Commercial production company Superlounge has secured Deirdre Rymer and Rachel Paget of indie rep firm Blush to handle the West Coast. Additionally Ann Asprodites is on board to rep Superlounge in the Southeastern U.S….Marketing executive Jennifer Smith has been named senior VP and chief marketing officer at Avid, based in the company’s Burlington, MA headquarters. Reporting directly to Avid president and CEO Louis Hernandez, Jr., Smith will be responsible for driving all aspects of Avid’s worldwide market presence and growth, including its strategic positioning, go-to-market strategies, and all marketing disciplines within the organization. Her role will be vital in fulfilling the Avid Everywhere vision to help media organizations and content creators connect with their audiences more powerfully and efficiently than ever before through innovative technologies such as the industry-changing Avid MediaCentral Platform. Smith will also oversee Avid’s strategic collaboration with customers via the Avid Customer Association. Smith brings 15 years of senior management experience in technology marketing at major software companies both in the U.S. and internationally. She joins Avid from Progress Software, where she held increasingly senior leadership roles on the marketing team before becoming the company’s chief marketing officer and senior VP, and where she led a very successful re-branding initiative. Before her seven years at Progress, Smith held marketing leadership positions in several different companies in Europe, including Peoplesoft and Microsoft….
“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