News

The 2025 edition of the Tribeca Festival will include a new piece of programming that will bring more independent artists into the fold. The annual gathering put on by production house Tribeca Film has announced a Creators Forum that will include talks, roundtables, and networking opportunities for and by the rising class of influencer filmmakers.

The Creators Forum will span multiple days during the 2025 Tribeca Festival, which will run from June 4 to June 15 in the namesake Manhattan neighborhood. A press release from Tribeca claims that the “broader filmmaking community” will be served by the new forum.

Industry leaders, indie hitmakers, and innovators will spearhead discussions on topics that bridge the gap between the social media world and Hollywood. One point of emphasis will be festival strategy and distribution — a logical focus given the Forum’s setting.

Tribeca Film sees the Creators Forum as an opportunity to expand its reputation as a support system for up-and-coming artists.

The stars of the Bill & Ted movies, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, are going to star together again. This time, they will be starring in a Broadway production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot directed by Jamie Lloyd, as part of the 2025-26 season of Atg Theatre in the fall of 2025.

Reeves will play Estragon, while Winter will play Vladimir. They announced the roles in a joint statement: “We’re incredibly excited to be on stage together and work with the great Jamie Lloyd in one of our favorite plays.”

The Jamie Lloyd Company, Atg Productions, Bad Robot Live, and Gavin Kalin Productions collaborated on the production of “Waiting for Godot,” with 101 Productions acting as general manager.

Keanu Reeves & Alex Winter On-Screen Chemistry and History

Reeves and Winter’s on-screen collaboration dates back to 1989 with “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” followed by “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey...

Keanu Reeves will make his Broadway debut in Waiting for Godot.

The play, directed by Jamie Lloyd, will come to Broadway in fall 2025. Reeves will play Estragon and Alex Winter, an actor and co-star with Reeves in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, will play Vladimir in the revival of Samuel Beckett’s play.

Reeves is well-known for his starring roles in the John Wick series, the Matrix films, Dangerous Liaisons, Something’s Gotta Give, Parenthood and more.

Reeves struck up a friendship with Winter after the filming of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Winter recently wrapped production on Adulthood, which he directed and starred in with Josh Gad and Kaya Scodelario. He has also directed the documentaries The YouTube Effect, Zappa, Showbiz Kids and The Panama Papers.

The exact theater for the revival has not yet been announced, but the production says it will play at one of Ambassador Theatre Group...

Creators are coming back to New York City’s most prominent film festival. The Tribeca Festival is partnering with influencer marketing firm Whalar Group to establish a creator-oriented vertical, beginning with this year’s event.

According to Deadline, the vertical will launch with a talk that will take place at the 2024 Tribeca Festival. On June 8, filmmaker Archie Gips will sit down with Brandon Edelman and Coco Mocoe. Both of those creators are Whalar partners who entertain millions of TikTok followers with comedic and trendy takes.

Deadline notes that the talk will span a diverse cross-section of topics that matter in the creator economy. Attendees can expect Gips, Edelman, and Mocoe to touch on engagement, fandoms, and storytelling, among other subjects.

Whalar will continue the conversation at the “creator campuses” it has set up through an initiative called The Lighthouse. At Lighthouse spaces in New York and Los Angeles, Whalar will...

Exclusive: Veteran PR exec Aj Feuerman has joined L.A.-based production company Valhalla Entertainment as Vice President, Publicity & Marketing.

She reports directly to Founder & CEO, Gale Anne Hurd, and in her new role will oversee all publicity and marketing efforts for Valhalla properties, as well as event execution and social media content. Feuerman comes to the company after working with Valhalla at her previous company @ajfeuerman Communications.

2024 is a landmark year for Valhalla with the 40th anniversary of The Terminator, the restored 4K release of The Abyss and the 25th anniversary of Dick. An exec producer on The Walking Dead, as well as Fear the Walking Dead, Tales of the Walking Dead, and Talking Dead, Hurd also serves in that capacity on current spin-offs Dead City, Daryl Dixon, and The Ones Who Live.

“Joining Valhalla is a dream role for me,” stated Feuerman. “Gale is behind some of the...

Kohn’s Corner is a weekly column about the challenges and opportunities of sustaining American film culture.

As actors continued to strike this week, the biggest stories about performers were unrelated to the unions. First came 21-year-old YouTube and Twitch streamer Kai Cenat being charged with inciting a riot after his impromptu Union Square giveaway led thousands to storm the park. Then came the shocking announcement that 10-year-old internet rapper Lil Tay had died under mysterious circumstances, followed by the revelation a few hours later that Lil Tay was actually alive and well but the victim of a hack.

Welcome to the wild, wild west of the online creator economy that drives so much of popular culture. While SAG-AFTRA and the WGA want streaming-dominated Hollywood to provide a better support system, the internet has no infrastructure to strike against. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how documentarians have no union,...

What is The YouTube Effect? Starting on August 8, the general public has a chance to find out.

On that day, Alex Winter‘s documentary about YouTube’s culture and reach arrives on streaming platforms like iTunes, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play, and Vudu. The 99-minute film premiered at the 2o22 Tribeca Film Festival. A year later, it scored a distribution deal with Drafthouse Films, which brought it to select Alamo Drafthouse locations beginning in July.

The YouTube Effect features appearances from creators, execs, and reporters, all of whom offer commentary about YouTube’s massive scale and its undeniable influencer on global events. Figures who appear in the film’s trailer include Anthony Padilla (who Winter directed in a 2015 Smosh feature film), Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints, and several notable figures from YouTube’s corporate history, including Co-Founder Steven Chen and former CEO Susan Wojcicki.

