And The Frog Says…

For those of you who are wondering about Disney’s decision to change Rapunzel to Tangled – our own Kim Voynar included – there is an interesting piece of detail on the DVD release of The Princess & The Frog.
There is a teaser trailer for the film on the DVD, which had to be produced at least a month before the Tangled announcement, that does not call the film Rapunzel. In other words, the studio has known it was making a change for a while – as is usually the case – and clued us all in when they were good and ready.

End Of An Error – VNU Presents ShoWest

It couldn’t have gone too much worse.
VNU bought ShoWest, om Bob Dowling’s advice, has The Sunshine Group manage it, and loses a bunch of money.
Going from a non-profit to a for-profit was a problem. Studios spent hundreds of thousands each year to entertain and amaze exhibitors and doing it so VNU or The Sunshines could profit didn’t make anyone happy.
But the timing issue was even more problematic. The consolidation of exhibition made the need to have a convention for the purpose of having annual eyeball-to-eyeball moments less. The biggest single issue in exhibition, digital projection, was already at a stalemate that would not be worked out at ShoWest by the time VNU came in. And about half way through the VNU contract, DVD revenues would start to drop and the corporate owners of the studios would start cutting costs, with ShoWest being a conspicuous expense.
So, now it will be return to NATO’s loving bosom and be called CinemaCon… a horrible choice, all too reflective of ComicCon. But hey, the feel of a bar mitzvah may be back. Everything old is new again.

Losing The Authorative Voice?

In the wake of Todd McCarthy’s exit at Variety, Glenn Kenny referred to “the increasing disrespect for what I call “the authoritative voice.'”
Eric Kohn writes, “Is this the end of the new beginning? The critical process continues on a track of immortality; a new era for its manifestation has revved up its engines and officially launched. In the dust of older models, a fresh civilization slowly congeals. (Hyperbole, by the way, looms larger than ever.)”
In a comment in another nearby entry, Don Murphy, a producer of genre pictures of all sizes, writes, “Welcome to the World That Knowles Created, David. It is not going to change in your lifetime.”
As I spent a few hours online being pepper by tweets from SXSW and looking at what seemed like an endless wave of shallow coverage of the fest by people being paid, I found myself rather depressed. Is this thin gruel really the future?
David Carr throws a thin veil of “oy” over it in his report on the NY Times blog, Media Decoder, today, writing, “Decoder is more of the dad coming down the stairs and looking in on the teen party

And The NYT Walks Down A Similar Variety Road…

If it makes Sharon feel any better, the New York Times nealry hacked up the Iron Cross story even worse that she. They had a long interview with Neil Stiles, by their own definition, but there is no hint of a direct question to him about whether he had the review removed. He, not Tim Gray, is the key player here.
But they did get this… and it could be a game changer… Tim Gray’s response, by e-mail (WTF?!?!).: “Of the

Joshua Newton Continues To Drive The Crazy Train As Sharon Waxman Laps It Up

It’s hard to know… is Sharon Waxman’s “grilling” of Joshua “I paid $250,000 for an Oscar campaign and all I got was this lousy movie” Newton meant as comedy, tragedy, or does she actually think it’s news?
The headline – Joshua Newton: Tim Gray is ‘Lying Through His Nose’ – seems to be a clue. But the interview is so self-contradictory, I don’t know how any alleged journalist could run it without doing any reporting on it… especially when so many attacks are being published along the way.
I’ll keep it as simple as possible.
ON THE ISSUE OF BEING SOLD ON A CAMPAIGN
When Tim Gray put the movie of his list of potential contenders, like the majority of films on the list, he had not seen it… no journalists had seen it. Why? Because, according to Newton, “I hadn

BYOB Sunday, Ides of March Eve

Wildman From SXSW #2

This time, it’s on a proper page.
He covers Cherry, Tucker & Dale vs Evil, American: The Bill Hicks Story, American Grindhouse, and Amer.

