[PR] Remember That "April Fool's Day" Joke About Re-Releasing Bananas?

Not a joke at all…
Well… actually… the push is still loaded with a ton o’ jokes… but Oscilliscope is, indeed, re-releasing Bananas in a handful of theaters and DVD for our viewing hilarity.

The full (and very silly/funny) press release is here…

And Memo To The Inmates: MGM Is Already The Titanic, Post-Iceberg

I ran into Carl DiOrio’s piece on MGM’s search for a new CEO and I had to scratch my head… The Old Guard and The New Guard?
Here’s the simple reality. I mean… not complex… really simple.
Veterans understand that MGM is a library sitting at the bottom of the ocean.
There is nothing wrong with the idea of starting a new studio with some old assets under Mary Parent. But it is delusional to think that there is “something to do” about the financial realities of the once major studio.
There is no way of “fixing the problem” when the problem is that the studio is worth billions less than that amount at which it was last capitalized. Literally, the ONLY solution for this business is finding the next Harry Potter – not a half-ass Harry Potter – and to find a way to get someone to throw hundreds of millions at the franchise so that the returns don’t need to be spread out over multiple investors.
As we all seem to know now… even half a pair of Hobbits and a Bond every 2 or 3 years is not nearly enough to dig the company out.
And I would say it is an act of barbarism to continue to force Mary Parent’s name to be dragged into it in every story as though she had any way of fixing the problem or even making big inroads. Nothing about this situation is her fault or the fault of any of her team. And I’m not tap dancing for friends or sources here. She came in with an aggressive production plan and had a hand (or both hands) tied behind her back from Day One.
And the line in DiOrio’s story about execs at a meeting discussing Lakers’ tickets… really a cheap shot. When the people on the Titanic realized – if they did – that there were no more life boats, they could keep pretending there was going to be a solution… or they could indulge in caviar and sexual congress before the breathed their last. Even the dance band – I will assume – was engaged in something that was about focus and staying centered, not pretending that they were going to survive.
Anything is possible. Ryan Kavanaugh is still making movies. The Magical Billionaire solution is always possible, though I don’t imagine that even Carl Icahn, free of Lionsgate, would pour more money into MGM. The most likely billionaire scenario is that some billionaire comes in and steals the library before it devalues any more (or recovers some of its value because of some unexpected economies of new technologies) and the investors in Harry Sloan’s dream eat a loss of billions.
The other scenario is that someone/thing puts up the money to get production started at the company again. The claim is that it would be in exchange for a piece of the company. But right now, $500 million is at least 25% of the value of the entire company. This leaves two possibilities for this “generous” offer. One… Qualia Capital, Anchorage Advisors and others are trying to get their hooks into the flesh of MGM and will get the business rolling again, but with odds that they will own an even higher percentage of the company unless the $500m returns big profits and thus, can earn its way to a profitable return on investment, therefore making the new investors money and delaying the death sentence for the current investors…
OR these new investors essentially run a side business, using the MGM name and assets, but without a major stake in the future value of the company, but primarily in the product coming out, which starts with Bond and The Hobbit… in other words, a fairly secure bet that leverages the only future assets on which MGM can still rely.
But let’s not get confused by the $500m offer… it would not relaunch the studio or give Mary Parent a ton of room to work with. One has to figure that at least $400 million of that money would be instantly assigned to the Hobbit films and Bond.
In other words, death by bunga bunga…. or death by gunshot, but first, bunga bunga!
I feel terrible for the players here. It’s like they are waiting for the cure for cancer… or the next DVD. Not likely to happen in the next quarter… or the next quarter… or the next quarter…
If only they had a… hot tub time machine!

