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...

  If there’s been one thing that’s become rare in the movie industry since the shockwaves of the pandemic, it’s been Chinese release dates. Once a powerhouse of the international Hollywood release scene, a combination of their rising domestic film industry, a political swing away from the West, and disputes over content types have rendered Chinese releases for Hollywood films a modern rarity. Avatar: The Way of Water , it seems, will be bucking that trend. Entertainment attorney Brandon Blake, with Blake & Wang P.A, has more. Brandon Blake A Previous Big Grosser The original Avatar movie did exceptionally well on the Chinese market, earning well over $260M across its release and re-releases. To put that in perspective, it’s also 9% of the film's lifetime cume and contributing to its status as the highest-grossing movie of all time. The original movie also managed to ‘score’ a modern Chinese release date, re-releasing to a selection of screens in March 2021 in order to dri...

  This week we see the UK government open a consultation period with leaders of industry on a plan to reform their tax relief measures for varying entertainment productions. In particular, they are looking to merge the tax credit system for TV and film, including children’s content and animation, into a simpler tax credit system. Blake & Wang P.A entertainment lawyer , Brandon Blake, examines the proposed changes.  Brandon Blake Spring 2024 Implementation While the reforms in question will launch in their final form in Spring 2024, interested parties only have until February 2023 to make their voices heard. The proposed changes aim to both modernize and simplify what is, indeed, a rather complex claims system. In fact, there’s few proposed changes to the qualifying criteria for access to the relief programs, simply how they are managed in the wider sense. However, high-end TV could see an increase in the minimum expenditure needed to qualify. Currently, this category t...

  Live sports streaming is accelerating fast, with more and more sports programs turning to streaming services, instead of traditional broadcast, to reach the widest audience possible. Roku has made itself a small, but solid, corner in the world of streaming giants through its adaptability- and it seems they’re back at it again with this new development, too. Brandon Blake, entertainment lawyer with Blake & Wang P.A, has the news. Brandon Blake Sports Dedicated Corner Roku will now add a dedicated area in their streaming interface for live sports fans to track the action. This will act as a centralized hub for their wider sports streaming offerings, sparing watchers the need to toggle between various apps to find the coverage they’re looking for.    With sports now booming across a range of streaming services- from Amazon’s NFL Thursday Night Football to Apple’s Major League Baseball and the wealth of sports now on offer through Disney’s ESPN+. Word is that N...