Weekend Box Office by Klady – Alice = 4 New Films + 50%

Alice In Wonderland‘s 10-day gross is only $6 million behind Avatar‘s and also #2 to Avatar as the top 2nd weekend gross outside of the summer. Obviously, the comparisons are a bit stretchy because of the December holidays (for better and for worse) and because the Sunday number is still a pure estimate. In terms of spring numbers, it’s The Passion of The Christ that Alice is dueling with and is a little behind and falling a bit faster. Still, even dropping at 40% a week from here in, $400 million domestic is in the crosshairs. Could be a little higher… could be a little lower. Regardless, mighty impressive numbers.
And huzzahs again to the former regime at Disney, which tee’d this ball up before Rich Ross took over. There was no demonstrable change in the marketing focus… only more finished footage to add to spots.
The openers didn’t have a happy weekend. Not one is estimating 3x Friday estimates. And the worst estimate, Friday vs Weekend, is Remember Me, estimating less than 2.5x Friday. What this says to me is that the hardcore Twilightinas were there on Friday, voting Team Edward. The movie getting to $25m domestic would seem to be a fantasy at this point.
Searchlight continues to get Crazy Heart out there and I wouldn’t say their 7% rise is so much a function of Oscar this weekend as it is of continuing to find the real audience for this movie… a Searchlight specialty.
The Hurt Locker almost doubled last weekend’s gross… to $810,000. This kinda seals the deal on the domestic theatrical on this movie. And taking a look all the way back, it is the lowest grossing Best Picture winner since Marty in 1955, which apparently grossed about $7 million. Adjusted Grossers would put that number at $90 million or so in 2009 dollars. Obviously, the gross numbers get smaller and smaller as you work your way back to 1929. But if you were to used adjusted figures – and this may be one of those rare cases in which it might be appropriate – The Hurt Locker is the least successful theatrical release to win Best Picture in Oscar history.
And clearly, post-theatrical for The Hurt Locker will blow Marty away by many multiples, given that we now live in a universe of post-theatrical revenue opportunities that could not even be conceived back in 1955… just as theatrical was so much more expansive, when you look at tickets sold, back then.
Box Office Mojo, I feel compelled to repeat, has done a great disservice by running obviously incorrect numbers in terms of adjusted gross and ticket sales. They have been quoted everywhere because they are used as a resource. The site is an excellent resource… to any box office in the last decade or so of gathering actual hard stats. But they have no detail on grosses from any distance and allowing their guesstimated stats to be used as news is a shameful failure on their part. Someone could spend a lot of hours and get an accurate count on the ticket sales – or at least within 10% – of Gone With The Wind. But I don’t care that much. I only care that loose guesses not be presented as facts… a re-written history that we will be stuck with forever because people don’t challenge the veracity. This does not diminish GOTW’s position… not the point. The point is that facts are facts and guesses are guesses and we need to know the difference if at all possible. In this case, it is possible.
Anyway…

Our Wildman @ SXSW

The lovely and talented John Wildman is once again reporting for MCN from an exotic location… Austin, TX. This will go up on a MCN page with a cool graphic and bolding and stuff later today, but for the sake of expedience – and with staff spread out on a Saturday – here it is, raw. Enjoy.
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John Wildman’s – SXSW #1
Just got into Austin after doing a caravan thing from Dallas with Actress/Producer Farah White and after a brief pit stop at a female writer/director buddy (whose name I can

DP/30 Redux – Lovers of Hate Goes To SXSW

We don’t often run DP/30s on The Hot Blog a second time, but Bryan Poyser’s Lovers of Hate was a Sundance sleeper and now, it’s being launched on the IFC’s VOD program through SXSW.
As you might recall, IFC and Magnolia’s more supported VOD gameplan is the only one I am actually encouraged by… though I still think the theatrical component needs to be stronger. Anyway, here’s Bryan… again…

