Disney’s live-action Lilo & Stitch has cleared the $1 billion mark at the worldwide box office, becoming the first Hollywood pic of 2025 to achieve the milestone and cementing its status as the year’s top-grossing Western movie both globally and internationally, the studio announced Thursday.
It finished Wednesday with a domestic tally of $416.2 million and $584.8 million overseas for a worldwide haul of $1.001 billion.
China’s Ne Za 2 is the 2025 record-holder overall, with more than $1.899 billion in ticket sales. The vast majority of that film’s earnings, or $1.832 billion, are coming from the Chinese box office. (It has earned $20 million in North America.)
Lilo & Stitch, an adaptation of Walt Disney Animation Studios’s popular 2002 animated film, has exceeded expectations all along the way since opening over Memorial Day, thanks to families and Gen Zers who grew up on the original title.
The milestone means Disney’s film empire has released four billion-dollar films in the past 13 months alone. In addition to Lilo, produced by Rideback, and the Moana sequel, the roster includes 2024 summer tentpoles Marvel Studios’ Deadpool & Wolverine ($1.328 billion), and Pixar’s Inside Out 2 ($1.698 billion), not adjusted for inflation.
“We knew there was a lot of love for Lilo & Stitch with audiences around the world, yet we never take that for granted, and we’re proud of how this new film has connected with people,” Disney Entertainment co-chairman Alan Bergman said in a statement. “I’m thankful to our filmmakers, our cast, and all on our Studio team who have made this film such a success, and we look forward to more adventures with these characters ahead.”
Domestically, Lilo & Stitch opened May 23 to a record-breaking $183 million over the four-day holiday, helping to fuel the biggest Memorial Day weekend in history alongside Tom Cruise-starrer Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, from Paramount.
Lilo & Stitch is one of only two films this year to surpass $400 million at the domestic box office, behind Warner Bros.’ A Minecraft Movie, which has earned a stellar $955.1 million globally to date, but fell short of gaining membership to the billion-dollar club. It is still ahead of Lilo in North America with total ticket sales north of $423 million.
Overseas, Lilo & Stitch ranks as the top-grossing international Hollywood release of the year, and is the highest-grossing Disney live-action film of all time in Mexico. It is also the highest-grossing film of 2025 across a range of key international markets in Europe (France, Italy, Spain) and Latin America (Brazil), in addition to several smaller markets.
Lilo & Stitch is stiil playing in theaters worldwide, with a sequel already in development. The new live-action film’s box office success has reignited global interest in the franchise, driving record viewership of the original animated classic and related content on Disney+, which have been viewed more than 640 million hours on the platform globally.
The all-audience crowd pleaser is the 58th film in history to cross the $1 billion mark globally. Among Disney’s other live-action pics, 2019’s The Lion King tops the list of best earners at $1.662 billion, not adjusted for inflation.
“Harry Potter” TV series might be a tipping point for our nostalgia-fixated monoculture, but it looks set to be just as big a cultural phenomenon as the movies and books, despite the ongoing controversy surrounding the HBO show. So far, we’ve had multiple set photos and official shots from the ongoing production, all of which have commanded massive attention. Our first look at the series’ version of Privet Drive gave us a glimpse of one of the key locations, while leaked set photos later revealed the new version of Platform 9¾. Now, more set photos have emerged which show the Dursley family visiting the London Zoo (via Daily Mail).
In both the book and 2001 film “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” the titular wizard visits a local zoo along with his muggle aunt and uncle and their son, Dudley. There, he experiences his own magical abilities after he unknowingly uses Parseltongue to communicate with a Burmese Python and removes the glass housing it, allowing the snake to escape from its enclosure and causing panic among the zoo’s guests. The “Sorcerer’s Stone” movie shot this scene in London Zoo’s Reptile House. Now, it seems the new series, which is set to debut in 2027, has returned to London Zoo to film what is likely the same scene — thereby nudging us all to consider once again the question of why we’re getting this remake in the first place.
Harry Potter takes a trip to the zoo
Warner Bros. Pictures
The new photos show Dominic McLaughlin’s Harry Potter wearing a blue hoodie and his famous circular glasses while attending his cousin’s birthday trip at the zoo. Also seen in the images is Amos Kitson’s Dudley Dursley, Harry’s aunt Petunia (Bel Powley), and his uncle Vernon (Daniel Rigby), all of whom appear in scenes being filmed at the zoo’s penguin enclosure. We also get a look behind the scenes as crew members prep the actors for their scene.
