Paramount

Video game movies are hard enough to get right, that the concept of adapting games for TV rarely comes up, but will Battlefield break the mold? Paramount TV and Electronic Arts aim to find out, teaming to bring the first-person shooter franchise off the small-screen and onto the … well, the same screen, but you’ll still have to find the right input.

Get ready, you’re about to read that “come out and play” reference quite a bit in the next few days. Fresh off their latest Marvel triumph, the Russo brothers have lined up yet another TV project, this time bringing cult favorite The Warriors to Hulu as a brand-new one-hour TV series.

Turn back the clock to 2010, and the hottest ticket on Broadway is a revival of August Wilson’s Pulitzer-winning play Fences, a poignant and daring meditation on race relations in America with a focus on the hardships of the black experience. It has all the necessary qualifications for a bona fide Broadway smash: a handsome pedigree of awards and acclaim (the production took the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play in 2010), urgent social significance, and some Hollywood talent slumming it on the boards in between film projects. Denzel Washington and Viola Davis starred as the married couple at the heart of Fences, winning raves and a Tony apiece, and created a rare sensation that dazzled audiences for thirteen weeks and then vanished.

It’s only been a few weeks since the most recent trailer for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, the sequel to the Michael Bay-produced TMNT picture of 2014, and though it also nicks the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Til Brooklyn” for the soundtrack, there are a handful of key differences that distinguish one from the other. Specifically, that this latest spot is chockablock with soundbites that, when taken out of context, could be used by audio editors to form scathing critiques of this film. As the trailer timecounter ticks on, the negative review puns basically write themselves: “We‘re turtles, whether you like it or not.” “This isn’t working!” “We keep failing.” It’s almost like they’re challenging their harshest critics to do their worst.

French thinker Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s popular novella The Little Prince uses the story of a young boy and a grounded pilot as a portal to hidden worlds of profound emotion, conjuring loneliness, sadness and helplessness from simple language and potent symbols. And so it was weirdly fitting when, a mere week before the film adaptation’s scheduled release, Paramount abruptly dropped it from their slate and pulled it from theaters. Not unlike le petit prince himself, Mark Osborne’s animated rendering of the beloved story was abandoned and left to float around in the vast expanse of the film marketplace. This story has a more straightforwardly happy ending than de Saint-Exupéry’s, though — Netflix has now picked up the rights to the film.

The tough thing about using someone else’s ideas to make money is that it’s not entirely legal. This lesson had to be learned the hard way this past weekend by Alec Peters, producer of an independent film titled Prelude to Axanar. The Star Trek fan film drew quite a bit of ire from copyright holders Paramount after a crowdfunding effort on Indiegogo brought this grassroots DIY production over half a million dollars last summer. The promise to make a “studio-quality” film including characters, settings, and other elements from the heavily-licensed Star Trek franchise with no engagement from the relevant studio spelled doom for the Axanar team, and now the chickens have come home to roost.

Men who abandon their brothers-in-arms during wartime are either tried, shot, or profiled in widely beloved podcasts. Directors who abandon their brothers-in-pre-production during World War Z-time probably just end up directing different, more desirable pictures.

For a movie about a guy who developed neck-snappingly fast cars, Michael Mann’s Enzo Ferrari has been making progress at an extremely gradual pace. Mann first started toying with the idea of chronicling the life of the Italian auto pioneer (a concept first realized fictitiously on the HBO series Entourage, with the world’s greatest thespian Vinny Chase in the title role) fifteen years ago, but the film only shifted into gear earlier this year.

Paramount has set a live-action feature adaptation of Dora the Explorer in motion with screenwriter Tom Wheeler locked in to draw up a script.

Paramount executives have set up the upcoming found-footage horror sequel Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension for failure at the box-office. Paramount has opted to release the sixth film in the Paranormal Activity franchise into a comparatively paltry 1,400 theaters in America, as opposed to the 2,883 of last year’s The Marked Ones and upwards of 3,000 for each of the previous films in the series. A new item from The Hollywood Reporter estimates that the film will gross a measly $10-12 million in the domestic market, an all-time low for a series that began with a $193.4 million gross on a $15,000 budget. And yet the executives at Paramount don’t consider this diminished box-office presence a failure at all.