THR's Women In Entertainment Issue

►On the cover: “Just go in and do your thing”: Hollywood’s most powerful women talk megadeals, bullying and perseverance at THR’s executive roundtable. Netflix's Bela Bajaria, Amazon's Jennifer Salke, Disney's Dana Walden and uber-creators Shonda Rhimes and Ava DuVernay get candid to Lacey Rose about their responsibilities and realities.

--Shonda Rhimes: "Jen was saying how grateful and fortunate she feels and I always like to point out that men never feel grateful or fortunate to be in the positions they are in. Men feel like they earned the right to be in the room. So, I like to say I don’t feel grateful or fortunate to be here. I earned my right to be here. I worked really, really hard just because I know that men say the same thing. But, yeah, there are totally doors that are not open yet. It would be ridiculous to suggest that everybody just throws open every door when they see a really annoying Black woman striding toward them, demanding her space."

--Bajaria: "I think there are a lot of misnomers about what travels and what doesn’t, and it’s a systemic problem. It is keeping people out of the room and out of being seen. In traditional Hollywood, people would say for years, “If you have shows with Black actors, they don’t travel globally, they won’t be as successful.” But if you look at When They See Us on Netflix, 50 percent of the audience was outside the U.S. Or if you look at something like Lupin from France, it has a Black lead and it’s traveled all over the world and broke records for us. Those two shows worked everywhere in the world."

--Salke: "The market is crazy, as you saw with the Knives Out deal. [Netflix paid $469 million for two sequels.] This is a full season of a huge world-building show [$465 million for one season of Lord of the Rings]. The number is a sexy headline or a crazy headline that’s fun to click on, but that is really building the infrastructure of what will sustain the whole series. But it is a crazy world and various people on this Zoom, mostly Bela and me, have been in bidding situations where it starts to go incredibly high. There’s a lot of wooing and we have to make decisions on where we want to stretch and where we want to draw the line. As for how many people need to watch Lord of the Rings? A lot. (Laughs .) A giant, global audience needs to show up to it as appointment television, and we are pretty confident that that will happen." The full roundtable.

+THR's  2021 Women in Entertainment Power 100: While the past 14 months may have seen a shift in the usual benchmarks for success, these execs, filmmakers, showrunners and multihyphenates rose above the turmoil with vision and resilience. Regina King, Donna Langley and, yes, Meghan Markle are among THR's annual list of women dominating a still-reeling industry. The complete list.
 

Golden Globes a Goner?

►Are the Golden Globes done for? As NBC pulls the plug on the 2022 honors, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association races to take steps to reform itself before the network decides to boot the awards show for good, Scott Feinberg writes.

--"What are the Globes without a TV platform? This is not the HFPA’s first time having to confront that question. In 1968, the FCC found that NBC had “substantially misled the public as to the basis on which [Golden Globe] winners were chosen and the procedures followed in choosing them,” prompting the network to drop the show." The story.

►Regina King has lined up her next directing project following her Oscar-nominated feature directorial debut, One Night in Miami. The actor and filmmaker will direct Bitter Root for Legendary. The film is an adaptation of the Images Comics title created by David F. Walker, Sanford Greene and Chuck Brown. The story.

►NBCUniversal makes big changes ahead of upfront. In retooling its red carpet coverage and pulling the plug on a late-night show, the new leadership regime is showing a willingness to change the status quo, Lesley Goldberg writes.The story.

Meanwhile, there has been a flurry of pickups and deals in the lead-up to the upfronts next week...

+Stacey Abrams has sold her new political thriller While Justice Sleeps to NBCUniversal. The Georgia politician and author’s novel was picked up after a bidding war by the NBCU-owned production company Working Title Television. The story.

+The truth is out there, and Demi Lovato is determined to find it. The Grammy-nominated singer-actress will star in a four-part limited unscripted series on Peacock, where she will investigate UFO reports. Unidentified with Demi Lovato follows Lovato “and her skeptical best friend Matthew and her sister Dallas, as they attempt to uncover the truth about the UFO phenomena. The story.

+The CW is bringing Olmec back to life. The broadcaster has ordered a revival of Nickelodeon’s beloved 1990s game show Legends of the Hidden Temple. The new version will feature adult competitors but retain many of the elements of the original game. More.

+Kiefer Sutherland is getting back on the case. The 24 and Designated Survivor grad will exec produce and star in an espionage drama that has been ordered straight to series at Paramount+. More.

+FXX has handed out a series order to an animated comedy called Little Demon, which will star Aubrey Plaza and Danny DeVito. The It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star’s daughter, Lucy DeVito will also star in the series, which centers on the relationship between the devil (Danny DeVito), a reluctant mother (Plaza) and her Antichrist daughter (Lucy DeVito). More.

+AMC is headed to space for its next original series. The cable network and its streaming outlet, AMC+, have greenlit Moonhaven, a six-episode suspense thriller set in a utopian community on the moon. Peter Ocko (Lodge 49, Black Sails) created the series and will serve as showrunner. More.

+Days of Our Lives will continue for several hundred more days on NBC. The network has given a two-season renewal to the daytime drama that will take the show through its 58th season. The pickup comes, as it has a few times in recent years, after extended negotiations with distributor Sony Pictures TV. More.