Just Wondering: Miramax Library Edition

Anyone else notice that the pseudo-official size of the Miramax library shrunk from 700 when the futile exercise of selling it began to 600, as noted in a law article today?
Of course, this is one of the reasons why Disney isn’t completely crazy in trying to get the library off their shelves asap… many of the oldest titles, especially the foreign language pick-ups, are reverting back to the producers, requiring more money to hang on to the rights, or perhaps worse, with no option left.
Without someone who wants to invest in the future of the library, it will slip into the 5s before it stabilizes and is probably in the 3s, in terms of product that the company actually Owns.

Trailers: The Artists Are A' Comin'… Mr. Romanek & Ms. Coppola

Sometimes, a trailer is about as exciting as you can imagine.
The delicacy, pain, and beauty of this trailer gives me hope for a truly great movie… a movie that breaks you down and rebuilds you in a couple of hours in the dark.
Romanek is an artist, like Fincher and Jonze. Fingers crossed.

Interestingly, the Sofia Coppola trailer came out just before NLMG. And while I have great hopes, it’s not the same kind of gut check for me. I guess that as much as I think Elle Fanning is capable of magic, Stephen Dorff scares the crap out of me… as “the next great rediscovery.” I hope he is that person. I hope Somewhere is as lush and gorgeous and all black keys as Coppola can deliver.

Paramount Takes Unfortunate Redbox Measure

Welcome to the slow erosion of the studios, episode 296, titled, “Didn’t You Read The Fucking Memo Before The Disappearing Ink Faded?”
Warners, Fox, and Universal created a window for sell-thru designed to avoid the devaluation of the DVD price point. Disney, Sony, and Lionsgate did deals with Redbox last summer, using what was then The Strategy of The Moment. That left Paramount with the only deal that was up for renewal before 2011 or 2012.
And Paramount, of course, decided that The Last Strategy was the way to go.
Brilliant.
They did a study and decided/determined that $1 DVD rentals from the first day of DVD release don’t hurt sell-thru. And indeed, on some level, that is probably 100% accurate. Redbox seems to be a market expander, making rental easy for an audience that is looking for better pricing and therefore may already be disinclined to purchase DVDs in this matured era of DVD.
Moreover, with half the majors windowing Redbox, there is a strategic advantage for the studio to being in the first wave.
On the other hand…
If there is no new sell-thru to rental/download/VOD/PPV window created, and the price point ranges from Redbox’s $1 to Blu-ray retail of, say, $25 (though we are already seeing a push down to the $19.95 range where DVD lived for a long, happy time) and the technologies of streaming and other digital delivery to televsion sets continue, the battle line will inevitably be – aside from protecting the theatrical window – price point.
If there is a $1 player in the market, there is little doubt that market forces will bring the higher priced players down towards the $1, not the other way around.
So Paramount loos at a year of The Industry pushing 3D and Blu-ray as their key agenda points to try to raise price point and concludes that this is an average year… at least in public. In particular to Home Ent, 2009/2010 has been about Blu-ray being driven by expanded product lines, reduced prices, and significantly lowered barriers to entry on the hardware side… as much of a created boom as there can be. With traditional DVD sales seeming to have bottomed out… at least for now… Blu-ray growth helped push the numbers into something less ugly in the last year or so.
But I don’t think that’s where the war is going to be fought… and neither do Fox, Warners, or Universal.
Of course, this deal will only last a few years and wherever the Big Strategy is when it ends, whoever is running/owning Paramount will have the choice to go a different direction then.
I think this was a terrible mistake, made more dubious by the clearly misleading public positioning of its reason. But to be fair… it’s not going to change the game, one way or the other. Disney, another company that seems committed to being an outlier, is a much more complex and important landmark maker. That said, anytime one member of such as small group of leaders in an industry goes against the grain and efforts to reassert financially responsible authority in post-theatrical distribution, it’s a little disappointing.
PS – On the media front… how does Paramount doing the same deal two other studios and the biggest indie currently have with Redbox a “game changer?” Or do you just write every phrase the comes out of Rob Moore’s mouth?

