The Weekend Read: Inside Netflix’s Layoffs, We Can See Oscars, Ken Russell Restored, Renate Reinsve Talks ‘Fjord’, Cowboy Culture & A Feminist Romantasy
Happy Saturday folks and welcome to The Weekend Read — your regular curated collection of the long-form Deadline stories you might have missed this week.
This time we’ve got the inside scoop on Netflix’s post-layoffs town hall from Deadline’s editor-in-chief Nellie Andreeva, chief critic Pete Hammond’s look at the unprecedented Oscar chances of Elizabeth Holmes doc You Can See Everything and a close-up on the restoration of Ken Russell’s film The Devils from film editor Damon Wise.
From our columnist Baz Bamigboye comes an in-depth sit-down with Renate Reinsve discussing her role in Palme d’Or winner Fjord and our photo editor Rob Lang explores a photographic exhibit of Black cowboy culture from documentary filmmaker Ivan McLellan.
And last, but very far from least, from international features editor Diana Lodderhose across the pond in our London office, we have a look at how Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgard-starrer Wicker went from unpublished short story to a big screen feminist romantasy.
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Inside Netflix’s Post-Layoffs Town Hall
Image Credit: Getty/Courtesy/Netflix A day after Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters faced anxious investors on the company’s Q3 earnings call after reporting mixed financial results, the duo on Wednesday faced anxious staffers at a town hall meeting after laying off 1,000 and shaking up the executive ranks by replacing Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria with Peter Rice and also ousting head of film Dan Lin.
The one-two punch of the layoffs on Wednesday, followed by the Bajaria exit on Thursday, which Netflix employees found out about from the press before the news could be communicated internally, was reportedly brought up at the town hall meeting, with Peters indicating job cuts were over for the foreseeable future.
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How ‘You Can See Everything’ Could Shake Up The Oscars Forever
Image Credit: A24 Ever since its super-secret onetime screening at the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekend, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim‘s brilliant, near three-hour Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything has been one of the most talked about films of the fall season — if not the entire year.
Now, after this past weekend’s sensational opening in about 800 theaters, where it grossed $15 million-plus to become the highest-grossing debut in under 1000 theaters in more than two decades (and the biggest non-music documentary opening since Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004), it is white hot and bound to accelerate.
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The Restoration Of Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’
Image Credit: Warner Bros. Clockwork If you don’t ask, you don’t get, and that’s what Mark Kermode discovered over 20 years ago while trying to put together the definitive version of Ken Russell’s badly butchered 1971 film The Devils. Thanks to Kermode’s sleuthing, not only did the missing moments turn up, but it also resulted in the one of the surprise hits of the year; this week the film expands on its planned one-week run after taking $1,725m — a $4,925 per-screen-average — from 350 locations across North America. Next weekend, it opens in its native UK just in time for Halloween.
Unusually for a restoration project, The Devils wasn’t just given a hi-res make-over, it was restored to the original version that Russell handed to Warner Bros. and never saw again, first thanks to the timorous British censor and then the much more scissor-happy MPAA. Based on Aldous Huxley’s 1952 non-fiction book The Devils of Loudon, about a notorious series of demonic possessions alleged to have occurred in the French town in 1634, it was controversial enough for its time, even though nobody ever got to see its most infamous scene, in which naked, rampaging nuns run riot and defile a statue of Jesus Christ.
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Renate Reinsve Talks ‘Fjord’
Image Credit: Tudor Pandura/Neon By now, Renate Reinsve is no stranger to the closing-night pomp of the Cannes Film Festival, having won the best actress trophy in 2021 for Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, her first ever leading role. Since then, she’s clearly mastered the art of capturing souls; after reteaming with Trier for last year’s Cannes triumph Sentimental Value, which brought her a nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars, Reinsve returned to the festival with Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, where Fjord, the film they made in collaboration with American star Sebastian Stan, won the Palme d’Or, the director’s second.
In Mungiu’s film — which has officially been selected by Romania as its Oscar hopeful in the Best International Feature Film race — Reinsve plays Lisbet, the wife of a Romanian educator (Stan) who has travelled with his family to live in her Norwegian hometown. After local title-tattle amongst the townsfolk, who deplore the family’s chosen Romanian Christian evangelism, there are accusations that the couple are harming their five children, which leads the state authorities to take the kids into care.
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‘Legacy In Motion’: Photographer & Documentary Filmmaker Ivan McClellan Explores Black Rodeo Culture
Image Credit: Courtesy For generations, Hollywood has perpetuated an image of the American cowboy as a rugged, solitary white man riding across an unforgiving frontier. It is a mythology deeply embedded in American popular culture, one that has frequently overlooked the Black cowboys who helped shape the West and whose traditions continue to thrive today.
Photographer Ivan McClellan has spent more than a decade capturing a different American West, one populated by Black cowboys and cowgirls whose lives combine athleticism, family traditions, contemporary fashion, and an unwavering devotion to rodeo culture.
His new photography book, Eight Seconds: Legacy in Motion, published by Damiani, continues that exploration with 91 previously unpublished photographs celebrating a vibrant community that is not merely preserving its heritage but actively reinventing it.
Scheduled for release in fall 2026, the 112-page hardcover follows McClellan’s acclaimed 2024 publication, Eight Seconds: Black Rodeo Culture.
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‘Wicker’s Journey From Unpublished Short Story To Feminist Romantasy
Image Credit: Photo courtesy of Black Bear When Justin Lothrop first came across Ursula Wills’ short story The Wicker Husband online in 2021, the Votiv Films producer immediately knew that it was material worth championing. The offbeat fantasy fable, which at its core explores themes of jealousy and the transformative power of love, was just the kind of unique IP that the Seattle and L.A.-based banner looks to back.
“It hadn’t been published anywhere,” Lothrop recalls of Wills’ story, which is the source material for Olivia Colman starrer Wicker that releases in the U.S. tomorrow (October 23) via Black Bear. “She was just writing them and putting them up on a website somewhere.”
For Votiv founder Brent Stiefel and Lothrop, who have built the company’s business around finding distinctive material and championing stories that might otherwise struggle to reach the screen – think Sydney Sweeney boxing title Christy and Rose Byrne comedy-drama Tow –, the premise was an immediate draw. Lothrop quickly optioned the story and sent it to producer Brad Zimmerman of Yoki, Inc., the production company founded with filmmaker David Michôd.
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