Prince is used to getting the royal treatment. But the award-winning show dog, an Afghan hound, becomes a driver for all sorts of crazy machinations in a cinematic and absurdist battle royal full of black humor that ensues in Uruguayan director and screenwriter Federico Borgia’s solo feature debut, which is simply entitled Prince.

Beyond the best-in-show dog, the movie stars his owner, her butler and their extended family. The setting: the fading seaside luxury of Punta del Este.

Prince, starring Roberto Suárez (The Saint), Maitina De Marco (27 Nights), Esteban Bigliardi (27 Nights) and more, gets its world premiere at the 70th edition of the BFI London Film Festival (LFF) on Thursday, Oct. 8. Alpha Violet is handling sales for the highly stylized film.

Since Prince becomes the main prize in a ruthless custody battle, the festival website describes the Uruguayan-Argentine co-production as a “kitsch comedy about avarice and love.” And class divides also play a key role.

“At the heart of the film is Jaime (Suárez), a former lover turned live-in butler to Isabel (De Marco), an affluent Argentine woman with whom he has shared two decades in an expansive coastal villa,” reads a synopsis. “Their peculiar domestic routine revolves around Isabel’s prize-winning Afghan Hound, Prince. When Isabel dies unexpectedly in her swimming pool, her will reveals an absurd condition: her entire luxury estate has been left to Prince, with Jaime appointed as his guardian. Isabel’s human relatives can only claim the property once the dog dies.”

So when Isabel’s estranged son and granddaughter move in, intent on finding a way to oust the dog, Jaime tries to protect Prince while being forced to confront Diego, his own estranged son, and a past he has long avoided. The resulting tension turns the villa into a claustrophobic pressure cooker.

Borgia, who previously co-directed Clever (2015) and The Champion of the World (2019) with Guillermo Madeiro, talked to THR about how Prince draws on his own experience living in Punta del Este and a childhood fascination with show dogs, as well as the cinematic atmosphere he crafted.

Watch a trailer for Prince right here.

The inspiration for Prince came from the filmmaker’s life. “It was very much influenced because I moved from Montevideo to Punta del Este. It’s a touristic coast town where social classes mix up – there’s this working class and this class that pays for services,” Borgia tells THR. “There is this mix of glamor and decadence that started surrounding me, and I started a game of observation. I started looking at people in different places and writing down things I saw and then started an imaginative game of questions about what was behind what I was seeing.”

The show dog seed was planted at an earlier age, though, he recalls. “When I was a kid, I had this nice dog that was given to me when I was 10,” Borgia explains. “And I remember going, with my mother, to this dog groomer [to trim the dog’s hair]. He didn’t participate in dog shows, but at this grooming place, I saw these pictures of contests with these guys in suits posing. They looked like lawyers, but with a dog.”

The creative started to mesh up these real-life elements with “this story of this inheritance thing,” Borgia recalls.

The character he conceived as a protagonist is in an unusual, some may even say uncomfortable, position. “He’s a worker who met this lady in some kind of service relationship, and then he became her lover, and that started this undefined point between being a lover, partner, butler. It’s really undefined as you start discovering, and then all the other relationships and bonds and all the problems that come with them and family come into the film.”

Finding the cast was a mix of asking people he had long admired and finding faces he wasn’t as familiar with, Borgia tells THR.

“Roberto Suárez, who plays Jaime, is someone I have wanted to work with for a long time, and he accepted really fast,” the filmmaker shares. “I really admire him, not only as an actor, but also as a great theater creator. So I really wanted to work with him throughout the [creative] process. He was reading different versions of the script and throwing out ideas, and they were always brilliant ideas. He’s also a great person.”

To find cast in Argentina, Borgia started exploring opportunities through castings, asking people and watching movies. “So, there were different parts and approaches to the casting process, and I am very happy with the cast I found,” he concludes.

Did the dog actor ever cause any challenges on set? “The dog was always perfect,” shares Borgia. “We never had a problem with the dog.” Except for that one time when things got hairy. “Just one time, he fell into the pool, and we had to dry his hair for two or three hours,” he says.

And no, the director didn’t choose an Afghan hound for its reputation for trainability but its aesthetics, its look. “I actually started investigating on the internet how to train a dog,” Borgia says. “And the Afghan hound was really low on the list of trainable dogs, well below the Border Collie, the German Shepherd and others.”

But the creative team met a man who lives with eight Afghan hounds. “There’s another film in that,” Borgia tells THR with a smile. “But he told us that Afghans are difficult, but he has one dog who is really young and different. He said he is like a Labrador in the body of an Afghan. He was really social and really calm.”

For Borgia, the story of Prince may unfold in a specific setting, but he expects audiences in various parts of the world will recognize key themes and issues that the movie explores. “The story itself is universal, but the most important thing for me was the characters and their relationship, and the tone of the film. I felt I could make it different. The original thing is how an author can make the premise of a film different.”

What’s next for Borgia? “I want to talk about it, but I have no clue,” he tells THR. “Every time I finish a film, I really don’t know if I’m going to make another one. Or at least that’s how I feel. But I know I will because it’s like an addiction. You know you’re going to fall into it again.”

EXCLUSIVE: Smart-TV maker Vizio, which was acquired by Walmart in 2024, is bringing to market an original holiday movie and more programming from premium suppliers and creators in a major content expansion.

