Industry roundup: Top Gun breaks records and the latest industry market news

Every Monday RedShark co-founder and CEO, Matt Gregory looks at key announcements, appointments and updates from the media and entertainment industry for the week ahead.

Cinema: Top Gun: Maverick takes $248m on opening weekend! This is the largest non superhero release since the pandemic hit and the first time a Tom Cruise movie has surpassed $100m on opening weekend (I was surprised by that stat’ actually). We’ve seen trailers and teasers literally for years now so the release is welcome and the news it’s worth the hype is genuinely exciting for our industry. The team at Sony will be breathing a sigh of relief as they’ve been straining at the leash to talk about how it was shot on the (at the time brand new) Sony Venice cinema camera! We profiled this nearly 2 years ago but hey, it’s still fresh today.

Streaming: Netflix has finally dropped the final series of Stranger Things! Sort of. The final 2 episodes will be released on July 1st, but there’s more than enough content to keep us going with the 7 episodes coming in at a hefty 8hrs 50 minutes. I’m all in though, the soundtrack, images and VFX work are all simply phenomenal, oh and the story is ace. Over on Disney Plusthey’ve released the highly anticipated Obi-Wan Kenobi which picks up life after Revenge of the Sith. We will be taking a dive into how this was made soon.

Sports: Saturday’s Champions League final between Real Madrid and Liverpool was watched by 380m people worldwide (for context this year’s Super Bowl has 115m viewers). Unfortunately the shambolic organisation by UEFA and the French authorities saw kick off delayed by over 30 minutes, once it did kick off Twitter (and a few of my WhatsApp groups) were all talking about the unusual camera angle that seemed to be incredibly far away from the pitch. This post from BT Sport presenter (and production company owner) Jake Humprey sums up the challenges the production crews faced thanks to tear gas and poor planning in and around the stadium.

Obi Wan Kenobi. Disney.

Industry news

• Vitec rebranded as Vivendum. Vitec, the parent company of many well known brands including SmallHD, Anton Bauer, Teradek, Manfrotto and Litepanels have rebranded as Vivendum - Latin for “must see”. We aren’t brand experts - after all we decided to name a site for video technology enthusiasts after a brightly coloured sea creature, however the logo looks pretty cool and it also means we won’t confuse them with another video technology company named Vitec who have settled a naming dispute in selected regions. Speaking of which….
• RED suing Nikon. Yes, RED are again going to court to protect their compressed RAW patent in relation to Nikon’s new N-RAW format they included in their 2.0 firmware update. They have previously been successful when challenging Apple and Sony. We only just reviewed the Z9 (Simon says it’s an “absolute beast of a camera”) so we will watch this closely.

Share Prices

(price correct as of 5pm BST Monday May 30th):

• Adobe: 423.04 (up 7.4% week on week)
• AMD: $102.26 (+11.3%)
• Apple: $149.64 (+4%)
• AVID: $29.75 (+11.1%)
• DELL: $49.58 (+23.1%)
• Disney: $109.32 (+5.4%)
• Microsoft: $273.24 (+6.9%)
• Netflix: $195.19 (+4.8%)
• NVidea: $188.11 (+15.6%)
• Vivendum/ Vitec Group: £1290 (+1%)

I wish I bought dome DELL stock this time last week! Anyway, have a good week everyone.

If you have news to share or want to get in touch, please email matt.gregory@redsharknews.com.