The news was first shared via Twitter by fellow comedian Jason Alexander, who wrote, “Gilbert Gottfried made me laugh at times when laughter did not come easily. What a gift. I did not know him well but I loved what he shared with me. My best wishes and sympathy to his family.” Gottfried’s family shared a message on social media as well confirming his death. “We are heartbroken to announce the passing of our beloved Gilbert Gottfried after a long illness,” the message from the Gottfried family said....

The film is set to be released in the United States on July 30 by A24, which has not announced any change in release plans. (IndieWire reached out to representatives at A24 and Entertainment Film Distributors for comment.) The news arrives as the country sees a spike in Covid-19 infections, specifically due to the global rise of the Delta variant. On July 19, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced “Freedom Day” with a fully reopened England and movie theaters operating at capacity....

“By my count I have written or co-written around 33 screenplay features. Two to three made by others, 11 made by me (Pinocchio in progress) so- about 20 screenplays not filmed. Each takes 6-10 months of work, so, roughly 16 years gone. Just experience and skill improvement.” The list of del Toro’s unmade film scripts include the following titles: “The Witches,” “Justice League Dark,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” “Fantastic Voyage,” “The Count of Monte Cristo,” “Mephisto’s Bridge,” “Pacific Rim 2,” “Secret Project (Untitled),” “Superstitious,” “Nightmare Alley,” “Haunted Mansion,” “The Buried Giant,” “The Coffin,” “Drood,” “List of 7” (co-written with Mark Frost), and “Wind in the Willows....

This week, Warners clarified the terms: “Wonder Woman 1984” is the kickoff for a full year of HBO Max day-and-date — everything released in 2021, from “Dune” to “The Matrix 4.” Maximizing theatrical revenue is no longer the point for Warners; the goal is elevating its struggling streaming site to the level of Netflix and Disney+. AMC principal Adam Aron had a fit. In a statement released by the exhibitor, he snarled at the prospect: “Clearly, Warner Media intends to sacrifice a considerable portion of the profitability of its movie studio division, and that of its production partners and filmmakers, to subsidize its HBO Max start-up,” he said....

Needless to say, “Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard” doesn’t have the same advantage. But what this breezy sequel lacks in newness it makes up for with a more assured sense of self, twice the possessive apostrophes, and a picaresque approach to comic violence that veers closer to the likes of “Lupin the Third” than it does to the weighty event films that people have to come expect this time of year. No one will ever confuse this for a good movie — it lacks any evident aspirations of goodness, as if returning director Patrick Hughes made the best thing he could while strapped to a bomb that would explode if its Rotten Tomatoes score ever went above 50 percent Fresh — but it’s really, really hard to work up any real hatred for a goofy action programmer in which Antonio Banderas plays a psychopathic billionaire named Aristotle Papadopolous....

The beloved Scarers of Pixar’s “Monsters, Inc.” are back. Mike (Billy Crystal) and Sulley (John Goodman) return in the 10-episode series, “Monsters at Work,” which officially debuted on Disney+ on Wednesday. Produced by Disney Television Animation, “Monsters at Work” was inspired by the Oscar-winning film and features returning characters alongside a slew of newbies. With a Disney+ subscription, you can stream “Monsters at Work” and other content on up to four devices at once, or download episodes to watch later....

Biden’s address comes after the largest military crisis in Europe since the Cold War. The United States is also facing record inflation as the COVID-19 pandemic extends into its third year. The President also announced his first Supreme Court nominee, judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who, if confirmed by the Senate, will make history as the first Black woman to be on the highest court. This will be Biden’s first State of the Union address, following his first joint address to Congress in 2021....

“The Many Saints of Newark,” the highly anticipated prequel film to “The Sopranos,” was released in theaters and on HBO Max on Friday where it will stream exclusively for the next month. Fans of the popular HBO series will get to see the making of Tony Soprano in the new crime drama starring Michael Gandolfini as a younger version of the character made famous by his late father, James Gandolfini....

They say truth is stranger than fiction, but more often than not it’s much sadder too. Where fiction likes to wrap things up in a tidy bow, real life is all about calculated compromise. In the case of Iván Garcia and Gerardo Zabaleta, whose touching love story is dramatized in the timely drama “I Carry You With Me,” the choice between a life together in the U.S. or with family in Mexico has no clear-cut answers....

But less than a week before Hutchins’ death, IATSE and the AMPTP struck a deal that fell far short of the transformative vision many members hoped for. The eleventh-hour deal came just hours before IATSE was set to call a strike that would have roiled Hollywood. Now, 60,000 crafts workers covered by two contracts in Hollywood and across the country begin voting today on whether to ratify the contract. In the nearly six weeks since the strike-authorization vote, they’ve become more divided....

