News

When Full House legend Bob Saget’s death was revealed in 2022, the world was in shock. TV fans across the country mourned the loss of the Tanner Patriarch.

But, imagine how hard the news of Bob Saget’s unexpected death hit his friends and family. Lori Loughlin recently opened up about how she learned of her co-star’s passing, and the details were heartbreaking.

The former When Calls The Heart actress joined Jodie Sweetin and Andrea Barber this month on the How Rude Tanneritos podcast.

It wasn’t long before the conversation turned to Bob Saget and his passing. In early 2022 the actor was found dead in his hotel room.

His death was determined to be the result of blunt force trauma to his head, apparently he had taken a fall while he was alone. Despite a lot of conspiracy theories, the actor’s death is believed to have been an accident.

The Scream franchise isn’t known for having any post-credits scenes, but does that change with Scream 6? The sixth installment in the horror film series leaves Woodsboro behind for New York City. Set a year after the events of 2022’s Scream, Samantha (Melissa Barrera) and Tara Carpenter (Wednesday’s Jenna Ortega) have moved away from Woodsboro to settle in the Big Apple where Tara now attends university.

The Scream films have become embedded in pop culture. The first film became a classic and with every installment the franchise managed to update its commentary — be it on horror movie tropes, franchises, or other self-aware teasing — to suit the time of its release. Scream 6 is no different. While it’s the first film not to feature Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell decided not to return for pay reasons), it is a continuation of Sam and Tara’s story following Scream 2022.

The latest installment in Scream's hit meta horror franchise, Scream 6 releases in theaters on March 10, but when will it be available for streaming? The Scream franchise has continued to be one of the most popular horror properties since debuting in 1996, but 2023’s Scream 6 is introducing some unprecedented changes to the story. Not only is Neve Campbell not returning as iconic final girl Sidney Prescott, but Scream 6’s setting also takes Scream 5’s Woodsboro survivors to the sprawling, over-populated location of New York City, which is a massive expansion on Ghostface’s typical hunting grounds.

With a fresh take on the Ghostface killings and a stacked cast, Scream 6 is expected to be a huge box office success, potentially with the biggest opening of the franchise. Scream (2022) went on to earn nearly $140 million at the worldwide box office, which Scream 6 is predicted to outdo. As such,...

The 2023 London Screenings, which unfold Feb. 27 to March 3, take place in an increasingly crowded international TV calendar. The event kicks off just days after the Berlinale Series Market, overlaps with the BBC Studios Showcase and precedes Series Mania and MipTV.

The week-long showcase has established itself as a key place to acquire the best of British and international programming. All major global TV distributors, spanning 26 companies, have a plethora of content to offer across genres and formats, and a series of screenings, meetings and events have been lined up.

To help you cut through the slates, Variety has surveyed the goods from key international distributors. Here are our picks of 15 shows that will whet buyers’ appetites.

A Body That Works

(Keshet International)

“A Body That Works”

An intense triangle involving love, jealousy, desire and selflessness sees a childless couple enlist the help of a surrogate to conceive. At the heart...

Announced back in June, Team17 has released a new gameplay trailer for their upcoming black comedy slasher-adventure, Killer Frequency. Not only that, but the developer has also announced that the game will launch on PC via Steam and Meta Quest 2 later this summer.

Set during the 1980s in the midwestern US town of Gallows Creek, where a serial killer is on the loose, Killer Frequency follows Forrest Nash, a washed-up DJ and presenter of the ‘The Scream’ late night show for Kfam. You’ve just started your shift when someone calls in with a horrifying discovery. What follows sees you meeting with a variety of eccentric small-town personalities including potential victims and suspects as you try to help each of your callers survive the night.

As the gruesome night unfolds in Killer Frequency, gameplay will have you interacting with callers to the show using a variety of conversation options while...

