Film industry

Women in film are still struggling to find jobs in the film industry, specifically in animation.

Animated films like Domee Shi’s “Turning Red” or Nora Twomey’s Oscar-nominated “The Breadwinner” are putting women and young girls in the spotlight, but the animation industry as a whole is still struggling to hire and promote women behind the scenes.

Nicole Hendrix is the co-founder and executive director of the BRIC Foundation.

“These pathways into the industry are not equitable,” said Hendrix.

“It’s like, there’s all this great talent out there that you’re not utilizing,” said Margaret Dean, the president of Women in Animation. Of the top animated films released from 2007 to 2018, less than 3% were directed by women and industry leaders say it’s because of inequality in the talent pipelines.

“It’s just very much exclusion by familiarity within the industry. It’s a ‘you have to know someone’ in order to get hired or to get into a really good program that you’ll get hired from. Not to mention money, right? Not everybody can afford to be an unpaid intern,” said Hendrix.

“It was just the phrases of ‘it was an old boys club,’ and then people always hired people that they knew that they were friends with,” said Dean.

A 2019 report from the University of Southern California found that women directors were more likely to be seen as a “risk” to studios, and less likely to be promoted to higher leadership roles.

Women overall hold around 30% of the creative jobs in animation. And as more people in Hollywood are becoming more aware of the gender-gap in entertainment, organizations like the BRIC foundation and Women in Animation are pushing for parity.

“There’s definitely waves that people ride and we just need to all come together to make sure that we hold people accountable,” said Alison Mann, the co-founder of the BRIC Foundation.

“Equally important work that we realized we needed to do was to start working with the women themselves, and to really launch talent development programs,” said Dean.

Women in animation, or “WIA,” has challenged the industry to achieve 50/50 parity by 2025. And its educational programs include mentorship opportunities for women, transgender and non-binary people.

“They became these little networks, almost like a seed of a little network,” said Dean.

The BRIC Foundation is working to create more opportunities for women as well through its own industry-wide summits, workshops and the development of a new apprenticeship program.

“Out of our third-year summit, the plan for an apprenticeship program came and it was an industry advisory across animation, visual effects in gaming, 60 major companies represented. And we really mapped out what are the entry level positions that people are wanting to hire for, what knowledge, software, skills, portfolio is needed to achieve those roles?” said Hendrix.

The program hopes to provide training opportunities for students in public high schools and community colleges and ultimately lessen the barriers to enter the animation industry.

“We have to remember to kind of rise above and continue pushing forward and figuring out new strategic ways to create opportunities for people that might not and, and I think everybody has a seat at the table to make change,” said Mann.

: newsy.com

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Apple has a Will Smith problem.

Mr. Smith is the star of “Emancipation,” a film set during the Civil War era that Apple envisioned as a surefire Oscar contender when it wrapped filming earlier this year. But that was before Mr. Smith strode onto the stage at the Academy Awards in March and slapped the comedian Chris Rock, who had made a joke about Mr. Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.

Mr. Smith, who also won best actor that night, has since surrendered his membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and has been banned from attending any Academy-related events, including the Oscar telecast, for the next decade.

Now Apple finds itself left with a $120 million unreleased awards-style movie featuring a star no longer welcome at the biggest award show of them all, and a big question: Can the film, even if it succeeds artistically, overcome the baggage that now accompanies Mr. Smith?

Variety reported in May, however, that the film’s release would be pushed into 2023.

rushed the stage and slapped Mr. Rock. Later in the show, Mr. Smith won the best actor award for his work in “King Richard.”

In this segment of “Pop Quiz,” Newsy’s “In The Loop” explores what a superhero battle would really look like in the U.S., from costs to clean up.

From disaster movies to sci-fi or fantasy, New York City seems to take a beating pretty often at the movies — especially in the superhero genre. In the canon Marvel Cinematic Universe alone, New York gets wrecked in about a third of the movies, and that’s only one superhero world.

So, how does New York actually handle all the real chaos?

Disaster experts like professor Sam Penta quickly question who cleans up the mess.

“I’m a fan of superhero movies,” Penta said. “As much as I love them, when I watch the destruction that happens in them, I die a little bit inside because… then I think about, ‘Oh, that’s 10 years of work and probably millions of dollars.'”

One disaster-cost assessment firm told The Hollywood Reporter that the estimated total cost of damages from the big battle of New York at the end of 2012’s “The Avengers” would be $160 billion. For reference, NOAA’s estimates for Hurricane Katrina costs were about the same at $161 billion, and Sandy was about $82 billion.

That cost measurement looks at a range of different things: infrastructure damage and repair, cleanup costs, lost revenue from businesses, workers compensation, insurance payouts and so on.

The firm that analyzed “The Avengers” looked into different insurance policies to see what would be covered here. For example, most homeowners insurance cover “an act of God,” usually meaning natural disasters. But, there might be a legal case that applies here, since the film’s villain Loki is technically a god.

Part of the reason these sky-high costs are hard to calculate is because of how varied disaster responses and insurance policies can be. That can often lead to confusion over who foots the big bills for cleanup and recovery, both at the government-level and the individual-level.

“There are also organizations that have defined missions that clarify who does what,” Penta said. “At the same time, in execution, that can be messy and difficult to parse out. You have folks who are really familiar with how disaster response and recovery works, working alongside folks that are really new to this process. That combination can make things really complicated in terms of what the disaster recovery looks like in the months and years following.”

