Month: April 2018

She had traveled to Alabama all the way from California to be here for this moment.

She had managed to stay dry in a torrential downpour that would have forced many others away. Had somehow beat the odds, got in line early, and secured one of the sold-out opening day tickets for access to The Legacy Museum.

So it was a surprise to Isoke Femi that the hardest thing for her to manage were the words to describe what she had just witnessed.

“My experience in there… is so painful,” she said exiting the exhibit.

Site of slave warehouse

Built on the site of a slave warehouse in downtown Montgomery, once the epicenter of the slave trade in the United States, in a town that at one time was the capital of the Confederacy, The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration is filled with visual exhibits that serve as a catalyst for understanding what many blacks in the United States have historically endured.

“Five-thousand blacks were lynched between 1880 and 1940,” said civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was an early supporter of the museum and the nearby National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a new memorial that sits on a grassy, six-acre hill overlooking Montgomery.

It is the first memorial and museum of its kind in the United States, tackling subjects such as racial terrorism and lynching.

Founded by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit organization working in marginalized and impoverished communities, the group hopes the Memorial and The Legacy Museum will help change the national narrative about race.

“We must face the truth of our origins,” Jackson told VOA in an exclusive interview immediately following his own trip through the museum in its opening hours. “We are a post-genocidal, post-slavery, post-Jim Crow society.”

​Facing the past

But not a post-racial society, says Mark Potok, former senior fellow with the Southern Poverty Law Center, who spent much of his career tracking hate groups in the United States.

“It is white people in this country, and in the South in particular, who are so averse to facing the past squarely,” he said.

Potok says racism and bigotry, particularly in Alabama, which now hosts this museum and memorial, are not yet consigned to the history books.

“It’s worth remembering that 15 years ago, a very short time ago, the majority of white people in Alabama voted to keep segregated schools in the state constitution,” Potok said.

Jackson says it’s not just Alabama.

“And even today … 200 attempts to get federal anti-lynching legislation has not passed,” he said.

Speaking to the impact of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, he hopes “this will give us a deeper narrative … and we will seek to become better. At the end of the day, we must educate and enlighten us. Not make us get behind more barriers.”

Change at the ballot box

The biggest barrier in Jackson’s mind today is the one keeping people from the ballot box.

“There are 4 million blacks in the South unregistered to vote,” he said.

Mark Potok agrees with Jackson, and believes the best way to bridge the racial divide in the United States is to vote.

“You know, it’s not beating up white supremacists on the streets of Charlottesville,” he said. “It is really changing the people who represent us.”

Isoke Femi, still reeling from her walk through the images and displays that deal with powerful and uncomfortable truths long avoided, sees hope in the crowds around her.

“The love it took to do this, the commitment, the courage, and the fact that everybody is here that it’s not just something that black people are coming to. Everybody is here. And even if they can’t find the words … they want the healing of America.”

In that healing, Jesse Jackson hopes there is also a lesson.

“We must learn to live together,” he said. “And that is one of the great challenges of our past.”
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For some people, makeup isn’t just about the latest shade of lipstick or eye shadow. It’s about empowerment.

Just ask the fans at Beautycon, a recent two-day event in New York that showcased more than 100 makeup and beauty brands, along with speaker panels featuring social media stars whose expertise is all things beauty.

At Beautycon, the spotlight wasn’t on supermodels or fashion editors, but everyday people who have used social media to upend the industry. With online fans numbering in the millions, these Instagram and YouTube influencers are charting a path into a once exclusive field and forcing insiders to rethink conventional notions of beauty.

“I figured out a way to express myself through social media and through my platform and just share my individuality,” said Irene Kim, a Korean-American social media influencer who spoke on a panel, “Niche is the New Norm.”

“Beauty is limitless,” Kim said. “It’s whatever you want to do and how you want to express yourself.”

Mecca Iman is a makeup enthusiast who agrees.

“It’s deeper than just, how it looks, it’s how you feel,” she said.

