The Hot Blog Archive for December, 2008
DP/30 – Elsa Zylberstein, Co-Star of I Have Loved You So Long
Available on GoogleVideo
or in QT, after the jump…
Mamma Mia! Manly?
Great tv spots for the DVD of Mamma Mia! during football yesterday.
“You know she wants it! Be man enough to buy her a musical!”
Love that.
(And on a less manly tack, did anyone notice Oprah failing to do much promotion of Ben Button while milking Mr Pitt in a Ben Button episode, taped November 5? Odd. Did she like the film? I hate to be doggin’ Da Button, but when Oprah can’t get in her normal frenzy for your Oscar movie… well… “It’s like nothing you’ve seen before” is not “I love this movie.” Just noticing.)
Imitation… The Sincerest…
Frost/Nixon took the lesson from Doubt this weekend and have come out swinging with new, much more aggressive spots for the film. Forget the subleties of Nixon trying to manage Frost and decided just how much he wanted to fall on his sword. This is now a mano-a-mano street brawl!!!
it aint the movie… but it might be a better sales choice.
It is one of the real problems with awards season. Marketers become respectful of the films. Too respectful. And they sell to too small an audience… a group of about 6000.
So good for you, Universal. Sell that dead president out. Make Frost look like he had some control of the situation. The movie works. Audiences will forgive you.
Next up, Milk. Wait for the gunshot… wait… wait…
Buh-Bye Strike… Buh-Bye SAG
The question for SAG is now
DP/30 – Ellen Kuras – Director, Nerakhoon (The Betrayal)
Available on GoogleVideo
or in QT, after the jump…
DP/30 – Matteo Garrone, director of Gomorrah
The director of the 2008 Italian submission for Oscar sits for a chat with David Poland.
Weekend Estimates by Klady
The weather outside is a popular cliche’… really.
Estimates may defy accuracy today. We’l see. Klady has Yes Man slipping well under 3x Friday… the other two openers right around there. At least one premature e-estimacator has retracted estimates a couple of times over the weekend.
People sometimes ask why some of this premature stuff irritates me so. It’s 3-fold. One, it’s often inaccurate. But more importantly, the sense of mining movie grosses like they are baseball stats is something that has irritated many for years, as box office has become assured of a Sunday night slot on every news show (and now, ever scroll). But we are getting to the point where we won’t wait for the news to happen before insisting we have the answer. This is not a situation where Traditional Media is doing a single bit of perspective reporting either. And those who are positioning themselves as experts are either completely ignorant of what they are really writing about or they are so busy trying to be first that they are doing a disservice to people who have a legitimate interest in what is going on out there.
And 3… the reason we have incredibly unclear and often no verifiable numbers in areas of new media is that there are so many irresponsible monkeys swimming around the pool in box office these days that the industry is dedicated to hiding every single number they can from her on in.
With due respect, this is AICN Syndrome. Reviewing test screenings has led to a test screening system that no longer works for filmmakers or the foolish execs that overvalued the numbers that came out of those screenings. And we don’t know the real numbers on anything other than box office now because “analysts” dipped too deeply into the well and misunderstood the numbers they did have, creating problems for every studio.
And by the way… here is a touch of what may become news in the days to come… purchasing a web business should require a lot of due diligence work, as word around the box office moat is that a lawsuit for stolen proprietary information is being seriously considered now that one web entity has grown deep pockets. As I have written before, domestic box office that studios hand out each week is not proprietary information. If you have a website or newspaper, you can get on the weekend phone list. But when you are digging past the first 20 or 30 grossers, it is likely that you are using numbers from just one or two actual hands-on box office information brokers aka reporting services
Friday Estimates by Klady
One has to go all the way back to 2003 to find a pre-Christmas weekend that was not right on top of Christmas, creating a 4-day or 5-day weekend and that entails. Now, 2003 did have Return of the King burning things up. That level of film has not entered the market this month. But after that, grosses were $11.5m, $11.4m, $7.8m, $5.5m
Confusion Abuse-ion
Crazy-Like-A-Buzzard Nikki Finke and her
13 Comments »BYOB – Friday 121908
Ev’rybody’s workin’ for the weekend…
(Corrected, 5:52p, by the good lyrical graces of one of Hollywood’s good guys.)
11 Weeks To Oscar
The Greatly Settled
Every year, I quote Bill Condon’s notion – which has more resonance with his Oscar gig this year … and less – of The Great Settling.
All the critics’ awards and nominations are laid out. Screeners are in every Oscar voter’s stockings. People go on their annual big vacations to wherever with the family and the discs in tow. And as the pressures from the hard push of the studios and press are relieved, cooling the situation, the films themselves creep into perspective. Nomination ballots go out right at Christmas and are returned en masse when people get back from their holiday to their lives.
But this year … not so much.
The Rest…
The Charts…
SAG Strikes… With Nominations!!!
Dan sag it!!!
Razum frazum foon ba!
Oops