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“Party of Five,” a 1990s teen drama that focused on a family grappling with life after the death of their parents, is getting a reboot with a Mexican American family whose parents are deported. Disney announced this month that the Sony Pictures Television retooled Generation X-era show will air on the Freeform network and will star a Latino cast. The new series is headed by the show’s original creators Amy Lippman and Christopher Keyser and comes as millions of Latinos in the U.S. wrestle with the uncertainty around deportations and aggressive immigration enforcement under the Trump administration. The original series,...

Thanksgiving and Christmas came a little early today for Quentin Tarantino and Sony Pictures. Picked up by the studio last week, as my colleague Mike Fleming Jr exclusively reported, the director’s next feature is among the 11 films awarded nearly $62.8 million in California tax credits. The Chris Sanders’ helmed adaptation of Jack London’s Call of the Wild, Destroyer, starring Nicole Kidman and directed by the Karyn Kusama, and an untitled Dan Gilroy project starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo were also recipients of the latest round of the hefty incentives made public Monday. The announcement this morning by the...

A huge range of security exploits, said to be worth over $2m if sold on the black market, have been leaked online.The tools are said to have been created by the US National Security Agency (NSA), and accompanying documents appear to indicate a possible breach of the Swift global banking system.Such a hack could have enabled the US to covertly monitor financial transactions, researchers said.The files were released by Shadow Brokers, a hacking group that has previously leaked malware.If genuine, it represents perhaps the most significant exposure of NSA files since the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013.On Twitter, Mr Snowden...

Audiences at screenings around the world have been cheering and applauding a macabre scene in a new film by Sacha Baron Cohen in which "Donald Trump" accidentally contracts HIV. "The Brothers Grimsby" opens March 11 in the US, though chances are you're learning that for the first time here, given a decision by Sony Pictures to limit its marketing of the satiric comedy. The studio is concerned about the reaction from the real Donald Trump. At the film's world premiere in London last week, the Daily Telegraph reported that the Trump moment was met with "loud cheering." The Metro newspaper...

WikiLeaks has made more than 30,000 documents from last year's Sony Pictures hack available to the public. The documents were put online in a searchable database on Thursday, which WikiLeaks says includes more than 173,132 emails from 2,200 Sony Pictures email addresses. "This archive shows the inner workings of an influential multinational corporation," Julian Assange, editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, wrote in a statement. "It is newsworthy and at the centre of a geo-political conflict. It belongs in the public domain. WikiLeaks will ensure it stays there." A Sony Pictures spokesperson said in a statement that it strongly condemned the actions of...

The No. 2 official at the Homeland Security Department intervened several times in projects with connections to insiders, including Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and a brother of Hillary Rodham Clinton, according to a report issued by the department's watchdog Tuesday. Alejandro Mayorkas, while head of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, created an "appearance of favoritism" in a program that offers visas to wealthy foreigners willing to invest in American companies, the report says, though it stops short of saying Mayorkas was guilty of wrongdoing. More than 15 whistle-blowers came forward to complain that Mayorkas was giving special treatment to...

Kellogg's Corn Pops The cereal business is not what is used to be, at least for products that are not considered "healthy." Among those is Kellogg's Corn Pops ready-to-eat cereal. Sales of the brand dropped 18% over the year that ended in April, down to $74 million. That puts it well behind brands like Cheerios and Frosted Flakes, each which have sales of over $200 million a year. Private label sales have also hurt sales of branded cereals. Revenues in this category were $637 million over the same April-end period. There is also profit margin pressure on Corn Pops because...

24/7 Wall St. has created a new list of brands that will disappear, which includes Sears (NASDAQ:SHLD), Sony Pictures (NYSE:SNE), American Apparel (NYSE:APP), Nokia (NYSE:NOK), Saab, A&W All-American Foods Restaurants, Soap Opera Digest, Sony Ericsson, MySpace (NYSE:NWS.A), and Kellogg’s Corn Pops. (NYSE:K).Each year, 24/7 Wall St. regularly compiles a list of brands that are going to disappear in the near-term. Last year’s list proved to be prescient in many instances, predicting the demise of T-Mobile among others. In late May, AT&T (NYSE:T) and Deutsch Telekom announced that AT&T would buy T-Mobile USA for $39 billion. The deal would add 34...

