Director Geoff McGann has joined the roster of V12 Commercials, a division of Studios V12, Santa Monica. McGann’s experience spans the agency and production house sides of the business. He served as a creative at Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, Ore., and directed for such production houses as bicoastal HSI Productions and Los Angeles-based A Band Apart Commercials before returning to the agency arena as a creative director at Ogilvy & Mather, Los Angeles. McGann then started his own production boutique, prior to linking with V12….Kirk Souder has been named president/executive creative director at Publicis & Hal Riney, San Francisco. Souder, who co-founded agency Ground Zero, Marina del Rey, Calif., left that shop in 2001….Directors Jimmy Diebold and Dinh Long Thai have signed with bicoastal Treat for worldwide representation. The directors will be repped as a team as well as individually….Partners Paul Newman, Jim Moran and Gary Bonilla have formed CO-OP, an advertising and design company in New York….Robert Beitcher has been named president of Woodland Hills, Calif.-headquartered Panavision, effective April 14. He comes over from Technicolor Creative Services, where he served as president, based in its Burbank office, since 2000…. Director/DP John Behring has signed with Kandoo Films, a Sherman Oaks, Calif.-based creative boutique/entertainment advertising company….Harpoon Pictures, New York, has secured director Michael Abt for exclusive U.S. representation….
“Mickey 17” Tops Weekend Box Office, But Profitability Is A Long Way Off
"Parasite" filmmaker Bong Joon Ho's original science fiction film "Mickey 17" opened in first place on the North American box office charts. According to studio estimates Sunday, the Robert Pattinson-led film earned $19.1 million in its first weekend in theaters, which was enough to dethrone "Captain America: Brave New World" after a three-week reign.
Overseas, "Mickey 17" has already made $34.2 million, bringing its worldwide total to $53.3 million. But profitability for the film is a long way off: It cost a reported $118 million to produce, which does not account for millions spent on marketing and promotion.
A week following the Oscars, where "Anora" filmmaker Sean Baker made an impassioned speech about the importance of the theatrical experience – for filmmakers to keep making movies for the big screens, for distributors to focus on theatrical releases and for audiences to keep going – "Mickey 17" is perhaps the perfect representation of this moment in the business, or at least an interesting case study. It's an original film from an Oscar-winning director led by a big star that was afforded a blockbuster budget and given a robust theatrical release by Warner Bros., one of the few major studios remaining. But despite all of that, and reviews that were mostly positive (79% on RottenTomatoes), audiences did not treat it as an event movie, and it may ultimately struggle to break even.
Originally set for release in March 2024, Bong Joon Ho's follow-up to the Oscar-winning "Parasite" faced several delays, which he has attributed to extenuating circumstances around the Hollywood strikes. Based on the novel "Mickey7" by Edward Ashton, Pattinson plays an expendable employee who dies on missions and is re-printed time and time again. Steven... Read More