Democratization of beauty

“There’s no longer a publisher who’s dictating what is beauty or what does health and well-being mean,” said Moj Mahdara, CEO of Beautycon Media. “Now you have a generation of young people who are creators creating that dialogue for a consumer, but that consumer is really their friend — their friend, their fan, it’s a two-way conversation.”

Iman teared up during a meet-and-greet session with social media star Raye Boyce. Boyce, who’s better known by her online handle, “ItsMyRayeRaye,” posts instructional makeup and beauty videos on YouTube and currently has 1.8 million subscribers.

“She’s just so relatable and so cool and then the makeup that she does, I learn from her. I learn so much from her,” Iman said.

Major brands take note

Boyce recently partnered with CoverGirl to promote the company’s cosmetics on her social media channels. She was also given the opportunity to visit the research and development labs of Coty, the parent company of CoverGirl and other consumer beauty brands like Clairol, Rimmel and Max Factor.

“I feel like them listening to us, they’re trying to understand the space,” Boyce said.

Nabela Noor, a beauty influencer with 749,000 Instagram followers and counting, has partnered with companies like Sally Hansen, Benefit and e.l.f. Cosmetics.

“The reason why I wanted to do what I’m doing is because I wasn’t seeing anyone else like me,” said the plus-sized, Muslim Bangladeshi-American. “I wasn’t seeing myself represented on television, in the media. I thought, if I’m not seeing it happen, I’m going to make it happen for myself,” she added.

“By being online and being myself and being proud of who I am, I’ve been able to help people feel good about themselves,” she said.

Tokyo Stylez, originally from Nebraska, calls himself “one of the others’“ or an “alien.” The flamboyant hairstylist started posting his wig creations on Instagram, and now works with artists like Nicki Minaj, Beyonce and Rihanna.

“People really support what I do, they trust my vision, they trust my judgment on things. So if I say, ‘Go do this’ they really go do it, which is amazing,” said Tokyo, who also commands upward of $900 per person for all-day workshops where he teaches his hair techniques. “I just do me, and it works for me,” he said.

Beauty from the inside out

Self-acceptance is a key theme for the demographic that marketers have dubbed Generation Z, the post-millennial group born in the mid-90s to mid-2000s who are well-versed with consumer technology. A section of Beautycon entitled “B-Well” focused on health and well-being, with vendors hawking probiotic beverages, vitamins and healthy snacks.

“Beauty is both inside and out, and how you treat your insides and your mental health and your physical health and your spirituality is all a part of how you foster beauty,” Mahdara said. “I think the industries around health and well-being and beauty are colliding into one and will be a very big movement moving forward.”
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U.S. comedian Bill Cosby was convicted Thursday of drugging and molesting a one-time friend in 2004, which could send him to prison for the rest of his life.

The 80-year-old Cosby now faces up to 10 years in prison for each of three counts of aggravated assault after a Pennsylvania jury convicted him of an attack on Andrea Constand, now 45. At the time of the assault, she was an administrator for the women’s basketball team at Temple University in Philadelphia, Cosby’s alma mater.

Cosby, best known as the lovable dad on his 1980’s television hit The Cosby Show, was convicted by a jury of seven men and five women after a two-week trial, not quite a year after another jury was unable to reach a verdict on the charges and a mistrial was declared.

Cosby stared straight ahead when the jury announced its verdict after deliberating 14 hours over two days.

But moments later Cosby lashed out at District Attorney Kevin Steele, calling the prosecutor an “asshole” after he asked that Cosby be immediately jailed because he might flee. The judge, however, decided Cosby could remain free pending sentencing.

A Cosby defense attorney said the entertainer continues to believe he did nothing wrong. “The fight is not over,” the lawyer said.

WATCH: Cosby accusers react moments after guilty verdict

In the retrial, unlike in the first trial, prosecutors introduced testimony from five women who said that Cosby, married for 54 years, drugged and violated them.

