Film and TV Briefing: Friday 29 August 2025
Welcome to this week’s round-up of news, commentary and industry announcements that you may have missed from the past week.
If you are looking for advice in relation to any of the issues mentioned, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
In the news
Venice Film Festival exhibits emergence of extended reality in mainstream filmmaking (The Guardian)
BBC buys ‘Trying’, Apple TV+’s longest-running sitcom (Deadline)
Disney+ and Nordisk Film agree exclusive licensing deal in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland (Deadline)
‘Weapons’ leads UK and Ireland box office for third consecutive weekend (Variety)
Summer box office to fall short of $4bn benchmark reached in 2023, despite surpassing 2024 revenues (Variety)
YouTube ranked top TV distributor for six consecutive months (The Hollywood Reporter)
Hertfordshire village used in adaptation of ‘The Thursday Murder Club’ transformed by production (BBC)
John Williams confesses he “never liked film music very much” (The Guardian)
Features and commentary
Venice Film Festival 2025: read all of Deadline’s reviews (Deadline)
Venice vs. Cannes: who is winning the fight for Oscar supremacy? (The Hollywood Reporter)
Industry announcements
ITV content on Disney+: key details for producers (PACT)
‘Transmission Critical’ Ofcom report: briefing for producers (PACT)
Legal updates
Anthropic settles lawsuit over illegal downloading and copying of books into AI system – details to be announced in coming weeks (The Hollywood Reporter)
Producers behind ‘G20’ sued for copyright infringement over screenplay (The Hollywood Reporter)
Class action lawsuit filed against Amazon over mislabelling movie and TV shows as “purchases” (The Hollywood Reporter)