The initiative, unveiled Wednesday during Advertising Week in New York, is designed to re-introduce brands to Vizio, which is now the top smart TV operating system thanks to Walmart‘s massive retail scale.

The film, Jingle Bells Wedding Bells, starring Rachel Bilson and Scott Foley and produced by ITV America Nashville and Happy Accidents, will premiere exclusively on Vizio’s WatchFree+ platform this holiday season. Geico is presenting sponsor of the premiere.

“As viewing habits continue to evolve, partnerships like this give us new ways to connect with audiences,” Arianna Orpello, Geico’s chief marketing officer, said in a statement.

WatchFree+, a free, ad-supported live and on-demand streaming destination, has more than 45,000 film and TV titles along with more than 400 live and local channels. The platform said Wednesday it is deepening its ties with MGM, NBCUniversal, Disney, A&E and A24, adding programming titles this fall like The Good Doctor, Chicago Fire, Law & Order, Property Brothers, Little House on the Prairie.

Another key component of the expansion is creator content. Also bound for the platform are more than 40 creator-led FAST channels spanning comedy, food, gaming, family, lifestyle, sports and travel. Creators fronting the channels include MrBeast, Celine Dept, Hot Ones, The Royalty Family, Ben Azelart, Ryan Trahan, Nick DiGiovanni, Preston Playz, Rebecca Zamolo, Sam and Colby, and Uncle Roger.

A creator-led series, Holiday Chocolate Workshop, will center on chocolatier Amaury Guichon. The series follows Guichon and his team of expert chocolatiers as they craft “ambitious, larger-than-life holiday masterpieces for a season-ending reveal,” according to the official logline.

Originals and channels with creators enable WatchFree+ to retain more viewers before they fall into YouTube, which doesn’t provide the same level of advertising returns for stakeholders.

Since it ceased being a public company and becoming part of Walmart, Vizio has not regularly released data on viewership. Along with the programming news, the company and its corporate parent said the Vizio OS now reaches 32 million yearly active devices, up 20% year-over-year. Viewing hours of WatchFree+ is up 58% year-over-year, according to internal data.

David Ellison and Ynon Kreiz spent a big chunk of their first day as CEO and co-CEO of Skydance, respectively, being interviewed.

First by CNN’s Anderson Cooper at the company town hall on the Warner Bros. lot in the morning and then by reporters in the afternoon at a press conference held on the other studio lot owned by the new Skydance, Paramount.

Ellison and Kreiz, following the trend of co-CEOs dressing alike, met with press on Stage 3, a fitting setting for a company driven by technology, as Ellison always stresses. Its manager Craig Weiss described it as “the first of its kind virtual production stage, utilizing laser projection.”

That was a major upgrade from the August 2025 post-merger Paramount press conference on the lot, which took place in an empty room nearby. (In another change, two of the senior Paramount executives who took questions alongside Ellison back then, Jeff Shell and Cindy Holland, are no longer there.)

The Skydance team utilized the immersive projection equipment for a Day One sizzle reel promoting the Paramount and Warner Bros. titles that are coming together. Despite the event taking place on a TV stage, the video was very film-focused, largely ignoring television for the majority of it until a sequence of series highlights in the final seconds.

Ellison and Kreiz were asked to elaborate on the language from the press release announcing Kreiz’s appointment as co-CEO, which stipulated that all business units report to both of them, and explain how they divvy up CEO duties.

“There will be natural delineation between us in terms of our respective experience and concentration, which we believe are highly complementary,” Kreiz said. “Where David will focus on creative, technology, long-term strategy, including especially as it relates to the creative part of the business, I will focus more on the operations and the day-to-day management of the business, including integration, particularly the first phase.”

The duo, who will take their message to investors next, were asked to explain how Skydance, which has $79B in debt, can commit to $30B – $40B on producing new content.

“We have a business plan,” Kreiz said. “There’s a complete financial envelope to how we’re going to run the business, and content is is a spend, but you can also see it as an investment because it’s also going to drive growth. And as a whole, yes, we have debt, but we expect to reduce the leverage.”

Ellison pointed to Paramount’s balance sheet for the last year.

“We’ve over delivered on synergies, $2.7 billion basically by the end of this year, from an initial announcement of $2 billion, we did that while doubling the film slate at Paramount, from eight films to 15, greenlighting four new and returning series, and growing even significantly year over year. So you actually can do both things simultaneously.”

Other tough questions Ellison faced included his family’s cozy relationship with President Donald Trump (“I think it’s important to talk to everybody on on both sides of the aisle” & “We believe in complete editorial independence”) and how he plans to rehabilitate his image and regain the trust of those in Hollywood who opposed the merger (“I do genuinely believe this is the the best outcome for the industry. I think we will deliver for the creative community. We will deliver for our shareholders. And the best I can say to our detractors is, give us time, and we’ll prove it.”).

There weren’t specifics on a number of topics — from the timeframe to merge the company’s streaming platforms HBO Max and Paramount+, to a possible consolidation of the three TV studios down the road, to the plan for Skydance’s 30+ cable networks as well as how film and TV operations will be split between the Warner Bros. and Paramount lots, how the Paramount and Warner Bros. studios will get to the 30 movies a year goal and the status of Barbie 2.

As Ellison and Kreiz noted repeatedly, it was Day One after all.