One of them, through tears, asked him, “You remember, don’t you, Mr. Cosby?”

Constand told jurors that Cosby knocked her out with three blue pills he called “your friends.” She testified that Cosby penetrated her with his fingers as she lay immobilized, unable to resist or say no.

Cosby’s conviction came in one of the first celebrity sexual-assault cases of the MeToo era in the U.S., in which dozens of powerful men in the corporate world, the film industry, media circles and academia have been accused by women of years of repeated behind-the-scenes sexual misconduct.

Cosby’s first trial ended just before women leveled a flood of accusations against the rich and famous, including powerful Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, television anchors Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, and Senator Al Franken. Many of the men apologized for their misconduct, some resigned from their jobs, and others were fired.

In all, more than 60 women have accused Cosby of sexual assaulting them over several decades.

Gloria Allred, a lawyer who represented one of the women who testified against Cosby, said, “We’re very, very happy and proud of the result. Women were finally believed. And we thank the jury for that.”
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An American German-Catholic woman who converted to Islam decided to design modest clothes after she couldn’t find them in stores. Macy’s, the nationwide department store, is now carrying her designs on its website. But some people’s idea of fashion options is being viewed by others as condoning the repression of women. In her first television interview, designer Lisa Vogl talks about why she designed her fashion line. VOA’s Carolyn Presutti has our story.
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The freedom to wear whatever you want is taken for granted here in the U.S. But some people’s idea of fashion options is being viewed by others as condoning the repression of women.  In her first television interview, a U.S. designer of Muslim clothing explains her why she designed her line. VOA’s Carolyn Presutti has our story.
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Tennis faces “very significant” integrity problems, particularly at the lower levels of the sport, caused by the sharp increase in internet betting, an independent report concluded in its interim finding on Wednesday.

The Interim Report of the Independent Review of Integrity said that its two-year investigation had not revealed widespread corruption at the highest levels of the professional game globally although “there is nonetheless evidence of some issues at these levels”.

Among its recommendations are a review of appearance fees and the ranking system and a halt to the sale of sporting data by the International Tennis Federation (ITF) at the low-level Futures events.

It also recommended greater monitoring of the lower levels where one investigator said there were a “tsunami” of problems.

The Review was commissioned by tennis’ major bodies (ATP, WTA, ITF and Grand Slam Board) in 2016 following a report by the BBC and BuzzFeed News which claimed 16 players ranked in the world’s top 50 had been flagged to the Tennis Integrity Unit (TIU) over suspicions that matches had been thrown.

The panel said: “the integrity problems are greatest where prize money relative to costs, prospects of advancement, pubic interest and attention, and financial resources of tournaments are lowest”.

It also said the advent of online betting and the sale of official live scoring date have greatly exacerbated the problem and recommends that the ITF ends its date sale agreement at Futures events.

It added that there are no simple solutions but called on the sport “to address and limit the betting markets that ultimately drive, and give expression to, the problem; and to improve the systems of preventing and disrupting breaches of integrity, and for detecting and sanctioning them when they occur.”

The report paints a picture of financial privation among many of the sport’s 15,000 professionals, with many at the lowest level struggling to cover the costs of competing. This, the report said, made betting on matches more attractive to players, many of whom admitted knowledge of match-fixing.

A survey of 3,200 players found that 16 percent indicated they had first-hand knowledge of players betting on matches, 11 percent knew of inside information being provided and 14.5 percent of match-fixing. Of these, 35 percent said they had knowledge of more than one instance.

Tennis’ governing bodies have committed to implementing the report’s final findings after a period of consultation.

The panel, which was chaired by Adam Lewis QC, took statements from 200 key stakeholders, conducted more than 100 interviews and collected more than 3,200 survey responses.
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The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy 50 years ago this June fractured the nation just two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and five years after his brother John F. Kennedy was killed.

But RFK’s funeral, particularly the train that took his body from New York City, following a funeral Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, to Washington, D.C., brought the country together. An estimated 2 million ordinary Americans gathered beside railroad tracks to honor him as the train passed by.

An exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “The Train: RFK’s Last Journey,” displays 21 of the 1,000 unique color slides made by photographer Paul Fusco on June 8, 1968. The images captured America’s grief in a way that was unusual in photography, by seeing the events through the eyes of ordinary people.

The photos show Americans of all colors and classes. Catholic schoolgirls, field hands, firefighters, blue-collar workers and housewives in their bonnets create a tableau of those who came to say farewell to the man many knew simply as “Bobby.”

Some climbed fence posts to get a better view. Some saluted. Others stood rock-ribbed straight. Some waved American flags or handmade posters: “So Long Bobby.” Others turned from work to see what was happening as the maroon train car holding his coffin rolled by en route to Washington, and from there to his final resting place at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

Fusco, at the time a staffer for Look magazine, made the images from his unique position aboard the funeral train. He said he was astonished when the train emerged from a New York City tunnel to see hundreds of people gathering beside the tracks. At times he used a panning motion to isolate certain people and scenes, creating a blur around the edges of the images.

The exhibit also shows the importance of the day for those who were there, through a collection of personal images sought out by Dutch artist Rein Jelle Terpstra, who became fascinated with Fusco’s photos and launched a research project in 2014 to collect pictures and films from the observers who watched the funeral procession go by. Among the most striking is a carefully labeled page from a photo album collage decorated with red, white and blue construction paper.

The moving exhibit also includes a 70 mm film reconstruction of the day by French artist Philippe Parreno, complete with the haunting sound of a train clacking through fields and cities.

So many people came to say goodbye to Bobby Kennedy on June 8, 1968, that the train slowed and the journey took nearly twice as long as usual, nearly eight hours to travel a typically four-hour route.

The RFK funeral train echoed a similar journey more than 100 years earlier when Abraham Lincoln’s body was transported by train from Washington to his home state of Illinois in 1865, with scheduled stops along the way where crowds of people turned out to pay their respects. The trip took nearly two weeks.

Kennedy, a U.S. senator from New York, was running for president and had just won the California primary when he was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles by Sirhan Sirhan. Kennedy died June 6, 1968.

“The Train: RFK’s Last Journey” is on display at the museum through June 10.
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Deep inside mountains along the China-Myanmar border, a 26-year-old ethnic Lisu villager, surnamed Zhang, sharpens his crossbow arrows to prepare for a hunt.

For Zhang and many other Lisu, a mostly Christian minority who inhabit the border region, the crossbow is an indispensable part of their culture dating back to 200 BC.

In a country that often bans the sale of kitchen knives during political summits, it’s still normal to see ethnic Lisu openly carrying the weapon in public.

Despite a decades-old hunting ban, law enforcement remains lax and Zhang and his friends still hunt birds and rodents for sport. Before the ban, Lisu hunters traditionally went for larger game such as bears and wild boar.

Lisu technically must have a crossbow license, which are regulated by district crossbow associations.

As more young people move to urban areas for work, Cha Hairong, head of the Liuku Township Crossbow Association of Lushui city, fears the crossbow is dying out.

Cha wants to preserve the tradition by promoting crossbow shooting as a sport and attract new enthusiasts far beyond the Nu River Valley.

“Our people’s crossbow culture must enter the National Games of China. It must enter the Asian Games. It must enter the Olympic Games! So that people all over world will understand our people’s culture,” said Cha.

The Lushui government has said it is committed to the preservation of the crossbow culture.

Crossbow tournaments offering cash prizes have been held in recent years in a bid to boost interest in the sport.

Some competitors simply enjoy the camaraderie at these events.

“This is just a time where we come here to chat and tell stories,” said Zuo Zhenfu, 27, who attended a crossbow tournament in late March.
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Fired FBI director James Comey’s memoir that details his private meetings with U.S. President Donald Trump sold some 600,000 copies in all formats in its first week, its publisher said on Tuesday, the latest in a series of best-selling political books.