This follows the first official photo of McLaughlin as The Boy who Lived, which was released by HBO on July 14, 2025, alongside the announcement that the new series was officially in production. The company also confirmed new cast members in the form of Rory Wilmot as Neville Longbottom, Kitson as Dudley, Louise Brealey as Madam Hooch, and Anton Lesser as Garrick Ollivander. All of this has only helped to build anticipation for the show, though that anticipation is offset by the fact that the author of the original books, J.K. Rowling has made controversial comments deemed anti-trans by multiple people, including several stars of the “Harry Potter” movies.
As such, every update we get from this production emerges under a dark cloud of controversy. Whether that will hurt the series’ performance remains to be seen, but that aside, it’s still just absolutely mind-boggling that this remake is happening so soon. The fact that the show is also shooting at the London Zoo, where the film version of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” was shot, only adds to the bemusement.
were first seen on “Star Trek” in the original series episode “Arena.” The Gorn soldier in that episode was played by several stunt performers, and voiced by Ted Cassidy. Many non-Trekkies remember the Gorn because of how silly it looked. It was slow-moving, and the lizard mask was almost completely unarticulated. On a practical level, the Gorn didn’t come back to “Star Trek” a lot, just because the mask looked like something from a Halloween store.
It was said in “Arena” that Captain Kirk (William Shatner) was the first Starfleet officer to meet a Gorn face-to-face. “Strange New Worlds,” however, fouled up that continuity a little bit, as it has now featured several stories with the Gorn, and it takes place in the five-year period before the original “Star Trek.” Oops. Some may worry about this continuity gaffe, but others are willing to let the facts be fudged a little.
“Hegemony, Part II,” at the very least, tried to explain why the Gorn weren’t active antagonists on “Star Trek” until the events of “Arena.” In effect, they put them all to sleep.
The Strange New Worlds season 3 premiere sends the Gorn into hibernation
Paramount+
In “Hegemony,” the Gorn attack a remote Federation outpost on a distant planet, operating under the auspices that it belongs to them and they have every right to exterminate any interlopers. This, too, was the story of “Arena.” Given the explosive fracas that the Gorn gets into with the Enterprise on “Strange New Worlds,” one might think that their ire would be inflamed, and they would continue to attack and attack until they could take over more Federation space. But “Hegemony, Part II” provides a very simple explanation for their absence in future “Star Trek” episodes: they were hibernating.
During the climax of “Hegemony, Part II” Pike and the crew realize that Gorn activities have moved in cycles over the years the Federation has known about them. Pike finds that this is because of an elaborate and prolonged hibernation cycle that the Gorn go through. They also discover that the hibernation cycle has something to do with the movement of the Gorn sun, which gives Pike a plan of attack: if he can somehow manipulate the sunlight of the Gorn homeworld, he can force them into hibernation. He is successful, natch.
The hibernation solution not only wraps up part of the story of “Hegemony, Part II,” but goes a long way to explain why the Gorn weren’t seen again until the days of Captain Kirk several years later. It may also offer an in-universe reason as to why the Gorn weren’t seen much on “Star Trek” after “Arena.” They never showed up on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” or the other ’90s Trek shows because, well, they were hibernating. The Gorn wouldn’t appear on Trek again until a 2005 episode of “Star Trek: Enterprise.”
Putting the Gorn to sleep may have been a Star Trek: TNG homage
Paramount
It’s possible that the writers of “Strange New Worlds” were making a deliberate reference to another “Star Trek” story — indeed, another “Part II” episode that opened a new season — wherein the villains-du-jour were defeated by being forced into hibernation. In the “Next Generation” episode “The Best of Both Worlds, Part II,” Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) had been kidnapped by the Borg and transformed into one of them. His body was implanted with machines and tubes, and his mind was absorbed into the Borg’s collective consciousness. The crew of the Enterprise-D managed to kidnap the Borgified Picard, hoping to cure him, but also to gain insight as to how they may defeat the marauding Borg.
