Crowd Pleaser
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Paramount Is Sitting on a $100 Million Reparations Musical. Why?
Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Kendrick Lamar made it. Now, ‘South Park and life’s circumstances have gotten in the way but we still believe in the project’
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Tales From the Lobby: Small Theaters and Survival in a Blockbuster Summer
Operators on Spidey, the screens that printed money, and why Hollywood can’t afford another PG drought
Latest Crowd Pleaser stories
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The Ross and Rachel Microdrama Is Coming
Six streamers in six months launched short-form feeds, betting bite-size clips lead viewers back to full-length shows
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‘The Odyssey’ Is Sold Out Through August — and Theaters Fear an IMAX Trap
The premium-format boom is minting money — and convincing audiences that regular screens aren’t worth the trip
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The Video Game IP Boom Is About to Hit the Wall
More than half the 50 best-selling franchises are taken. What’s left — and changing habits — is worse than Hollywood thinks
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Christopher Nolan & the Short List of Directors Whose Names Open Movies
‘The Odyssey’ sold out before a single review. The three ingredients that turn a filmmaker into box office IP today
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Comedy Got Old. Now It Wants Its Own ‘Backrooms’ Moment
The genre killed by committee at the studios now faces online upstarts lining up to run horror’s same playbook
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Old Dogs, New Clips: How Stars Are Turning Past Roles Into Fresh Fame
‘Oh, that guy!’: Inside the new playbook for adapting a catalog of film and TV work for a modern social-media following
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Star Wars’ Disney+ Hangover: A Fight to Make the Galaxy Feel Big Again
The fandom is deeply fractured as ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ arrives in theaters with low expectations
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Horror! A24’s Youngest Director Ever Started on YouTube
From the coming ‘Backrooms’ to ‘Obsession,’ studios find the next teen and twentysomething auteurs online
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CinemaCon’s Quiet Wars: Fewer Movies, Bigger Screens — and TikTok in Charge
Behind the optimism in Vegas lies a more fragile theatrical reality
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‘Mario’ and the New Fandom Flywheel Upending Hollywood
A $372M opening reveals the new power structure: Fans build, amplify and ultimately decide what wins
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Scenes from the Lobby: Why Movies Flop — The Audience Already Knows
Inside the exit-polling machine that captures what fans actually think: ‘Every movie, if made for the right price, should make money’
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Gen Z Will Make or Break These 7 Upcoming IP Films
From ‘Minecraft’ to ‘Snow White’ lies a divide between loser legacy brands and lived-in fandom. So where will Labubu fit in?
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Age of Cinemanesia: The Vanishing Afterlife of Movies
Name five classic films from this decade. I’m waiting
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MoviePass Is Back (Really). This Time, The Bet Isn’t On Tickets
For the first time, co-founder and CEO Stacy Spikes details the company’s collapse and comeback attempt through its own predictions market
Crowd Pleaser tracks what’s connecting with audiences — and isn’t — offering insight into what’s breaking through, Gen Z’s influence on the market, and which way fans are moving.