Sony Pictures is triumphant today because their release of the North Korea-inspired comedy The Interview by Seth Rogen and James Franco had an estimated sales of $15 million over the weekend from largely online sales. The movie was schedule to be released in about 3,000 theaters, but because of “terror” threats, it was released in a limited number of theaters and online.The revenue is about $5,000 per canceled theater, or about 300 people per theatre. Kind of light traffic for a new release with a great deal of publicity surrounding it. Count it another triumph however for a renegade state...

Snapchat CEO lashes out after Sony leaks By Cory Bennett - 12/17/14 05:25 PM EST Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said Wednesday that he was “angry” and “devastated” at the information leaked about his disappearing messaging app as a result of the Sony hack. Good chunks of Snapchat’s business plans were revealed Tuesday when the cyberattackers that hit Sony dumped Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton's email catalogue. Lynton sits on Snapchat’s board of directors and had numerous candid email exchanges with Spiegel about hiring practices, possible acquisitions and potential future products. “I felt like I was going to cry all morning,”...

A rogue nation targeted a multinational corporation and won.  North Korea has almost certainly ordered the massive cyber-attack on Sony Pictures, stealing and publicly dumping enough data to make a dent in the company’s stock price. North Korea cannot challenge the United States militarily, despite what movies have portrayed.  Regardless of their saber-rattling, and America’s reduced presence on the Korean peninsula, a real attack of any substance against our ally South Korea (or Japan for that matter) would bring a suicidal level of retribution on the North, and they know it.  But they’ve found a vein where they can draw...

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. (CNA) – Far ahead of the May 19 film release of the “DaVinci Code,” Sony Motion Pictures corporation has decided to address the film’s numerous critics by providing them a Web platform. The film, which goes by the same name of the popular and controversial Dan Brown fictional work, stars Tom Hanks. The plot of the book, and now film, makes claims that Jesus married and never rose from the dead, and that the Catholic Church, along with the apostolate Opus Dei, orchestrated a massive cover up of this information. The site (www.thedavincichallenge.com) features essays and opinions of...

It is rare to have books exploring the legacy of a presidential administration still in its first term. It is rarer still to have the number of insider accounts that Americans have access to in 2004. “These books appear to be painting history before our eyes,” said Charlotte Abbott, news editor of Publishers Weekly. “No one in the industry of publishing can remember a time since Watergate when so many political books have come out and the public has been interested – and a lot of those Watergate titles came out after.” One of the reporters who first exposed Watergate,...

NEW YORK (AP) — Former counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke's best-selling book may soon be a movie. Sony Pictures Entertainment has purchased the film rights to Against All Enemies, Sony vice chairwoman Amy Pascal told The New York Times for its Saturday editions. In the best-selling book, Clarke, a counterterrorism adviser to the past three presidents, charges that the Bush administration prioritized Iraq above threats from al-Qaeda before and after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The movie version is to be produced by John Calley, the entertainment group's former chairman, who worked on the 1976 Watergate drama All the President's Men...

    Sony Pictures has optioned film rights to Richard Clarke's nonfiction best seller "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror" for producer John Calley. "Enemies" -- which was published last month by the Free Press, a subsidiary of Simon & Schuster -- has been at the center of the current national debate about America's readiness to respond to terrorist threats before Sept. 11. Clarke, who was a counterterrorism expert in the administrations of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, appeared before the 9/11 Commission the week the book was published. During that hearing, he testified that...

Sony Plans Movie Based on Richard Clarke's Book Former counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke's best-selling book may soon be a movie. Sony Pictures Entertainment has purchased the film rights to "Against All Enemies," Sony vice chairwoman Amy Pascal told The New York Times for its Saturday editions. In the best-selling book, Clarke, a counterterrorism adviser to the past three presidents, charges that the Bush administration prioritized Iraq above threats from al-Qaida before and after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The movie version is to be produced by John Calley, the entertainment group's former chairman, who worked on the 1976 Watergate drama...