Top 10 Picks of the Day – Friday 7 November
What To Know
- On Live With Kelly and Mark, Mark Consuelos played coy about the fate of his 9-1-1 character, tech billionaire Tripp Houser.
- Kelly Ripa expressed interest in Consuelos getting his own 9-1-1 spinoff series.
- Consuelos previously described Tripp as a reckless risk-taker whose decisions put others in danger during a dramatic space mission storyline.
From getting swallowed by a whale to launching people into space during a geomagnetic storm, Mark Consuelos‘ guest star stint on 9-1-1 has been nothing short of memorable.
“Tonight, I have to point out, is, I think, it’s my final episode of my arc on 9-1-1,” Consuelos told viewers on the Thursday, October 30, episode of Live With Kelly and Mark. “It comes to a thrilling conclusion.”
His wife and cohost, Kelly Ripa, has been such a fan of his 9-1-1 performance that she wants his character, tech billionaire Tripp Houser, to get his own spinoff. “I love you on this show,” she gushed before sharing her idea for the potential series. “You bumbling through outer space. The Bumbling Astronaut.”
Live executive producer Michael Gelman went on to ask Consuelos, “Do they kill you off?” Playing coy, he replied, “You gotta watch tonight.”
Ripa chimed in, adding, “Mark’s not gonna tell you. Yeah, you gotta tune in to see if he dies.”
However, Ripa claims to be just as clueless about Tripp’s fate as fans are. “I don’t even know if he dies. He’s told me nothing,” she insisted.
Disney/Christopher Willard
9-1-1 Season 9, which premiered last month, kicked off with the 118 saving Tripp’s life after he was swallowed by a whale while kayaking. Although the rescue was a group effort, Tripp rewarded Hen (Aisha Hinds) by inviting her on a spacewalk with other everyday heroes. Hen agrees and asks Athena (Angela Bassett) to join her.
Ignoring warnings from his staff of a dangerous geomagnetic storm, Tripp sends the group into the stars, only for things to go awry when debris causes their vessel to lose contact. The show’s October 23 episode ended with Hen, Athena, and their fellow astronauts taking shelter in the International Space Station, just as another wave of debris heads their way.
“Obviously, it’s an awful decision. Anybody who’s of sound mind would say, that’s really dangerous and there’s souls in that spaceship,” Consuelos exclusively told TV Insider earlier this month of Tripp’s reckless actions. “But I believe the way I justified it is that he had made a career of rolling the dice and steamrolling and taking big chances and always kind of landing on his feet.”
He continued, “He does ask, ‘What’s the percentage? What’s the percentage chance?’ And they said it’s 43.8%. I said, ‘I’ll take those odds.’ I’ve probably made decisions with worse odds than that and that’s the way he rolls. And so it’s as simple as that.”
Adding to the drama is the fact that Tripp’s fiancée, Tricia (June Diane Raphael), is one of the astronauts in danger. “Now that you bring that up, that’s really, he’s morally questionable, this guy, which I love,” he joked before describing Tripp and Tricia’s relationship as “transactional on both sides.”
“I think his relationships with people are probably all the same,” Consuelos explained. “It’s probably transactional, and he sees what this person can do for him, and he’s a bit of an egomaniac and a narcissist. So I don’t know if he considers other people that much.”
Live With Kelly and Mark, Weekdays, check local listings
9-1-1, Thursdays, 8/7c, ABC
Nine years and five seasons later, Netflix‘s flagship series is finally coming to an end. “Stranger Things” will debut its fifth and final season this November, and the streamer has released a new trailer for the installment, promising a huge final battle for the beloved cast of characters.
Set in the fictional small town of Hawkins, Indiana, during the nostalgic days of the 1980s, “Stranger Things” follows a group of civilians — ranging from adults to teenagers — who encounter threats from the Upside Down, an alternate dimension teaming with monsters. Season 4 saw the cast confront the mysterious Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower), an incredibly powerful telepath, in a battle that left Hawkins devastated and expanded the rift between the Earth and the Upside Down.
The trailer for Season 4 shows a bit of the fallout from the events of Season 4, as Hawkins is now under military quarantine from the United States government to contain the monsters of the Upside Down. In order to save the town, the kids agree to go on one final adventure to find and kill Vecna, who himself has plans involving Will Byers (Noah Schnapp).