The Chucky-O-Matic

Wow… you have to rise a glass to Sam Stoddard for taking the time and having the patience to create the first web tool to offer homage to a – resisting the urge to make a “tool” joke at Chucky’s expense – member of the Committed Hot Blog Commernters Club.
The Chucky-O-Matic In Jersey
Between this and LexG’s cartoons, a shark may be looking up in the air for a Hot Blog motorcycle flying overhead. But still, funny…

BYOB – Quiet Tuesday

QUICKIES – 6/14/10

Trying to clear the tabs on my browser…
Is Cannes losing ground to TIFF? – Duh. LOST ground.. =. at least in terms of what matters in America to all but the most elite of critics and cinemagoers. Toronto is not the artistic haven that Cannes is. Never has been. Never will be. But if you want to see what’s coming down the pike (and what’s not), especially for the North American audience, no festival is more important than Toronto… and it’s been that way for nearly a decade.
Do People Still Care About Watching Movies on Film? – No. Projection in 2010 is better and more consistent than it ever was. Would I love to see movies on unfouled celluloid, projected by a quality projectionist who has maintained the projector to perform as best it can? Absolutely. And the other 95% of theaters are good to go digital for me.
I am reminded of the debate over the Blu-ray of The French Connection. Ironically, the digital process allowed the director to make the movie look more like celluloid on a digital disc than it ever did on celluloid. Some hated it. But the director claimed, fiercely, that it matched his original intent and that the printing process for celluloid in the 70s was haphazard at best.
So who is right?
I believe that Manohla, as noted in the linked story, was 100% right in this way… if a film is made to be shown on celluloid and is not converted effectively to a digital format, the filmmaker has been unfairly damaged, especially at a fest like Cannes. But in the best digital work of the moment, many people really don’t know what is digital and what is film. Part of that is the projection… part of that is the increase in quality in digital production.
We’re into the debate about whether records are better than CDs here… and 98% of the world not only doesn’t care, they couldn’t tell the difference with $1000 a headsets on their noggins.
Cuban & Icahn – This is not a complex situation. Icahn owns a big, expensive chunk of a company that has never become the boomer it has tried so very hard to become. They have had success, but not enough to overcome a down library market and a lack of mega-hits. Enter Joe Drake. The Lionsgate culture moved even further into caviar, private planes, and big ideas. Icahn doesn’t like it… sees it as reckless and much more likely to destroy the company than to make it a high-flier. So now he wants all the way in or all the way out.
The stock price is inflated by Icahn, so his $7 a share offer is well above the real value and may be too generous, given the devaluation of the libraries. But Drake and those who brought him in don’t want to get kicked to the curb after being the ones in the trenches – well, the trenches with a great view and a Bentley – for so long.
In the end, Icahn will win or Lionsgate will die from trying to keep him from winning, hurting him as well, but not mortally.
It kind of reminds me of a high school kid earning $200 a week and claiming financial independence from the parents whose home he lives in, car he drives, food he eats, etc.
Even if he is The Bad Guy (which I don’t think he is in this case), nothing he is saying they should do is remotely wrong… but they are so busy spitting in his face, they are making his case, more and more, week after week,
The Killer Inside Me: can the violence be justified? – Absolutely. It’s very uncomfortable to watch, but I don’t think the movie is misogynistic, so much as it puts a psychopath at the center of a story with a lot of style. My problem wasn’t being offended… I was mostly bored. The style is great… but the film isn’t as well considered as an arc of Dexter.
Does movie marketing matter? Analysis suggests that big spending on tentpoles pays off – I didn’t actually see any analysis in this piece that suggests anything other than the status quo. Studios spend most of their ad budgets on TV? REALLY? If you see something interesting here that you didn’t know… let me know.
All done…

