By this point Dear Evan Hansen and In the Heights feel much farther away than West Side Story, Encanto, and Tick,Tick ... Boom!, but they all came out in 2021. And, writes Jackson McHenry, most of them came out better than had seemed the case a few months ago. - Vulture
“Dune,” the sprawling first installment of Denis Villeneuve’s ambitious adaptation of the 1965 science fiction novel, was the only nominated film that could claim to be a classic box office success, having earned more than $100 million in bricks-and-mortar theaters. - Washington Post
"The benchmark in the minds of the audience is content that they have watched from across the globe. That has pushed Indian filmmakers, writers and actors to pull up their socks and upgrade the quality of entertainment." - DW
It was as if the infotainment center had decided to team up with the ghost of HAL. You remember that malfunctioning, soft-spoken and ultimately sinister artificial intelligence computer from “2001: A Space Odyssey”? - Seattle Times
"The definition of success (is) more slippery than ever. Gone are the days when box office is the only metric; streamers calculate their investments not based on conventional monetary returns, but in gaining and retaining subscribers." And some nominees simply don't fit within the art-pop binary. - MSN (The Washington Post)
The Chinese streaming giant Tencent had — to much criticism and mockery — removed the final scene, in which buildings explode as an anarchist revolution starts, and replaced it with a title card saying that the authorities had foiled the plot and sent Tyler Durden to an insane asylum. - The Hollywood Reporter
To boost its efforts to offer an alternate means of counting the video-watching masses, NBCU is working with more than 30 different advertisers to test a new measurement tool it has built with iSpot.TV — and using the company’s Olympics and looming Super Bowl broadcasts as a sort of test run. - Variety
Netflix’s proprietary approach— based on sole control of intellectual property and intense hostility to all other players—is destined for long term failure. - Ted Gioia
QA testing doesn’t involve leisurely trying out different video games, but is instead an intense and often tedious process of making sure that every single aspect of a game is up to snuff. - Slate
"The CEO of the Canadian video-sharing platform Rumble (tweeted) … 'How about you bring all your shows to Rumble, both new and old, with no censorship, for $100 million bucks over four years? This is our chance to save the world.'" - The Hollywood Reporter
“Red Dawn” would become a case study observed by every producer in Hollywood who needed this market to make a profit. And soon, it wouldn’t be just Hollywood taking the lesson of the movie to heart. - The Wall Street Journal
“Men on screen have a whole life, and women only have a shelf life,” says Nicky Clark, the founder of campaign group Acting Your Age, which lobbies for age-appropriate casting and representation for older women on screen. - The Guardian
The trend is weirdly strong: "If you read the tea leaves put forth by the nominations for the DGA and SAG, there’s a strong possibility that all three of those categories may not include a first-time nominee." - Variety
But whew, the discourse. For instance, Emma Thompson isn't "brave" for acting in sex scenes; she’s "an actress who’s still at the top of her game, performing brilliantly and telling a story that isn’t often told. So there are small steps." - The Guardian (UK)