The Borg charge their way to Earth and kill over 11,000 people before the Enterprise can help. Data (Brent Spiner), working with Dr. Crusher (Gates McFadden) and Counselor Troi (Marina Sirtis), manages to find a solution. Data discovers that the Borg, because they are cyborgs, have a “reboot” mode deep in their computer brains. If he activates it, he’ll be able to shut them all down while they update their software. In effect, he puts them to sleep. Because the Borg were forced to “sleep” against their will, however, they cannot find the problem they were shut down in order to detect. They self-destruct instead, and Picard is rescued.
The makers of “Hegemony” may have had that plot lingering in the backs of their minds when they made their episode. It’s possible they were paying homage to “Best of Both Worlds, Part II” in “Hegemony, Part II.” Or it could just be a coincidence. But I assure you that old-school Trekkies will recognize the parallels. Heck, we already did that at /Film.
As announced on July 16, the two lead actors for the upcoming live-action movie “The Legend of Zelda” have been cast. The title princess will be played by British actress Bo Bragason, and the heroic warrior Link will be played by the equally British Benjamin Evan Ainsworth. Both actors are quite young and, to date, only have brief resumes. Ainsworth’s highest-profile gig — at least the one that American readers would most readily recognize — was playing the voice of the lead character in Robert Zemeckis’ live-action/CGI Disney remake of “Pinocchio. Bragason, meanwhile, has appeared mostly on-screen in her native England, boasting a small role in the Shudder-released 2021 horror film “Censor,” which was about the notorious Video Nasties.
Wes Ball’s “The Legend of Zelda” will, of course, be based on the video game first published by Nintendo in 1986. The games are fantasy epics about a sword-wielding paladin who traverses a fantasy kingdom searching for dungeons and the magical Triforce pieces that lie therein. He must ultimately rescue the Princess Zelda from the clutches of an evil pig-like wizard named Ganon. There have been 19 additional “Zelda” games since 1986, and the two main characters have evolved considerably in that time. Some iterations of the character are lanky and mature, while others are squat and comedic. The most recent game in the series was called “The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom,” and it was released in 2024. It remains unclear which versions of Zelda and Link that Ainsworth and Bragason will be playing.
By coincidence, “The Legend of Zelda” will not be the first time Bragason has worked on a feature film based on a video game. Back in 2016, when she was only 12, Bragason provided some of the motion-capture movements for the 12-year-old version of a character named Luna in the Japanese CGI film “Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV.”
The complex, confusing world of Final Fantasy
Aniplex
Any fan of the “Final Fantasy” video game series can tell you … well, they can probably tell you way too much. The first “Final Fantasy” video game, set in a medieval world of wizards and dragons, was released for the Famicom in 1987 and has spawned 16 sequels that stretch into the modern day, and then into the distant future. The series has spawned dozens and dozens of spin-offs, and some of the spin-offs have multiple sequels and spin-offs of their own. For example, there are seven games in the land of Ivalice, and they were released under their own banner.
The franchise has also spawned four feature films, starting with the cel-animated “Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals” in 1994. Most American audiences may be more familiar with the second film, “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within,” an American-produced film that boasted expensive, realistic animation (considered super-advanced at the time). “Spirits Within” infamously cost a whopping $137 million to make, and only earned $85 million at the box office.
That didn’t stop the franchise from making “Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children” in 2005, and then “Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV” in 2016. Bo Bragason doesn’t play a very large role, as her character only appeared in flashback scenes. Also, she doesn’t technically appear on camera, having only provided the movements for the Luna character. The adult Luna was originally voiced by Shioli Kutsuna in Japan, and then dubbed over by Lena Headey for the English-language release. Bragason does no voice work on the movie, but it was a video game movie where she did some acting, so it counts.
The plot of the film involves a magical protective crystal that creates a city-wide force field, an evil army of techno-knights, and a lot of internal regal politics on the distant planet of Eos. The English dub also featured Sean Bean and Aaron Paul.
If you have several decades to spare, I recommend getting into “Final Fantasy.”
The 78th edition of the Locarno International Film Festival has a lot to offer movie buffs. There is auteur cinema, both from established and new voices, big-screen classics, plus experimental fare, Cannes highlights, and stars like Jackie Chan, Emma Thompson and Lucy Liu who will receive fest honors.
