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Ex-Prime Video UK Boss Chris Bird Launches Two AI Ventures

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Former Prime Video UK chief Chris Bird has launched a pair of AI ventures aimed at empowering indie content creators, one with documentary director Dan Hartley.

Bird is behind HawksHead AI, a predictive data analytics platform, and CineMe AI, an AI-powered development took he has co-founded with The Boy Who Lived director Hartley.

Having left Amazon last year, where he was Managing Director of Prime Video UK, Bird has been building up his new businesses behind the scenes and is now in Cannes at the film festival to launch them.

HawksHead AI is being billed as a data analysis platform that helps content creators predict how their projects will perform with audiences at the earliest stages of development from script or synopsis. 

Using proprietary AI tools and private databases, HawksHead gives eagle-eyed analysis on the likely performance of a project within specific audience groups and provides actionable guidance on how to adjust scripts, casting or the creative approach to improve resonance. A ‘synthetic panel’ capability also allows creators to test changes and gauge results in advance, getting feedback in hours.

Bird hope this will collectively allow creators to win commissions or secure investment from broadcasters and streamers.

CineMe comes from Bird and Hartley, whose HBO and Sky feature documentary David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived, about Harry Potter stunt performer was BAFTA and Emmy-nominated) is being marketed as “a pioneering, accessible and affordable visual development tool for filmmakers, powered by AI.”

In practice, it will take a script and automatically createsa visual storyboard of related photo-realistic images in seconds. The founders say it enables collaboration between producers, directors, production designers, DPs, locations, costume designers and VFX teams, simplifies how ideas are shared and saves “significant” time and money.

The tool is being aimed at everyone from established Hollywood film producers to indie grassroots creators. Generative AI VFX capabilities that allow for complex visual effects such as explosions or large-scale set pieces entirely through AI will be introduced over time.

“The old ways of commissioning, based on who you knew and what talent you could attach are changing rapidly,” said Bird. “Streamers and platforms have for years used sophisticated data analysis to make investment decisions, and that data was their exclusive preserve.

“Now, through HawksHead AI and CineMe, we’re levelling the playing field – putting that same power into the hands of British filmmakers and content creators at the point where it matters most: before a single frame is shot. As AI-produced content becomes more mainstream, the ability to optimise for audience engagement will only become more important. We exist to help creators make the best decisions with the best available data.”

Hartley added that CineMe “was born out of frustration with slow, laborious systems for getting projects off the ground,” adding: “There’s an absence of accessible, affordable visual development tools outside of the studio system. We’re changing that — for established filmmakers looking to simplify the production process, and for the next generation of content creators across film, television and web-based media.”

CineMe is currently in beta phase testing, with “a series of confidential, high-profile productions on board.” Unnamed “key advisors and industry names from across the film, technology and investment sectors” are on board and will be announced “soon.”

Hartley and Bird have also formed the CineMe Future Fund, which will put 5% of the company to a charitable trust, with the goal of providing enterprise-grade AI to the screen-based creative industries workforce. Hartley, a freelancer who hit hard by financial insecurity in the wake of the pandemic and Hollywood strikes, wants the fund to start a conversation about supporting those most vulnerable to disruption.

”Over a 20-year career I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the leading luminaries in the British film industry, and I’ve seen first-hand how important it is to align teams around a creative vision,” said Hartley. “I see CineMe’s role as supporting the next generation of storytellers and filmmakers, by giving them access to affordable tools that will transform how they develop, produce and distribute films. Before CineMe you used to have to wait until you’d made a film before you could see it, now you don’t.”

Bird added: “After 15 years at Amazon, seeing first-hand how new technologies can help reduce cost, improve decision-making and increase efficiency, I’m excited to bring that ethos to the UK content creation space with CineMe.  We sit on the precipice of significant change in our industry, and CineMe is perfectly placed to help creators bring their vision to screen more easily than has ever been possible.”

The news comes after Deadline’s Breaking Baz revealed David Holmes, who played Daniel Radcliffe’s stunt double in Harry Potter before a tragic accident on the set of Deathly Hallows: Part One left him paralyzed from the waist down, was turning Harley’s doc The Boy Who Lived into a stage play.

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Obama Relives Tan Suit Debacle In ‘Life, Larry & Pursuit of Unhappiness’

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As Larry David‘s comedic trip through U.S. history comes to an end, he took credit for one of the nation’s more recent presidential scandals.

On Friday’s season finale of the HBO sketch comedy miniseries Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, President Barack Obama made a surprise appearance as himself in a sketch set in 2014, as David advised him to wear the now-infamous, outrage-inducing tan suit during his live press conference on military response to ISIS.

Following some banter on how the POTUS avoids stains, David accidentally spills juice on Obama’s suit jacket when he leaves the room. When the 44th president returns, the comedian recommends he wear the tan suit that Obama planned on taking it to Turin for NATO Summit, for “a daytime event, it’s outdoors, a little more casual.”

