Amazon Abruptly Cancels Pricey Drama ‘The Last Tycoon’ (Exclusive)
The move comes as Amazon continues to tighten its financial belt amid a search for a broad hit.
The Hollywood Reporter – Amazon has canceled its F. Scott Fitzgerald period drama The Last Tycoon, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter.
The decision arrives days after the retail giant/streamer made an about-face and canceled another Fitzgerald drama, the previously renewed Z: The Beginning of Everything, starring Christina Ricci as the author’s wife, Zelda Fitzgerald.
Amazon had spent roughly $7 million during preproduction on the scrapped season of Z. The cancellations come as what sources say is larger belt-tightening going on at the outlet as it looks for a large-scale hit.
The streamer is now beginning to rack up a series of one-and-done shows, with Last Tycoon, Z and 1970s Newsweek period drama Good Girls Revolt joining drama Mad Dogs.
The pricey Last Tycoon was picked up to series last year and began streaming on July 28. While Amazon, along with Netflix and Hulu, doesn’t release viewership information, the drama debuted to mixed reviews from critics (its score sits at 53 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 57 percent on Metacritic).
The Last Tycoon starred Matt Bomer, Kelsey Grammer and Lily Collins, and its nine episodes centered on the machinations of the Hollywood studio system in the 1930s. The show was based on the unfinished novel of the same name by the Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise author which centered on the character Monroe Starr, who was modeled after producer Irving Thalberg.
Category: News
Lily Collins to Co-Star Opposite Nicholas Hoult in Biopic ‘Tolkien’
VARIETY – Lily Collins is set to star opposite Nicholas Hoult in Fox Searchlight and Chernin Entertainment’s J.R.R. Tolkien biopic “Tolkien.”
Collins will play Edith Bratt, Tolkien’s great love, and eventual wife who inspired the elven princess characters in the Lord of the Rings” saga. Finnish director Dome Karukoski will helm the movie.
The film’s script by David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford focuses on the author as he finds friendship, love, and artistic inspiration among a group of classmates prior to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He served in the British armed forces from 1916 to 1920, then wrote the three “Lord of the Rings” novels while working at Pembroke College. Tolkien died in 1973.
Fox Searchlight and Chernin Entertainment have been developing the project since 2013. Tolkien’s epic novels served as the basis for the film trilogies “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit.”
“The Hobbit” was first published in 1937. Tolkien then wrote “The Lord of the Rings” between 1937 and 1949 as what was initially intended to be a sequel, but the story became much larger — and ultimately one of the best-selling novels of all time with more than 150 million copies sold.
Collins is coming off the Sundance pic “To the Bone,” which earned her some of the reviews of her career. Netflix acquired the distribution rights for that film and recently released it this past July. She was also seen in the Netflix movie “Okja” and has a starring role on the Amazon drama series “The Last Tycoon.”
She is repped by CAA, LBI Entertainment, and Definition Entertainment.
A trailer for season one of The Last Tycoon has been released, and the series will premiere July 28th on Amazon Prime.
Lily has received her first Golden Globe nomination! Congratulations to Lily, we are all so proud!
Best actress, musical or comedy
Annette Bening (20th Century Women)
Lily Collins (Rules Don’t Apply)
Hailee Steinfeld (The Edge of Seventeen)
Emma Stone (La La Land)
Meryl Streep (Florence Foster Jenkins)
Lily Collins Joins New Anthony Lucero Movie Based On ‘The Clown’
EXCLUSIVE: Lily Collins has joined the cast of Anthony Lucero’s next movie, which is based on his long poem The Clown. Set against the backdrop of a small traveling circus, the pic centers on a European clown and his 5-year-old daughter as they lead each other through the everyday mysteries of love, magic and loss.
Pål Sverre Hagen, Holliday Grainger, Keti Mchedishvili, János Derzsi, Harry Treadaway, Stacy Martin, Nikola Djuricko, Nutsa Kukhianidze and Jean-Marc Barr co-star in the pic, which is shooting in Tbilisi, Georgia, with Thor Halvorssen and Lucero producing and Terrence Malick and Ilene Feldman executive producing.
Collins, whose credits include the Snow White tale Mirror Mirror, is next up on the big screen starring in Warren Beatty’s Rules Don’t Apply, which will bow as the opening-night film at AFI Fest. She also is starring in To the Bone, the dark comedy about anorexia that marks feature directorial debut of TV writer Marti Noxon.
Collins stars opposite Matt Bomer in The Last Tycoon, the Amazon drama series based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final unfinished novel that was recently picked up to series.
She is repped by CAA, LBI Entertainment and Sloane Offer.