Some of the more high-profile titles screening at this year’s fest, running Aug. 6-16 in the picturesque Swiss lakeside town, include Dracula by Romanian director Radu Jude, the latest from Abdelletif Kechiche, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, this year’s Cannes winner, Jafar Panahi‘s It Was Just an Accident and Legend of the Happy Worker, which was executive produced by David Lynch and directed by veteran editor Duwayne Dunham, who worked with Lynch on Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet.
Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro is the man who is once again in charge of serving up an eclectic lineup full of “the pleasure of cinema,” as he likes to say, to festival audiences and industry attendees alike.
Nazzaro spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about how Locarno78 will reflect the state of the world, screening a timely-sounding TV series, bringing the controversial Kechiche to Locarno and how special it is for him and Locarno to honor those big stars.
Congratulations on the great lineup. Any insight you can share into how tough it was to put together what looks like an exciting mix of serious art-house films, from established and new voices, more offbeat-sounding fare, as well as broader-appeal movies?
We were extremely tough on ourselves, and unfortunately, the selection process was also very harsh, because a lot of films that we loved didn’t make the cut. Sometimes I say that the quality of a selection is as good as the films that did not make the cut.
In unveiling this year’s lineup, you noted that the festival does not take place in a vacuum. How is the state of the world reflected in the 2025 ineup?
This is something that really kept our minds busy all the time, because we are all complex beings. As someone who belongs to a lineage of cinephiles, we always try to protect our cinephilia from the outside world, especially people like me who have grown up in Italy, where there is this ideological mortgage coming from our cinephile ancestors with political engagement and a political outlook on the films and whatnot. So we try to break free of this cage. But somehow, everything that is going on in the world keeps asking you questions. So, what really is the place of a certain film in this specific moment?
I really wish I could just be in my own mental space where cinephilia reigns supreme. But then you have to ask yourself serious questions: how do you pick a film and contextualize a film in the framework of a world that seems to be falling apart? I know this sounds a bit sanctimonious, because we still have the privilege of going into a dark cinema and watching a film. But how do we not abuse this kind of privilege, and how do we not make it just a selfish thing? I know this sounds terribly abstract because it does not have a straight answer. But it goes back to the fact that cinema is at its most political and free when it is completely independent.
Locarno 2025 will also feature two films that seem to refer to the Gaza conflict: With Hasan in Gaza by Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari in the main competition and Israeli director Eran Kolirin’s Some Notes on the Current Situation in an out-of-competition slot. Why did your team pick these two, and did you select films from different perspectives on purpose?
It would be wrong on so many levels to think that one thing evens out another thing. It would be the worst mistake to do something like that. It would be terrible. We have a film about Gaza, because it’s a film that was supposed to be Kamal Aljafari’s first film, when he was looking for a friend in Gaza, around the early years of the 2000s, when the so-called largest open-air prison in the world was creating the preconditions of the unspeakable tragedy that we are witnessing today. And the reason why we picked that film as programmers was that we see a filmmaker who, while he thinks he’s making something, he’s actually creating his very own archive of himself, his family, his land, his homeland and so on. This material somehow got lost, and then Kamal retrieved it again, and it’s a very fascinating story. And somehow this material has become timely.
We also have the new film by Eran Kolirin, who is an extremely outspoken Israeli filmmaker. That is not a film about Gaza. It’s really a film about the Israeli and Jewish Zionist identity. It shows: “What we were, what we thought we were, what we have become.” And it’s a completely no-budget film in black and white. It’s a film made in sketch episodes. And it’s terribly prophetic in a way.
Jean-Stéphane Bron is doing double duty at Locarno this year. He has the documentary Le Chantier in an out-of-competition slot, and his series The Deal, about the Iran-U.S. nuclear talks at Lake Geneva in 2015, which sounds so timely. It’s not the first series you screen at Locarno, but it’s still rare. How did that decision come about?
This is the second time in my years that we will show a series. We also screened, a couple of years ago, an Italian teen TV series called Prisma, which was a very big success for Amazon. The Deal is interesting. I got an email with the six episodes. I usually look into something just to have a taste of what it is. I was immediately hooked. Director Jean-Stéphane Bron is known as a documentary filmmaker, and suddenly he’s in this environment where he creates this six-episode TV series about the behind-the-curtain dealings of the 2015 Lausanne Iranian nuclear deal talks. It’s extremely interesting, and it’s also eerie in a way, because when we picked it up, I thought this is a really interesting Swiss production about something International, and it looks a bit like 24 or The West Wing, this kind of American political TV series. Then history creeps up on you, and suddenly it happens again. History is quicker than cinema. So, we go back to your earlier question. We felt that history was urging us, pushing us, as if [to say]: “It’s not good enough. You have to do better.”
