The Hot Blog Archive for March, 2011

BYOBermuda

This is my first trip of more than 12 hours without a laptop… iPad only… which in an otherwise great hotel that has crap wi- fi, has meant a degree of disconnection… happy disconnection.

The ocean was perfect today. And we didn’t even mind the Iodine Coladas.

I know I should feel bad about missing really important stories, like how they managed to make Adrianne Palecki look weird in a Wonder Woman costume… yet, I do not.

Maybe when it starts raining tomorrow, I’ll get my priorities straight!

More later…

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BYOB – Bermuda Prep

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It’s Hype… But The Prize Is Pretty Great!

Dear David,

We are excited to announce that in celebration of the launch of their new iPhone and iPad app, MY DAILY CLIP, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is giving Twitter users a chance to win 365 DVDs.

You have until April 11th to follow @MyDaily Clip and tweet “Give me my movies! #MyDailyClip” to be entered for a chance to win a DVD for each day of the year.

Enter now: http://twitter.com/#!/mydailyclip

With a new or classic movie clip to watch each day on your iOS device, MY DAILY CLIP is the must-have app for every movie fan!  Watch memorable moments from classic films like Spider-man, Ghostbusters and Dr. Strangelove.

Download the app for free at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-daily-clip/id423054595?mt=8

You may not have time for a feature-length movie, but you always have time for a clip!

ABOUT MY DAILY CLIP:
My Daily Clip is the ultimate daily companion for every movie fan. Receive a new movie clip on every day of the calendar year and search by special themes to unearth a classic scene, share a teary moment, or access action and adventure. My Daily Clip delivers perfectly edited and high quality video, served via adaptive streaming, to optimize the user viewing experience. Connect with Facebook to share clips with your friends, test your knowledge through embedded movie trivia, or purchase the feature-length movie directly from iTunes all from inside the beautifully designed iPhone and iPad application. You may not have time for a feature-length movie, but you always have time for a clip. My Daily Clip.

1 Comment »

Is Netflix Abandoning Its Business Model Again?

Netflix, Netflix, what will you be?

It’s been less than 9 months since Netflix made its first high-end deal for streaming content with Relativity. Since then, it’s expanded into Canada, cut it’s base price, made a deal with EPIX and others, let go of Criterion, and expanded its base of viewers, marginally.

The media has sucked down the spin that Netflix is a threat to pay-tv and cable like hungry infants. So that spin is overriding something far more interesting about what appears to be a deal for a high profile new series from Kevin Spacey and David Fincher, who together (with many others) brought The Social Network to the world.

This is very, very interesting in two ways.

Firstly, this choice, combined with the exit of Criterion and the abandonment of Red Envelope, their previously stab at original content, clearly tells us that Netflix sees no future in quality film lovers as a primary audience for the service. Fair enough. But it will be interesting to see when the cineastes get the message.

Secondly, it seems that Netflix has figured out what some of us figured out months ago… that leasing content at over retail prices can only be a means to an end, not an ongoing, hard-charging business model. In other words, they can prop up the business to sell it and/or become a 2% a year growth middle man amongst many.

So now they are back, as they were with Red Envelope, to trying to compete as a “sign up for Netflix-Only content” play. This time, they can lead the way as the first streaming-first original content business. But with just this one show, they are looking at spending $3 per paying customer per year to have the show, or about 8% of the annual fee each home pays for the service. Will they try to sell advertising to go with it? Maybe. But that is a significant change in their model.

Of course, there will be ancillary revenue from DVD, foreign sales, etc. So maybe the show costs 2% of revenues. It’s still a lot when you have your foot in another business model, which is streaming library content and third window content.

Regardless of the hard numbers, it’s something new for Netflix. It’s a gray signal that the company is not likely to sign Starz (aka Disney & Sony) again. Just with what they have and Starz, streaming fees would be over $800 million a year, minimally. on total annual revenues around $1.35 billion. Do you throw in for a $50m a year deal while you’re waiting for that $400 million-a-year deal to close?