“First of all, it’s a gorgeous suit,” David declared. “And this is casual Friday!”

“It is a great suit,” admitted Obama, as David told him, “Oh boy, oh boy. I think this is the move. … Old lips won’t let you down. You’ll thank me!”

As Obama models the look, David gives him his signature, “Pretty good! Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.”

“You sure about this?” asks Obama, as David assures him, “Never been more sure about anything in my life. People are going to be talking about this for a long, long time.”

Obama’s cameo in the finale comes as David marks the United States Semiquencentennial with the seven-part sketch comedy limited series, which recounts major events in U.S. history through the comedian’s signature observational humor.

David’s longtime Curb Your Enthusiasm partner Jeff Schaffer, who serves as an executive producer on Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, previously told Deadline that Obama, who produced under his Higher Ground banner, reached out to his buddy David to ask if he’d be interested in making the show to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday.

“When you’re doing a show about American history, you want to do it warts and right now we have this orange saggy wart that we wish would go away,” said Schaffer. “But the nice thing about having President Obama produce this and be a part of it is that this country’s had a lot of fuck ups, we’ve seemed to have learned very little, but we’re still moving forward sometimes, and then we move back a little bit, but we always move forward again. While Larry’s pointing out a lot of the steps back, the President is telling us we can still step forward.”

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Matthew McConaughey Performs “Quill” From ‘Rivals of Amziah King’ — Watch

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Matthew McConaughey shows off his vocal skills (and some hidden banjo talents) with his latest role in The Rivals of Amziah King.

On Friday, Lakeshore Records released the single and music video for “Quill” from the original motion picture soundtrack, performed by the Oscar-winning and co-star Ben Hardesty, also featuring Miranda Zickler, Angelina LookingGlass and Andrea Pister.

Set in the backwoods of Oklahoma, The Rivals of Amziah King follows the musically gifted Amaziah King (McConaughey) and his bluegrass-playing band of misfits while overseeing the premier honey-making operation in town. When Amaziah’s estranged foster daughter unexpectedly returns, he leaps at the chance to reconnect and create a family business. But the honey game is ruthless, and Amaziah’s rivals threaten to destroy everything he has built.

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Premiering Aug. 14 in theaters, the Andrew Patterson-written-and-directed drama also stars Angelina LookingGlass, Cole Sprouse, Jake Horowitz, Tony Revolori and Kurt Russell.

Producers are David Heyman, Teddy Schwarzman, Jeffrey Clifford, Michael Heimler, James Montague and Will Greenfield.

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Jane Schoenbrun On Tackling “Toxic Soup” Of Slasher Genre In ‘Camp Miasma’

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With their latest directorial outing, Jane Schoenbrun used subtle pieces of nostalgia to deconstruct the slasher genre.

The Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma writer/director explained to Deadline that they wanted to create “a mindset where you can really enjoy something scary,” noting the frequent symbolism of candy and junk food as providing an atmosphere “that’s actually safe” while diving into a horror movie or exploring sexuality after trauma.

“There is this idea that if it gets too real, you can turn it off, that you’re exploring something dangerous, doing it in a way that’s actually safe,” said Schoenbrun, who is non-binary. “Which in my experience of coming into my sexual identity post-transition, kind of required some gummy candy on hand. What I mean by that is, even if we’re going to be exploring scary and vulnerable and potentially embarrassing, triggering parts of ourselves, we trust each other well enough to know that at any moment, we can be like, ‘Let’s stop, we gotta just eat some fucking gummies.’”

In Schoenbrun’s latest film, Hannah Einbinder stars as queer director Kris, who is tapped to helm a new installment of the long-running Camp Miasma horror franchise. While courting Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the actress who played the “final girl” in the original film, to reprise her role, the pair spirals into a psychosexual frenzy as the slasher’s killer, Little Death (Jack Haven), comes to life.

Acknowledging the problematic trans representation of horror films like Psycho (1960), Sleepaway Camp (1983), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995), Schoenbrun admitted the genre has been “catnip to me since I was 10 years old,” and they jumped at the chance to direct their own.

Jane Schoenbrun at the
Jane Schoenbrun attends the ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ premiere on Aug. 5, 2026 in New York City.

“So many slashers do have this sense of humor, and even if they’re not overtly meta like the Scream movies are, they’re so aware of their own tropes and the sort of rituals … And I just loved that from a young age and loved all of the little rituals within it, and so, getting to make my own is just like play and joy,” they explained.

“But it also felt like the perfect way to talk about sex and to talk about my experience as a trans person post-transition, learning how to come into a sexual identity that I could feel comfortable within, because so many of these movies are obviously deeply engaged in gender and sexual roles, and these movies have so much to say for better or for worse about deviants,” said Schoenbrun. “It is there in the DNA of the slasher genre that these movies are talking about fear and desire, gender and sexuality, normativity and deviance. And that’s all swimming in the toxic soup of the genre, so I wanted to remake it in my own language.”

