Ron Howard News

The Canadian Donald Sutherland will be honoured with a Donostia Award recognising his more than fifty years of excellent performances. The actor, who has participated in almost 200 productions, will attend the 67th edition of the San Sebastian Festival on Thursday 26 September to receive the accolade prior to the screening in the Kursaal of The Burnt Orange Heresy, a thriller directed by Giuseppe Capotondi. The film, with a cast featuring Mick Jagger, Claes Bang and Elizabeth Debicki will close the coming edition of the Venice Festival.

Joana Vicente and Cameron Bailey, Co-Heads of TIFF, today announced that Academy Award-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins will be honoured with the Variety Artisan Award at this year's TIFF Tribute Gala awards event. The award recognizes a distinguished filmmaker who has excelled at their craft and made an outstanding contribution to cinema. Taking place on Monday, September 9, at the Fairmont Royal York, during the 44th Toronto International Film Festival, the Gala is an annual fundraiser to support TIFF's year-round programmes and core mission to transform the way people see the world through film, and to celebrate the film industry's outstanding contributors. Variety is proud to be the exclusive trade media partner on the event. 

Imagine Documentaries President, Justin Wilkes, announced today that the company has reached an exclusive deal with the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation to produce the definitive documentary on Jazz legend and beloved entertainer, Louis Armstrong. The deal comes with access to hundreds of hours of audio recordings, film footage, photographs, personal diaries and a life's worth of ephemera for exclusive use in the first significant documentary dedicated entirely to his life. In addition to Louis' prolific music and film career, Louis was an avid biographer and kept an almost daily audio diary from the early 1950's until the day he passed in 1971, all on reel-to-reel tape recordings and all organized meticulously “for posterity” by “Pops” himself.  

Politics and the press will collide next month as Lyric Theatre presents the Oklahoma City premiere of Frost/Nixon.

The Toronto International Film Festival​®​ documentary programme reveals its lineup of 25 non-fiction works, including 18 World Premieres with representation from 18 countries. The films cover many high-profile figures, both famous and infamous — including Truman Capote, Merce Cunningham, Ron Howard, Bikram Choudhury, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Imelda Marcos — and a broad range of themes, including artistic achievement, the power of journalism, immigration, global politics, and resistance against corrupt leaders. Three films use sports as a framework to look at environmentalism, capitalism, and racism.

TIFF Co-Heads Cameron Bailey and Joana Vicente announced today that the World Premiere of Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band, Daniel Roher's touching tale of Robertson's young life and the creation of one of the most enduring groups in the history of popular music, The Band, will be the Opening Night Gala Presentation for the 44th Toronto International Film Festival® on Thursday, September 5, at Roy Thomson Hall. The premiere marks the first time a Canadian-made documentary opens the Toronto International Film Festival.

Paramount Network today ordered a 10-episode first season of Sexy Beast, a series adaptation from Paramount Television and Anonymous Content based on the critically-acclaimed and award-winning feature film. Michael Caleo (The Sopranos) is set to write and executive produce the series. Karyn Kusama (Destroyer) is directing and executive producing through her company, Familystyle, which is also comprised of Matt Manfredi and Phil Hay (Destroyer), who will also serve as executive producers on the show. Also serving as executive producers are Louis Mellis and David Scinto, the original screenwriters of the film Sexy Beast.

Paramount Network's hit series Yellowstone is driving the network's first quarterly year-over-year ratings gain since 2014. For the second calendar quarter of 2019, Paramount Network averaged a .16 rating among P18-49, a +3% increase from the same quarter last year. The brand jumped +4% compared to the same quarter last year in M18-49 ratings (.16) and +2% in W18-49 ratings (.15).

Paramount Network's hit series Yellowstone ranks as the #1 summer series on cable and continues to achieve massive demo growth and break series records, driven by increases in young viewers and female audiences in L+3 viewing. In all key demos, Yellowstone episode 202 ratings jumped at least +60% year-over-year from episode 102 (L+3).

