The AI Film Festival is branching out to include design, new media, fashion, gaming and advertising, AI firm and festival organizer Runway has announced. In a video posted Wednesday to Instagram Reels, the company said the next annual edition of the festival, which will be held June 11 in New…

ESPN and Disney will start hyping their coverage of the 2027 Super Bowl more than a year in an advance with a 24-hour event dubbed The Handoff. Starting on Feb. 8, the day when NBCUniversal will air Super Bowl LX from Santa Clara, CA, ESPN will establish an on-air presence in Southern…

Range has acquired Superfly, a live event firm known for running Bonnaroo, Outside Lands, Clusterfest, and The Friends Experience. The experiential marketer, founded 25 years ago, will be operated by Range Sports. Superfly founders Rick Farman, Rich Goodstone and Kerry Black, along with other…

A line of Kpop Demon Hunters toys and merchandise was unveiled Tuesday at the Nuremberg Toy Fair by Netflix, Hasbro and Mattel. The runaway animated hit produced for Netflix by Sony Pictures Animation was such a left-field success last summer that it didn’t come with the line of consumer…

Fox Entertainment is furthering its ambitions in vertical video, inking a scripted programming pact with Dhar Mann Studios. Videos made under the auspices of Mann, a popular scripted creator, will be hosted on the MyDrama app. MyDrama is owned by Holywater, the vertical platform in which Fox…

Connect Ventures, originally a partnership between CAA and New Enterprise Associates and now a full-fledged venture capital firm, has tapped investor Nicole Quinn and CAA alum Michael Blank to lead the outfit. Founded in 2020, Connect Ventures took stakes in about 30 companies, among them TMRW…

The temperature is rising in the Warner Bros Discovery chase, with key figures at Netflix and Paramount ridiculing the other companies’ merger proposals. Netflix, running what might be termed Operation Reassure Wall Street, has recently made Co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters available to…

AMC Networks Chief Financial Officer Patrick O’Connell is stepping down in order to pursue “an opportunity outside of the media industry,” the company said Thursday. In announcing the departure, the cable and streaming programmer didn’t offer details about O’Connell’s next career chapter. It…

Microsoft has found what caused an outage that crippled its services like Outlook and Teams. Thousands of users swarmed to social media to find out what was happening with their e-mails during the middle of the business day. It turns out that Microsoft was experiencing an outage with…

Substack, whose text-based subscription platform has reshaped the media business since launching nearly a decade ago, has launched a TV app. The app is in beta and is thus far only available on Apple TV and Google TV. In a blog post announcing the move, the start-up dropped several names…

Adobe is rolling out a new AI offering aiming to create common ground among major talent agencies, top filmmakers, visual effects houses and others balancing human creativity with technological advances. Dubbed Firefly Foundry, it uses AI models the tech company calls “commercially safe” to…

Paramount has extended the deadline for Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders to throw their support behind the company’s hostile takeover bid. The initial deadline of Wednesday has now been pushed to February 20, the company said in an SEC filing. Paramount CEO David Ellison, along with his…