mp3 of the interview

Friday Estimates by Klady – Alice Takes In More Than The Four Newcomers Combined

Wow. I don’t know whether to feel good for Disney of bad for everyone else.
Start with Green Zone, a movie that never seemed to be selling more than Matt Damon’s big head and a lot of fatigues and military chatter. I saw one or two ads that tried hard to make it seem like a Bourne spin-off. But mostly, pretty quiet until a wave of mostly good – a few virulently bad – reviews and… not much more.
i am sympathetic to the notion that “iraq movies” are still not good box office bait. But it seems to me – having not seen the film, the quality of which is irrelevant to the sell, but which needs to have the elements to sell – that there must have been more here. Maybe if you fear that you’re going to get Duplicity/State of Play opening numbers, you subconsciously will them into existence with the kind of focus you have – or don’t have – on the movie in question. After all, who wants to be disappointed again?
Remember Me, which is a pure “Come See The Vampire Hottie Have Sex” sell, is a good opening by Summit standards. It looks like it will compete to be Summit’s #2 opening for a non-Twilight film, pushing out Push and behind only the mainstream Nic Cage Blue Clues Actioner (Nic’s own category), Knowing. And it will likely outgross the entire domestic take of The Hurt Locker by next weekend. Mostly what it will do, as all studios must, is keep their franchise boy happy that the studio made an effort on his behalf.
For me, the big unhappy surprise of the weekend is She’s Out Of My League, a movie that seems to be universally well liked, but has no familiar names – we’ll see how Disney hides Jay Baruchel as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice behind Nic Cage this summer and Mike vogel’s alleged Captain America shot didn’t get any help this weekend – and a genre that is the odd one that always seems like it is going to do better than it does.
The last big example of a wannabe Risky film was The Girl Next Door, opening to $6m in 2004… which is about the equivalent of this opening in 2010. That film featured Elisha Cuthbert at the height of her hottieness and Emile Hirsch, whose star was still rising. Here, you have the spectacular-indeed Alice Eve and JB, who has a cult following and not even so much as a Jeffrey Jones or a Joey Pants as a known side-story entity.
Alice Eve, it seems, is one of those “thought I wrote about it” moments I sometimes get after doing this for so long. I seem to remember writing a ridiculously lavish comment on her presence in Stoppard’s Rock-n-Roll… something akin to seeing a Jessica Simpson or a pre-surgery Pam Anderson for the first time… but with some acting skills. I didn’t see Starter for Ten, but I was roped into its dinner party at Toronto that year and I remember a pretty girl, but not THAT. She has IT. The question will be whether filmmakers can figure out how to put it on screen. Girls like Ms. Eve always face the real possibility of ending up playing blow-up dolls in Hollywood films, which is, when someone actually does have more than The Body, a shame.
But as for the film itself – again, I am not back on a screening schedule yet and haven’t see the film – it seems that selling “the girl that boys want to sex” is just not a good theatrical business. Kelly Preston in Secret Admirer and Mischief… smoking… but neither film did $10m domestic…. which in 1985 wasn’t as strong as Moving Violations.
And Our Family Wedding is Searchlight’s most recent attempt to go Urban. I just had a surprising moment as I looked at Searchlight’s openings on BO Mojo and sorting the division’s history by opening, none of their big grossers opened wide. But even more interesting, almost all of their biggest openings are black-themed films. Of their Top 12 openers – #12 is $5.7 million – 7 are black-themed. The biggest opening for Searchlight in this group and in the Dependent’s history is Notorious, which opened to $20.5 million. If OFW opens to 7, it will be right in the middle of the pack for Searchlight “urban” openers. If it was Tyler Perry’s Our Family Wedding, it would be a disastrous number. But it’s not. It’s just an attempt to look like a TP film. So, perhaps disappointing, but likely in line with Searchlight’s internal expectations.
Shutter Island passes $100m. Cop Out is Kevin Smith’s biggest grosser ever and is still doing some business. Avatar passed $2.6 billion this last week. And sadly, a minor bump for The Hurt Locker off of its win last Sunday.

DP/30 – Clash of The Titans writers Phil Hay & Matt Manfredi

mp3 of the interview here
This is one of those rare cases when I agreed to do an interview without realizing that I wasn’t going to be seeing the movie before the chat. It was on a day with four interviews in one location… they were #3.
In any case, they were also a lot of fun. I have no idea whether the movie will be any good. But this is another team of ivy league funny guys, in this case, quite likable.

It's A Trailer… It's A Fest Promo… It's VOD!!!!