In a new image from the upcoming horror film Azrael, Ready or Not star Samara Weaving finds herself soaked in blood once again. The Australian actor is no stranger to violent horror, starring in The Babysitter, its sequel The Babysitter: Killer Queen, and the highly-anticipated Scream VI. However, Weaving may be most recognizable from her acclaimed performance in the black horror comedy Ready or Not, which found the actor completely covered in blood on her wedding night.

Deadline now shares a first look image at Weaving's new action-horror film, Azrael.

Although not much is known about the film, Weaving stars as the titular character, who has run away from a cult-like women-led community where no one speaks. The Ready or Not star finds herself drenched in blood again in the new movie. When Azrael is recaptured, she is chosen to be sacrificed to keep an ancient evil at bay. With...

“We go where others do not go,” said a passionate Vanja Kaludjercic, of the mission to celebrate rising film-making countries.

At an emotional opening night event in a packed Doelen Grand Hall, Vanja Kaludjercic, festival director of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, expressed “her sense of relief and her gratitude” at being able finally to welcome guests “after a three-year wait”. She became festival director in 2020 but her first two editions at the helm, including the 50th anniversary, happened online.

These, she acknowledged, were “three years that actually changed the world as we knew [it]; three years that took a toll on all of us.

Edvard Munch’s best-known work, “The Scream,” has been endlessly referenced or parodied – even in “The Simpsons.” But the painter himself, who passed away in 1944, remains an enigma.

“His art is famous, but not the artist. And I wanted to tell a story about the artist. His life is the main focus here,” says director Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken, whose “Munch” has been selected as opening film at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

He never intended to make a typical biopic, however. “Most of them are quite… boring. Munch evolved a lot, in terms of how he lived, but also his art and his motives. It was necessary to find another way.”

With the help of four different screenwriters, each focusing on a different period in his life, he cast four actors as Munch: Alfred Ekker Strande, Mattis Herman Nyquist, Ola G. Furuseth and even Anne Krigsvoll.

“The hardest part was...

Scream 6's trailer features a scene with the Ghostface killer brandishing a shotgun that has divided the online horror community. The slasher franchise kicked off with the original Scream in 1996, introducing a memorable cast of self-aware characters who attempt to use their knowledge of horror film tropes to survive a series of slayings perpetrated by the masked Ghostface. Scream 6, which comes to theaters on March 10, is the latest entry, following Scream 2022 survivors Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera), Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega), Chad Meeks-Martin (Mason Gooding), and Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmin Savoy Brown) to New York City.

Earlier this week, the Scream 6 trailer offered the most detailed look yet at the film, including a scene where Ghostface hunts Sam and Tara in a bodega using a shotgun he stole from the store's owner. This scene sparked debate among horror fans, as some expressed their trepidation at a slasher villain...

Even among big box-office titans like The Batman and Top Gun: Maverick, horror has had a dominant year. Director Ti West delivered an early favorite of the year with his homage to 70s slashers X. The Scream and Predator franchises returned in top form with some new directors who brought some fresh energy and gave fans new hope. The MCU even dipped their toes into the horror genre with Sam Raimi’s horror vision for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Christian Bale’s performance as Gorr the God Butcher in Thor: Love and Thunder. Not to mention, Jordan Peele just delivered one of the biggest horror summer blockbusters in recent times with Nope.

There’s never a great time to learn that the corporate entity producing your TV show is calling it quits. For the folks behind Quibi’s Swimming with Sharks, however, the timing of the streamer’s demise was particularly less than ideal.

“We actually learned about the platform officially ending on like the third-to-last day (of shooting),” Sharks showrunner Kathleen Robertson tells Den of Geek. “I found out while at the monitor watching (the performers) act. I literally got an alert and it was from Deadline saying like ‘Quibi is no longer.’”

Quibi, the now-legendary icon of streaming era hubris, launched on April 6, 2020 with the working theory that audiences preferred their content in “quick bites” (hence: “quibi”). After audiences resoundingly responded with a firm “no thanks”, Quibi closed its doors on Dec. 1, 2020, leaving dozens of original TV series and movies without a home. That’s when The Roku Channel swooped...