Suddenly, when we were watching, I was telling my team: We need to be able to ensure that the films we select will also tell, retrospectively, something to someone who will study what happened in Locarno while the world was in flames. I didn’t simply want the idea that even with the world going out of balance, we were just involved in our tiny cinephile squabbles. We wanted to have films, cinema, that look head-on into history.
Locarno is again showcasing a range of cinema today, including comedies and some outrageous-sounding films. Can you talk a bit about why it’s key for you to not solely focus on serious, even gloomy, art-house fare despite Locarno’s strong art-house reputation?
My team and I always try to create a program that is as diversified as possible. I don’t want that after 11 days, people go back home and say the only thing they saw were long takes and people staring into a void. I want people to go on a ride, on a trip. So you can have challenging films and funny films, you can have documentaries, and you can have genre films, but not because of a high priest of eclecticism. A comedy is there because it’s an interesting film. And if a film takes three hours to get its point across, and we select it, it’s because we sincerely believe it is a film that needs to be enjoyed on its own terms.
As you can also see with Dracula, Radu Jude resists, stoically, the temptation to make beautiful films. And I mean that as the highest possible praise! And, luckily, we have extremely intelligent genre filmmakers who don’t care about sticking to the rules of so-called genre filmmaking and go their own crazy ways.
Are there any countries represented in Locarno for the first time this year or represented again after a long break?
We finally have Japan in the competition again. For certain reasons, we didn’t manage to get a film for a while, and it was really weighing heavily on my mind. I thought we should try to find one, because we receive a lot of film submissions, but we also actively look for films since all of us have a large network. And we found Sho Miyake‘s Tabi to Hibi.
The new Abdellatif Kechiche film, Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due, the final movie in his trilogy, is probably one of the most controversial selections for this year’s fest. Kechiche, who won the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 2013 for Blue Is the Warmest Color, has been confronted with criticism of harsh and controversial working conditions on his sets, as well as a sexual assault allegation, which he denied, and a probe which was dropped. Why did you decide to screen his new film at Locarno despite all this?
We are obviously all aware of what happened, the backlash, and the aftermath of it, and so on. But then we got in touch with the producers, and we had an opportunity to see the film. And the film is in no way controversial. The film is simply a reminder of the tremendous talent that Kechiche is. It’s such a staggering talent — the film seems to be light-footed, light-hearted, and quickly made as if it had been shot in an afternoon among friends. It was like when you drink a glass of natural still water, which is fresh, and then you think: Oh, I never tasted water before. What I mean is I think the film deserves a chance. It does not mean that we condone certain behaviors. The official stance of Locarno is very clear on that. But the film is not about this. It’s about something else, and I think it deserves to be shared. It’s a wonderful film.
Let me return to the theme of the timeliness of the Locarno lineup and how it fits into the state of the world.Miguel Ángel Jiménez’s The Birthday Party, starring Willem Dafoe, will world premiere on the Locarno Piazza Grande. The film feels like a reference to our time’s discussions about the power of rich people, given all the current talk about tech billionaires. Any insight on what made you bring that film to Locarno?
It’s a very old story about a patriarch who does not want to share his wealth, including with his daughter and offspring. It’s a story about greed. It’s a story about living in a world of your own making. It’s also very Greek. It’s about an ogre that lives on an island, and everybody is willing to please this ogre. So it’s a story that resonates with ancestral echoes. Willem Dafoe plays this character with extreme gusto, and he [channels] some great, great actors, but I don’t want to give it away. But when you say [billionaires] today, obviously, there are those names that pop into your mind inevitably. And if people see it that way, I cannot say anything against that.
Locarno will also welcome some big names who will receive honors this year: Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu, Emma Thompson, Milena Canonero and Alexander Payne. How did you decide who to honor this year?
It’s really about the wish of having a larger family. As a Hong Kong cinema fan — I’ve written three books on Hong Kong — Jackie Chan is a dream come true. Lucy Liu is one of the greatest actors in the world. Emma Thompson is a genius — craft and talent incarnated. Milena Canonero, it goes without saying, is a Renaissance genius. So it’s really not about the fetish of the names. It’s really about the pleasure of having these people become part of the Locarno family.
