Sindy, the Singing Movie Star? A2R2 Productions Acquires Film Rights to Beloved British Doll

by admin | Jul 16, 2025 | Articles, Hollywood Reporter Articles

Sindy, the popular British doll that emerged from Pedigree Dolls & Toys in the 1960s as a rival to America’s iconic Barbie, may soon be singing her way onto the big-screen.

A2R2 Productions — the production company launched last fall by actor Archie Renaux and manager-producer Arjun Rose — has acquired rights to adapt Sindy and they’ve set plans for a “bold, feel-good live-action musical that mixes heart, humor and high fashion,” the team confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter.

Rose, who dabbled in music with a live performance series called Laughing Boy that featured the likes of Ed Sheeran and Jessie J, will produce along with Renaux. The British talent was last seen on the big screen in Alien: Romulus. Daniel Hulme, a leader in the tech and artificial intelligence space who currently serves as chief AI officer at WPP, joins the team as executive producer.

It’s early days on the project as A2R2 is currently on the hunt for a “visionary female director” to breathe life into Sindy’s story, which the company is eyeing as “a funny, fierce and emotionally honest fairy tale for our filtered age” that would explore friendship, identity and what it means to be seen. The Sindy adaptation marks is the second A2R2 project to get some traction, following a fully financed debut film titled On that is slated to head into production later this year.

Introduced to the market in 1963, the fashion doll became a best-seller in the United Kingdom. Sindy’s story only got more colorful and complicated from there as attempts were made to broaden her appeal by introducing her to the United States market in the 1970s. Hasbro eventually bought the rights to Sindy, and subsequently gave the doll a makeover though that didn’t help to spur sales. According to online reports, Mattel, home to Barbie, filed a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement.

Another makeover happened though Sindy never managed to leap past Barbie’s popularity. Pedigree regained ownership of Sindy, and the doll got a relaunch in January 1999. She got anniversary relaunches for her 40th and 60th birthdays. Per various reports, Sindy has sold north of 150 million dolls over the doll’s lifespan.

Hollywood has a long track record of adaptations featuring dolls and other children’s toys that includes such lines as American Girls, Bratz, Transformers and The Lego Movie franchises, to name just a few. Of course, no history is complete without placing Greta Gerwig’s Barbie film at the top as the actress-turned-filmmaker captured the zeitgeist and delivered a culture-shifting effort courtesy of 2023’s Barbie starring and produced by Margot Robbie. Other doll-inspired projects in the works include Mattel’s Polly Pocket adaptation, which Lena Dunham had been shepherding until recently. The multi-hyphenate opened up on her decision to exit the project, a revelation that underscores the challenges in bringing such projects to the screen.

“What Greta did with Barbie, managing to take this piece of IP and make it so personal and specific, it’s really really hard, and I just didn’t think I was going to be the best person for the job,” she said on a podcast while promoting her Netflix show Too Much. “Because Greta did it so well, it’s always going to be unnecessarily compared, and she’s my friend and I love her and we’ve known each other for 20 years, like, who needs that? That movie just changed the world.”

‘No Sleep Till’ Review: A Tropical Storm Threatens a Florida Town in a Mesmerizing Debut

by admin | Jul 16, 2025 | Articles, Hollywood Reporter Articles

Alexandra Simpson’s debut No Sleep Till opens with a haunting message. Over the airwaves in Florida, a crackly voice announces a tropical storm warning for the area. The tone is stern but matter-of-fact, a sign of the routine nature of these events. As the voice rattles off forecast advisory numbers — essentially encouraging residents to evacuate — we see scenes of people going about daily life. Pool laps must be completed, wet hair blow dried and dogs fed.

Elsewhere in Jacksonville, where Simpson sets her film, people are readying themselves to party, as if the only appropriate response to an atmosphere of doom is with one last rave. They light sparklers and play music loudly while moving their bodies. Working with Swiss cinematographer Sylvain Marco Froidevaux, Simpson captures these groups like ghostly figures haunting an apocalyptic world. 

Bowing in select theaters this Friday, No Sleep Till follows a handful of residents as the hurricane threatens their area. The film, which premiered at Venice last year and is being released by Factory 25, is composed of vignettes that thematically build upon one another to conjure the distinctive lyricism of coastal ennui and the increasingly familiar dread of climate fatalism. On that latter point, No Sleep Till joins a small but growing number of films that continue to push representations of climate change by quietly threading the realities of the crisis within the narrative. No Sleep Till does a particularly fine job of portraying an eerie kind of climate adaptation, one in which people acquiesce to their fate in the face of the elements. That’s especially true of the families for whom the idea of evacuating doesn’t seem to cross their mind. 

