Upfront Takeaways

►Four takeaways from the big 4 networks’ upfront presentations. As the industry shifts to prioritize streaming, unveiling a fall schedule for a broadcast network (and even promoting new shows) has taken a back seat, Lesley Goldberg writes.

--"As the TV industry continues to inch closer to a return to pre-pandemic normalcy, Disney, NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS and even the “nimble” Fox have shifted the focus of their upfront presentations to reach a point where some didn’t even bother to unveil fall schedules or trailers for new programming as the shift to streaming and a unified portfolio takes hold." The story.

The remainder of the upfronts news...

►The advertising-supported tier of HBO Max will launch the first week in June at $9.99 per month, the company said Wednesday. The name, “HBO Max With Ads,” and the pricing details were announced as part of WarnerMedia’s upfront presentation to advertisers.

--The ad-supported tier of HBO Max is seen as a crucial piece of the company’s strategy to grow its streaming business. During WarnerMedia’s (pre-recorded) upfront presentation, Kilar added that the ad-backed option will be “the most brand-safe, elegant experience for advertisers, across all of television.”

--At $9.99, HBO Max With Ads is $5 per month less expensive than the standard, ad-free version of HBO Max, but it is still priced higher than some competitors. Peacock’s ad-supported tier is $5 per month, Discovery+ is $5 per month too, while Hulu’s ad-supported tier is $6 per month and Disney+, which is ad-free, is $8 per month. The story.

+Chad is returning to TBS. The Nassim Pedrad comedy series has been renewed for a second season, the WarnerMedia-backed basic-cable network announced Wednesday as part of its upfront presentation.

--Also returning for additional seasons is TBS’ Wipeout revival from Endemol Shine North America with host and exec producer John Cena; and TruTV’s Fast Foodies, from Warner Bros. Unscripted TV and Shed Media. Also returning is AEW, which will move from TNT to TBS in January 2022. More.

+CNN's originals slate: The cable news channel is getting into natural history genre with Patagonia, and expanding the travel-food genre pioneered by Anthony Bourdain and continued by Stanley Tucci. More.

The Return Of Movie Magic?

►Kevin Feige, J.J. Abrams, Arnold Schwarzenegger call for return to movie theaters: “We are back.” At an in-theater event in Century City, a coalition of Hollywood studios and theaters promoted moviegoing as the pandemic eases and the summer box office approaches, Pamela McClintock reports.

--Producer Jason Blum closed out the lengthy presentation that teased dozens of summer titles. “I would stay for any of the movies previewed here today,” he said. “There is buzz in the creative community is about movie theaters opening. That’s where most artists want to see their work.”

He also addressed shifting business models and “crazy corporate consolidation” especially of the past week. “It puts us at this intersection of recovery and change,” Blum said. “My head is spinning and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to make of it.” The story.

In other film news...

+Cher is getting the biopic treatment thanks to Universal and Oscar-winner Eric Roth. Roth is set to pen the screenplay for a feature film about the life and career of the multi-hyphenate entertainer, whose decades-long career has spanned music, television, fashion and film. Mamma Mia! producers Judy Craymer and Gary Goetzman are set to produce the project, having worked with Cher on the Mamma Mia! sequel, Here We Go Again. The story.

+Amid COVID turmoil and low wages, feature producers form union. The new group led by It Follows producer Rebecca Green aims to establish health and pension plans, basic minimums and a clear definition of what producers do. "It's become a hobby of the rich people," secretary Chris Moore (Manchester by the Sea) says. The story.

+The Batgirl movie project has found its director. Or, rather, in this case, its directors. Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, the duo behind the 2020 hit Bad Boys for Life, have closed a deal to steer Warner Bros.’s DC feature centering on Barbra Gordon, the daughter of Gotham City police commissioner James Gordon. Christina Hodson, who wrote Bumblebee and is in the Warners fold with her screenwriting on Birds of Prey and The Flash, penned the script for what is being planned as movie for HBO Max. The story.