At the end of July, for the first time since August 2022, there will be a changing of the guard at the top of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The Academy’s day-to-day operations and employees (some 700 are spread across locations in L.A., New York and London) are overseen by a well-paid CEO, a position held since June 2022 by veteran fundraiser Bill Kramer. He’s not going anywhere. But the members of the organization — currently numbering around 11,000 and based in more than 80 countries around the world — are led by an unpaid president chosen from amongst, and by, the governors on its 55-person board, who are themselves Academy members elected by their peers. That role has been filled since August 2022 by producer Janet Yang, just the 36th person — and only the fourth woman and second person of color — elected to it since the founding of the Academy in 1927.
Yang was re-elected to the presidency in 2023 and 2024, and almost certainly would have won re-election again this cycle if she were allowed to seek it. But given that she is about to complete her second three-year stint as a governor, term limits require her to step away from the board for at least two years (after which she will be eligible to serve two more terms as a governor, and up to four more consecutive years as president). And that means that the Academy’s board for 2025-2026 — which was solidified in June via elections and appointments — must soon pick a new top officer.
This seems a fitting moment to look back on Yang’s tenure — and ahead to who is poised to succeed her, based on THR’s reporting.
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Janet Yang
Richard Harbaugh/A.M.P.A.S. via Getty Images
Yang, 68, the Queens-born daughter of Chinese immigrants, joined the Academy in 2002, but was not especially active within the organization until Chris Rock made Asian children the butt of a joke during the 2016 Oscars telecast. After that, she rallied dozens of fellow Academy members of Asian descent to lean on the Academy’s leadership to do better, resulting in an apology from the organization’s then-CEO Dawn Hudson and a commitment to work more closely moving forward.
The savvy manner in which Yang advocated for change — including inviting Hudson, in 2017, to a reception for new Asian Academy members — led the Academy to ask her, in 2018, to serve on its A2020 Committee, which was tasked with recruiting diverse members of the filmmaking community to join the Academy. In 2019, she was appointed to the board as one of three governors-at-large, a position created in the wake of #OscarsSoWhite to make sure that inclusion is top-of-mind in board deliberations. And in 2020, she was chosen by the board to chair its membership and governance committee.
By the time casting director David Rubin was forced by term limits to vacate the presidency of the Academy in 2022, Yang was admired enough to be chosen as his successor over fellow producer and governor-at-large DeVon Franklin. And over the three years since, she, in close collaboration with Kramer, has presided over a period of relative tranquility at the Academy, especially considering that they both came to office in the wake of not only #OscarsSoWhite and the unrest caused by Rock at the 2016 Oscars, but also the Moonlight/La La Land debacle in 2017; the shocking Will Smith slap in 2022; the controversial decision, ahead of the 2022 telecast, to not air live or in their entirety Oscars for eight below-the-line categories, provoking outrage from many members; and the two lowest-rated Oscars telecasts on record, in 2021 and 2022.
Yang inherited a few headaches — for example, the Academy’s polarizing “inclusion standards” that have to be met for a film to be eligible for the best picture Oscar were approved in 2020, but took effect in 2024. (They appear to have had little impact in any direction.) And she created a few other headaches for herself. She championed, in a quickly-deleted 2023 social media post, her friend Michelle Yeoh for the best actress Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once, resulting in a new rule prohibiting such endorsements from governors. And she and Kramer put out a weak statement in the aftermath of the assault of Palestinian filmmaker Hamdan Ballal just days after he was awarded the best documentary Oscar, for which they took considerable flack and ultimately apologized.
But for the very most part, the Kramer/Yang era has been extremely well-regarded by people inside and outside of the Academy.
Some things happened during Yang’s presidency that probably would have happened under any other — for instance, the restoration of equal treatment of all categories on the Oscars telecast, and the continued growth of the Academy Museum Gala, a glitzy fundraiser to support the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures that was first held the year before Yang’s election, but that has since grown into the Met Gala of the west, helping to generate considerable publicity and revenue for the museum.
But her personal stamp has been evident in other ways. The number of Academy members based outside of the U.S., which began to grow in the aftermath of #OscarsSoWhite (paving the way for Parasite to become the first non-English-language best picture Oscar winner in 2020), has soared during her tenure (non-Americans now account for some 25 percent of the membership). She and Kramer have traveled extensively to personally cultivate these new members, and this year, for the first time, there was at least one non-American nominee in every category.