Similarly to her contemporaries, Simpson, who directed, wrote and edited No Sleep Till, tells a nonlinear story with poetic undertones. The film is the latest from a collective known as Omnes Film, whose previous offerings include Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point and Carson Lund’s Eephus. Like these other projects, No Sleep Till finds new ways — mostly through experimenting with atmosphere — into a familiar story. The film moves at the languorous speed of a humid summer day. As we amble from one scene to the next, we overhear bits of conversation and piece together stories of entire lifetimes. This pacing gives the film a fever-dream quality that’s hard to shake. One moment we are watching figures gesticulating against the deep purple sky of a transitioning day; the next, we see pool cleaners methodically at work. All the while, the low buzzing sounds of the natural world envelop us. 

While there is no conventional narrative, No Sleep Till eventually converges around three stories. In one, a storm chaser (played by Taylor Benton, who chases tornadoes and cyclones in real life) tries to get closer to the approaching tropical cyclone. As residents drive away from the town, he goes toward it, stopping along the way to have brief and sometimes revelatory conversations with locals.

In another storyline, a young woman named June (Brynne Hofbauer), whom we initially meet while she’s swimming at the pool, carries on her routines in what begins to feel more and more like a ghost town. There’s a scene in which June gets a note from a friend. He wishes her well, and the goodbye — written on a scrap of paper — reflects another tragic reality of these increasingly volatile weather patterns: the separation of friends and sometimes even family.

The last story, my favorite, follows comedian Will (Jordan Coley) and his friend Mike (Xavier Brown-Sanders) as they negotiate a trip up north as a way to escape the incoming storm and perhaps even achieve their ambitions of comic fame. Their story bucks climate nihilism by subtly celebrating friendship and dreaming even in the face of disaster. Their relationship operates at a natural, low-key frequency, and their conversations — Mike wants to stay, Will thinks they should go — are sweet and occasionally sad. On the road, they talk about fine-tuning their acts as well as cities they should stop in before they reach their final destination in Philadelphia. Their talks culminate in a particularly poignant exchange about risks and, in Mike’s words, the excitement of  “doing something.” 

Even as the storm rages on, waxing and waning as it approaches the shore, the people in this town continue to do something. That feels like the grandest lesson of Simpson’s modest but assured film.

Millie Bobby Brown, Gabriel LaBelle to Star in Netflix Romantic Comedy ‘Just Picture It’ (Exclusive)

by admin | Jul 16, 2025 | Articles, Hollywood Reporter Articles

Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown and Gabriel LaBelle, who broke out with Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, will star in Just Picture It, a romantic comedy set up at Netflix.

Lee Toland Krieger, known for helming the drama The Age of Adaline and episodes of Netflix’s hit You, will direct the feature.

Written by Jesse Lasky, the script centers on two care-free college students (Brown, LaBelle) who are surprised when their phones glitch and start showing them pictures from 10 years in the future featuring them as a happily married couple with kids. The real glitch? They have yet to meet each other.

Veterans Joe Roth and Jeff Kirschenbaum are producing Just Picture It. Brown and Robert Brown are also producing, via their PCMA Productions. The project is Brown’s first romantic comedy and she has shepherded the project from inception. 

Executive producing are Alyssa Altman of R/K Films, Jake Bongiovi and Isobel Roberts for PCMA Productions, and David Kern.

This is the first feature sale for Lasky, who hails from the TV world. He began his career in New York comedy as a monologue joke writer for The Late Show with David Letterman and later acted as an associate producer on the entire run of the ABC’s series Revenge. On top of writing freelance episodes, he wrote and produced all DVD bonus features for the show, and was also hired to write the Revenge spin-off novel that was published by Hyperion. He was also a staff writer on the medical drama Code Black and has sold pilots across town.

LaBelle famously starred as a young Steven Spielberg in the director’s Oscar-nominated semi-autobiographical drama The Fabelmans. Last year, he was the center of Saturday Night, portraying Lorne Michaels in Jason Reitman’s tale of the making of Saturday Night Live’s first episode.

Brown is a Netflix feature favorite thanks to her enduring role as Eleven in the company’s Stranger Things series, which has its fifth and final season arriving in two parts in November. Earlier this year, she starred in the big-budget sci-fi adventure movie The Electric State opposite Chris Pratt, and last year toplined the dragon fantasy Damsel, both for Netlix. Damsel, which she also produced, is number 9 on the streamer’s most popular films list (English). She recently wrapped Enola Holmes 3, in which she stars and also executive produced for PCMA.

Brown is repped by WME and Hansen, Jacobson. LaBelle is repped by CAA, Play Management, and Sloane Offer. Lasky is repped by Echo Lake Entertainment and Goodman Genow.