Advertisers will be hearing about the slate of live events in the coming year — and how AI is being integrated. Plus, media consolidation reshapes the line-up.
Source: www.cnbc.com
Venmo is rolling out a significant redesign over the coming months that aims to make the app more useful, social, and easier to navigate. This is the peer-to-peer payments app’s biggest refresh since 2021.
The timing is notable. PayPal, which owns Venmo, is restructuring to spin Venmo off as a standalone business unit — a move widely seen as laying the groundwork for a potential sale. Stripe has reportedly expressed interest in buying PayPal outright. In that context, a splashy redesign looks less like a routine update and more like a window-dressing job ahead of a transaction.
The rollout will begin this week, followed by additional features over the next few months. By the time fall arrives, the entire redesign is expected to be available to all users.
One of the first changes users will notice starting this week is the revamped feed. Where it once showed a simple list of who paid whom — with GIFs, a heart button, and comments — the new feed will feature a wider variety of visuals and larger images, along with more ways to respond to payments, such as reactions and quick action buttons like “Pay Again” and “Say Thanks.” It’ll also be more personalized, surfacing tailored cashback offers from brands you shop from and product suggestions based on previous purchases.
Another addition is the ability for users to endorse their favorite local businesses directly through the app. A new “Give a Shoutout” button will be available under payments in the feed.
As Alexis Sowa, Venmo’s senior vice president and general manager, explained to TechCrunch, “One of the things that we hear a lot, especially from Gen Z and younger audiences, is a real desire to support and endorse local businesses or merchants that they like. With this feed redesign, we’re giving an opportunity for them to share what we call social proofing. In the future, you will be able to kind of endorse that business — give a thumbs up, almost to say, ‘I go to you.’”
Two new tabs, “Send” and “Money,” will also launch in the next few months. In the Send feed, your most frequent contacts now appear as a row of profile icons front and center, instead of requiring you to dig through past contacts or user names. The bill-splitting “Groups” feature” is now easier to access, too, letting users split expenses with up to 30 people. You can also send gifts to friends and schedule payments in the Send section.
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The Money tab, meanwhile, is where you can manage your expenses as well as access Teen Accounts and Crypto.
There will also be a new Rewards tab that pulls all limited time offers in one place. This is also where Venmo’s Stash program will live. Launched last November, this gives users up to 5% cash back when they shop with their favorite brands in the app, money that’s deposited directly to their Venmo Mastercard Debit Card.
Sowa said the redesign came out of a year of user research, and that one of the biggest findings was how many features people didn’t know existed. “One of the biggest insights is how many features and functionalities we have that [customers] just have no idea exist in the app,” she said.
The update reflects a broader trend in what younger users expect from payment apps — less utility tool, more social platform. For instance, apps like Verse and Daylight offer features that let users keep up with their friends’ spending behavior, and the European fintech app Revolut offers features like group bill splitting and in-app chat.
Venmo’s core audience increasingly wants to see and share financial activity the way they would on any other feed, and the app is clearly trying to meet that expectation before a potential new owner comes knocking.
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Source: techcrunch.com
Vietnam-based Skyline Media has acquired worldwide sales rights to “The 10th House,” a folk horror feature from ProductionQ, with the title set to be introduced to buyers at the Cannes Film Market.
The pre-production project is the latest from director-producer duo Tran Huu Tan and Hoang Quan. Drawing on a little-explored strand of Vietnamese folk belief – in which house builders are said to conceal hidden spells within the structure of buildings – the film follows a young man who begins recording unsettling incidents in his home after his father’s unexplained death, only to uncover a forbidden ritual connecting the property to a widening chain of violent supernatural events.
The deal builds on a sustained commercial run for both companies. “Vietnamese Horror Story” topped the Vietnamese box office in 2022 as the year’s highest-grossing horror title, breaking opening-day and presale records before travelling across 45-plus countries and territories and screening at France’s Gérardmer International Fantastic Film Festival. “The core Reaper” followed in 2023, surpassing its predecessor to become the biggest Vietnamese horror release the genre had produced up to that point, before being picked up by Netflix for Southeast Asian distribution. “The Sisters” earned a selection in International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Limelight section, sold to more than 12 territories, and stands as the top-earning Vietnamese period horror title on record.
“The 10th House” arrives in a market that has shown consistent appetite for Asian found footage horror, a wave that includes Taiwan’s “Incantation,” the Thailand-South Korea co-production “The Medium,” and South Korea’s “Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum.”
Source: variety.com
The full version of Playground Games’ upcoming Forza Horizon 6 game has leaked online over the weekend and has already been cracked by pirates. The download appeared on file sharing sites after some Steam users were allegedly able to obtain access to an unencrypted preload version of the game.
Forza Horizon 6 isn’t supposed to launch until May 19th on Xbox Series S / X and PC, but cracks to bypass online checks in the game are already widely available. Reddit users first noticed that games files, totaling more than 150GB, had appeared online yesterday, before Reddit’s legal operations team removed the post.