Read on about Jane Schoenbrun’s love letter to the slasher genre with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, now playing in theaters.

DEADLINE: It was really fun to see the slasher genre through your eyes. Tell me about finding inspiration in that genre and “final girls.” 

JANE SCHOENBRUN: I mean, it was the easiest thing in the world because it’s just one of those genres that has been catnip to me since I was 10 years old. I just raided the horror section of the video store as a kid from an age when I really shouldn’t have been doing that, like in 5th grade, I watched in the span of about one week, every Nightmare on Elm Street movie. I think that I was always drawn to movies and really anything entertainment where it felt forbidden in some way, like the thing on the tape, how is that even allowed? And that’s the thing that I love about a lot of my favorite slashers. Don’t get me wrong, I love like brutal ones, like I love Texas Chainsaw, that’s a nasty movie at its core, and that’s what’s so special about it. But so many slashers do have this sense of humor, and even if they’re not overtly meta like the Scream movies are, they’re so aware of their own tropes and the sort of rituals of, OK, what’s the most outrageous way that like these like dumb kids can get killed? But watching it, it’s not about fear a lot of the time, it’s about joy and celebration. And I just loved that from a young age and loved all of the little rituals within it, and so, getting to make my own is just like play and joy. But it also felt like the perfect way to talk about sex and to talk about my experience as a trans person post-transition, learning how to come into a sexual identity that I could feel comfortable within, because so many of these movies are obviously deeply engaged in gender and sexual roles, and these movies have so much to say for better or for worse about deviants, whether that be Norman Bates or Buffalo Bill or Sleepway Camp or Jason, Michael Myers, Leatherface in drag. It is there in the DNA of the slasher genre that these movies are talking about fear and desire, gender and sexuality, normativity and deviance. And that’s all swimming in the toxic soup of the genre, so I wanted to remake it in my own language. 

‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ (2026)

DEADLINE: I’m curious about the symbolism of all the processed junk food and the chandelier of wrappers.

SCHOENBRUN: The junk food in the movie, I forget when it found its way in there. It’s like so much of the movie is about, like I said, ritual, about being in a mindset where you can really enjoy something scary, whether that be Kris [Hannah Einbinder] in bed, with, you know, with Raisinets and the popcorn, watching a schlocky horror movie, or the two characters learning how to be present and enjoy sex after a lot of trauma. There is this idea that if it gets too real, you can turn it off, that you’re exploring something dangerous, doing it in a way that’s actually safe. Which in my experience of coming into my sexual identity post-transition, kind of required some gummy candy on hand. What I mean by that is, even if we’re going to be exploring scary and vulnerable and potentially embarrassing, triggering parts of ourselves, we trust each other well enough to know that at any moment, we can be like, “Let’s stop, we gotta just eat some fucking gummies.”

DEADLINE: And one thing I really love—I just feel like it’s a theme in your work—is how it depicts the way media and entertainment influence us. Why does that inspire you? 

SCHOENBRUN: I think it comes from a fascination and sensitivity to the complex relationship between what we think of as fiction and what we think of as reality, which we tend to, as a society, think of as pointing in one direction. Like, reality dictates fiction, not vice-versa, but when you actually look at the way the world works, it’s like one echoes off the other. And I think a complicated, sometimes terrifying and sometimes beautiful way, where the fiction, the cultural norms, the things we grow up looking at on our screens, the roles that we’re told people play, they kind of inspire us to create reality. There’s something liberating when you start thinking in that way. I think it’s a way of thinking that we as a culture, could do a lot more of. To think about the idea of fiction inspiring reality just as much as reality is inspiring fiction, is a potential path to liberating us from this hellscape that they’re telling us is the only way the world can be. 

Gillian Anderson in ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ (2026)

DEADLINE: And I know you have the Secretary reading. Tell me what it’s been like prepping for that and why you all chose that movie. 

SCHOENBRUN: I mean, that was such a huge influence on on Miasma. There just aren’t that many fun and funny movies about deviant sex. And just the way that movie is like feather light while talking about really raw and taboo things, it is just really inspiring to me. And the dynamic between those two main characters is definitely one that had a lot of influence on on Kris and Billy’s [Gillian Anderson] relationship in Miasma. And it’s already to me a very queer movie in its way, but having Gillian reading the James Spader part and Hannah reading the Maggie Gyllenhaal part, I think it’s just gonna be like a very unique joy. Honestly, we’ve been prepping a little bit, but I think it’s just gonna be about getting up there and feeling the chemistry of it all, and just letting these folks who we have all gotten to know each other really, really well, but we haven’t actually done anything wacky and creative like that in a while, like as a reunion, it’s gonna be a real blast, I think.

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