Douchebag, director Drake Doremus and actors Andrew Dickler and Ben York Jones

Box Office Hell

So… the last Jackass movie opened to $29 million. This one has a 3D bump. So what’s a great number for them? A good number?

RED is a Summit movie… $24.6m is their best non-Twilight opening. What is a good number for this film? Willis’ last two openings were $18m and $14m.

People seem to be estimating a drop for Social Network of about a third.

DP/30 – RED Double Feature

Projects for producers and writers in Hollywood have all kinds of degrees of “hands on” or “hands off.” In the case of RED, the producer developed the material from early on and the screenwriters were on the project from the time of their first draft through today. So there is a distinct pride of authorship from all three individuals.

Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura

Writers Erich & Jon & Hoeber

Poll du Jour: The Most Likely…

BYOB 10/13/10

I am trying to come up with something visual to fill the space when I do BYOBs… your suggestions are welcome…

Winter’s Bone, writer/director Debra Granik

DreamWorks Conference Call

So Stacey Snider invited a few close friends (read: everyone who writes about studios) to a conference call, where the main news was that War Horse was moving to the date it really was meant to be on, around Christmas. The one oddity is that Spielberg’s next won’t be Spielberg’s next. Tintin, Spielberg’s only digital film made in cahoots with Peter Jackson, is being released here by Sony, will launch a couple of weeks earlier.

But War Horse is a weighty drama about a boy and his horse and loyalty and passion and war and sacrifice and belongs in the Christmas/Thanksgiving window. I was also pleased to hear that SS is making the movie with real horses and not any puppets – as the award winning stage show has – and that he is making those real animals the greatest effect in the world. Exciting. This is a return, in many ways, to Empire of the Sun for Spielberg, though with less war and more boy. It could be one of his best.

Two of the reporters on the line were obsessing on 3D… why only one of the first 6 DreamWorks 3.0 movies are in 3D even though a few are big action-heavy films.

3D is dead, boys. Long live 3D. Animation only after 2011… The Year That 3D Dies As A Great White Hope.

My greatest pleasure from the call was hearing that Stacey is still articulating the same principles that she and the team did when I was last at The Adobe, about a year ago. DreamWorks was always a unique place, but it’s really a smaller, tighter, more focused place right now. That can never assure movies that are great or make a ton of money. But in a business where the sands seem to shift weekly these days, it is good to remember that some places have a clear and unshaken philosophy… at least until the films start landing…

Sorkin On The Woe Of Work-Product As Web Fodder

Ray Pride posted this in a Sunday Times of London transcript and I think it’s worth repeating often…

“It’s not just the final product that is being judged, and it is being compared to various drafts that were obviously only meant for Mike to see.”

““Too many people are watching how you make the sausage now—and there is an assumption that your motives, whether it’s overcutting a scene or reshooting a scene or putting in a new scene or changing this line to that, are somehow sinister or mercenary or motivated by fear…”

On Lionsgate’s Return To The MGM Table

I hate the word “merger” being used so carelessly by the media as regards the future of MGM.

The Spyglass deal is not a merger.

And while there is no real detail available about Lionsgate’s bit, aside from it leading to 45% ownership, it too is not really a merger. Lionsgate is also looking to acquire a percentage of the company in return for funding a future for the MGM production pipeline and perhaps some cash or stock in Lionsgate’s case. You can be sure that Carl Icahn is not approving LGF taking on of any debt in this deal.

It’s pretty basic for MGM. Do they foresee a return to a higher valuation coming with Sony or WB marketing the studios movies made under Spyglass or from Lionsgate producing and marketing the MGM product? Neither deal means immediate salvation for MGM, so either way, looking into the future is a big part of making the choice.