The logline for the season reads: “The fall of 1987. Hawkins is scarred by the opening of the Rifts, and our heroes are united by a single goal: find and kill Vecna. But he has vanished — his whereabouts and plans unknown. Complicating their mission, the government has placed the town under military quarantine and intensified its hunt for Eleven, forcing her back into hiding. As the anniversary of Will’s disappearance approaches, so does a heavy, familiar dread. The final battle is looming — and with it, a darkness more powerful and more deadly than anything they’ve faced before. To end this nightmare, they’ll need everyone — the full party — standing together, one last time.”
“Stranger Things” first premiered in July 2016, receiving critical acclaim and becoming a massive word-of-mouth hit for the streamer. Currently, the fourth season is the most-watched season of TV in Netflix’s history according to its own internal metrics, only ranking behind Season 1 of “Wednesday” and the limited series “Adolescence.” The series has also spawned a large multimedia franchise, including an ongoing Broadway stage production, “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” and an upcoming animated series, “Stranger Things: Tales From ’85.”
The series was created by identical twin team Matt and Ross Duffer, who also showrun and executive produce the series via their Upside Down Productions banner. Following the conclusion of the final season, the two will depart Netflix for Paramount, where they signed a four-year deal to produce new content for the studio. Shawn Levy of 21 Laps Entertainment and Dan Cohen also produce.
Season 5 features a huge ensemble cast that includes Bower, Schnapp, Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Sadie Sink, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery, Maya Hawke, Priah Ferguson, Brett Gelman, Cara Buono, Amybeth McNulty, Nell Fisher, Jake Connelly, Alex Breaux, and Linda Hamilton. The season will be split into three parts: the first, consisting of four episodes, will arrive on November 26. Three more episodes will debut on Christmas, and the finale arrives on New Year’s Eve. Each volume will debut on the streamer at 5 p.m. PT/8 p.m. ET.
Watch the trailer for “Stranger Things 5” below.
Comcast leaders hedged their words carefully when pressed by Wall Street analysts about the company’s appetite for M&A activity amid the swirl of interest around Warner Bros. Discovery.
Mike Cavanagh, Comcast co-CEO, told analysts during Comcast’s third quarter earnings call Thursday morning that “the bar is high” for the company to consider a major merger of acquisition. But he didn’t rule anything out. He also indicated that Comcast’s ability to secure federal approval for any transaction would improve once the spinoff of its linear cable channels (other than Bravo) is completed later this year.
“The bar is very high for us to pursue any M&A transactions given how strongly we feel about the businesses we have, the strategies we’re pursuing and the opportunities we have ahead of us, so that continues to be an important anchor point for how we think about things,” Cavanagh said. “You should expect us to look at things that are trading in our in the space around our industry. It’s our job to try to figure out if there’s ways to add value.”
Cavanagh was pressed on how much the political situation in Washington, D.C. with President Donald Trump and his open hostility to Comcast is hampering the company in a significant way.
“The strategies we have are really sound and durable without M&A. That said the question about what’s feasible to get any deals through, obviously the fact that we’ve been taking the path of setting up as our cable network business to pursue strategies that didn’t fit inside the sort of the new NBC media business with great strength and assets and the cash flows there have with light leverage, and that is on track to happen,” Cavanagh said. “In light of that, what we’d be looking for and what we’re going to look like post-Versant spin, I think more things are viable than maybe some of the public commentary that’s out there.”
More to come
Japan’s animation industry grew by 14.8% to hit record revenues of $25BN (JPY3.8TR) in 2024, with much of the increase coming from overseas markets, according to a report presented by the Association of Japanese Animations (AJA) at TIFFCOM.
The report, introduced by Megumi Onouchi, AJA committee member and CEO of Japan’s HumanMedia Inc, also showed that overseas revenue accounted for 56% of the total – or $14.25BN (JPY2.17TR) – while Japanese domestic revenues pulled in $10.97BN (JPT1.67TR) accounting for 44% of total income.
Without the overseas portion, the industry’s revenues would have been pretty much flat in 2024, compared to the previous year when domestic income came in at $10.67BN for a 49% share.