The idea that they are competing with HBO is interesting, but until Netflix can find a way to bring its streaming leases in line with a company like HBO’s… which is to say, paying less than half of what they are now paying and openly narrowing their range of content significantly… it’s not a real fight. If the money that HBO or Showtime was willing to pay for this show was close to what Netflix offered and either was willing to make a 2 season commitment at the top, there is zero chance that it would have gone to Netflix. The marketing power of HBO and Showtime are too much to pass up. But neither company would seriously consider a built-in 2 season commitment to anything for anyone. They pulled the trigger on Season Two of Boardwalk Empire on opening night… but they pretty much knew what they had and for that show to have one season would have made it even more expensive than it is (because of the build out). But they didn’t buy 26 up front.

So once again, Netflix is committing more than others to get on the same field. That only works s a shot-term model.

Anyway… the next couple of steps by Netflix will expose even more, as their outrageously pricey Relativity and EPIX buys did this fall.

And what does it say for Amazon, Facebook, and the other syndicated outlets for content that are interested in the space Netflix is currently in? If Netflix is abandoning the library streaming business less than a year into some big investment, what does it say about the future for anyone else? Truth is, it’s probably a better model for a company like Amazon, that is basically the world’s deepest Sear’s catalog already. Amazon is a warehouse business and they will never be reliant on streaming video as a primary business.

At Netflix, the writing on the wall was there. And they priced themselves out of the game. So it looks like a new strategy is here. In the great tradition of the network and cable game, make themselves a “must carry.” I wouldn’t be shocked to see them in the bidding for hockey or trying to make a deal to stream Major League Baseball or something like that before long. If they are going this way, no one show “airing” 13 times a year is going to keep customers paying $8 or more a month. If Netflix becomes a thrift shop, with content here and there and everywhere, the churn will get worse.

It’s gonna be interesting…

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Can The NYT Be Trusted To Cover The Film Business?

Sorry, but the Brooks Barnes story on Zemeckis has a lot of facts and quotes that are fine… but they are put together in an intellectually dyslexic way that is actually a bit dangerous. Right or not, the New York Times is still The Paper of Record. But in this piece, as with many others, Brooks Barnes takes liberties with the forest while getting the trees he can figure out portrayed accurately.

Surprisingly, this piece is the NYT As Blog to the Nth degree. it allows, for instance, Roger Ebert, to crow about it, only really considering one context, because the piece takes a crap on 3D and that’s Roger’s favorite whipping format these days. (This is, of course, a little odd, as Roger is one of the great champions of variations of format. But the business side of 3D seems to have raised his pique lately.) Or it allows guys like Rich Greenfield, who overstates for quotes all the time, to get at a true idea but to misplace blame in stunning fashion with, “‘We believe exhibitors’ core strategy of raising ticket prices through 3-D premiums’ is a ‘dangerous strategy.'” (Note: the quote was cobbled together by the NYT.) In fact, exhibitors are not in any way responsible for the rise of 3D. It’s a studio strategy. 100%. Or perhaps Mr. Barnes doesn’t know the difference between exhibitors and distributors.

There are a whole parade of wildly overstated ideas here… and again, the blogginess is that Barnes states completely unproven, unprovable ideas as fact.

““Mars Needs Moms” also signals broader movie business problems.”

Uh, no. It’s one movie. It is a platform from which people who believe that animation is getting oversaturated can repeat their case. But it clearly proves nothing, aside from the failure of one movie to open.

But the facts are much more complicated. Rango opened well, but not sensationally, one week earlier. But great word-of-mouth and the phenomenon of parents waiting for word-of-mouth to decide whether a film is safe for their under-10s made Rango a strong 2nd weekend choice for Mom’s core audience. Combine that with weak reviews and a campaign that obviously got no one excited and two animated films in two consecutive weekends and you are a lot closer to an answer than “the sky is falling on animation, motion-capture, and 3D.”

““Mars Needs Moms” may lead to the end for the Zemeckis style of motion-capture filmmaking, which has proven increasingly unpopular with audiences.”