I think Lionsgate is a very good business. But one should consider the history. Here are LGF’s top 10 domestic grossers of all time:

1 Fahrenheit 9/11 $119,194,771
2 The Expendables $102,752,519
3 Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail $90,508,336
4 Saw II $87,039,965
5 Saw III $80,238,724
6 Saw IV $63,300,095
7 Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Family Reunion $63,257,940
8 Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married Too? $60,095,852
9 Saw V $56,746,769
10 The Haunting in Connecticut $55,389,516

Here are Sony’s Top 10 releases this year…

1 The Karate Kid $176,591,618
2 Grown Ups $161,801,268
3 The Other Guys $118,020,516
4 Salt $117,923,111
5 Dear John $80,014,842
6 Eat Pray Love $80,006,996
7 The Bounty Hunter $67,061,228
8 Resident Evil: Afterlife $58,866,846
9 Takers $56,773,203
10 Easy A $48,228,201

And WB’s…

1 Inception $289,183,607
2 Clash of the Titans $163,214,888
3 Valentine’s Day $110,485,654
4 Sherlock Holmes $106,925,723
5 Sex and the City 2 $95,347,692
6 The Book of Eli $94,835,059
7 The Town $73,847,527
8 A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) $63,075,011
9 The Blind Side $59,396,157
10 Cop Out $44,875,481

A Word (or 900) On The Word “Gay”

I got a call from a friend about the Vulture piece on The Dilemma and the word “gay” being used. It followed an angry, terse e-mail about whether I would like it if other pejoratives that I might identify with were being casually bandied about. The friend is a top marketing executive and is also gay… so there is a vested interest and an experienced perspective on how choices are made about marketing elements.

Unlike what was written in Vulture, I don’t think this issue is about what the word being used made me feel. My issue is with the idea of media making this into a controversy. It’s possible that whoever started this frenzy called Universal first and said, “I feel like that joke crossed the line and i think others will.” And it’s possible that Universal said, “That’s stupid… sod off.” More likely, we witnessed a minor misstep by the studio and a reporter all too eager to get some extra page views this week.

(I might also note that I felt a bit misused by Anne Thompson’s suggestion, also this week, that Deadline’s decision to attempt a print series was making me unhappy. Not true. I think they are misguided, but I don’t much care whether they do them or not. I explored and passed on the option years ago for reasons that are probably not a deterrent to Deadline’s ownership. I do think the one serious issue is the Academy list being used, a breach of Academy rules… and further, whether Academy leadership, some of which already tries to control Deadline coverage by offering some early news, will look the other way so as not to endure the wrath of C. Nikki… even if there is no evidence of that wrath meaning much outside of the playground. But I am not offended by anyone trying to do what they think they need to do to make their business work or thrive.)

The issue is how this use of “gay” makes others feel… and secondarily, there is a philosophical issue. In terms of how it makes others feel, the aforementioned grown man, who has been completely out and proud for as long as I have known him (more than a decade), felt like it was not unlike someone calling him a “faggot” out of a car window while he crossed the street one recent day. And that is not nothing. I don’t think that the two uses, in the trailer and on that street, are the same. But he is the one who is relating to having had language used as a weapon with the intent to hurt him.

My philosophical take on controversial language is that we empower words by taking them too seriously. I believe that hiding the ugliness of “nigger” behind “The N-Word” is a disservice to black people as well as our culture and gives “nigger” more power than it deserves. I also believe that someone using the word “nigger” lightly in public is deserving of abuse, perhaps even physical abuse, for taking the potential feelings of others into so little consideration.

So, does Universal deserve a punch in the eye for putting this joke in the trailer? Do I deserve one for not seeing it as a serious offense?

Read the full article »

A Gay Poll

Another Year, director Mike Leigh

Simpsons/Banksy

I apologize to those outside of the US who are not able to watch Hulu. This is the only place that Fox hasn’t kept from running the opening that Banksy did for The Simpsons.

And I encourage you all to click on and read The Exit Through The Gift Shop Diaries for more on Banksy…

I grabbed these three images for those of you who can’t see the whole thing…

The Four Faces Of Blockbuster & The Price Point Of Doom

James Surowiecki is both right and wrong about Blockbuster’s demise in his new Yorker piece this week. In doing so, he points out a schizophrenic element of media coverage of itself.