+Mike Showalter is changing his home base. The Search Party co-creator is extending his relationship with HBO Max and has inked a two-year, first-look deal with the WarnerMedia-backed streamer for his Semi-Formal Productions banner.Under the deal, HBO Max will have the first right of refusal on projects created and developed by the Wet Hot American Summer co-creator. More.

THR Talks

►Barry Jenkins and Nikole Hannah-Jones on the nuances of storytelling and trauma. The Underground Railroad director and Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project creator talk freely about Kanye West saying slavery was a choice, the TikTok calling for Black wizard stories, and the controversy of casting African actors over African American talent.

--Jenkins: "I feel like I made two movies. The one movie is the story of Cora Randall. She’s on this journey. It’s this big adventure, but it’s rooted in the condition of American slavery. That was the one movie. Then this other movie: I’m also aware of the power of the possibility of doing harm with these images. And so I’m making that in my head — I had to see it in order to not do it. Then there was this third thing that happened, which was [about] disconnection and erasure. I feel like we haven’t been allowed to really see our ancestors."

--Hannah-Jones: "I felt so many connections to my feelings and my fears in creating The 1619 Project. You have the weight of the subject matter, but you also have the weight of the obligation of doing right by the people, you know, our ancestors. I love that you talked about the Black gaze, because one of the things that I was determined to do from the beginning was, we were going to be completely unconcerned with how white people would feel or think about what we were doing. We were going to do the project that we needed to do. And if white people loved it and Black people hated it, we would have failed, period. Hopefully, a bunch of white folks would like it, but that wasn’t what I was thinking about." The complete conversation.

►Star Wars authors claim Disney royalties “fall through the cracks." Writers speak out with allegations that they’re owed money since the Lucasfilm and Fox acquisitions, while an activist task force goes public to reclaim pay. The story.

►Creators are the new currency. And they are a commodity in increasingly high demand. As digital influencers keep gaining in popularity, companies like YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok are increasingly leaning in and betting that their pathway to growth lies with these independent content producers. And the tech giants are putting their money where their mouths are, committing hundreds of millions of dollars to support, create and entice creators to produce for their platforms. The story.

►Fox Corp’s “key future focus” emerges: Streaming and sports betting. The Murdochs eye growth for the media giant with the acquisition of sports site Outkick and investment in ad-supported streamer Tubi. More.

►Ahead of the release of A Quiet Place II, John Krasinski and his Sunday Night banner have inked a first-look deal with Paramount.Sunday Night’s slate includes a new installment of the A Quiet Place franchise from Mud director Jeff Nichols and thriller Apartment 7A from director Natalie Erika James. More.

+Also: Amazon has inked Super Bowl champion Russell Wilson and Grammy-winning singer-actress Ciara to a first-look deal. Under the pact, the married duo will develop and produce scripted series and films via their Why Not You Productions for the company. More.

►Obituary: Norman Lloyd, the actor, producer and director whose collaborations with Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, Bertolt Brecht and Jean Renoir made him a legend — albeit an off-the-radar one — in Hollywood, died Tuesday morning. He was 106. The obituary.

►In Hollywood, is the press the new human resources? Studios and agencies shouldn’t wait to act on claims of bad behavior until the media start reporting on it, write Liz Alper and Deirdre Mangan, television writers and co-founders of grassroots group #PayUpHollywood. The guest column.

►Film review: Lovia Gyarkye reviews Spiral: From the Book of Saw, writing that the film "delivers when it comes to gore, if that’s your thing, and appropriately dour aesthetics — but not much else. That’s a shame, because the story’s themes, from the unreformable nature of the police department to the cost of integrity in a space that values power above all else, could not be more relevant. If the mission was, as Bousman has suggested, to create a Saw film driven by a strong narrative instead of gruesome torture, it hasn’t been fully accomplished." The review.

In other news...

--Edward Norton is sharpening his detective skills for Rian Johnson’s Knives Out sequel. Norton is in talks for the follow-up to the popular whodunit, joining Dave Bautista in what will be a starry ensemble.

--James Murdoch is getting in on the SPAC frenzy that has taken over Wall Street over the past year. Murdoch is the co-chairman of Seven Island Inc., a special purpose acquisition company seeking to raise $345 million from investors in an IPO. Murdoch’s partner in the venture is Uday Shankar, the former CEO of STAR India and chairman of The Walt Disney Company’s India businesses.

--Alt-rock veterans Foo Fighters, new wave pioneers The Go-Go’s, East Coast hip-hop icon Jay-Z, singer-songwriter north star Carole King, mercurial rock savant Todd Rundgren and Queen of Rock n’ Roll Tina Turner make up the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame's Class of 2021.

--Palestinian actress Maisa Abd Elhadi — who starred in Hulu’s Baghdad Central and last year’s Venice-bowing feature Gaza Mon Amour — has been injured after allegedly being shot by Israel police during a demonstration on Sunday in the city of Haifa.

What else we're reading...

--"How the Golden Globes went from laughingstock to power player" [N.Y. Times]

--"Who should John Mulaney be now?" [Vulture]

--"Donald Glover thinks fear of cancelation is to blame for boring films and TV. He’s wrong" [Vanity Fair]

--"Jake Tapper, Rat Pack novelist, likes to unwind with a martini and a mountain of research" [L.A. Times]

Today's birthdays: Rami Malek, 40, Jason Biggs, 43, Emilio Estevez, 59, Malin Akerman, 43, Tony Hawk, 53.