EXCLUSIVE: Bond has hired Ben Brown as President, Head of AV and will team with Wayne Watson, who has led the division for the past two years, to lead the company together as co-presidents. Both report to co-founder and CEO Seth Phillips Althoff and will work closely with co-founder Luke Silver-Greenberg in future growth of the company.

The two will lead in distinct but collaborative lanes, each staying hands-on creatively while sharing responsibility for
developing Bond’s team.

Brown arrives from Zealot, where he served as SVP and established the company’s theatrical division, with cuts on
campaigns for Apple, Amazon MGM, Paramount, Sony, Warner Bros., Disney, A24, Searchlight, and Focus Features.

His work includes trailers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Widow’s Bay, Is This Thing On?, Eternity, Roofman,
Saturday Night, AIR, the A Quiet Place and Sonic the Hedgehog franchises and Here, whose campaign won multiple
golds at the Clio Entertainment Awards. He has also worked on campaigns for filmmakers including Martin Scorsese,
Yorgos Lanthimos, Bong Joon Ho, Darren Aronofsky, Emerald Fennell, and Derek Cianfrance. Before Zealot, he
spent nine years at AV Squad — where he and Watson first met — rising from producer to Creative Director, after
beginning his career in film development at Rogue Pictures and Silver Pictures.

Watson joined the company in 2024 after serving as President and Executive Creative Director at Ignition, energizing
Bond’s AV division raising the bar for creative excellence. Some of there recent cuts include Spider-Man: Brand New Day, The Odyssey, How to Rob a Bank, The Last House, Resident Evil, Insidious, Anaconda, and the HBO MAX rebrand.

Watson and Brown each helmed a trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, whose launch became the most-viewed
campaigns in history and whose $360 million opening this past weekend now stands as the biggest domestic debut of
all time.

Watson’s two years have also produced a round of promotions across the group which includes, Patricio Hoter promotion to VP, creative director. Among the earliest members of Bond’s AV department and its standard-bearer for the craft ever since, with Clio and Golden Trailer recognition spanning Insidious, The Pitt, The Penguin, Hacks, and Welcome to Derry and Smile. Other promotions included Bryan Dobrik to Creative Director, Tim Muraviov to Associate Creative Director and Michael Yanoska to Lead Editor.

“Our growth is always predicated on getting better, not just bigger. Better for our clients and better for our team,
because growth is what creates opportunity. Five of the six names in this announcement already work here and we
are proud to see them thrive,” said Althoff.

As for Bond, some of there recent work includes Spider-Man: Brand New Day, The Odyssey, Dune: Part Three, One Battle After Another, Sinners, Wicked, The White Lotus, The Pitt, Andor, The Penguin and Battlefield 6. Some of the partners they collaborated with on campaigns include filmmakers Christopher Nolan, Denis Villeneuve, Paul Thomas Anderson, Ryan Coogler, and Robert Eggers. Bond is the first agency ever named Clio Entertainment Agency of the Year in back-to-back years, an honor it has taken three times.

“Wayne and Ben are two of the best in the business. They relentlessly push themselves and the team to create work that captures attention, excites audiences, and delivers results. In today’s hyper-saturated landscape, standard trailers and spots simply get lost, but Wayne and Ben consistently collaborate with clients to deliver the kind of bold creative that cuts through the noise and moves the needle.” said Silver-Greenberg.

When Gordon Bressack wrote a play called Fuggedaboudit!, he likely didn’t expect it to come to life in this way.

Bressack died in 2019 after a long health battle, and is remembrered for sharing three Emmys with his colleagues on the 1990s animated staples Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain.

Now, seven years after his death, Bressack’s son, filmmaker James Cullen Bressack is dusting off Fuggedaboudit! to turn it into a feature film, with a twist. The roles will be played by puppets. Human actors played the roles in the 2009 stage production at the Hudson Backstage Theater in Los Angeles.

Per the logline, “After a car accident wipes his memory clean, a serially romantic New York model is confronted by an ex-fiancée, an ex-girlfriend, a mobster and a circle of brutally honest friends, all competing to rewrite his past before he figures out who he really was.”

The film is currently casting up.

“My father always dreamed of making live-action films, so there was something incredibly poetic about bringing one of his stories to life through puppets. Puppetry exists somewhere between live action and animation, and it felt like the perfect medium to tell this story,” James Cullen Bressack said in a statement.

The younger Bressack recently wrapped production on a horror movie shot entirely on VHS, and has an ecclectic filmography that also includes action movies starring actors such has Jean Claude Van Damme and Bruce Willis.

“The puppets aren’t the joke. They’re the device that tells the story,” he continued in his statement. “They’re the conduit for my father’s comedy, allowing us to embrace the heightened absurdity and heart that made his writing so special. When I reread Fuggedaboudit!, I realized the most honest way to adapt it wasn’t to imitate reality. It was to create a world where audiences could simply accept the characters for who they are and let the comedy shine.”

Bent Wrist Productions, Jackie Smook Company, and Sandaled Kid Productions are behidn the project. James Cullen Bressack produces with Jackie Smook and Dani Abraham. BJ Hendricks and James Rundquist executive produce.

Gordon Bressack grew up on the east coast and in his later years enjoyed writing plays, several of which were staged in Los Angeles. Before his death, he teamed with his son on the 2017 animated feature CarGo, while the younger Bressack has already adapted one of his father’s works, the 2023 meta horror movie Murder, Anyone?

Charlie vs. the Chocolate Factory will give global audiences a chance to grab a ticket for the forthcoming animated feature.

Netflix announced Wednesday that the film will have a wide theatrical release globally on Nov. 5, 2027, before hitting the streaming platform on Dec. 22, 2027, just in time for the holidays. Jared Stern and Elaine Bogan direct the movie that sees Kit Connor and Taika Waititi leading its voice cast.

Charlie vs. the Chocolate Factory centers on Willy Wonka (Waititi) aiming to start a new life after his release from prison, just as Charlie (Connor) and other teens whose families face eviction are set to burglarize Wonka’s factory.

This news follows Netflix’s other arrangements with exhibitors, including Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew getting released in Imax and wide global theaters Feb. 12, 2027, before hitting Netflix April 2, 2027, while the Brad Pitt-led follow-up to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood landed a two-week exclusive Imax run this November. Additionally, Netflix’s theatrical moves in 2025 included a sing-along version of KPop Demon Hunters and a two-day release for Stranger Things: The Finale.

Joining the voice cast for Charlie vs. the Chocolate Factory are Kate Winslet (The Reader), Helena Bonham Carter (One Life), Nicola Coughlan (Bridgerton), Charithra Chandran (Bridgerton), Samson Kayo (F1: The Movie) and Christopher Chung (Slow Horses).

Aron Warner and Timothy Yoo serve as producers for Charlie vs. the Chocolate Factory, which sees Sony Pictures Entertainment handle international theatrical distribution. Waititi executive produces the movie that continues the universe that began with Roald Dahl‘s 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.