Variety Insider Takes A Bat Out And Swings For The Inside Baseball Fences

This came from “Vic,” clearly an anonymous poster… whose tag, I have to assume, is short for “victim.”
I am about 97% sure I know who the author is… but I’m sure not telling.
I cannot vouch for the accuracy of most of the facts or the presumptions of intent assigned to some of the people called out by name. As in all things, perspective matters a lot. But it is a clear position of the feeling of one Variety insider. And that perspective deserves to be heard, in my editorial opinion… even if it is excessively angry and accusatory… and even if it is not.
I have added paragraph breaks for reader sanity.
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I agree with you today about Todd McCarthy — maybe he doesn’t fit the model going forward, but that’s not how you part with a man who has done so much for the Variety brand.
Unfortunately, that’s just kind of the fucked-up way Variety managers handle layoffs. They seem to get off on the process, although I’m sure they’ll be very offended at the suggestion. We’re talking about an organization in which the personnel director, Mark Torres (aka “The Executioner”) has a VP title and is listed high on the masthead.
It’s like clockwork to them now. Every couple of months, Torres will swagger into Tim Gray’s office, along with Kirsten Wilder and/or former Peter Bart assistant Krystal Hunt (carrying a yellow notepad to write down names and dates and such), and they’ll have what looks like a fun, cordial meeting behind closed glass doors. Occasionally, Neil Stiles or Steve Gaydos will pop in — everyone looks like they’re having fun. They’ll repeat this very visible process several times over the course of a month, just in case the staff isn’t sufficiently terrified.
A few weeks later, they’ll blind-side everyone with the news. No proposed buyouts, no warnings, your number is just up — probably because Tim secretly doesn’t like you, or maybe you pissed off Gaydos, or you have a content position Stiles doesn’t value, or who knows.
They process you quickly now. After a morning of terror, in which upper-level employees get axed, lower-end victims are summoned into a room with the other less fortunate of the round, and Gray and Torres calmly give you the news (in case you haven’t already figured it out). Then they read you your rights (severance and such) individually — sometimes playfully bickering as they go — and away you go.
Anne Thompson was given two weeks to pack up her things during the January 2009 round — she took all 14 days to get lost. I’m told now that you’ve got to leave by noon.
A few hours later, Gray will attempt to calm the staff with a memo, telling everyone that they really didn’t need the just-dispersed parts and that the paper is still profitable. He said it in January 2009. Repeated it in April 2009. Said the same thing last week. Gaydos, Wilder, et. al. all get promotions.
Occasionally, an outgoing employee will be honored with a mock Variety front page full of staff-written parodies. But that just serves to make the rank-and-file folks who are just thrown out on their ass feel even worse.
It’s interesting that Variety has many more editors than reporters now. In fact, the trade almost has more folks with publisher-level titles — Stiles, Brian Gott and Linda Buckley Bruno — as reporters. Sure, there’s a good reason people are getting let go — money’s tight, and Gott’s main job acumen (cashing checks) isn’t as easy to pull off as it used to be. But instead of a big, sweeping, professionally handled layoffs, you get terrifying incremental blood loss. And you rarely understand the reason behind the decisions.
For example, designer Danielle Grimes carried the features department on her back for years. She was canned Monday. But Gaydos has two editors in that same department who focus on post-production issues, who probably work half as much.
Often, it’s very obvious that economic conditions are merely an excuse for firing people they don’t like. Former executive editor Michael Speier knows the entertainment business cold, but he was a bit of a polarizing figure in the newsroom, a Peter Bart guy, and Gray — who often called him and fellow editor Kathy Lyford “crazy” behind their backs — used “layoffs” to replace both of them with the more affable but less knowledgeable Leo Wolinsky.
No, Gray wasn’t looking to re-organize Variety to compete against all those barbarian blogs he so disdains — he merely wanted someone he likes working with. Which brings us to the chilling conclusion that we all kind of know: all of this isn’t really going anywhere. Guys like Gray and Gaydos hung their hats for two decades on their abilities to manage up when it came to Peter Bart. But they got tired of that, and grew to resent the man. Now the keys are theirs, and their using Stiles editorial bloodlust to reshape the place to their liking — at least to some degree.
Stiles, meanwhile, is what everybody thought he might be when he came in — a hatchet man, charged with cleaning the place out, cramming it into a new building with a flashy red sign… so that the bloodless European owners could sell the business. None of this seems congruent with any plan to evolve a 100-year-old entertainment journalism brand into the digital age.

The Friday Afternoon Knife Gets Zemeckis

And then there was Jerry Bruckheimer.
The putsch at Disney continues, as Bob Zemeckis and ImageMovers Digital gets the ol’ heave ho as of the end of the movie they are already in production on… and if the Yellow Submarine re-do happens, ok… but if not, okay too.
Oh yes… and kiss the Roger Rabbit sequel goodbye too. It was not even mentioned in the press release. Perhaps that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. As Pirates assures Bruckheimer’s – and ONLY Brickheimer’s – place on the lot for now, Roger 2 may have been the gold ring keeping Disney interested in keeping a relationship with Zemeckis after already establishing the DreamWorks relationship with Spielberg.
Zemeckis could have a hard time coming back from this curb kick. There is no other studio out there that I would expect to be prepared to foot the bill for his motion capture efforts in light of Avatar. His style is no longer in vogue and the way brand managers think, it never will be. Zemeckis may even have to go make some regular movies for a while. Heck, me might even like it.