Comey’s “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership,” has so far outpaced Hillary Clinton’s campaign memoir “What Happened” and journalist Michael Wolff’s behind-the-scenes White House expose “Fire and Fury” in opening week sales, according to industry figures.

Publisher Flatiron Books, a division of privately-owned Macmillan, said it has printed more than 1 million copies of Comey’s book, which has made national headlines.

Flatiron did not say whether the first week sales were global or limited to the United States.

Comey has been on a media blitz, sitting for numerous television and radio interviews, while also on a book tour that has seen him appear before sold-out audiences of more than a thousand.

The book has drawn Trump’s ire as Comey compared the president to a mob boss who stresses personal loyalty over the law and has little regard for morality or truth.

Trump dismissed Comey in May last year while the FBI was investigating allegations Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion between Russians and Trump’s campaign.

Trump has repeatedly denied any collusion.

“A Higher Loyalty,” which is billed as Comey’s thoughts on leadership, was atop Amazon.com’s bestseller list for several weeks before its release.

Clinton’s “What Happened” sold more than 300,000 copies, including hardcover, e-book, CD and digital audio, in its first week after publication in September 2017, according to CBS Corp-owned publisher Simon & Schuster.

Wolff’s portrayal of a disorganized West Wing filled with strife and aides questioning the president’s fitness to lead debuted in January with some 28,000 in sales.

Higher-than-expected demand led Macmillan imprint Henry Holt & Co to order up 2.1 million copies in its first week.

Wolff’s book has sold nearly 975,000 print copies, and Clinton’s memoir has sold some 511,000 total print copies, according to NPD BookScan.
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Claire Foy says the controversy over her pay for the Netflix series The Crown has changed her approach to Hollywood.

“It definitely opened my eyes to a lot. And I certainly won’t be naïve about those things,” Foy said in an interview Monday in Las Vegas. “It’s really opened my eyes about what I am allowed to have an opinion about, and what I’m allowed to stand up for myself about. And I think that’s really changed my approach to myself and other women in this industry. It’s been only a positive thing — even though, embarrassing.”

A producer disclosed last month that Foy, who starred as Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, was paid less than Matt Smith, who played Prince Philip, because Smith was better known.

The gender pay gap has become a big issue in Hollywood after revelations that many female stars have been paid less than their male counterparts. Foy and Smith are being replaced by older performers in the next season of the show.

Foy was in Las Vegas promoting The Girl in the Spider’s Web, which completed filming this month. It’s based on the fourth book in Stieg Larsson’s popular Millennium series revolving around hacker Lisbeth Salander, previously been played in movies by Noomi Rapace and Rooney Mara.

Foy said she hadn’t sought their blessing before beginning her work.

“I mean, we are all actresses. We all know the game. I don’t doubt for a second that those two incredible actresses don’t both hate me and also … ”

Director Fede Alvarez interjects that he did, indeed, get Rapace’s blessing.

“I met her at the premiere of her last movie and we got introduced and I told her what I was doing and she really wished us good luck and she knew you were doing it,” he said.

“You got her blessing? Did you? He never told me this,” Foy said, laughing. “Oh, well there you go. One down! One to go.”

The 34-year-old actress says she exercised intensively to play the character — and got a new hair style.

“I got an undercut, which is something that I never thought I would have in my life. Which is great! Then all her tattoos and just how she moves and the clothes that she wears. I loved being her every day, actually. It was very liberating thing,” Foy said. “Because I didn’t have to worry about being attractive or being liked or any of that nonsense that women quite often have to wake up every day thinking how does the world see me? And it was really nice to wake up and just be like, like this. What you see is what you get. I quite enjoyed that.”

The Girl in the Spider’s Web is set for release in November.
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“The Handmaid’s Tale” returns to television this week with its chilling portrait of a near future where women are turned into second-class citizens seeming even darker and more prescient than ever.