Thus far, The YouTube Effect has earned generally positive reviews.

The Walking Dead producer Gale Anne Hurd has called for U.S. and European countries to strike formal co-production agreements to support indie films and TV shows.

“There are no co-production agreements between U.S. and European countries, so what many of us have done is partner with countries that do have them, like Canada and the UK,” said Hurd at the Audio-Visual Producers Summit in Italy. “That’s what I’ve been doing: putting those pieces together. Can we today move to find legitimnate co-production agreements between the U.S. and European countries?”

The Valhalla Entertainment founder and Terminator producer revealed she had “struggled for a year” to get distribution for her latest film project The YouTube Effect, in a tough environment for indie productions. “Everyone turned us down but we went ahead anyway because we had supportive financiers who believed in the project and now we’re in distribution,...

Chicago – In a manifestation of his most famous catchphrase, filmmaker Alex Winter, also known as Bill of “Bill & Ted” fame, wants us to “be excellent to each other” when it comes to our interaction on a certain online video sharing website. He ponders all the implications in his new documentary “The YouTube Effect.”

Rating: 4.0/5.0

In a stylish and vital breakdown regarding the growth of YouTube, owned by Google (which is not well known), Winter tells a story of a noble 2005 origin aspiration that lost its way due to its sheer popularity, and is now dangerously used for propagating radicalism and affecting elections. Google is the number one most searched website in the world. Number two? YouTube … and they’re both owned by the same business. Using a stylish palette, director Winter tells a cautionary tale, that could explode into a “it may be too late” scenario. While Facebook and Twitter...

Exclusive: Moviegoers who catch Alex Winter’s new documentary The YouTube Effect can expect a cinematic bonus: We can reveal the film is preceded by a short documentary for the National Courtwatch Network narrated by Fiona Apple, with original music by the singer-songwriter.

The four-and-a-half minute long short, which also features narration from actor Jesse Williams and Dr. Carmen Johnson of Courtwatch PG, examines a growing movement to bring accountability to the judicial system by training court watchers to observe judicial proceedings “and report their findings to the public.”

The movement picked up steam during the pandemic when many court proceedings were made available online, allowing Courtwatch volunteers around the country to monitor arraignments, bond hearings and other judicial matters that might otherwise go unwitnessed by members of the public.

“This principle of courts open to the public was inscribed in the Constitution by the nation’s founders who themselves...

The YouTube Effect

A year after screening at Tribeca, Alex Winter’s documentary The YouTube Effect is finally hitting cinemas. It’s a smart and very thorough look at the evolution of a media giant, and if anything the delay has made it more relevant, in light of the big changes currently happening in the online world. A few days ago, Alex and I got together to discuss it, and he began by reflecting on his own internet journey.

“I first got online in the early Eighties, in the early days of dial-up when you stuck your phone line into the back of your Mac classic. So it does go back aways, and for me, I've always been most interested in the rise of online community. And in those days, it was BBSs and newsgroup sites, pre web, and then AOL and then Napster and so on. And that's kind of what led me.

The YouTube Effect is a fascinating documentary that explores the origins of one of the world’s most influential websites before diving into the dangers lurking beneath its friendly interface. The documentary features interviews from users and creators alike; YouTube founder Steve Chen, platform star Andrew Padilla, former alt-right extremist Caleb Cain, and more sat down to discuss the benefits and dangers of the site. The film is both timeless and incredibly relevant, as it both establishes the unlikely rise of a global institution and questions its culpability in recent tragedies like the Christchurch shootings and January 6th, 2021.

The documentary was directed and produced by Alex Winter, an established filmmaker whose previous efforts include Showbiz Kids, Trump’s Lobby, and Deep Web: The Untold Story of Bitcoin and the Silk Road. Despite primarily working behind the camera in recent years, Winter is immediately recognizable to many thanks to his performances...

Drafthouse Films, known for its commitment to genre-defying cinema, has announced today that they’ve acquired supernatural horror movie Everyone Will Burn.

The Spanish horror movie premiered at the Sitges Film Festival and racked up multiple festival wins around the world. Directed by David Hebrero, the film follows Lucía, a strange little girl who just might be connected to a local legend about stopping an impending apocalypse.

Everyone Will Burn will have a theatrical release at Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas and other theaters, before debuting on all major streaming platforms.

The film is part of a three-film slate from Drafthouse Films that was announced today, which also includes Mister Organ and Alex Winter’s documentary The YouTube Effect.

”We are in this business because we know there are others just like us who want nothing more than to sit in a dark theater enjoying the movies they care about,” says Alamo...

Drafthouse Films has acquired three films that it will release theatrically in U.S. theaters followed by digital releases across major streaming platforms.

They include “Mister Organ,” a documentary from journalist and filmmaker David Farrier, whose 2016 film “Tickled” explored the dark underbelly of “competitive endurance tickling,” will be released in theaters this fall. As he turns his camera on another stranger than fiction story, Farrier finds himself caught in an increasingly dangerous game of cat and mouse with a mysterious character who expertly manipulates the lives of anyone who dares to expose his secrets. The film, Produced by Ant Timpson and Firefly Films’ Emma Slade and Alex Reed, was a critical and audience favorite at Fantastic Fest 2022, and has become a box office hit in Farrier’s native New Zealand.

“I am incredibly happy to be working with Drafthouse Films,” said Farrier “Watching this funny, disturbing, and deeply weird documentary...