Indeed, the report, which looked back at 22 years of data, clearly showed why Japan’s entertainment industry is increasingly focused on overseas expansion. Revenues from outside Japan first overtook local sales in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic when global streaming platforms started to accelerate distribution of Japanese anime overseas.
Local income took the lead again in 2021; was neck and neck with overseas revenue in 2022; but fell behind again in 2023 when overseas pulled in a 51% share. In 2024, the dominance of overseas revenue was clear, accounting for 56% of overall income, and is expected to keep rising.
“Overseas revenue is now climbing high and has not yet reached the peak. We believe it has potential to expand to even more markets,” said Onouchi. “We’re also seeing a rise in international events related to anime. There are currently 160 events across 50 countries, and the numbers are increasing.”
Onouchi also noted that much of the overseas revenue currently comes from licensing to streaming platforms, and that Japanese entertainment companies could see further growth by becoming more directly involved in secondary business activities in international markets, such as merchandising and events.
Japan’s government is positioning anime and related media as a core industry under its ‘New Cool Japan Strategy’, setting an ambitious target of reaching 20 trillion yen (or US$130BN) by 2033.
The TIFFCOM session during which the report was presented, ‘The Cutting Edge of Japanese Animation’s Global Expansion’, also included presentations from three leading Japanese animation studios – Bandai Namco (Gundam), Toho Global (Godzilla) and Studio4℃, about how they are taking animation properties into international markets.
Studio4℃ recently produced animated movie ChaO, which won the Jury Award in the feature films category at this year’s Annecy International Animation Film Festival. Eiko Tanaka, CEO and producer at Studio4℃, explained that the film was positioned for theatrical release in international markets and has already been lined up for release in more than 20 territories.
Maria Riva, the only child of Marlene Dietrich who as a rare contract player with CBS was one of the top television personalities in the medium’s early days of live, kinescope broadcasts, died Wednesday. She was 100.
Riva died in her sleep at the home of son Peter Riva in Gila, New Mexico, he told The Hollywood Reporter. She had been living with him since early last year.
William S. Paley’s favorite actress, Riva starred, often as a woman in peril, on such classic anthology series as Studio One, Lux Video Theatre, Suspense and The Philco Television Playhouse and on shows including Danger, Crime Photographer and Climax!
She quit acting in the late 1950s — she often described herself as a “Poor Man’s Dietrich” and admitted she never had a burning ambition to be an actress — but managed her mother’s glitzy one-woman Las Vegas act and global tours for many years.
A few months after Dietrich died in Paris in May 1992 at age 90, Riva published a book about her glamorous movie-star mother. “I consider myself a biographer, not the daughter,” she said in a 2009 chat for the Television Academy Foundation website The Interviews.
“I’m very proud of the fact I was able to step back as a biographer … what was wrong was wrong, what was right was right, what was great was great, what was brilliant was brilliant. [People] don’t understand how it is possible to be a child of an ephemeral creature that is beyond normalcy. It’s very difficult.”
Maria Riva (left) and mom Marlene Dietrich in 1947.
Courtesy Everett Collection
The only child of Dietrich and Rudolf Sieber, an editor and assistant director who later was put in charge of translating films for Paramount in Paris, Maria Elisabeth Sieber was born in Berlin on Dec. 13, 1924.
“But I never thought that was my name, because being the child of a very famous person, I was always ‘Maria, the Daughter of Marlene Dietrich,’” she said. “I actually signed it that way when I was a child.”
When she was 5, she “was imported” to Los Angeles to live with her mother, by then a huge star at Paramount Pictures.
Riva played Catherine the Great as a child — Dietrich portrayed the Russian monarch as an adult — in Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress (1934), then appeared in another film starring her mom, David O. Selznick’s The Garden of Allah (1936), an early Technicolor release.
Later, she was raped repeatedly by a woman who was the secretary of one of her mother’s lovers, she said.
Riva attended the Brillantmont International School in Switzerland and studied acting as a teenager at the Max Reinhardt Academy in Los Angeles at Wilshire & Fairfax, where the Academy Museum is now.
She then taught and directed there — her students included Elizabeth Taylor’s brother, Howard — acted on the radio with Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater and appeared on Broadway with Tallulah Bankhead in Foolish Notion in 1945.
