Rushes | Disney Licenses IP to Sora, Remembering Béla Tarr, Oscars Move to YouTube

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NEWS

Fantasia (1940).

• Disney has agreed to license its intellectual property to Sora, a short-form generative AI platform owned by OpenAI. The company will be able to generate short user-prompted videos that feature Disney and Disney-owned characters. Over 200 familiar faces will be available in the library, including Mickey Mouse, Lilo and Stitch, and animated versions of the Star Wars characters. As part of the deal, Disney will also make a $1 billion investment in OpenAI, currently reported to be valued at $500 billion.
• Director Carl Rinsch was convicted of defrauding Netflix after he pocketed $11 million specifically earmarked for his unfinished sci-fi series White Horse, for which the company had already invested $44 million. Rinsch deposited the money into a personal brokerage account and gambled it on speculative stock options and cryptocurrency, then indulged in extravagant personal purchases, including five Rolls-Royces.
• After airing for over 50 years on ABC, the Academy Awards ceremony will be broadcast on YouTube starting in 2029, where it’s projected to reach an audience of over 2 billion. YouTube will also host the red carpet preshow, the Governors Awards, and other awards fare.
• The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funded PBS, NPR, and other local radio and TV stations for over 50 years, announced that it would voluntarily dissolve the organization after Congress voted to cut off its federal funding. After lawmakers stripped more than $500 million from the corporation, the CPB’s president, Patricia Harrison, and board of directors agreed to wind down operations instead of lying dormant and opening themselves to potentially further political misuse.

DEVELOPING

• Tom Cruise debuted the title and poster, and then a teaser trailer, for his next starring vehicle, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger (2026), due out in October.

REMEMBERING

Tarr Béla, I Used to Be a Filmmaker (Jean-Marc Lamoure, 2013).

• Béla Tarr has died at 70. The Hungarian filmmaker began his career working in a socially realist, cinema vérité mode of filmmaking, attempting to capture the lives of ordinary workers and the poor in his home country. Beginning with Damnation (1988), Tarr embarked upon a career-long collaboration with novelist László Krasznahorkai, and his style evolved in tandem. His most acclaimed films—Sátántangó (1994), Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), and his final feature The Turin Horse (2011)—were shot in black and white and frequently deployed endurance-testing long takes, often of characters trudging from one place to another against desolate, wind-swept backdrops reflecting their existentially bereft circumstances. A desperate, apocalyptic tone courses through his films, capturing an unsentimental portrait of humanity that leaves room for lightness amidst the despair. Following his retirement from filmmaking in 2012, Tarr moved from Budapest to Sarajevo and opened film.factory, an experimental doctoral school for film studies that garnered acclaim for its open-study format and the international artists who served as teachers. In his final years, he moved into installation work, which combined cinematic and theatrical practices he developed over the years. “When art loses such a radical creator, for a while it seems that everything will be terribly boring,” said Krasznahorkai in a statement to the New York Times. “Who will be the next rebel here? Who will come forward? Who will kick everything apart?”
• Robert and Michele Singer Reiner have died at 78 and 70, respectively. The American filmmaker first met his future wife, a photographer and activist wife, while he was in production on When Harry Met Sally… (1989); their whirlwind seven-month courtship inspired him and cowriter Nora Ephron to change the film’s originally muted ending to its more famously romantic one. Rob Reiner began his career as an actor and rose to prominence with his turn as Meathead on the popular sitcom All in the Family (1971–79). He transitioned into directing in 1984 with the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap (1984), in which he costarred as a documentarian profiling the eponymous, fictional heavy metal band. His prolific career spanned multiple genres, including the coming-of-age drama Stand by Me (1986), the fantasy adventure comedy The Princess Bride (1987), and the psychological thriller Misery (1990). He also continued to regularly act in film and television, often playing fathers, as he did on the sitcom New Girl (2012–18) and in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). Meanwhile, he and his wife Michele became producing partners and advocated for social justice; Michele was a founding member of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, and both sat on the board. Reiner revisited Spinal Tap in his final directorial effort, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (2025),  in which he reprised his role as director Marty DiBergi for his final screen performance.

• Rosa von Praunheim has died at 83. The German filmmaker and activist was a pioneer of early queer cinema and began making experimental films in the late 1960s. His second feature It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (1971), a call for public solidarity amongst the gay community, generated acclaim and controversy and has been described as Germany’s “Stonewall moment.” He went on to make over 150 films over the course of his career, including a number of films about the AIDS crisis. His final feature Satanic Sow (2025), a poetic meditation on his life and career, premiered at last year’s Berlinale.

The Wire (David Simon, 2002–08).