For many artists, their subjects have a deep connection to their world view, their past and one experience which perhaps still haunts them to this day, even though this link is quite difficult to grasp for the viewer. Sometimes the theme, for example, with a masterpiece such as Munch’s “The Scream” or Picasso’s “Guernica”, is obvious, albeit without maybe getting the many details and finer textures of the work upon first viewing. When it comes to a concept such as water or water drops, the idea itself is such as multi-leveled metaphor, it is too abstract to find the aforementioned connection, despite acknowledging the level of skill that comes with painting this subject realistically. South Korean artist Kim Tschang-yeul, however, made a career painting water and water drops, among many other subjects, but when asked about his works, he claimed “Water drops mean nothing to me. If anything,...

Scream 6 (or whatever it may be titled) is officially happening. This is hardly a surprise after the fifth Scream film, confusingly titled just Scream, surpassed all pandemic and January expectations by opening to $33.9 million over MLK Day weekend. Still, it was nice to get a confirmation Thursday that the sixth entry is greenlit and moving ahead with Radio Silence’s Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillet returning to direct, and James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick once again writing the screenplay.

That creative team did a solid job of filling the shoes of Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson last time, and the quartet moving ahead for a fast tracked sequel that will shoot this summer has echoes of the quick turnaround Craven and Williamson pursued for Scream 2—a movie we believe to be one of the better horror sequels ever made. Undoubtedly, this collection of filmmakers have their own ideas about where...

Theater

British Singer and TV personality Peter Andre (“I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!” “Strictly Come Dancing”) will make his West End debut as Vince Fontaine in an upcoming production of Jim Jacobs and Waren Casey’s stage musical “Grease,” playing at the Dominion Theatre starting May 17, with previews from May 3.

Directed by Nikolai Foster and choreographed by Arlene Phillips, the show returns to the West End for the first time since playing at the Piccadilly Theater in 2007. Key casting includes Dan Partridge (“Hairspray”) and OIivia Moore (“Waitress”) as Danny and Sandy, with Jocasta Almgill (“Romeo & Juliet”) as Rizzo and Paul French (“Greese” U.K. Tour) as Kenickie.

“I’m beyond excited to be making my West End debut playing Vince Fontaine in ‘Grease’ at the beautiful Dominion Theatre,” said Andre. “’Grease’ is such an iconic musical and we can guarantee audiences will have the most...

“Scream,” the lively new meta slasher thriller, is neither a reboot nor a sequel to “Scream,” the landmark 1996 meta slasher thriller it shares a title with. The new movie is a requel, a term the film dutifully explains — it means a franchise extension that’s poised, on a kitchen knife blade, between the past and the present, between something jumpy and new and a respect for the legacy characters that gave the original its soul. The young characters in the original “Scream” were living out their own schlock horror movie, complete with a masked killer who was like a mascot of death (he was like Edvard Munch’s The Scream turned into a piece of costume-shop kitsch), and they drew on the rules they’d absorbed from their endless watching of slasher films: how you get fooled into thinking the killer is this person when it’s really that person,...

Documentary

In a recent study conducted by Sky marking the one-year anniversary Sky Documentaries, two in five Brits admit to watching more documentaries over the last 12 months than ever before. With those numbers in mind, the broadcaster has unveiled five new original commissions and released a first trailer for its highly anticipated upcoming docuseries “Murder at the Cottage: The Search for Justice for Sophie,” announcing that the series will premiere on Sky Crime and streaming service Now on Sunday, June 20.

“Murder at the Cottage” is produced, directed and features six-time Oscar nominated director Jim Sheridan, who spent more than a decade documenting the 25-year-old case of French film and TV producer Sophie Toscan Du Plantier, wife of filmmaker Daniel Toscan du Plantier, who was murdered at her holiday home in Schull, West Cork.