After a brief first marriage and performing in Germany and Italy for two years as part of a USO troupe, she taught a graduate course in acting and directing at Fordham University and married scenic designer William Riva in 1947, while Dietrich was away in Europe.
When she complained to him about what she was seeing on television, he said to her: “’I’m so tired hearing you criticize this new profession. Why don’t you go and do something to make it better?’ And that’s why I went into television.”
She made her first TV appearance in 1951 on the anthology series Sure as Fate before signing a three-year contract for $250 a week with CBS, which sought to create a movie-style studio system. She acted often alongside John Forsythe and appeared on hundreds of TV episodes.
“There was a saying: You played to Mrs. Glutz in the Bronx,” she said. “People who knew nothing about acting, about the profession, would now get [their entertainment] for free in their home, and they should be glad to get whatever they got. So you played to a very low standard. Which was fine, because I had no talent.”
Still, she received Emmy nominations as best actress in 1952 and 1953, appeared in a “mirror-image” photograph with her mother on the cover of Life magazine in August 1952 and later turned down an opportunity to replace an ailing Imogene Coca on NBC’s Your Show of Shows.
Maria Riva starred with John Forsythe on a 1952 episode of ‘Studio One.’
Courtesy Everett COllection
Riva also did TV commercials for Alcoa in which she would demonstrate how to use the company’s new product — that would be aluminum foil — and was paired with famed product pitchwoman Betty Furness when CBS tested color television for the first time.
At the height of her career as the TV industry moved west, she quit, not wanting to return to Los Angeles. “I had grown up in a world where everybody was beautiful, everybody was rich, everybody had everything that everybody else in the world wants, and nobody was really happy. And I learned a very valuable lesson, that it’s not what it looks like on the surface.”
She did tour in stage productions of Tea & Sympathy and Country Girl and noted that, “outside of Jackie Gleason and the great comedians, I was probably the first person that drew people as a television personality into another media.”
Riva returned to acting to play Mrs. Rhinelander — the wife of Robert Mitchum’s character, Bill Murray’s boss — in Scrooged (1988), directed by Richard Donner. Her first-born son, the late J. Michael Riva, was the film’s production designer, and another son, John-Paul Riva, was a production assistant in the art department.
She acted again in All Aboard (2018), a short film directed by grandson J. Michael Riva Jr.
Riva also co-authored a 2001 photography book with previously unseen images of her mother, edited a 2005 volume of Dietrich’s poetry and wrote a 2017 period novel, You Were There Before My Eyes, about a woman who emigrates from Italy to Detroit.
After Dietrich’s death from liver failure, she sold much of her mom’s estate to Berlin to be housed in the city’s Deutsche Kinemathek museum.
She and William Riva remained together until his death in 1999.
In addition to her sons Peter and John-Paul, survivors include another son, David, and her grandchildren, Lily, Ayla, Aidan and Marilee.
A timeless icon of style, Dietrich received an Oscar nomination for her turn opposite Gary Cooper in Morocco (1930) and starred in such films as Blonde Venus (1932), The Devil Is a Woman (1935), Touch of Evil (1958) and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961).
Dietrich and Sieber, who died in 1976, never divorced, even though they lived together for only a few years. Meanwhile, she reportedly had sex with the likes of Cooper, John Gilbert, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Frank Sinatra, Eddie Fisher, James Stewart, Jean Gabin and Yul Brynner. And that was just the men.
While promoting her book about Dietrich, Riva told Diane Sawyer that her mom had this idea for her own funeral: “All the men who walk into the church, and women, who had slept with her would get a red carnation, and all the people who said they had slept with her but hadn’t would get a white carnation.”
In classic Florence and the Machine fashion, their latest album, Everybody Scream, will be released on Halloween 2025.
This album has seen front woman Florence Welch collaborate with artists including Mark Bowen of IDLES, Aaron Dessner and Mitski, as well as director Autumn de Wilde (Emma), who directed the Everybody Scream music video, released in August.
Fans will have the chance to experience the album live, along with a selection of the band’s biggest hits, during their 2026 UK tour with support from Paris Paloma.
