Ashley Rodriguez

Star Wars has paid off for Disney.

Snapchat might be going the way of YouTube.

Christopher Nolan is a champion for originality in Hollywood.

The fiercest family debates this holiday season may have been over Netflix’s new movie Bright.

Disney took aim at Netflix with its bid to buy 21st Century Fox. The proposed $52 billion deal would give Disney—which made a record $6 billion at the global box office two years in a row—even more top TV shows and movies, as well as access to talent, at a time when it is pulling films from the streaming service and planning its own rival offering.

Streaming video exploded in 2017. Netflix surpassed 100 million subscribers. YouTube’s 1.5 billion users watched 1 billion hours of video per day. None of that made it easier to be a parent.

There’s more on PornHub than pornography.

Last month, the New York Times revealed (paywall) that inappropriate videos of popular children’s characters were finding their ways into the YouTube Kids platform. A few weeks later, BuzzFeed uncovered unsettling clips that appeared to endanger children. Now, the Times (paywall) in London has found that predators are using the streaming-video platform to exploit kids.

Alexa was the hottest gift on Amazon this holiday season.

Over the holidays, Amazon customers bought Echo devices, called their parents with Alexa, used the voice-assistant to find chocolate chip cookie and Martini recipes, listened to Michael Bublé on Amazon Music, and watched Elf on Prime Video.

Disney may have squandered the final Skywalker reunion in Star Wars.

If you don’t have a fireplace to cozy up beside this holiday season, Netflix has you covered. You and your loved ones can sing carols and sip hot cocoa beside a festive new video of a flaming can of trash. The vibrant burning garbage and graffiti-covered walls will remind you of all the comforts of home—if home is under a bridge.

Bright isn’t your typical blockbuster.

This is the final installment of our series on The gift of good TV. 

Jordan Peele’s Get Out got Oscar attention way back in February when it landed in US theaters as the first surprise hit of 2017. Here we are, ready to close out the year, and the satirical horror movie is still on top. By Rotten Tomatoes’s measure, it’s the best-reviewed movie of the year. Acclaimed films that followed it like Dunkirk and The Big Sick didn’t hold a candle to the refreshing, zeitgeist-hitting film.

Critics on Rotten Tomatoes love The Last Jedi. Audiences seem thoroughly unimpressed.

By the time Disney rolls out its streaming services for sports fans and families in 2018 and 2019, US audiences may be too overwhelmed to care.

One bad apple really can spoil the bunch.

Like many American children of his generation, Mike Goslin grew up watching Star Wars. He saw the first movie in theaters when he was a boy, and remembers the seminal moment in A New Hope when Obi-Wan Kenobi introduced the lightsaber. As Kenobi described it to Luke Skywalker: “This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or random as a blaster. An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.”

Hulu has been around for nearly as long as Netflix has been streaming video and it still hasn’t found its edge. It has a large back catalog of old TV shows and movies. It recently launched a live-TV bundle. And it’s been getting noticed for more original programming like The Handmaid’s Tale.

MoviePass, a sort of Netflix for cinemas that gets subscribers into one movie showing per day at major US theaters, has been catching fire since it lowered its price to $9.95 a month earlier this year. That’s not much more than the price of an average movie ticket. And MoviePass offered absurdly cheap deals to folks who paid for a year’s subscription in full, and to Costco members who bundled MoviePass with Fandor, the movie-streaming service.

Media’s most successful CEO is leaving Disney with one last parting gift: his biggest buy yet.

Disney’s $52.4 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox includes a never-ending list of A-list media properties, including The Simpsons, Avatar, and the X-Men. But the most important name in the deal is nowhere to be found in the press release.

When Amazon entered the grocery business with the acquisition of Whole Foods this year, it was thought to be a supermarket killer. The grocery business was already facing competition from general retailers like Walmart that operate on larger scales and offer lower prices, and invading European grocers like Aldi and Lidl, before the mammoth conglomerate took an interest.