🎬 Ninth Time's The Charm

👋 Hey there. LA's list of gone-dark theaters keeps getting longer (the Cinerama Dome, Westwood's classic venues, take your pick), so it's worth celebrating when one actually gets rescued. Kristen Stewart just bought the Highland Theatre, a 100-year-old Highland Park movie palace designed by Lewis Arthur Smith (the same architect behind the Vista in Los Feliz) that went dark in 2024. Her plan goes beyond a straight restoration: she wants it to be a community cinema hub and “an antidote to all the corporate bullshit.” Big swing. We’re rooting for her!

Welcome back to The Dailies. The week's half over, your coffee's hot, and we've got everything you need to stay plugged into Hollywood. Let's get into it. 👇

The Berlin Film Festival (or Berlinale, if you want to sound like you've been) opens tomorrow. It's one of the "Big Three" European festivals alongside Cannes and Venice, the first major one each year, and its top prize, the Golden Bear, is basically the Palme d'Or's German cousin.

The 22-film competition spans animation, westerns, thrillers, and horror. Highlights include Kornél Mundruczó's 'At the Sea' (Amy Adams), and Karim Aïnouz's 'Rosebush Pruning' (Callum Turner, Elle Fanning, Pamela Anderson). The title with the most heat: 'Josephine' (Channing Tatum, Gemma Chan), fresh off a Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award double at Sundance. Wim Wenders heads the jury.

Notable absence: major studios are sitting this one out. Warner Bros.' 'The Bride!,' A24's 'The Drama,' and Amazon MGM's 'Project Hail Mary' all skipped Berlin. Tricia Tuttle, who took over as Berlinale director last year, says it's not personal. Films like 'Sinners' and 'One Battle After Another' bypassed festivals entirely last year, launching straight to market. It's less a Berlin problem and more a "festivals in general" problem.

The silver lining: international cinema is having a moment. 'Sentimental Value,' 'It Was Just an Accident,' and 'Sirat' combined for 13 Oscar noms this year and eight-figure box office. That's Berlin's lane. And unlike Cannes, where you need three badges and a blood oath to see a movie, Berlin sells 336,000 tickets to the public, giving films real word-of-mouth before they hit the wider market.

Running alongside the festival, EFM is one of the world's top three film markets and the industry's first real temperature check of the year. This is where the deal volume lives. Some to watch for:

Tuttle is also trying to get the festival and market sides talking to each other again. Buyers told her last year's program was great but hard to sell, so this year's competition skews more commercial.

Looking ahead… The festival runs February 12-22, with EFM wrapping up on the 18th.

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Ninth time's the charm, or so Paramount hopes. The company just filed its ninth proposal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, doing everything it can to pry WBD away from its $83B Netflix deal. The sweetened $30/share hostile bid now includes:

WBD's board says it will review the offer with its advisors but isn't changing its recommendation on the Netflix deal. Shareholders have been told to sit tight and take no action. An official response is due within 10 business days.

Paramount's also picking up allies. Activist investor Ancora Holdings has built a ~$200M stake in WBD and are planning to oppose the Netflix deal. They think the board hasn't given Paramount a fair shake.

Looking ahead… WBD still hasn't set a date for the April shareholder vote on the Netflix deal. And Paramount has another card to play: it's planning to nominate its own slate of board directors at WBD's annual meeting later this year. If those candidates get elected, they could push the board to ditch the Netflix deal and accept Paramount's offer instead.

🤝 Gregg Araki's Sundance buzzer ‘I Want Your Sex’ sold to Magnolia Pictures in a seven-figure deal. Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman, Charli XCX and Chase Sui Wonders star in the erotically charged comedy, which is getting a wide theatrical release later this year.

🤖 Microdrama company Holywater acquired AI-assisted VFX firm Jeynix and rebranded as Holywater Tech. Jeynix specializes in face replacement, de-aging and lip-sync tech, a.k.a. the uncanny valley starter pack. The Ukraine-based company recently raised $22M and has a deal with Fox to produce over 200 shows.

🏗️ A $250M studio complex called Filmology Labs is headed to Paterson, NJ, purpose-built for vertical micro-dramas, digital series, podcasts and AI content. The 250K sq. ft. hub features 21 sound stages with permanent standing sets designed for speed and scale. The ghost of Quibi just shed a single tear.

⚖️ OpenAI won a key ruling in its copyright fight with authors, dodging an order that would've forced it to reveal why it deleted two training datasets built from pirated books. Internal communications stay under wraps for now, though authors' lawyers are pushing a separate theory that just downloading pirated works counts as infringement.