+Julia Louis-Dreyfus will star in the A24 feature Tuesday, which is described as a “mother-daughter fairytale.”Irish actress Lola Petticrew will play Louis-Dreyfus’ onscreen daughter, with Arinzé Kene also stet for the project. More.

+Also: Amazon Studios has struck another deal for worldwide rights to a Hollywood studio film waylaid by the pandemic: Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. The streamer announced early Tuesday that it will release the movie exclusively on Prime Video on Sept. 17, 2021, in more than 240 countries and territories. More.

+Richard Newby writes about the "sense of relief" of returning to a movie theater: "But of course, going to the movie theater isn’t just the movie itself. It’s the whole package: the booming audio, the perfectly set lighting, and of course, the trailers. Let me tell you, friends, watching the trailers for F9, Black Widow and The Suicide Squad on a phone or laptop doesn’t hold a candle to seeing them on a theater screen. And perhaps for that reason, the hype of getting to see big-budget blockbusters in movie theaters again, seeing something small scale like Spiral felt like an appetizer for the summer to come." The column.

Quincy Jones: THR Icon

►THR Icon: Quincy Jones reflects on his career, Michael Jackson and why he wouldn’t work with Elvis. The musical maestro inaugurates the THR Icon series with his famously candid takes on Hollywood racism and drug use, his formidable exes and his powerful Silicon Valley pals: "Richard Branson and Paul Allen and Elon are trying to get me to go with them to space."

--What brought you to Hollywood during the mid-1960s?

"They called me to do Gregory Peck’s Mirage [in 1965] and I came out here. I was dressed in my favorite suit, and the producer came out to meet me at Universal. He stopped in his tracks — total shock — and he went back and told [music supervisor] Joe Gershenson, 'You didn’t tell me Quincy Jones was a Negro.' They didn’t use Black composers in films. They only used three-syllable Eastern European names, Bronislaw Kaper, Dimitri Tiomkin. It was very, very racist. I remember I would be at Universal walking down the hall, and the guys would say, 'Here comes a shvartze' in Yiddish, and I know what that means. It’s like the N-word. And Truman Capote, I did In Cold Blood , man. He called [director] Richard Brooks up, he said, 'Richard, I can’t understand you using a Negro to write music to a film with no people of color in it.' Richard said, 'F*ck you, he’s doing the score.' I did, and I got nominated for an Oscar."

--Do you miss those days of jazz?

"Yeah, I just enjoyed it, man. I learned very early why God gave us two ears and one mouth, wants us to listen twice as much as we talk, or he would have given us two mouths, not two ears. There’s 12 notes that have been floating around the universe for 720 years now, and we have those same 12 notes that Brahms, Bach and Beethoven had. When I [moved to Paris in 1957 and studied with famed music theorist Nadia] Boulanger, I saw Stravinsky every day. He was with her, too." The interview.

►Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first TV series as a leading man is officially a go. Netflix has ordered eight episodes of the untitled show, described as a global spy adventure series centered on a father and daughter (Schwarzenegger and Monica Barbaro). The project from Skydance TV and creator Nick Santora (Amazon’s Reacher, CBS’ Scorpion) will be the Terminator star’s first scripted series. The story.

+Julie Plec is creating a new vampire universe for Peacock. The Vampire Diaries franchise co-creator is adapting author Richelle Mead’s beloved young adult book series Vampire Academy as a scripted live-action drama for Peacock. Plec and her longtime collaborator Marguerite MacIntyre will serve as co-showrunners on the drama, which has received a straight-to-series order at NBCUniversal’s streaming platform. The story.

+HBO Max’s Green Lantern has zeroed in on an actor to play Alan Scott, with Jeremy Irvine, who led the Bourne TV spinoff Treadstone, in talks for the role of the comic book hero. Scott is one of the higher-profile gay characters in the DC Universe, although that is only a relatively recent development. More.

