Most of the time, if a movie plays well at a festival and proves itself a crowdpleaser, a distributor will snap it up. Last Labor Day Weekend, Oscar-winner Orlando von Einsiedel (“White Helmets”) was thrilled when his documentary “The Cycle of Love” wowed Telluride audiences. The same was true at Middleburg and other festivals.

The movie is a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction heart-tugger about a Dalit sketch artist (P.K. Mahanandia) who in 1977 enjoys a halcyon summer of love in New Delhi with a Swedish tourist (Lotta von Schedvin), who doesn’t care about his low caste. After she returns home, the smitten young man sells his possessions to buy a bike and pedals 6,000 miles to find her. He supports himself along the route by trading his drawings of people for food. The bicycle odyssey takes four months and three weeks.

Von Einsiedel was giving a speech in Sweden at a Nobel Peace Prize event when two young people came up to him, handed him a book, and said, “We know your work, and this is our parents’ story.” He eventually picked up the book and saw the cinematic possibilities. He met with P.K. and Lotta in their house deep in the Swedish woods. On their first meeting, the mid-70s P.K. did a headstand. “I fell head over heels in love,” said von Einsiedel on Zoom. “They are the most open, warm, generous people. I wanted to spend the next few years surrounded by them, sharing their story.”

The movie, a rare nonfiction romance, uses every tool in the documentary arsenal to make the story fly. (Except AI.) Von Einsiedel shot most of this extended road movie over seven weeks in India and Sweden, using India to sub for more than a dozen locations (including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Germany, and Austria) on the “hippie trail” from New Delhi to Borås, Sweden.

The skeleton crew roughed it from the Himalayas to the desert in Rajasthan and the jungle in Odisha. The filmmaker hired an actor (Chirag Lobo) to play the young P.K., but shot the reenactments like a documentary, pitting the actor against real people in real time.

“Nothing is scripted,” said von Einsiedel. “Everything is from the actors themselves. Everything is improvised, and all the other people we meet along the way, they’re communities of Afghans, Iranians, and Turks. Everywhere we’d go, we would find normal everyday people, and we’d street cast people in the morning and tell everybody, ‘An actor is recreating a journey from 50 years ago. Would you come and have your portrait drawn and have a chat?’ And then we’d let the camera roll. A lot of the actor’s job was to listen to people talking about hopes and dreams and love and marriage.”

The mature P.K.’s charming narration fuels the movie. “If somebody’s going to carry a film, they’ve got to have charisma, be a raconteur to some degree,” said the director. “And he has that in droves. That’s one of the key reasons he survived and could do this journey because, despite language and cultural differences, he charmed everyone he met. He inspired them, and people wanted to help him. They wanted him to stay with them. They believed in the love story, and they wanted to champion him and make sure he made it safely across the world.”

So why the long gestation? Netflix, which released the Oscar-winning short “White Helmets” and feature “Virunga,” wasn’t on Einsiedel’s distributor wish list because he wanted a theatrical release. Many established theatrical distributors are also wary of the current depressed market for documentaries.

“Docs have not had a robust acquisition market for a few years because of the double whammy of declining box office and streamers saying no one watches docs on their platforms with the exception of celebrity, music and true crime,” wrote one veteran distribution executive in an email. “If you do a U.S. box office chart of 2023-2026 theatrical docs, it’s pretty sad. After a few music docs, ‘Am I Racist’ and ‘Melania,’ and a couple of docs around angry Middle East topics, almost nothing. ‘Cookie Queens’ got to 600K, which was a feat.” 

The Telluride response gave the filmmakers the confidence to pursue a theatrical release. Einsiedel, UK distributor and global sales outfit Dogwoof, and his producers took the time to raise enough funding to support a theatrical North American release via service distributor Variance. The movie is booked worldwide, but other openings will follow the U.S.

“There are challenges,” said von Einsiedel. “We also turned down some opportunities because we wanted to fight for a theatrical. From the beginning, it always felt that we wanted people to experience this in the cinema. It’s a lot of work to make that happen, and we spent the last 12 months since Telluride raising money. We’ve had to learn as a team to build the right coalition of partners to raise the finance.”

Variance president and founder Dylan Marchetti plans a long run in theaters starting at New York’s Angelica on August 28. Von Einsiedel will do Q&As (with surprise guests) in New York, followed by Los Angeles and San Francisco, and in September and October the movie will hit another 20-30 markets, including Boston and Seattle. “It’s a beautiful romantic universal story,” said Marchetti. “People who see this will tell other people to see it. When you start with a film like this, word of mouth escapes. Coolidge Corner will unlock Amherst Cinema. We will take time with it and give people time to talk.”

The filmmakers have also hired established Oscar campaign veteran Chris Albert (Oscar-nominated “Porcelain War”) and 42West to push the film with documentary voters. If enough people see it, it’s a surefire Oscar contender.

“This is a film which cuts across politics,” said von Einsiedel. “I wanted to tell a positive, joyful story. I’ve spent a career making docs about what I believe are important, urgent issues, and always, that will exist as a reason to make documentaries. But why can’t docs be about happiness and joy? Love is something everybody can agree on. All you need is love.”

“The Cycle of Love” opens August 28 from Variance Films.

EXCLUSIVE: Two months after BET+ was folded into Paramount+, with its programming migrating to the larger streamer, four of the former BET+ original series have been renewed by Paramount+. They include Tyler Perry’s Divorced Sistas, picked up for Season 3, and Zatima (Season 6), as well as Carl Weber’s The Black Hamptons (Season 3) and The Family Business (Season 7).

Divorced Sistas and Zatima‘s orders are for 16 episodes, which is typical for Perry shows, running in two eight-episode installments. That has been the pattern for Divorced Sistas while Zatima‘s seasons to date have consisted of 20 episodes, split in two batches of 10.