That’s not by chance. As the Emmy-winning series moves away from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian 1985 novel, it delves further into how the United States moved from democracy into a fictional totalitarian state called Gilead.

Here, pollution has caused widespread infertility, women are forbidden to read, cannot control money, and people spy on each other.

“We began Season 1 feeling we cannot let Margaret Atwood down,” said Warren Littlefield, one of the show’s executive producers. “Then right after the [2016 presidential] election, as this pre-Gilead Trump administration unfolded, we felt the responsibility that we can’t let down America.

“We are storytellers, but our world that we depict is relevant and the themes are more relevant than ever before,” Littlefield added.

Season 2 starts on Wednesday on streaming platform Hulu, resuming immediately where Season 1 ended last June, with the pregnant Offred (Elisabeth Moss) taken away to face punishment for an act of mass rebellion by a group of handmaids in Gilead.

Pre-Gilead flashbacks show the undermining of human and civil rights, where women need their partner’s consent to get birth control, are pressured to be stay-at-home mothers, and gay people lose legal protections to face persecution.

It also gives viewers a first, terrifying glimpse of the book’s polluted colonies, where infertile or dissident women are sent to live in concentration camp-like conditions.

“There is a lot that we draw upon from the world we are living in,” Littlefield said. “The series tried to dramatize some of the human rights issues that we are experiencing in the world and understand, ‘How did that happen?'”

Season 1 premiered in April 2017 but production started long before Hillary Clinton lost her bid to become the first woman in the White House and Donald Trump was elected U.S. president.

The TV series, striking for its handmaids dressed in red capes and white face-obscuring bonnets, won awards in its first season.

Canadian author Atwood remains as a consultant and producer as the second season moves beyond her book, which became one of the top 10 best-selling novels of 2017.

“Margaret is probably the biggest cheerleader for go, move, do not fear going past the book,” Littlefield said.
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Summer starts early this year in Hollywood with the potentially record-breaking release Thursday of Avengers: Infinity War, and the marquee Marvel superheroes couldn’t be coming at a better time.

The box office for the year is down nearly three percent, and the industry is looking to redeem itself after last summer, which, despite hits like Wonder Woman, had its worst performance in more than a decade. Although all studios are embracing the year-round blockbuster schedule and massive hits can emerge in any month, like Black Panther in February, It in September and Star Wars in December, with work and school vacations, nothing can beat the summer’s potential.

This summer movie-going season, which typically runs from the first weekend in May through Labor Day, could get things back on track. Two of the most profitable franchises have major films on the slate. The Walt Disney Company and Marvel have Avengers: Infinity War (April 27) which some experts are predicting will score the biggest opening of all time, and Universal Pictures is releasing the sequel to the fifth-highest domestic earner of all time, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, on June 22.

And as with every summer, there are more than a handful of sequels and familiar brands coming to theaters, including: Deadpool 2 (May 18); Solo: A Star Wars Story (May 25); The Incredibles 2 (June 15); Sicario: Day of the Soldado (June 29); The First Purge (July 4); Ant-Man and the Wasp (July 6); Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (July 13); The Equalizer 2 (July 20); Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again! (July 20); and Mission: Impossible — Fallout (July 27).

But Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Fritz whose new book The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies, examines the current state of the industry, notes that while the big, franchise, tent-pole films are always the highest-grossing and that films like Jurassic World 2 and Avengers: Infinity War will be sure-fire hits, oversaturation is possible too. 

“People do like to see the big franchise tent-pole films,” Fritz said. “But even if the studios make more of them, people are not going to more movies. The more of them there are, the more they are competing for the same box office dollars and as a result you see more flops.”

According to Box Office Mojo, in 2017, movie ticket sales were at a 25-year low, and competition for audience attention is only intensifying. Netflix has a whole slate of summer films too, from an Adam Sandler and Chris Rock comedy (The Week Of, April 27) to the WWII-set adaptation of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. This year, too, has shown a concentration of box office dollars on just a few films — Black Panther, Fritz noted, accounted for 23 percent of the ticket sales in the first three months of the year.