►A BBC bombshell: An independent investigation has found that journalist Martin Bashir used “deceitful” methods in securing a famed 1995 BBC television interview with Princess Diana. The investigation, launched last year following pressure from the family of the late Princess, found that Bashir used fake documents to gain Diana’s trust and convince her to speak to him.

--The interview, for the BBC’s Panorama program, in which Diana spoke frankly about the problems in her marriage to Charles, the Prince of Wales, was a global media sensation. Tens of millions of viewers tuning in to watch Diana make her infamous declaration that there were “three of us in this marriage,” in reference to Prince Charles’ long-time mistress, now wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. The story.

►How will the WarnerMedia-Discovery merger impact Comcast? Wall Street analysts are chiming in on challenges for NBCUniversal's streamer Peacock and European pay TV giant Sky, with several defending the stock after a Monday drop, Georg Szalai writes.

--CFRA Research’s Tuna Amobi told THR that “Comcast’s NBCU and ViacomCBS might understandably be open for potential M&A opportunities” after the big Discovery-WarnerMedia deal, but noted they were “arguably not an immediate strategic imperative for their respective streaming platforms.” The story.

+Another big win for John Malone: Britain’s Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) has given its final approval of the planned 50:50 joint venture, to be created in a merger valued at ($31.4 billion) $44 billion, between Liberty Global’s cable operator Virgin Media and Telefonica’s mobile firm O2. More.

+Meanwhile: In a securities filing Wednesday afternoon, Lions Gate Entertainment, the parent company of the independent studio Lionsgate and the Starz pay-TV/streaming service, said that Discovery CEO David Zaslav is stepping down from its board of directors, effective immediately.

Casting roundup: The Sex And The City revival And Just Like That… has enlisted Grey’s Anatomy  and Madam Secretary  favorite Sara Ramirez with the Tony-winning actress set to play the franchise’s first nonbinary character... Tim Burton has cast his new Wednesday Addams for Netflix’s forthcoming live-action Addams Family offshoot drama Wednesday. Yes Day and You grad Jenna Ortega will star in the series...

In other news...

--Paul Mooney, the pioneering comic, writer and actor, has died. He was 79. Mooney died Wednesday at 5:30 a.m. at his home in Oakland, California.

--Amid film release date changes, magazines face cover chaos: “Do you think it will move again?”

--The 98-year old Hollywood Sign is getting a very 21st century treatment: an NFT.

--Hugh Grant, Michael Sheen, Steve Coogan, Armando Iannucci, Neil Gaiman and Salman Rushdie are among the big names who have signed an open letter warning of the “severe” threat to U.K. public service broadcasters, such as the BBC, from global streaming giants and the conservative British government, led by Boris Johnson.

--For the 74th Festival de Cannes, attendees won’t be partying like it’s 2019. The Cannes Film Festival and its accompanying film market have published new COVID-19 safety protocols ahead of the 2021 festival —set for July 6-17—and while organizers are confident the show will go on, expect a more somber affair than in Cannes’ past.

--The 2021 Tribeca Festival has added Steven Soderbergh’s crime drama No Sudden Move as its centerpiece film, with the HBO Max and Warner Bros. movie set to receive a world premiere screening at the New York event on June 18.

--Call it “The One With Actual Footage.” This time it’s the real deal. This is not last week’s brief preview video that merely teased the backs of the Friends cast. This is a full two-minute trailer from HBO Max’s eagerly anticipated Friends: The Reunion special.

What else we're reading...

--"2 years after being named CEO of Fox, Lachlan Murdoch is pulling all nighters to prove he is a worthy successor of his father" [Insider]

--"How a review changed both Sarah Silverman and our critic" [N.Y. Times]

--"Cable guys team up as the global streaming war intensifies" [Bloomberg Businessweek]

--"Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance invest in Rumble video platform popular on political right" [WSJ]

Today's birthdays: Cher, 75, Tony Stewart, 50, Timothy Olyphant, 53, Louis Theroux, 51, Busta Rhymes, 49.