That includes upcoming seasons of both series that had not been announced but had been quietly filming: a 20-episode fifth season of Zatima, and 16-episode second season of Divorced Sistas. The latter, a spinoff from Perry’s popular BET series Sistas, last summer logged the most watched series premiere on BET+.

The Family Business and The Black Hamptons’ pickups are for 10 episodes each. They are somewhat surprising given the large gap between seasons, especially for The Black Hamptons, whose renewal comes more than two and a half years after the series’ eight-episode second season ended its run on BET+. The Family Business‘ 10-episode sixth season released its finale on Dec. 18 last year. It is possible that the renewals have been done unofficially awhile ago and are now being announced.

The pickups for Divorced Sistas, Zatima, The Family Business and The Black Hamptons join the March Season 6 renewal for for BET+ original comedy Ms. Pat Show, which was done ahead of BET+’s slate transition to Paramount+ in June.

‘We feel the migration was very successful, the audiences are showing up for sure, Paramount+ Head of Originals Jane Wiseman told Deadline last week, noting that the volume of originals that BET+ was known for is not going to go down now that the shows are on Paramount+.

The integration of BET+ into Paramount+ involved Paramount buying out Tyler Perry Studios’ stake in BET+. He remains one of Paramount’s most prolific creators/producers across BET and Paramount+.

“Our relationship with Tyler Perry is very strong, and I’m excited for more content from him, as well as working closely with our friends at BET Studios,” Wiseman said last week.

BET Studios also works across Divorced Sistas, Zatima, The Family Business and The Black Hamptons.

Here are details on the newly renewed series:

Title: The Black Hamptons
Season: 3
EPs: Carl Weber, ND Brown Jones, Trey Haley
Logline: In this adaptation of Carl Weber’s novel, the Britton family faces high tensions with the newly arrived Johnsons in the upscale Black town of Sag Harbor, NY.
Talent: Lamman Rucker, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Elise Neal, Brian White, Karon Riley, and Mike Merrill
Episode count: 10 Eps

Title: The Family Business
Season: 7
EPs: Carl Weber, ND Brown Jones, Trey Haley, Ernie Hudson
Logline: The wealthy Duncans run their lucrative New York-based criminal enterprise with iron fists, and family always comes first.
Talent: Ernie Hudson, Valarie Pettiford, Darrin Dewitt, Javicia Leslie, Tami Roman, Sean Ringgold, Michael Jai White, Arrington Foster and Lisa Raye McCoy.
Episode count: 10 Eps

Title: Tyler Perry’s Divorced Sistas
Season: 3
EPs: Created, directed, written and executive produced by Tyler Perry.
Logline: What begins as one confession cracks open everything this group of women thought they were protecting. Years of deception, half-truths, and emotional compromises finally surface, forcing Rasheda, Geneva, Naomi, Tiffany, and Bridgette to confront not just the men in their lives, but one another.
Talent: LeToya Luckett, Khadeen Indréa, Porscha Coleman, Briana Price, Jennifer Sears, DeVon Franklin, Ronreaco Lee, and Robert Christopher Riley.
Episode count: 16 Eps

Title: Tyler Perry’s Zatima
Season: 6
EPs: Created and executive produced by Tyler Perry.
Logline: Revelations are birthed from misunderstandings, lessons of love and loss are painstakingly learned, and forgiveness and reconciliation dominate. For Zac and Fatima, the fight to protect their family becomes the center of everything as they learn what it truly takes to hold a life and a future… Together.
Talent: DeVale Ellis, Crystal Reneé Hayslett, Nzinga Imani, Remington Hoffman, Cameron Fuller and Guyviaud Joseph.
Episode count: 16 Eps

After several years in limbo, Coyote vs. Acme finally got its moment in the sun on Wednesday at its L.A. premiere.

It was a night that for a long time did not seem possible, after Warner Bros. Discovery shelved the film in November 2023 in favor of a tax write-off. Fans rallied around the project, though, refusing to let it die — until in March 2025, Ketchup Entertainment saved the film and set it up for a summer 2026 theatrical release.

Star Will Forte looks back at that period as “an emotional roller coaster,” admitting that despite how vocal people were being online to revive the film, “I didn’t think it would do anything.”

“I was just like, ‘They’re not hearing you, it’s not going to make a difference.’ And then they just kept going and it’s because of them the movie’s out,” Forte told The Hollywood Reporter on the carpet. “I had given up on it and I can’t thank these people enough. I always thought this movie was super special and the support from the community has meant so much. It’s made me feel sane; I felt gaslit for a while and their support, now the positive reviews coming out — [they] just make it feel like you’re not crazy.”

Coyote vs. Acme is a hybrid live-action and animation movie set in the Looney Tunes universe. It sees Wile E. Coyote deciding to sue the Acme Corporation after their products fail him one too many times in his relentless pursuit of the Roadrunner, with Forte as his inexperienced lawyer and John Cena as Acme’s attorney. And as Forte mentioned, the film is being released amid glowing reviews and very positive audience buzz.

“It’s so validating. I’ve been a part of a lot of projects that haven’t gotten great reviews that I have loved — MacGruber. I love it. People may hate it, but I love it, I’m so proud of it,” the actor said, noting that reviews are not everything but “in this case, I am accepting positive reviews and saying they do mean something, I’m doing a flip around.”

He continued that much like Wile E. Coyote going up against a big corporation, the film itself is an underdog, “so we need all the help we can get, and it feels like all these voices, the voices that helped us get the movie into the theaters, are helping spread the word about it being in the theaters. Hopefully people will listen to them and see these positive views and go like, ‘This movie deserves to be seen.’”

Cena echoed, “We’re here, we’re coming out in theaters, I just hope that everyone who used their voice shows up to see this thing.”