🎬 $1M for 23 pages

👋 Good morning! Here's a fun one for the "what does he know that we don't" file. Andrew Garfield spent months living inside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's head for Luca Guadagnino's upcoming 'Artificial,' then told Jimmy Kimmel the first thing he did after wrapping was delete ChatGPT. He couldn't really explain why. Just that the more he learned, the more it felt like we're "careening into some very unknown territory." Cool, cool. Anyway, happy Friday, everybody. Let’s get you caught up before you check out for the weekend. 👇

Top-streamed chart (U.S.) Sep. 3 to Sep. 9. Data provided by Luminate.

The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) opened last night with 'Being Heumann,' Siân Heder's Judy Heumann biopic for Apple starring Ruth Madeley and Mark Ruffalo. Coming up over the next ten days: Florian Zeller's 'Bunker' fresh off its Venice premiere, Zack Snyder's first indie 'The Last Photograph,' and Mike Flanagan's 'Carrie' series on the TV side.

Backed by C$23M from the Canadian government, the new market brings 200 private screenings (double the usual), 6,000+ delegates, and hundreds of sellers who haven't been to Toronto in a decade (TIFF is covering travel for many of them). Every Tim Hortons on King Street has been briefed and has stocked up on extra Timbits. CAA, WME, and UTA are all in with finished films and packages.

Meanwhile, everyone in town is hunting for the next 'Obsession.' Last year's sub-$1M Midnight Madness horror sold to Focus for $16M and grossed $500M+. So buyers are chasing original, Gen Z-friendly genre over IP and stars. Among the buzzier finished films premiering at the fest without a distributor yet:

Not everyone's sold, though. The sales world traditionally goes quiet after Cannes (the Europeans take the summer off), so sellers say having packages ready by September is a tall order.

Looking ahead… The market runs through Sept. 16, and the festival wraps Sept. 20 with the People's Choice Award.

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🇮🇹 Venice is in the home stretch. Just a few highlights from the last few days: Florian Zeller's 'Bunker' got a 16-and-a-half-minute ovation, the third-longest in festival history. Married co-stars Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem shared a tearful kiss, and then the reviews came in lukewarm on pretty much everything but the two of them. Alex Gibney's four-hour 'Musk' went over well with critics and badly with Musk, who called it a "hit piece." His lawyer then sent a legal notice over the film's suggestion that Starlink played a role in the 2024 election. Casey Affleck's 'Company' didn't really land and still has no US buyer. Awards, including the Golden Lion, are tomorrow.

🏛️ Congress is now drafting a 20% federal film and TV tax credit. After Trump's Aug. 31 endorsement, a bipartisan group in the House is putting the incentive on paper: a 20% credit on labor costs, with 5% bonuses (for rural shoots, indie productions, bringing work back from abroad, or spending across multiple states) that could push it to 30%. That's on top of state credits, and everything from scripted to reality to animation is in. It could be introduced as soon as next week, but no one expects a vote before the election. The best case is it gets tacked onto a year-end spending bill after the election. More likely, it's a next-year story.

🎟️ Netflix is finally going to show its box office numbers. The streamer will share grosses for six upcoming theatrical releases, a first for the company. The slate rolls out from mid-October through next November and includes 'La Bola Negra,' David Fincher's 'The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth,' 'The Mosquito Bowl,' 'Ink,' Greta Gerwig's 'Narnia: The Magician's Nephew,' and an animated 'Charlie vs. the Chocolate Factory.' The windows range from 26 days to nearly 50, and the two 2027 tentpoles get wide releases. Netflix insists it's still streaming first, but the drift toward theaters is getting increasingly hard to ignore.

📖 Netflix paid $1M for a 23-page short story. That's about $43K a page for Nicholas Binge's 'Understudy.' Lord Miller and Steven Yeun's Celadon are executive producing, Binge is adapting, and Phil Lord and Chris Miller will likely direct the pilot. Seven studios bid. Somewhere a novelist is deleting chapters.

🦸 'Avengers: Doomsday' has already banked $50M in domestic pre-sales, and it doesn't open until Dec. 18. Disney's CFO shared the number, adding that over 70% of buyers sprang for Infinity Vision, the studio's new premium large format tier. Victor von Doom, Q4 earnings hero.

📲 Apple finally folded: The iPhone Duo, its first foldable phone, debuted with Netflix among a handful of pre-release partners redesigning apps for its 7.6-inch screen. Netflix rebuilt its homepage promos, player controls, and vertical Clips feed for the wider screen. October ship date, if you've got $1,999 lying around.

🧑‍💻 "Video Essayist" is officially an IMDb profession now. IMDb and IMDbPro added a "Digital Creator" category with sub-labels including Streamer, Vlogger, Gaming Creator, and Influencer, no film or TV credits required. It's live for IMDbPro Premium members, so your nephew's Minecraft channel is industry.

🔮 BOX OFFICE PREVIEW: 'Practical Magic 2' should finally knock 'Spider-Man' off the top spot after six weeks, with tracking pointing to a $40-50M opening. Not bad for a sequel to a movie that only did $46.7M in its entire 1998 run. Further down the chart, 'Runner' ($3-6M) has an outside shot at sneaking into the top three, while the Oasis doc ($5-7M) and 'The Uprising' ($2-7M) fill out the rest.