Tickets have already gone on sale for the majority of UK dates; however, Florence and the Machine have now announced three additional stops. Here’s how you can get tickets today.
Did you know you can also get Alfie Boe tickets and Two Doors Down tickets?
Jump to:
What are the new Florence and the Machine tour dates and venues?
Here’s a full list of all the dates on the 2026 Florence and the Machine tour, including the three additional Ireland and Scotland dates:
- 6th February 2026 — Belfast, The SSE Arena, Belfast
- 8th February 2026 — Birmingham, bp pulse LIVE
- 9th February 2026 — Glasgow, OVO Hydro
- 11th February 2026 — Newcastle Upon Tyne, Utilita Arena Newcastle
- 13th February 2026 — Liverpool, M&S Bank Arena Liverpool
- 14th February 2026 — Sheffield, Utilita Arena Sheffield
- 16th February 2026 — London, The O2
- 17th February 2026 — London, The O2
- 20th February 2026 — Manchester, Co-op Live
- NEW: 27th June 2026 — Limerick City, Thomand Park Stadium
- NEW: 28th June 2026 — Dublin, Marlay Park
- NEW: 24th August 2026 — Edinburgh, Royal Highland Showgrounds
When do Florence and the Machine tickets go on sale?
General sale tickets for the additional dates will be released at 9am on Friday 31st October.
Florence and the Machine pre-sale
The Gigs in Scotland and Summer Sessions pre-sales are currently live for the Edinburgh show, and will run until 8am on Friday 31st October. Artist pre-sale for the Edinburgh show will open at 9am on Thursday 30th October and run until the same time.
The Mastercard pre-sales are currently live for both the Dublin and Limerick shows, and will be live until 8am on Friday 31st October.
Buy Florence and the Machine tickets at Ticketmaster
Florence and the Machine hospitality tickets
If you want to take your Florence and the Machine experience to the next level, you can do just that with hospitality tickets. These packages include benefits like VIP Lounge access, a dedicated host, and food and drinks.
So far, hospitality tickets are only available for the Manchester concert at Co-op Live and there are still plenty available. Prices start at £349 per person.
Buy Florence and the Machine hospitality tickets at Seat Unique
How to get Florence and the Machine tickets for the Everybody Scream UK tour
We already know that Everybody Scream is a popular tour, so be sure to head online at least 15 minutes before tickets go on sale – we would ideally recommend half an hour before, so you can be placed into the waiting room.
Keep your Ticketmaster login details to hand as well, to be sure that you don’t waste any time.
You can check out additional sites like Live Nation, where demand may be slightly lower for tickets (although please note that not all shows are available on each site).
Also, money permitting, you could opt for hospitality tickets, as these are often far less in demand than general sale.
Buy Florence and the Machine tickets at Ticketmaster
We’ve also put together a list of the best concerts coming to the UK in 2025.
After mountains of drama, messy love triangles, and one chicken smoothie, Love Is Blind Season 9 has officially wrapped up. In a remarkable franchise first, not a single couple walked away married, despite two of them making it all the way to the altar.
So, will the show give the experiment another shot at finding love sight unseen? Fans of the franchise are already wondering about another round of the reality TV drama, so it only makes sense to look ahead. During the Season 9 reunion, did Nick and Vanessa Lachey reveal any news about Season 10? Swooon is breaking down all the details we know so far about the next chapter of Love Is Blind, including information we have about the next city and more.
I have fond memories of sitting in the back row of the tiny Holiday Cinema 3 at the Sundance Film Festival with indie executive Bingham Ray, in acquisition mode, checking out a new movie that only the programmers had ever seen.
Back in the ’90s through the aughts, the excitement of discovering the next “In the Bedroom,” “sex, lies, and videotape,” or Jennifer Lawrence was palpable, when buyers for American narratives were plentiful and the indie market was on the rise. It wasn’t all about celebrity suites and swag giveaways back then. The burgeoning Main Street parties were always musts to avoid, except for one: It was always tough to get into Cinetic’s Monday night party, but you learned everything you needed to know in that upstairs room at Zoom.
Those days, and Zoom — and its one-time owner and Sundance founder Robert Redford — are gone. But as Sundance preps for its January 2026 Park City finale, the industry is wondering what the first Sundance Boulder edition in 2027 will look like. Many hope the festival will contract in scale.