New documentaries announced by Sky include:

“Mother Teresa: For the Love of God?”, a look at the...

The impressive animated memoir “My Favorite War” revisits writer-director Ilze Burkovska-Jacobsen’s childhood in Soviet Latvia in the 1970s and ’80s. The result of a nine-year labor of love from a Norwegian-Latvian team, it combines distinctive cutout animation with family photos and archival footage to forge a look at an authoritarian society through a young girl’s eyes. It also encompasses her eventual realization of the painful history repressed beneath the platitudes and propaganda of her school days.

A narration by the adult Ilze adds another layer to the narrative as she looks back and ponders the connection between freedom of choice and happiness. After a remarkable festival career that included a prize at Annecy, the film is now available on demand via Vimeo for American audiences.

The war referred to in the ironic title is WWII, or as Ilze is taught, the great patriotic war against the Nazi enemy.

The Scream franchise has had four movies, with a fifth on the way, three seasons of a television series, and three decades of time to stew in the public consciousness. Beloved by horror fans for reinvigorating the genre with a sense of realism, the series posits a world where the characters know the tropes of a horror movie, yet fall victim to them all the same.

Related: Horror Movies Coming In 2021 That We Can't Wait For

These movies are a product of their time, so seeing them with fresh eyes can make one realize that there are certainly some issues. These issues range from content and lines to characters and production members. Sidney may have dealt with a lot, but some of these things didn’t need to be included.

With Halloween just around the corner, Drew Barrymore reprised her classic Scream role as Casey Becker for a new parody sketch. These days, Barrymore has been hosting her own talk show, called The Drew Barrymore Show, on CBS. This week, she presented a "Where Are They Now?" video imagining what Casey would be doing if she had survived the first Scream movie. Wearing a wig with Casey's '90s hairstyle, Barrymore doesn't appear to have aged a day over the past 24 years, and it's a really fun watch for old school Scream fans.

Though we get a good look at how Casey would look in 2020, Barrymore doesn't speak in the video. After we see Ghostface noticing that "Murder" is on his to-do list, the masked killer starts texting Casey, reminding her that it's "that time of year" where he has to kill her. Getting no reply, Ghostface tries calling Casey,...

Courteney Cox will reprise her role as news reporter Gale Weathers in the upcoming “Scream” reboot.

Spyglass Media Group and Paramount made the announcement Friday and said filming is expected to begin later this year in Wilmington, N.C. “Ready or Not” directors Matthew Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett are helming the reboot from a script by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick (“Ready or Not”).

David Arquette announced in May that he would reprise his role as Sheriff Dewey Riley in the upcoming reboot. Plot details for the reboot are under wraps.

The original “Scream” debuted in 1996 with Neve Campbell starring as Sidney Prescott, the target of the Ghostface killer, who had a look inspired by the Edvard Munch painting “The Scream.” Cox and Arquette co-starred in the four-film franchise, directed by Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson. Bob Weinstein’s Dimension Films released all four films, which combined for...

France has a burgeoning eco-system of virtual reality and augmented reality producers, and is one of Europe’s leading Vr/Ar hubs. The UniFrance Rendez-Vous with French Cinema in Paris, a showcase of French projects that wraps Monday, included a Vr/Ar showcase, with recent projects demonstrated by Wide Management Vr, VRrOOm and Atlas V. UniFrance’s online MyFrenchFilm Festival also includes three Vr projects – “The Scream,” by Sandra Paugam and Charles Ayats, “Isle of the Dead” by Benjamin Nuel, and “A Bar at the Folies Bergère” by Gabrielle Lissot. Variety looks at this emerging sector.

UniFrance published studies in 2018 and 2019 on foreign sales for the country’s Vr sector, which revealed that there were 109 foreign sales of Vr titles in 2017, generating total sales of €41,963, and 204 foreign sales in 2018, with total sales of $240,000. UniFrance emphasizes that these results show that the market remains embryonic, but notes that French sales agents such as MK2 Films,...