Box Office & Grok AI International Insider

Good afternoon Insiders, it’s a new year and it’s rather chilly, but never fear, your favorite weekly roundup of the biggest entertainment biz news is here. We hope you all had a lovely break. Do read on, and sign up here.

Box Office Optimism

Tentpoles and indie still got it: Gower Street Analytics previously predicted that 2026 will be the highest grossing global box office year since before the pandemic, and even with the prospect of the world’s biggest streaming service buying one of the world’s biggest movie studios, one can’t help but enter this year with a sense of optimism. Major tentpoles like Avatar: Fire and Ash and Zootopia 2 are lighting things up, while lower-budget fare including Timothée Chalamet-starrer Marty Supreme, Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet and zombie horror We Bury the Dead are proving that indie can still do it, thank god. Deadline is always keen to see what’s going on in theaters around the world and Anthony D’Alessandro headed to the ever-interesting Chinese market, where the 2025 box office hit big numbers (albeit they would have been down on 2024 had it not been for Ne Zha 2). Or how about Italy, where moviegoing has struggled somewhat since Covid, Anthony writes. That makes the latest success of the comedy Buen Camino, starring and written by Checco Zalone, which is on its way to becoming the highest-grossing local-language film in Italy, all the more amazing. There are a million caveats to a strong box office year and we all know how difficult it is so attract punters, but with heavy hitters like Avengers: Doomsday and Christopher Nolan’s epic Odyssey incoming later this year, plus plenty more, we’re raising a glass to cinemagoers returning to theaters around the world. Deadline, as ever, will be following each step of the way.

Grok AI Generating Headlines

Still raising billions: Imploring Elon Musk’s new AI tool to respect her privacy was probably not the way that Maya Jama wanted to spend her day but the Love Island host took to X to join an ever-growing number of women trying to take action against the invasive tool. Grok has been in the headlines over the past few days for all the wrong reasons as more and more women reveal they have been deepfaked via its Imagine setting, including a 14-year-old Stranger Things actor, who was manipulated by Grok to put her in a banana print bikini, and a presenter who campaigns for privacy rights after intimate photos were shared around her school without consent when she was 15. Musk acknowledged the problem publicly and has stated that action will be taken against child sexual abuse material. Earlier today, X updated its policy so that only paying users of the platform can image edit. This came after the UK government went ham, condemning the “appalling” images and urging X to move fast. The country’s regulator, Ofcom, didn’t rule out a full ban of the service over the issue. Depressingly, none of this intense backlash stopped Musk’s xAI raising a whopping $20B in its latest funding round, with investors including Qatar Investment Authority, MGX and Baron Capital Group. Grok Imagine offers a Black Mirror-esque window into how AI can be leveraged for harm, and yet, as so often feels the case, never-out-the-news tech baron Musk powers on stronger than ever.

Baz Meets Julia Roberts

That signature gleaming smile: Someone else who has been addressing artificial intelligence head on has been Julia Roberts, who has been one of its most vociferous critics and refuses to even use ChatGPT. Breaking Baz’s first big interview of the year was with the Oscar-winning Erin Brokovich star and she responded with an emphatic “Yes” to the question of whether we are at a dangerous crossroads with the tech and its impact on Hollywood. Never fear though, as Baz writes, an AI version of Julia Roberts would be doomed from the start. A computer program could never replicate her signature gleaming smile — the one that lights up Notting Hill and Pretty Woman — or the inner turmoil that tortures Alma, the Yale philosophy professor she captures so astutely in Luca Guadagnino’s riveting drama After the Hunt. Roberts dives deep into working with Guadagnino on After the Hunt and muses introspectively about whether Pretty Woman – the 1990 romcom in which she played an escort hired for a wealthy corporate raider (portrayed by a dashing Richard Gere) – would have been made today. The piece is well worth a read.

The Essentials

🌶️ Another One: Desert Angel, a documentary about the search for stranded migrants, has been picked up for worldwide distribution.

🏆 Awards latest: BAFTA Film longlists have just come out… One Battle After Another leads the pack and there were a fair few snubs and surprises.

🚄 Hijacked: Idris Elba spoke to us about stepping back into a high-stakes world of hostages for the second season of his hit Apple TV series.

😏 Frontrunners: We took a look at who is leading the race to become the next BBC Director General.

💵 Tax credit: Europe’s first rebate for unscripted shows has rolled out in Ireland, but there are question marks over whether Fox shows filming in the Emerald Isle will benefit.

📈 Number crunch: The Asia Pacific screen biz will hit revenues of a whopping $196B by 2030, according to a Media Partners Asia report.

🚪 Exiting: Lionsgate’s Noel Hedges, who leaves his international acquisitions role after eight years.

🗣️ The big interview: Meyer Levinson-Blount, the Oscar-nommed Butcher’s Stain filmmaker, told us how he took a “respectful” approach to telling a story about a Palestinian in Israel.

🤝 Done deal: Universal picked up a 30% stake in India’s Excel Entertainment.

🏕️ Fest latest: Petra Volpe, director behind Late Shift, will be awarded the Zurich Film Festival’s Golden Eye.

📺 Ratings: Jake dove deep into the UK TV numbers for 2025 and found The Celebrity Traitors, Adolescence and KPop Demon Hunters had come out on top.

🎥 Clip: For Netflix’s Museum of Innocence, a Turkish miniseries adapted from Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk’s bestseller.

🕯️ RIP: Danielle Scott-Haughton, the BBC drama executive behind shows including the upcoming Peaky Blinders series, who died unexpectedly in her sleep. She was in her 30s. Our thoughts go out to Danielle’s family and friends.

International Insider was written by Max Goldbart and edited by Jesse Whittock.