In 2023, she and the board implemented a larger theatrical release requirement for films to be eligible for best picture starting in 2024, which was not particularly appreciated by the streamers, but which champions of the theatrical experience certainly appreciated, particularly in the wake of the darkest days of the pandemic.
After decades without the addition of a new Oscar category, she and the board approved an Oscar for casting in 2024 (which will be presented for the first time in 2026) and an Oscar for stunts in 2025 (which will debut in 2028). The Academy’s longtime broadcasting partner for the Oscars, ABC, would surely prefer a ceremony with fewer categories and a shorter runtime, but the casting and stunt communities, as well as their allies, are overjoyed.
And, perhaps most importantly, ahead of the 2028 expiration of the Academy and ABC’s current deal, which provides the Academy with the bulk of its operating revenue, ratings for the Oscars telecasts that have taken place under her watch have ticked up each year (18.7 million in 2023, up from 16.62 in 2022; 19.5 million in 2024 and 19.7 million in 2025); the Oscars joined the modern world by streaming live, for the first time, in parts of Europe in 2023, and in the U.S. in 2025; and the tone of the Oscars ceremonies has become markedly less snarky, more celebratory and almost entirely apolitical — all of which should help the Academy’s negotiating position moving forward.
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Which brings us to the question of who will succeed Yang.
Candidates for the Academy’s presidency almost always have come from the pool of existing officers. The officers during Yang’s final term have been Howard A. Rodman (vice president/secretary), Donna Gigliotti (vice president/treasurer), Lynette Howell Taylor (vice president), Lesley Barber (vice president) and DeVon Franklin (vice president). Gigliotti and Franklin are terming out alongside Yang. Which leaves Rodman, Howell Taylor and Barber.
THR has learned that Rodman, a screenwriter and former president of the Writers Guild of America-West who, for 25 years, until earlier this year, was a professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, has decided not to pursue the presidency. And we hear that Barber, a Canadian composer best known for her work with Kenneth Lonergan (she scored 2000’s You Can Count on Me and 2016’s Manchester by the Sea), who currently chairs the Academy’s membership committee (as did Yang before running for president), was mulling a run, but has not actively pursued one. (Candidates must be nominated by a fellow governor before the end of the day on Thursday.)
So the overwhelming expectation among insiders — many of whom are excited about the prospect — is that Yang’s successor will be Howell Taylor, a widely liked and respected producer of acclaimed indies (e.g. 2006’s Half Nelson, 2010’s Blue Valentine and 2016’s Captain Fantastic) and studio films (e.g. 2018’s A Star Is Born, for which she received a best picture Oscar nom, and The Accountant 2, a hit earlier this year).
Howell Taylor, who became a member of the Academy in 2014, is certainly qualified for the job. She produced the 2020 Oscars telecast with Stephanie Allain; was elected to the board later that year; and has chaired the board’s Awards Committee, which is integrally involved with the planning of all aspects of the Oscars ceremonies, for the last three years. (The 2024 telecast was awarded four Emmys, including best live variety special for the first time, and the 2025 telecast was nominated on Tuesday for six, including that same honor.)
A native of Liverpool, England, who moved to Hollywood at 22, Howell Taylor is just 46 years old. If elected, she would be the first president of the Academy born outside of the U.S. in 28 years (following Frank Lloyd of Scotland, Frank Capra of Italy, Jean Hersholt of Denmark and, most recently, Arthur Hiller of Canada) and the youngest president of the Academy in 70 years (since George Seaton took office at 44).
She has a full plate: she and her husband, Endeavor Content co-president Graham Taylor, have two young kids; the family recently lost their home in the Pacific Palisades wildfire; and she has a film, Derek Cianfrance’s Roofman, starring Channing Tatum, coming out later this year. But she is known to be indefatiguable; understands the inner-workings of the Academy and the Oscars, and could therefore hit the ground running; and would only have to/be able to serve for one year, since a year from now she will be forced by the same term-limit as Yang to step away from the board for two years before potentially continuing.
A Star Is Born actress Lady Gaga and producer Lynette Howell Taylor on Oscar night in 2019.