Movies Are Sold Like Diamonds, Not Like Bagged Fruit

Okay… seriously… does anyone on here know ANYONE who has said, “You know… the May movie product sucks… I think I will wait until July… give Hollywood a chance to let things get better?” Or any approximation of that?
Movies are not fruit. They don’t ripen.
They may be better loved with the passing of time. Underappreciated work may be seen in a new, kinder light. But film, if you are talking about the theatrical release and box office, is nothing like a piece of fruit. And certainly, only crazy people would imagine that an industry with a minimum one-year lead time on every studio film released is going to ripen as the summer progresses.
Movies are commodities sold for theatrical release as event moments that must be participated in at a higher price and with greater inconvenience than waiting 4 months to see them at home. (And every survey I have ever seen says that people over 30 are more than comfortable waiting for most movies to get into post-theatrical. The “must-see” push is with younger audiences who are more prone to trend chasing.)
The big box office numbers are only marginally about good movies and bad movies… and almost never (99%) on opening weekend. Box office is about how much the audience MUST see the film… which in the case of opening weekend, none of their most trusted advisers – their friends and family – have seen the film to praise or tarnish it. Movies are a gut-check buy. There really aren’t any “razor blades,” in that the industry sells the movie experience and people who “buy in” have to keep refilling with product.
Your kid wants to see Karate Kid… or not. You want to take them… or not. It looks safe for your kid to see… or not. Add to this the hundred little shocks that flesh is heir to, from sex to girl’s night to geekdom to finding the lowest common denominator amongst your friends, and you know why movies do business… or don’t.
Yes… more people use the many “new” post-theatrical options every year. About 2% of theatrical box office is lost to it annually. And as Kane said, if this keeps up, theatrical will have to worry about it in a century or two.
Yes… people don’t go to see movies they don’t want to see and sometimes, those movies show up in a bunch. If you think someone planned it that way, you are a moron. Studios want to take advantage of the opportunity to have open space for their movies to play.
In May, Robin Hood went into a slot that tends to be iffy – Second Weekend of Summer – but someone looked at Troy, which did $133m domestic and just shy of $500m worldwide, and decided to take a shot. Prince of Persia counted on Iron Man 2 being done by the end of the month, Robin Hood not being huge, and being counter programming to Shrek Forever After and Sex & The City 2. All that was true… and they still didn’t do a ton of business domestically.
You could – and you would still be reaching – make the argument that some people skipped Killers in anticipation of Knight & Day. It’s unlikely, but it is possible. But those are apples and apples.
Trying to put the entire industry in a box all the time is a pathetic attempt to simplify what some are too ignorant or lazy to comprehend. And the sad part it… it’s doesn’t require genius. You just have to pay attention and live with the fact that there are no easy answers.
Here’s an easy answer… Iron Man 2 and Twilight 3 will be the biggest movies of the summer… so they will therefore be the best… right? Oh… yeah… they have the advantage of being sequels… so they will be amongst the 5 best, right? Wait… they HAVE to be in your summer top 10, no? Wait… okay… getting my head around this… these big hits are at least good, right? Like the tailor-made-for-tim-burton Alice movie that made over $1 billion worldwide… that wasn’t just something people wanted to see even though it kinda sucked, which is a shame for a guy as brilliant as Burton, right?
Next time you want to claim that a minor box office dip – some percent of which is limited 3D after a ramped up winter/spring of people paying premium prices – is about quality, be ready to embrace those most successful as the best instead of just lazily smacking around lesser box office successes as “the end of theatrical as we know it.”

It's Dumb… But Seems So Right

Yeah… it’s ridiculous sexism from a ridiculously sexist site that builds its business on the Lindsay Lohans of the world getting out of cars without underwear. But it somehow captures the “issue” of a new actress on Transformers 3 with every bit of the importance it deserves. And really, it speaks precisely to the single reason why anyone has any interest at all.
Well, if she put down her left arm, there might be a second reason showing. And is she then bent over and picked up a pencil while pretending to ride a bull… then we’d see three reasons…
(Note: if this post gets you angry, you’re probably too easy to get angry. I’m on your side. I just still have a sense of humor.)