My first visit to the 13th Middleburg Film Festival, set at billionaire founder Sheila Johnson’s posh Salamander resort in the rolling hills of Virginia outside of Washington, D.C., reminded me of the pleasures of a small film festival. If just 45 new features are on view, every attendee gets into the venues. If the press and talent guests are a select few, there’s more access to the folks roaming the halls.
I dropped into a late-night library circle as Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao (whose “Hamnet” shared the audience prize with “Rental Family”) confessed she’d like to open a funeral home. I ate lunch with Rose Byrne and Mary Bronstein (“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”), Nina Hoss (“Hedda”), and Zoey Deutch (“Nouvelle Vague”). I ate dinner with Middleburgh producer-advisors Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger (“Little Miss Sunshine”) and “Train Dreams” auteur Clint Bentley (“Sing Sing”) and his star Joel Edgerton. And at the annual barbecue, I hung out with songwriter Diane Warren, who still hopes to win a real Oscar after 16 nominations, as opposed to settling for an honorary one. (For the 2023 Oscar show, she practiced her song “Applause” on a dummy piano, she confessed, which turned out to be live accompaniment for singer Sofia Carson on the broadcast. That’s grace under fire!)
Good stuff, right? Over the years, I’ve gotten to know industry people at small festivals around the country, from California’s Mill Valley, Santa Barbara, Palm Springs, and Sonoma to Florida’s Sarasota, Miami, and Fort Lauderdale, Washington’s Orcas Island, Oregon’s Ashland, and New York‘s Hamptons. I bonded with friends and expanded my ever-growing film community.
The question for any small festival is how to control growth and expansion. Do you have to keep growing? Middleburg director Susan Koch is weighing these questions now, as demand for attendance grows. She doesn’t want her local audience to not get into her screenings, as happens to regular passholders at Telluride ($780), who often wait in line for popular titles only to see most seats taken by priority passholders ($4900).
Telluride director Julie Huntsinger, who has her 20th festival coming up, keeps the program to about 60 titles. She is not able to control the rising costs and price-gouging in the wealthy Colorado mountain town. “It’s a box canyon,” she said on the phone. “Prices are going to be whatever they’re going to be. But in terms of growing, we’re small, we’ll keep to the same amount of passes.” At Telluride, in effect, the patrons pay for the cheaper passes, which have not gone up in price for 16 years.
The danger of a festival getting too large — Toronto plays more than 200 features — is that it overwhelms its attendees with too much choice. “People want that curation,” said one festival leader, who criticizes festivals like Toronto for programming too many movies that are not “a bold new voice taking a chance. I hope Sundance becomes a little more concise. Bigger is not better.”
Another festival executive added, “Sundance and Toronto are selling titles in the independent acquisitions market. You never know what is the center of attention there.”
The Toronto International Film Festival has scaled back, actually. Since 2015, the feature films in the official selection steadily declined from 287 to 210 in 2025. “We put ourselves on a diet in the mid-2010s,” said TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey. “People were just scrambling, trying to see everything, and buyers were trying to see all the sales titles. They felt there was too much on offer. It was hard to tell what they should focus on most. They wanted a tighter selection.”
Bailey has also made an effort to make the festival more walkable, eliminating theaters that required transportation. Now, every screening venue is within a 10-minute pedestrian distance.
Bailey sees festivals as “living things, and they have to evolve,” he said. “Typically, festivals, once they catch on with the industry and public, will increase in size or at least in ambition. Sundance has an opportunity to completely reset.”
On a much smaller scale than Toronto, even though it’s in a bigger city, Film at Lincoln Center’s New York Film Festival main selection has stayed about the same size for years: this year’s slate was 29 films, with additional sidebars tallying a total 75 features. The festival books two films a night in its main venue, Alice Tully Hall. “It’s the best experience for the audience,” said Film at Lincoln Center president Daniel Battsek.
As the indie market contracts, what should Sundance’s primary role be in 2027 and beyond? “Sundance has a long-held and well-deserved reputation for nurturing and anointing new talent; this process and the festival play a critical role in the independent film ecosystem,” said Battsek, who points to a movie like Jordan Peele’s Sundance breakout “Get Out” in 2017. “The audience reaction created a bit of a wave that continued right through to all sorts of success.”