Earlier this year a pre-release version of Death Stranding 2 on PC suffered a similar fate, after an encrypted Steam preload allowed someone to download and share the game. It’s not clear why both games were unencrypted during the Steam preload period, but we’ve reached out to Microsoft to comment on this latest Forza leak.
Forza Horizon 6 is set to debut next week and will see players exploring Japan and the neon lights and buildings of Tokyo. The game has the largest map in a Forza Horizon title, and will have more than 550 cars at launch. Playground Games and Turn 10 Studios are also working to bring Forza Horizon 6 to PS5 later this year.
Source: www.theverge.com
In a shift at the top of the South Korean box office, the high-fashion sequel “The Devil Wears Prada 2” claimed the No. 1 spot during the weekend of May 8–10.
According to data from KOBIS, the tracking service operated by the Korean Film Council, the film earned $1.3 million from 195,513 admissions, narrowly surpassing the previous week’s leader to capture a 28.08% revenue share. It has reached a cumulative gross of $8.2 million since its Apr. 29 debut.
“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” moved to second place, adding $1.2 million over the three-day period. The Nintendo and Illumination collaboration remains a formidable player with a cumulative gross of $8.6 million and over 1.3 million total admissions.
The local horror sensation “Salmokji : quiet Water” took third place and reached a milestone, crossing the 3 million admissions mark. The film earned $1 million over the weekend, bringing its total gross to $21 million.
The science-fiction epic “Project Hail Mary” followed in fourth place, adding $496,088. The Ryan Gosling-starrer has now amassed $21.4 million since its Mar. 18 release. In fifth place, Jung Woo’s directorial debut “Audition 109” earned $217,598, bringing its cumulative total to $2.4 million.
The historical phenomenon “The King’s Warden” held the sixth spot, adding $153,123. Now in its 14th week of release, the film has reached 16,833,568 admissions and $110.5 million in revenue. While the pace has slowed, the film continues to chip away at the all-time attendance record as it remains the second most-watched film in Korean history.
Lee Myung-se’s documentary “Ran 12.3” took seventh place with $74,954, bringing its total to $1.5 million.
“Mortal Kombat II” debuted in eighth place, earning $60,563 from limited opening weekend screens. Since its mid-week launch on May 6, it has grossed $92,568.
The identity drama “My Name” followed in ninth place, adding $30,035 to reach a cumulative $1.2 million. Rounding out the top 10 was the Japanese coming-of-age drama “All Greens,” which debuted with $17,458. Directed by Koyama Takashi and starring Minami Sara and Deguchi Natsuki, the film follows a trio of bored rural teenagers who plot an escape from their town by starting an illicit business.
The overall market collective gross for the weekend was $4.9 million, significantly below last week’s $12.2 million.
Source: variety.com
At the Cannes Market on Wednesday, sales agency The Playmaker we will be hosting a private screening of Nikias Chryssos’ horror film “Bloody Tennis.” Variety spoke to the German director about his debut English-language movie, which stars Sandra Guldberg Kampp (“Foundation”), seen in the first-look image from the film, above, and Golden Globe nominee Helena Zengel (“News of the World,” “The Legend of Ochi”).
The cast also includes Elina Löwensohn (“Amateur”), Zlatko Burić (“Triangle of Sadness”), Lucie Zhang (“Paris, 13th District”), Lily Taieb (“The French Dispatch,” “Bergman Island”), Vincent Romeo and Tracy Gotoas.
Nikias Chryssos on location with “Bloody Tennis”
Courtesy of Augenschein Filmproduktion
Chryssos’ first feature film, “The Bunker,” premiered at the Berlinale, and was shown at over 40 festivals,
winning several awards. His second feature, “A Pure Place,” premiered at the Munich Film Festival and won the award for best director. He then directed the feature “Rave On,” starring Aaron Altaras and Clemens Schick.
“Bloody Tennis” is produced by Jonas Katzenstein and Maximilian Leo at Augenschein, whose credits include “Mother Mary,” starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, “The Weight,” with Ethan Hawke and Russel Crowe, and the upcoming “Flesh of the Gods,” starring Kristen Stewart and Wagner Moura.
Anyone for tennis?
The film follows Sophie, who has been admitted to an elite tennis academy hidden deep in the South of Europe. Here, she must contend not only with fierce competition but the school’s increasingly sinister undercurrents.
Chryssos was drawn to tennis, in part, because there is “such a big contrast to the usual aesthetics and look of horror.” Referring to a tournament like Wimbledon, he says, “There are these beautiful surroundings, the sun and the white clothes, and I thought this would make a great contrast for a horror story.”
He adds, “Tennis has such a strange combination: there is something very delicate and graceful about it, but it’s also very athletic, and can be very brutal. You can get into these duel situations.”
He adds, “I like these microcosms, where people are locked away in isolation. These boarding schools are the epitome of that, and then you have a competitive spirit – an arena where things can go a bit crazy.”
While he says that films set in the world of elite sports or dance like “Black Swan” or “I, Tonya” were an influence on him, the movies that inspired those films were more of a direct reference point, such as Dario Argento’s “Suspiria” and “Phenomena,” as were, to a lesser extent, American high school films like “Mean Girls.”