To just use New York as an example: In the year after the 9/11 attacks, less than a quarter of the federal aid that was promised had actually went to where it was supposed to go. That delay was mostly because city and state officials couldn’t figure out how to distribute the billions of dollars.

A little over a decade later, after Hurricane Sandy, aid groups like the Red Cross would also come under fire for delayed responses and mismanaged resources. Both FEMA and private insurance companies also drew criticism when flood victims were stuck waiting to settle flood insurance claims for years after Sandy. In some cases, FEMA ended up billing the victims, accusing them of receiving help from different groups to cover the same costs twice.

One of the Marvel movies actually alludes to interagency conflict in cleanup efforts. In “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” a semi-private organization called the Office of Damage Control butts heads with city contractors over who gets paid to clean up Grand Central, which makes up the origin story for the Vulture.

The delay in relief can have pretty devastating consequences for households.

“It takes years to come back from a major disaster event,” Penta said. “We’re talking about not just the physical infrastructure, but we’re also talking about the systems and the people that need to come back.”

Just this year, it was reported that every single request for aid for flood damage after Hurricane Ida was denied by the city government in New York. The Department of Emergency Services pointed to a law from 1907 saying the city isn’t liable unless the damage is from city negligence.

It’s not just New York: FEMA has been criticized in recent years for denying requests for disasters around the country at historically high rates. Where FEMA has failed to help, private lenders are stepping in to assist homeowners — on the condition that they’re getting paid back with interest.

Many experts would agree that one of the best ways to help with damage from disasters, attacks or superhero battles is preventing a lot of the damage in the first place.

“Mitigation can really go a long way in reducing human suffering, reducing the financial cost,” Penta said. “Really if we want these systems to work well in times of crisis, we have to invest in them and care about them when the skies are blue.”

Take the ending of “The Batman” as an example.

The streets of Gotham, standing in for New York, get flooded after the Riddler blows up the seawall protecting the city from high tides during a major storm. That’s actually inspired by a real-life seawall that has just begun construction around New York City, originally planned after Hurricane Sandy.

Not everyone can agree on what mitigation plans deserve funding and attention. For example, seawalls are controversial because they also might trap water inside city limits from intense rainfall.

Climate change is also making it harder to predict disasters, plan responses and mitigate threats.

“As we experience climate change, that makes that work much more difficult because we are increasingly finding that historical model of the models, historical patterns that we relied upon to understand the threats we face, the hazards in our communities may be decreasingly reliable,” Penta said.

There are hints of the real trauma and long recovery efforts in some superhero movies, but one thing movies don’t often show about city response is the ordinary people who answer the call in a crisis.

“A lot of times there’s this idea that people will just panic in a disaster and really panic in blind, irrational action based on that fear,” Penta said. “Typically, we don’t actually see that in disasters. People are able to act rationally. Another thing that sort of is interesting with the Marvel movies is clearly they are focused on the superheroes and this idea that this is a handful of people that save the day. But what’s missing in the background is there’s actually a ton of people doing a lot to save people. There’s the EMT working in the background. There’s the cops that are trying to do what they can to face this threat that they have no idea how to even conceptualize.”

: newsy.com

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“The Suicide Squad” should have been a big hit for Warner Bros. last month. It had superheroes, a marquee director (James Gunn), a huge production budget ($185 million) and received terrific reviews. But instead of delivering a box office ka-pow, it went ker-thud: Ticket sales total $156 million (split roughly 50-50 with theaters), compared with $747 million for the first “Suicide Squad” in 2016.

Of course, the latest one had to battle a pandemic. And it was also made available free on HBO Max in lock step with its theatrical debut. On that platform, it was a relative success — at least according to HBO Max, which heralded “The Suicide Squad” as the service’s second-most-viewed movie debut of the year.

But it offered no numbers.

“Paw Patrol: The Movie” (Paramount) was released simultaneously in theaters and on Paramount+ late last month. It took in $13 million over its first weekend, enough for second place behind “Free Guy,” a holdover. But the actual demand for “Paw Patrol” was shrouded. Regal Cinemas, the second-largest multiplex chain in the United States behind AMC Entertainment, refused to play the animated adventure because of its streaming availability. Paramount+ said on Aug. 25 that the movie “ranked as one of the service’s most-watched originals.”

But it offered no numbers.

In contrast, Disney-Marvel released “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” exclusively in theaters on Friday. Disney’s chief executive had called the old-fashioned release an “experiment.” Would the coronavirus keep people at home?

In surveys in late August of American moviegoers by the National Research Group, a film industry consultant, about 67 percent of respondents said they felt comfortable (“very or somewhat”) sitting in a theater. Disney has cited coronavirus concerns for making films like “Jungle Cruise,” “Cruella” and “Black Widow” available in homes on Disney+ at the same time as in theaters (even though Hollywood has suspected that the real reason — or at least an equally important one — has been helping Disney+).

The crystal-clear result: Audiences flocked to “Shang-Chi,” which was on pace to collect $83.5 million from 4,300 theaters in the United States and Canada from Friday through Monday, according to Comscore, which compiles box office data. Overseas, the well-reviewed movie, notable for being Marvel’s first Asian-led superhero spectacle, generated an additional $56.2 million. “Shang-Chi” cost roughly $200 million to make.

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Will Smith’s ‘Emancipation’: What Will Apple Do?