Paramount Network today ordered a 10-episode first season of one-hour scripted drama Coyote from Sony Pictures Television. Emmy Award-winning executive producer Michelle MacLaren (Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad), will direct the pilot and executive produce the series. Emmy Award-winning Michael Chiklis is attached to star and executive produce the series. Coyote, which is scheduled to debut in 2020, comes to Paramount Network from MacLaren Entertainment, Dark Horse Entertainment and Sony Pictures Television.

HBO will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo mission moon landing with a special encore presentation of the Emmy®-winning 1998 miniseries FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON.

With updated L+3 viewing numbers, the season two premiere of Paramount Network's hit series Yellowstone continues to break brand and series records, reaching record-high ratings across all key demos. With more than 5 million total viewers tuning in, Yellowstone is the most-watched premiere in the history of the brand (covering both Paramount Network and Spike TV). Total viewers jumped +109% over LSD viewership for the season two premiere and increased +6% from the 2018 series premiere in L+3. Against the competitive landscape, Yellowstone ranks as the most-watched original cable telecast this summer and the highest-rated original cable telecast of the summer among P25-54, M25-54, and M18-49 (excluding sports and news).

Following the recent greenlight announcements of Rebuilding Paradise from Academy Award-winning director Ron Howard and The Untitled Thai Cave Rescue Project (wt) from Academy Award-winning director Kevin Macdonald, National Geographic has announced it will continue to expand its feature documentary slate with The Cave — a powerful new film about a hidden secret underground hospital in Syria and the unprecedented female-led team of civilians and medical professionals who are risking their lives to provide medical care to the besieged local population. The announcement comes as the Museum of the Moving Image prepares to honor National Geographic for its accomplishments over the past few years, including the success of its newly formed documentary film unit — which recently won the Oscar and BAFTA for Best Documentary Feature of 2018 for Free Solo.

Today, the Artistic Director Antonio Monda, in agreement with Laura Delli Colli, head of Fondazione Cinema per Roma, and Francesca Via, General Manager, announced several sneak previews of the fourteenth Rome Film Fest, which will take place from October 17th to 27th 2019 at the Auditorium Parco della Musica, and will extend, as usual, to several other locations and cultural entities in the Italian capital.

The season two premiere of Paramount Network's hit series Yellowstone reached record-high ratings for L+SD across several key demos (P25-54, M25-54, W25-54, P18-49 and M18-49) and showed tremendous gains from the series premiere in 2018. Across the night, Yellowstone earned a gross average audience of 3.9 million total viewers (includes Paramount Network premiere and encores, in addition to a CMT simulcast and TV Land encore). It ranks as the #1 most-watched original cable premiere this summer.

Netflix has acquired worldwide rights to Imagine Entertainment's film adaptation of Tick, Tick...Boom! 

Nickelodeon and Imagine Kids+Family are partnering to develop the original live-action series, Untitled Space Show (working title). Untitled Space Show will be showrun and written by Daniel Knauf (Carnivale, The Blacklist) and centers around a group of kids who mistakenly launch into space. The series marks the first project co-produced by Nickelodeon and Imagine Kids+Family. Untitled Space Show will be executive produced by Imagine Entertainment Chairmen Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, Imagine Kids+Family President Stephanie Sperber, and Knauf. The production will be overseen by Shauna Phelan, Senior Vice President, Scripted Content for Nickelodeon and by creative executive Will Davis for Imagine Kids+Family.

Spectrum Originals and Paramount Network have picked up new, Southern Gothic mystery series, Paradise Lost (working title), from Paramount Television and Anonymous Content.

Emmy Award-winning executive producers Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman and Mark Herzog bring The Movies to CNN on Sunday, July 7, at 9 p.m. ET/PT. The new six-part CNN Original Series explores American cinema through the decades and the cultural, societal and political shifts that framed its evolution. Combining archival footage and interviews with leading actors, directors, producers, critics and historians, the series showcases the most pivotal moments in film that have stirred the imagination and influenced our culture.

Academy Award®-winning director Ron Howard's new documentary about the most beloved opera singer of all time, PAVAROTTI, is set to open in theaters on June 7th.