Entertainment Lawyers

  Sony is taking a bet on Japanese Anime as a growth vector with the launch of Crunchyroll Storyworks, its new division. Brandon Blake, entertainment attorney at Blake & Wang P.A., shares the news.                                                                   Brandon Blake   New Unit The new unit will be headed by Tohru Iokibe, a veteran at Sony Corp., and hopes to extend the platform’s influence among the Japanese anime community as well as boost its global profile. They will report to Crunchyroll’s Chief Content Officer, Asa Suehira. The new division was announced last week at Crunchyroll’s own Anime Future Forum and ahead of the New York Comic Con.  Storyworks will primarily focus on adapting global stories into anime, and, conversely, bringing Japanese anime titles into the live-action arena....

  With this year’s stellar box office performance only highlighting the enduring interest in the cinema experience, there’s a lot for the cinema industry to celebrate. However, that doesn’t mean the woes that have followed the industry since the pandemic are fully put to bed. Industry insiders argue that passing the SCREEN Act could do a lot to support those remaining struggles. Entertainment lawyer Brandon Blake, at Blake & Wang P.A., looks at what’s at stake.                                                                Brandon Blake   Ongoing Struggles Fundamentally, one strong year does not a full recovery make. At least not when it comes to the capital the post-pandemic years have slowly eroded. That’s partly what the bipartisan Supporting Cinema Renewal, Enhancement, and Enriching Neighborhoods, or SCREEN, A...

  With this year’s stellar box office performance only highlighting the enduring interest in the cinema experience, there’s a lot for the cinema industry to celebrate. However, that doesn’t mean the woes that have followed the industry since the pandemic are fully put to bed. Industry insiders argue that passing the SCREEN Act could do a lot to support those remaining struggles. Entertainment lawyer Brandon Blake, at Blake & Wang P.A., looks at what’s at stake.                                                                     Brandon Blake   Ongoing Struggles Fundamentally, one strong year does not a full recovery make. At least not when it comes to the capital the post-pandemic years have slowly eroded. That’s partly what the bipartisan Supporting Cinema Renewal, Enhancement, and Enriching Neighborhood...

  With the general optimism around this year’s box office, it’s always great to see a strong week, even if it's free of the splashy record-breakers this year has delivered. Brandon Blake, entertainment lawyer at Blake & Wang P.A., dives into this past week’s releases.                                                                          Brandon Blake Resident Winners The rebooted Resident Evil franchise, now under Zach Creggar, has turned in a surprisingly strong start, at $108.3M worldwide. It’s the best start for the franchise, and for Creggar as a filmmaker. Notably, it replaces Resident Evil: Retribution , and that film only took a total of $240M worldwide, something this iteration may well surpass and should at least repeat. It also managed to bring in an extended audience, instead of o...

There have been some significant recent changes in Disney’s senior leadership, especially in its direct-to-consumer division. Brandon Blake, entertainment lawyer with Blake & Wang P.A., has the full story.                                                                               Brandon Blake New Streaming Head Joe Earley, the exiting president for Disney’s D2C interests, will now move to a new role as President of the Disney Entertainment TV Franchise and Content Strategy. Adam Smith will step into his shoes as chairman. This will leave him overseeing pretty much everything that falls under Disney’s D2C banner, including their products and engineering, ad technology, programming, partnerships, viewer experience, and the ever-more-important data and analytics. That’s across both Di...

  As Avengers: Doomsday sees strong ticket sales three months ahead of its actual release date, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day continues to see box office success, are we headed for another superhero wave? Brandon Blake, entertainment attorney at Blake & Wang P.A., takes a look.                                                                          Brandon Blake $50M With Three Months to Go Domestic pre-sales have now passed the $50M threshold for Avengers: Doomsday . The film only releases in three months. It’s certainly an excellent start for the next Marvel installment, which will be competing for screen space with the third installment in the Dune franchise when it opens in December this year. Especially given that Dune is set to dominate IMAX screens, at least for its first weekend in ...