Early on, he writes that, “Blockbuster’s demise, for one, was inextricably linked to the success of Netflix.”

Perhaps he means that The Media links them and this is inextricable. But in fact, Netflix has very little to do with the demise of Blockbuster.

And Surowiecki turns the corner on that reality later in the piece, as he explains his views on how Blockbuster failed to adjust to a new rental paradigm.

Indeed, it as the fourth generation of Blockbuster that finally has died. And Blockbuster deserves to be respected for lasting so long in a changing landscape. The business started, like Netflix, as an outsider consumer of VHS, with some price breaks, but not an intimate relationship with the studios. It was a giant mom & pop.

The Second Generation of Blockbuster was when it got in bed with the studios to deliver massive numbers of copies to each store, making it almost impossible for the moms & pops to compete based on availability. If you wanted to see the new release, you were more likely to get it at Blockbuster than anywhere else. Also part of this was studios participating in rental revenue as they had not participated before.

The Third Generation of Blockbuster was when DVD landed. They fought, hard as they could, to keep DVD primarily a rental business, not a sell-thru business. (This was done in the past, effectively, with pricing.) But they lost that battle.

And this how the studios, really, made Netflix possible. Besides the specific convenience and consistency of shipping DVDs, there was the fact that Netflix was able to purchase DVDs at prices that made the “see as many as you want” system possible. If DVD had been a rental-driven format, the price per DVD would have been, in most cases, about triple what Netflix paid wholesale, even without deals with the studios. This significant additional expense may well have kept Netflix from launching, period.

Sell-thru DVD was a mega-bubble for the studios, a cash cow that they rode for more than five years as though it would never end. But the studios, basically, threw Blockbuster under the bus the day they decided – yes, colluded – to make DVD a sell-thru medium. Putting aside Netflix, the economics of sell-thru put owning a DVD at $15 (an oft-discounted to price point) and renting for $5 in serious competition.

But shouldn’t Blockbuster have become a leader in sell-thru? Not so fast. Not only was there Wal-Mart, which got all the benefits of being the biggest retailer in the country, but there was new competition like Amazon.com, which would deliver to your home, offering deeper discounts because of their lack of brick & mortar.

In fact, DVD sell-thru removed all the unique benefits the Blockbuster had developed over the previous decade. They may have had slight price breaks on inventory, compared to Netflix and then Redbox, but with the wholesale price already so low, there wasn’t much significance to the difference anymore. Being in bed with the studios meant revenue sharing on rentals, which others didn’t need to deal with. There was nothing remotely exclusive about sell-thru and as noted earlier, Blockbuster was on the losing end of price competition.

The only unique proposition of Blockbuster, before Netflix’ emergence and with DVD sell-thru, was having a store where people could browse.

That was the beginning of the end.

But the real coup de grace was the market itself. And this is the part where the DVD bubble was burst by the studios in an act of self-destructiveness. There was very little consideration paid to the ultimate limitations of sell-thru, regardless of new technology. How many dollars will people spend for how many years to accumulate how many discs and boxes in their homes? Even if you got some used DVDs and some new, some deeply discounted on Amazon and some at full retail, those 500 discs on your shelf, staring at you as you were still paying $75 – $125 a month for cable/satellite, were an investment of about enough to pay for your kid’s used car he/she would drive to college and keep for 4 or 5 years. When people started finding themselves spending hundreds on furniture to house the thousands of dollars of DVDs, most of which they watched one or twice and never again, the gig was up.

Read the full article »

More Gurus

Yes… one more visit from The Gurus before the weekly appearances start in November.

Does it matter? Well… if you care, it matters, And if you don’t, keep surfing.

I’m not sure that The King’s Speech is really thrilled about being pushed to frontrunner status this early in the game. But there they are. Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, and Helena Bonham Carter all lead their categories as well.

But there is a lot to chew over deeper into the Acting categories.

Here’s the chart