As for Sundance, as festival director Eugene Hernandez often points out, the first half has long been noisier and more crowded, while the vibe changes as the second half returns to the quieter movie-focused Sundance of yore. Sundance has also created a smaller sidebar festival every year, first in London, then, in recent years, Mexico City.
Separated from its ritzy ski resort setting, will Sundance Boulder return the festival to its indie roots and resist the pressure to permit Main Street’s corporate swag suites and raucous parties? Hernandez is still focused on Sundance 2026, and his team has yet to make many key decisions about Sundance 2027, from screening venues and hotels to festival hubs. They have been mounting screenings with the local film community, which includes enthusiastic cinephile college students.
Sundance Boulder promises many changes from icy Park City, which had become daunting to navigate. It could be tempting for the festival to expand into a more spacious town. Already, Sundance has announced plans to center its activities in the walkable downtown area, including the pedestrian mall Pearl Street, wrote IndieWire’s Kate Erbland, “with access to restaurants, cafes, vintage theaters, performance arts spaces, a multiplex, university facilities, and other auditoriums.”
As Sundance makes its transition to Boulder, we can hope that its leadership not only builds a more sustainable film festival but resists the temptation to expand into the Boulder playground.
Tetsu Fujimura’s keynote talk The Future of Japanese Intellectual Property in Global Adaptations offered TIFFCOM attendees a convincing argument that Japanese IP is quickly becoming one of the country’s core industries, rivalling even its mighty car manufacturers.
TIFFCOM is the market arm of the Tokyo International Film Festival.
The founder and CEO of consulting firm Filosophia, as well as the founder of major distributor Gaga Corporation, Fujimura began the talk with a brisk run through of his rise to a leading producer of Japan-generated content for a world audience, including the hit Netflix live-action “One Piece” series.
Key to his success, he explained, were connections with top-tier Hollywood producers, beginning with Marvel Studio founder Avi Arad, with whom he produced the 2017 live-action sci-fi “Ghost in the Shell,” and TV producer Marty Adelstein, who became his partner in making “One Piece.”
But his individual achievements, as he illustrated with a blizzard of meticulously researched facts and figures, form only one wave of growing tsunami of Japanese IP, from manga and anime to movies and games, that is advancing into the global marketplace.
This tsunami has been a long time in building, from the 1990s when only about 10 or 20% of the top 30 films at the global box office were based on existing IP, to approaching 90 percent in the current decade.
Of the top 20 titles in the most current IP revenue rankings, compiled in 2021, ten are Japanese, including ‘Pokemon,’ ‘Hello Kitty,’ ‘Anpanman,’ ‘Super Mario,’ ‘Shonen Jump,’ ‘Gundam,’ ‘Dragon Ball,’ ‘Fist of the North Star,’ ‘One Piece’ and ‘Yu-Gi-Oh!.’ “In these kinds of global rankings, Japanese works inevitably appear in large numbers,” Fujimura commented. “So I think you understand that Japan occupies a significant presence in the world in many ways.”
What makes Japanese IP so strong? Fujimura listed three reasons: Japan’s massive appetite for manga and anime, fueled by major publishers, TV broadcasters and animation studio; the global distribution of anime, with Netflix and Amazon leading the way; and Japan’s rank as one of the world’s leading gaming powers, with Sony (“Uncharted,” “Gran Turismo”) and Nintendo (“Sonic the Hedgehog,” “Super Mario”) not only leading the pack but generating hit films from their games.
“Among game originals adapted into Hollywood live-action films Japanese IPs are currently the most numerous,” Fujimura said. “I believe they will attract even more attention going forward.”
One example is the 2023 “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” which grossed $1.361 billion worldwide making it the fifth highest earning animation of all time. “Disney has produced countless animated films, and this outranks all of them but ‘Frozen 2,’” Fujimura said. “What it’s achieved is incredible and really shows just how powerful Japanese animation is.”
His conclusion: “Japan’s representative IP genres – manga, anime, and games – possess extremely high growth potential that I believe will continue to be a source of pride. It’s a testament to Japan’s strength, proving that Japanese IPs can succeed in Hollywood.”