Chryssos appreciates having a mainly female cast for the film. “Because the last film I did [‘Rave On’] had a testosterone-driven male protagonist, it was nice to have a more female energy in this movie,” he says.
The roles taken by Burić, the grumpy coach, Romeo, who plays a scary janitor, and Löwensohn, who is the academy’s strict yet maternal manager, allowed Chryssos to toy with sports world tropes.
Boris Becker
Chryssos, who was born in the same town as Boris Becker and went to the same school, had in mind an elite tennis boarding school like that created by Nick Bollettieri, whose students included Andre Agassi and Anna Kournikova, although Bollettieri’s school wasn’t anything like the awful one in the film of course.
Burić’s coach, he says, is inspired by the larger-than-life people that were around top tennis players like Becker and Steffi Graf in the 80s. It was “a way of having characters that are a little bit over the top and play with those,” he says. “These real-life figures are already so over the top that they already feel like stereotypes, but they become these fascinating characters.”
Mother’s day
Löwensohn’s character is “like a motherly figure for the girls,” Chryssos says. “It’s very important that you have in this situation someone you trust and look up to; someone who is always between administering punishment and giving you love, in a weird dependency relationship.
“I did a movie about a cult before, and I did a lot of research about them, and I think you have a cult-like quality in these elite boarding schools because they’re so isolated from the surrounding environment. In my case, the school is housed in an old monastery, so you have a religious element to it. There’s something a little bit occult about it. The students are striving towards one goal. You have to cut off everything else around you if you want to succeed. And then you have these figures who are projection areas for the young players, and Elina Löwensohn filled that with her own flair. And that was really nice – between dominance and tenderness and understanding towards the girls. And there’s also something a little bit mean about her.”
The smell of vomit
He says that someone told him of a ballet school where “the smell of vomit” permeated the air, and he tried to instil an “underlying creepiness” in the academy. Then there are the stories of abuse at sporting academies that add another layer of menace. Added to that was the extreme pain that athletes have to endure in order to reach a high level of achievement. “This environment I thought was a nice playground for me to explore,” he says.
Ancient world
Speaking of the location in Gran Canaria, he says, “We were looking for something that’s really isolated from the rest of the world, so that it creates its own atmosphere, and also there’s an element of danger. We have a protagonist who comes from the U.S. into this European environment, so she’s very far away from home, which already feels like it’s a prison. We also wanted to find something that has something ancient about it, so that it’s an academy with a long tradition. And we found an old mansion on the Canary Islands. It had an old chapel that we could use as a classroom. It is really nice if you get the chance to not build something from scratch, but play with something that exists and has patina and history. And it had red walls, which fits very well with the clay courts, and, of course, the blood.
“At the beginning, we were a little bit reluctant as we were looking for something a bit more modern, you know, more straight lines. But then we saw this, and we thought it’s also such a nice contrast to the players, who are these young women, and they come from our world into this environment. This is a nice contrast that they enter this ancient world. And when I saw this house for the first time it seemed to us a little bit ‘Suspiria’-like and we fell in love with it. And I lived there with my DOP [Constantin Campean] while we were shooting there. We had little rooms above the house, so we could do our shot list at the location and live there for a few weeks.”
Microcosmos
Chryssos likes films that take place within their own cut-off world. “What I like to explore in my films are these kinds of microcosms where people live in isolation. In the first movie, it was a family. In the second, it was a religious community. And in this one, it’s a sports academy. And what I find interesting is mixing genres in the sense that what they have in common is that they have horror, they have an element of something uncanny going on, but still take place in a kind of reality. And they have moments of absurd comedy which contrasts with this horror. And there’s always some element of social critique in them as well. And this is something I’ve been trying to explore.
“So they’re this little cosmos, little worlds, I would say, with these special tonalities. Someone who’s doing this but in a very different way is Peter Strickland, who’s doing it in a very absurd way. His first film was kind of mythical, but he’s also creating these little fantasy worlds which are kind of weird and strange. So I think this element of something little bit dream-like or nightmarish, I think that’s what I’m interested in in these films.”
Social satire
There’s something of the social satire to his film.
“I think you can see the academy as an exaggerated version of a society that puts pressure on people to succeed, where ruthlessness is rewarded, not compassion and pity, which, in a way, comes with the territory of sports, because they’re, of course, competitive, but it’s here taken to the extreme. So there is something like that in there.
“And I was also looking at this character of Sophie, who enters the academy as someone who enters an environment that is not obviously violent, but that is violent. It is very violent, but it’s not really detectable. But step by step, she accepts the rules of this environment, and she becomes violent herself, and she sacrifices her friendship and her love for the greater good, which is to become a pro-athlete. And this is something that we have to pay attention to: How slowly violent environments, ruthlessness and an emphasis on competition and everyone on their own replaces a community that could strive together. That is something I was thinking about under the disguise of this horror movie.”
The Playmaker will be hosting a private screening of “Bloody Tennis” on May 13 at 5 p.m. at Lerins Cinemas Club in Cannes.
Source: variety.com