Again, incredibly irresponsible, lazy writing. “The Zemeckis Style” is not just motion capture, but specific to Bob Zemeckis as a director or a producer. This is his fifth motion capture film and the second one he didn’t direct. The three he did direct did, in succession, $290m, $200m, and $325m each worldwide. I’m not sure how this qualifies as proving “increasingly unpopular.” However, the films have each been quite expensive, which is the issue for Warner Bros, Paramount, and Disney.

The first Zemeckis-produced mo-cap was Monster House, which did $140m worldwide. Not a home run. But not a flop either… especially coming out of Sony, where they have slowly been growing their animation business. And now this clear flop.

“Mr. Zemeckis’s previous motion-capture film, “A Christmas Carol,” released in December 2009, was a commercial disappointment and contributed to the ouster of Dick Cook…”

Oh, bullshit. Iger went in a completely different direction than was at the core of Dick’s philosophy. That is why the change, which filtered through every corridor of the company except Iger’s, took place. But more importantly… how eager does the NYT have to be to push an angle to twist the facts? Dick Cook was dumped two months before Zemeckis’ Christmas Carol opened. Did the Opening Box Office of Christmas Carol Past go back in time and kill Dick Cook?

After 13 paragraphs of speculative crap, Barnes finally mentions, quietly, Avatar… the 3D motion-capture film that grossed $2.7 BILLION last year. Then, horrifyingly, he connects Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, which was done on the WETA system by a different filmmaker than Zemeckis, with a very different visual palette than Zemeckis has chosen to work with on his five films, to this flop. If I was Spielberg, I’d be setting fire to some at the NYT.

This piece is so busy trying to sell its false premise, that this is an industry game-changer, when in fact it is a flop that will affect one filmmaker who has been doggedly sticking to his format and look, that he fails to deal with the reality of the tool of motion capture or to seriously address the animation glut, the vast majority of which is not mo-cap.

There are significant technological differences between WETA’s mo-cap system and the one ImageMovers has developed. But they are both just tools to be put in the hands of filmmakers. The resulting content is very much about the filmmaker and not the equipment. Tintin will not look like Avatar. However much of The Hobbit that Peter Jackson decides to use the technology for, will not look like either film.

For that matter, Monster House doesn’t really look like Zemeckis’ mo-cap directed films. Gil Kenan did a much more stylized version, not trying so hard to approximate reality and therefore, not suffering the “dead eye” issue.

And let’s not leave ILM out of this. When they did Davey Jones for the Pirates films, they ended up replacing Bill Nighy’s eyes with CG eyes… and it looked sensational and real. But the cost of doing that for every character for every minute of a film would be wildly prohibitive.

And I should also point out that Gnomeo and Juliet, in 3D and made outside of Disney, is by far the biggest off-brand success coming out of Disney so far… and that Tangled, in 3D, was easily the biggest Disney-brand animated hit since the heyday of Disney’s animation revival, 16 years ago. But why bother with little details like that when there is so much hyperbole available?

I know that some people won’t care at all about this badly conceived, written, and edited story being out there… but I do because these kinds of proclamations by the NYT seep into the cultural conversation as though they were accurate and insightful. This is not a philosophical disagreement between me and some writer. This story is deeply, lazily, enthusiastically misleading. The urge to write pieces announcing cultural change drives even the best papers to some terrible decisions. But does Bill Keller know enough about the movie business to be embarrassed by how wrong Barnes gets it, as Holson and Waxman did before him?

Is Mars Needs Moms a game changer? Only for Bob Zemeckis, who can go home, count his nine-figure fortune again, and decide what he feels like spending another studio’s money on next. I actually do feel bad for him. He is one of the great underrated directors in history. And he’s invested years trying to make this technology sing. Audiences are okay with it… but not $700 million worldwide okay with it… and that is the kind of gross these films need. Unless he wants to fund himself, he’s going to have to move on now.

Right now, the mo-cap film system that has drawn this size audience is WETA’s… and only WETA’s. But mo-cap isn’t going anywhere. Disney hasn’t decided to kill off their 3D-on-every-animated-film plan. And animation will continue to be a massive crowd pleaser, if only because it is one of the few true 4-quadrant genres.

Getting it wrong is one thing. But the arrogance of getting it so lavishly wrong… it just makes me ache.

