Entertainment Lawyers

 It’s rare for there to be an upfront week calendar shift, but this coming year Paramount Global will not be holding its traditional get-togethers at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Blake & Wang P.A entertainment lawyer , Brandon Blake, looks at the shift in more detail. Brandon Black A Swing to Intimate Instead of the traditional upfront presentation, Paramount Global released plans for a ‘series of high-impact, intimate gatherings’ with each of their major agency partners and clients. In 2022, we already saw them utilize an abbreviated presentation. But the swing away from Carnegie Hall entirely breaks a pattern we’ve seen for decades with first CBS and then Paramount holding fort there. While 2022’s return to purely in-person events may have seemed like a return to the ‘norm,’ it also signaled a transformative time for the industry as a whole. So this likely won’t be the only novel reinvention of tried-and-true traditions we see, especially regarding the advertising industry’s rel...

  With a rather spectacular development budget, it was always going to be a little hit-and-miss as to whether Avatar: The Way of Water would meet the lofty benchmarks needed for both profit and to boost the wider Box Office totals for 2022. To date, well, it’s not looking great. Blake & Wang P.A entertainment attorney , Brandon Blake, unpacks the totals so far.  Brandon Blake Total Global Launch With its full opening weekend under its belt, Avatar 2 has managed to net a global total of $441.6M, with $307.6M of that coming from international play. While it did have a stronger Sunday than initially predicted internationally, it’s lackluster to say the least. By its own needed benchmarks, that is. It does manage to make it to the 3rd highest global weekend of the pandemic era, as well as the 2nd highest global opening this year, which is nothing to sneeze at.   What does this mean in real terms? This does put it (considering like-for-like) a cozy 82% ahead of T...

  It’s been a dizzying year to keep track of the shifts in the streaming waters- and now there’s another move afoot. HBO Max will be returning to the Amazon Prime Video Channels over a year after it was pulled from the service. With a prospective merger for the overall HBO banner on the cards after the formation of Warner Bros Discovery and two streaming platforms coming under one banner, it’s an interesting move indeed. Entertainment attorney from Blake & Wang P.A, Brandon Blake, dissects what we know. Brandon Blake New Deal As from Dec 6th 2022, HBO Max’ premium tier will be offered for $14.99 a month through the third-party Prime Video Channels service. Discovery’s content will be added to the deal once it launches next year.   When the service was pulled from Amazon Prime Video last September, it took 5 million HBO Max subscribers with it. While some services- think Paramount+, AMC+ and Starz- have done very well for subscribers out of the platform, others (nam...

  In a reversal of its previous decision, the 2023 Academy Awards will once again air in full across all 23 categories. This rolls back the decision to cut 8 of the categories from live broadcast which we saw removed from the 2022 telecast amid a lot of industry ire. Blake & Wang P.A entertainment lawyer Brandon Blake has all the news for us.                                                                                               Brandon Blake Controversial Decision The original decision to ax so-called ‘unpopular’ categories- including original score, documentary short, editing, live-action and animated short, sound, makeup and hairstyling- from the broadcast for 2022 was not well received, both among the guilds and industry leaders who...