And it is at least part of the reason why many studios are touting the diversity of their slates beyond the spectacle of superheroes and blockbusters.

“Today, it’s even more important that there is a wide variety of films out there, films that are provocative, that are thrilling, that obviously are entertaining and that you’re presenting them in new and exciting ways,” said Jim Orr, Universal Pictures’ president of domestic theatrical distribution. “We have right now a theater-going audience who is discerning and I think we need to keep that in mind with everything we put forth.”

Universal has Jurassic World and Mamma Mia! sequels, sure, but it is also releasing Dwayne Johnson’s action-thriller Skyscraper and its indie arm Focus Features has films like the dark dramedy Tully (May 4), with Charlize Theron, Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman (Aug. 10) and documentaries about Mr. Rogers (Won’t You Be My Neighbor, June 8) and Pope Francis (May 18).

Warner Bros., home of Wonder Woman, Batman and the other DC Comics superheroes, doesn’t even have a major DC film on the slate this summer (aside from the animated Teen Titans GO! To the Movies, July 27). Instead, its slate boasts films like the star (and female)-driven Ocean’s 8, with Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Rihanna and others, comedies like Tag (June 15) and Life of the Party (May 11), and an adaptation of the popular book Crazy Rich Asians (Aug. 17).

“The business just gets spread out over 12 months,” said Warner Bros. domestic distribution president Jeff Goldstein. “It’s not about one particular season and for a studio, it’s about opportunistically dating your movies in a way to maximize your box office on any given film.”

Beyond Ocean’s 8 there are a number of gender-flipped reboots and bawdy female-led comedies, like Overboard (May 4) with Anna Faris, the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels remake The Hustle (June 29) with Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson, Book Club (May 18) with Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen, and The Spy Who Dumped Me (Aug. 3) with Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon.

And action fans can look forward to Mark Wahlberg as an intelligence officer trying to smuggle a police officer out of the country in Mile 22 (Aug. 3) and Jason Statham fighting a shark in The Meg (Aug. 10).

Audiences thirsting for more unconventional fare may just have to look a little deeper for the potential hidden gems, like Uncle Drew (June 29), a comedy about an aging basketball team competing in a street tournament, with Lil Rel Howery, Kyrie Irving and Shaquille O’Neal, and Hereditary (June 8), a trippy horror about the strange things that start happening when a family’s matriarch dies.

Sundance breakouts coming this summer include Eighth Grade (July 13) from comedian Bo Burnham, which follows an eighth-grade girl around her last week of middle school, Blindspotting (July 20) about a police shooting in Oakland, and Sorry to Bother You (July 6) also Oakland-set, but with a quirkier sci-fi edge.

There’s the almost too-strange-to-be-true The Happytime Murders (Aug. 17) from Brian Henson and starring Melissa McCarthy, where puppets and humans co-exist and a private eye takes on the case of a puppet on puppet murder.

And then there’s Hotel Artemis, the directorial debut of Iron Man 3 screenwriter Drew Pearce. It’s an original action-thriller about a hospital for criminals set in a dystopian, near-future Los Angeles with a star-studded cast including Jodie Foster, Sterling K. Brown and Jeff Goldblum that Global Road Entertainment is releasing on June 8. Pearce said there was no way he could have gotten it made in the studio system.

“Hopefully this is a rallying cry. It’s not a sequel, it’s not based on a comic. It’s not a reboot. It’s its own eccentric and hopefully loveable beast of a movie,” Pearce said.

“I think what we’ve seen in the last year is movies with real personality are actually what an audience is crying out for, whether that’s tiny movies that made good like Get Out or taking the superhero blockbuster like Thor: Ragnarok and essentially making a quirky New Zealand comedy out of it,” he said. “I think there’s a real appetite for something that’s just a little different and a little less cookie-cutter.”
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