With the unfortunate exception of “Songbird,” which tried to wangle a Michael Bay movie out of the pandemic by turning the pandemic into a Michael Bay movie, the first wave of films written and shot during COVID have all been as confined as any of the people watching them from home. But leave it to Ben Wheatley — an irrepressible British filmmaker whose best movies (“Kill List,” “High-Rise,” “Sightseers”) have always felt like claustrophobic reactions to the psychic horrors of modern living — to zag where the likes of “Locked Down,” “Coastal Elites,” and “Malcolm & Marie” have zigged, and leverage our suffocating new status quo into an open-air horror movie that will make you never want to go outside again....

IndieWire’s Deputy TV Editor and TV Critic Ben Travers also won an award for Entertainment Commentary for his piece TV’s IP Problem: How Reboots, Spinoffs, and Blockbuster Franchises Could Shape the Future. Travers’ win was accompanied by a judge’s comment that noted “the writer brilliantly argues that the repetitive nature of the blockbuster mentality is at the expense of originality we all will have to pay for.” In his essay, Travers argues that “today, TV does it all, and when it comes to scripted series, the small screen is seeing an influx of reboots, revivals, and sequels, some of which take the form of big-budget franchises....

Oscar winner Vikander stars as Mira, an American movie star who is disillusioned by Hollywood and a recent breakup. Mira jets to France to star as Irma Vep in a remake of the French silent film, “Les Vampires,” but life soon imitates art as Mira struggles to see where Irma ends and her reality begins. See Vikander transform into Mira (and Irma) in the first look photos below. Writer-director Assayas returns for the limited series, which will make its debut at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival before premiering on HBO on Monday, June 6 at 9 p....

Cameron noted that the room for discovery that comes when the actors get new ideas or respond in unusual ways to each other and their environment is actually far more limited on a traditional film than it is with performance capture. “I think that once you’ve established your master shot, your happy accidents become quite limited,” he said. “But the beauty of performance capture is that we can get a bright idea on take five and do it completely differently....

The Oscar winner found herself in hot water this week when she claimed that “The Hunger Games” was the first action film with a female protagonist during a conversation with Viola Davis for Variety’s Actors on Actors series. “I remember when I was doing ‘Hunger Games,’ nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie,” Lawrence said. “Because it wouldn’t work, we were told. Girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead....

“Early on, in the pre-production of ‘Once Upon A Time In Hollywood,’ I flirted around with the idea of — and [by the way], I couldn’t be happier with what Dakota Fanning did, it’s one of the best performances in the movie. She’s amazing as Squeaky Fromme. She becomes [her]. But early on, I investigated the idea of Jennifer Lawrence playing Squeaky,” Tarantino said (via The Playlist). “She came down to the house to read the script cause I wasn’t letting it out....

After Adam McKay brought on John C. Reilly to portray former Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss in HBO’s “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty,” the news reportedly led to Will Ferrell splitting with McKay as producing partners for joint company Gary Sanchez Productions. McKay’s decision to cast Reilly was the final blow to their relationship. In a The Hollywood Reporter cover story, McKay recalled when there was some discussion about Ferrell joining the cast as Buss, though they ultimately went with Michael Shannon instead....

While hosting “The Drew Barrymore Show,” the “Santa Clarita Diet” star joked that the high-profile Hollywood trial was a “seven-layer dip of insanity.” Depp is currently suing Heard for comments she made about their alleged abusive relationship in an op-ed piece for The Washington Post. The trial has been live-streaming since April 11. “It’s like one layer of crazy, it’s a seven-layer dip of insanity,” Barrymore previously said. “I know that these are two people’s real lives and I know what it’s like to have your life put out in public....

The acting, writing, and producing multi-hyphenate may consider that just a “normal level of output,” but that may be because the actor has maintained a certain tenacity, telling IndieWire that he “fought like hell” to star in projects like “King Richard” and “We Own This City.” In a phone interview from his home in Ojai, California, Bernthal told IndieWire how neither he nor “King Richard” writer-director Green “knew anything about tennis, but we definitely knew that if we were going to do a tennis movie, we needed to get the tennis right....

Just ask Julia Garner, whose take on faux German heiress Anna Delvey (née Sorokin) is at the center of the highly anticipated Netflix series, “Inventing Anna,” premiering February 11. “She’s actually really sweet. She’s very gentle,” Garner explained in a Town and Country cover story of the convicted con artist. “But then her voice gets less soft-spoken when she wants something.” And that voice is just as jarring as Delvey’s story: a convoluted and carefully constructed mix of Russian, German, British, and American inflections to make Delvey appear more…regal....