• James Ransone has died at 46. The American actor’s first major part was in Larry Clark’s Ken Park (2002), as a sadistic adolescent who murders his grandparents, but his breakout role was the reckless and immature dock worker Ziggy Sobotka on The Wire (2002–08). This was Ransone’s first collaboration with David Simon, with whom he’d work on two more series, Generation Kill (2008) and Treme (2010–13). Ransone also delivered memorable supporting performances for directors such as Spike Lee (Inside Man, 2006; Red Hook Summer, 2012; and Oldboy (2013), and Sean Baker (Starlet, 2012, and Tangerine,2015). His sole leading role was in Frank V. Ross’s Bloomin Mud Shuffle (2015), where he played a romantic house painter trying to make a doomed relationship work.
• Isiah Whitlock Jr. has died at 71. After minor supporting roles in Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) and Goodfellas (1990), the American actor first came to prominence in Spike Lee’s 25th Hour (2002) and the first season of The Wire (2002–08). In both projects, he debuted his de facto catchphrase: “sheeeeeeeee-it,” the inspiration for a run of talking bobbleheads. He later appeared in the Netflix documentary series History of Swear Words (2021) to opine on his use of profanity.  “‘Shit’ has become a huge part of my career,” he said. “I didn’t plan it that way.” Whitlock was a recurring presence  in numerous Spike Lee productions including She Hate Me (2004), Chi-Raq (2015), and Da 5 Bloods (2020). He also had recurring roles on Veep (2012–15) and Atlanta (2016–22), appeared in numerous off-Broadway and Broadway plays, and was an active member of the Atlantic Theater Company.

RECOMMENDED READING

 One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025).

• “These characters are easily identifiable by their political commitments, which map onto their demographic status: young or old; white or nonwhite; queer or straight; poor or rich. Behind the metaphorical armour of their algorithmically-honed selves, they struggle to communicate with one another.” For ArtReview, Rebecca Liu considers the social-politics dramas of 2025 and how they embody the fractured dialogue, cultural polarization, and technological nihilism of our current moment.
• “Who’ll stop the vampires from coming in? The violence that permeated American life in 2025 walked in through the front door, thuggishness empowered by executive order and enabled by the careless stewardship, or worse, of the executive class.” For Filmmaker, Mark Asch synthesizes the year in film and teases out cinema’s relationship to the ongoing devaluation of community and rise of coarse oligarchy in the world at large.
• “Malick has always been frustrated with the typical methods of making movies. In fact, he seems to become restless even with his own methods. If he’s helped liberate other filmmakers, he has also continuously sought to liberate himself. That may be why what has remained constant throughout his work has been change.” For The Yale Review, Bilge Ebiri surveys Terrence Malick’s oeuvre and traces its influence on contemporary American filmmaking.
• “The news comes at a time when arts organizations nationwide are under siege, particularly those on the margins of the margins, so to speak; fields like video art are often misunderstood at best and spurned at worst. It has been daunting for those involved, both directly affected and otherwise.” For the Chicago Reader, Kat Sachs examines the devastating layoffs at the Video Data Bank, “one of the country’s foremost resources for the distribution of contemporary video art,” by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

Nadja (Michael Almereyda, 1994).

• New York, January 8 to February 2: The Museum of Modern Art presents the 22nd annual edition of To Save and Project, which opens with a new restoration of Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Rapt (1934) and features premieres of new restorations of Sumitra Peries’s The Girls (1978), Roger Corman’s Bloody Mama (1970), and Michael Almereyda’s Nadja (1994).
• London, January 22: The Institute of Contemporary Arts and Sonic Cinema presents a program of ten short films by Viktoria Schmid and Johann Lurf. The Vienna-based filmmakers deploy a wide variety of mediums (such as 35mm CinemaScope, 16mm, and stereoscopic 3D) to reconfigure natural vistas and landscapes.
• London, January 30 through April 19: The Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art presents It’s 8:30. Do you know where your brains are?, the first UK exhibition of the work of Paper Tiger Television, a US-based video collective that critiques corporate control of the communications industry and presents a politically radical alternative to mass media.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• Universal Pictures presents a trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day (2026), a UFO film starring Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor. The film will be released nationwide on June 12.
• Universal Pictures also presents a trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026), an adaptation of Homer’s epic starring Matt Damon as Odysseus, Tom Holland as Telemachus, and Anne Hathaway as Penelope. The film will be released nationwide on July 17.
• A24 presents a trailer for The Moment (2026), a mockumentary starring Charli XCX as a fictionalized version of herself gearing up for a headline tour inspired by her pop album Brat (2024). The film will have its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival before entering theaters on January 30.
• Neon presents a trailer for Julia Ducournau’s Alpha (2025), the French filmmaker’s follow-up to the Palme d’Or–winning Titane (2021), which chronicles a 13-year-old girl’s brush with a mysterious virus after receiving a stick-and-poke tattoo with a shared needle. The film will enter limited release on March 27.

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

• The LARB Radio Hour features critics A. S. Hamrah and Melissa Anderson in conversation about the year in film and film criticism.

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK



Illustration by Niklas Wesner.

• Catch up with our 2025 Year in Review, including our annual suite of Fantasy Double Features, Robert Barry on the original scores (and sounds) that defined the year, and the latest Soundtrack Mix by Florence Scott-Anderton for your listening pleasure.
• Speaking of (and about) good music: Hugo Emmerzael spoke to Oneohtrix Point Never about his score for Marty Supreme (2025) and his longtime collaboration with the Safdie brothers.
• “Tom Waits. Is Tom Waiting? Absolutely not.” We’re pleased to present Jawni Han’s translation of Park Chan-wook’s droll tribute to Tom Waits, beautifully illustrated by Michelle Perez.