Boo! A Madea Halloween Scares Jack Reacher at Box Office

Tyler Perry's new Madea movie earned $27.6 million in North American theaters over the weekend, a new record for Madea movies and enough to race past Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, which managed to reach $23 million. Well-reviewed horror sequel Ouija: Origin of Evil and The Accountant fought it out for third place and were nearly tied at $14 million, with the Ouija movie holding a slight edge. [Box Office Mojo]

Chinese Box-Office Growth Slows

Remember when analysts were saying China would become the world's biggest movie market by 2018? It could still happen, but it no longer looks like a sure thing — after three consecutive years of strong growth, ticket sales are slowing at the Chinese box office. Speaking in L.A. last week, Wanda Group Chairman Wang Jianlin predicted an annual growth rate of about 15% percent for the Chinese box-office, a comedown compared to recent growth rates that approached 50%. It's bad news for Hollywood studios that have been cutting deals to ensure Chinese distribution while banking on continued revenue growth in that market. [Los Angeles Times]

AT&T to Spend $85 Billion on Time Warner

As was widely expected, AT&T announced on Saturday that it had reached an agreement to buy Time Warner in a transaction valued at $85 billion. The new conglomerate would have a market value of more than $305 billion — exceeding the value of Comcast and Disney combined. The deal is subject to regulatory scrutiny — but given that Comcast's acquisition of NBCUniversal passed muster in 2011, it seems likely the AT&T Time Warner deal will be approved. [The Hollywood Reporter]

Director Tim Miller Is off Deadpool 2

Somewhat surprisingly, given that his VFX bona fides (and an amazing test reel that leaked online) were widely credited with getting the original Deadpool greenlit, director Tim Miller has left the sequel after butting heads with star Ryan Reynolds. "Creative differences" were officially to blame, but apparently Reynolds was unhappy with Miller's stylistic intentions for the sequel as well as his plan to hire Kyle Chandler to play the character of Cable. Deadpool made more than $780 million on a budget of $58 million; whoever else steps in to direct the sequel, it's almost sure to cost a lot more than that. [The Wrap]

Every Episode of Jessica Jones Season 2 to Be Directed by a Woman

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With Hollywood increasingly under fire for its failure to hire women to direct film and TV projects — while simultaneously complaining that the industry suffers from a lack of women with experience directing for film and TV — Jessica Jones showrunner Melissa Rosenberg says all 13 episodes of the second season of Marvel's Jessica Jones, which will go into production for Netflix in 2017, will be directed by women. Jessica Jones will become one of the first shows to have an all-female directorial slate, but it will take a lot more of them to balance out the number of series that are directed entirely by men. (The DGA said that in 2015-2016, women directed just 17% of all TV episodes.) [Variety]

Do You Have the Fast iPhone 7 or the Slow One?

Apple isn't usually terribly chatty about the inner workings of its iPhones, but wouldn't you assume that the guts of one iPhone 7 are the same as the guts of another? Turns out that's not the case. For one thing, storage performance varies, with 32 GB iPhones reading and writing more slowly than their more capacious counterparts. For another, the internal 4G modems are different, with certain handset models performing better than others under tests.  [ZDNet Hardware 2.0]