Nur and Jason Shrier for DreamCrew Entertainment; Zack Hayden and, Gibson.

Neuromancer marks...