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Zemeckis Cut Loose At Disney 3.0™

The Question: How much of Yellow Submarine is Disney eating in order to get rid of it?

Look… whatever they say today, the studio was telling people – after Christmas – that the film would be on their release schedule in 2011, which surprised the hell out of me, really.

It’s Disney’s responsibility to not embarrass Zemeckis here. The potential for one project that they really do want, Roger Rabbit 2, is still there. More so now with Mr. Spielberg in the fold. And so, they’re going to stick to their story.

I believe that this project was the last one announced under Dick Cook’s regime. And so, that string ends.

Disney 3.0 really starts with Cars 2 in June. From that film on, everything on the Disney docket is either Pixar, Disney under Lasseter, DreamWorks, Marvel, Henson, Studio Ghibli or in-house product from Disney Channel or other internal franchises. Bruckheimer as a fully studio-funded entity probably ends with Pirates 4 (or 5 or 6), as Disney will happily re-up with him if he brings private money to the table with him. That will be a critical moment as the new model continues to roll out.

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BYOB: Beware The Day Before The Ides Of March

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Pirates 4: Cap’n Jack Undoes The Wrong Chastity Belt!

I’m actually quite happy to see Disney putting out some story elements of the film. No doubt, it will look beautiful. But the story really does matter, no matter how much critics scream!

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Weekend Estimates by L.A. Klady

Not a lot to add.

Looks like Rango found a younger audience for whom word-of-mouth made the film safer.

Good number for Battle: Los Angeles. The real test for Sony on this one is overseas, where they did pretty well. The idea seems to be to make a smaller effects film that has enough juice to make money on a $70m budget. (I have no inside info on budget and don’t trust Mojo’s budget numbers, but for the sake of this discussion, even if it ended up higher, the idea is what interests me.) So $100m here… $150m international (the studio is estimating $53m overseas this weekend), and you have a profitable film. The real hope is $150m here and $250m over there. Not this time. But they can keep trying this without the threat of a big loss. (Of course, too much success and the pressure is on to hire a $20m name for the next one… which pushes the budget back up to $100m and probably doesn’t pay off at the box office. The circle of dumb.)

The Red Riding Hood number would be a success for Summit… not so much for WB, which probably doubled (or tripled) Summit’s Letters to Juliet ad buy. The first big question for WB now is whether they can get the title past the 3x multiple that took Juliet to $53m domestic. Will this movie have great girl word of mouth, even if critics hate it? Second big question is international, which is where WB has an advantage over Summit and won’t expect the film to do half of domestic, like Juliet did, but more like 150% of current projections of domestic at minimum. Warner’s international machine is one of the very best, so expect the international campaign to lean even less heavily on Seyfried, to show more action, and try to push Gary Oldman harder. Summit pulled off a 30% improvement on domestic with the last Twilight movie. That would put Hood at $115m or so worldwide, which is just about where the red-to-black ink border is on this film.

Disney 3.0 will absorb the Moms blow by blaming Disney 2.0. Zemeckis came with them. The dance, however, requires some finesse, as the studio is still expecting to push out Yellow Submarine this year and Zemeckis is also involved with the Murphy/Montford-produced DreamWorks title, Real Steel, though perhaps not in a very hands-on way. Point is, the business relationship continues… so a car wreck like this gets very political.

Jane Eyre is a decent opening, but can’t be spun out into any specific expectations. The only Focus release to open with a single-digit screen count that got to $10m domestic was The Kids Are All Right. Otherwise, it’s anywhere – for an opening like this – from $3m to $9m.

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Some Views From The “Tree of Life”9

Russians got 70 images… TheFilmStage.com offered them up… I offer the 20 I found most interesting and/or classically Malick…

(edit, Sunday 1:53p)… but I am taking them down at the request of Summit, which is doing international sales of the film even though it isn’t releasing the film stateside. I’m not sure that the company actually owns “all rights in and to The Tree of Life motion picture, including but not limited to all related copyrights,” but close enough.

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Arianna: “Respect My 315 Million Dollars Of Authoritay!”

Aggregation “too often it amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model.”
Bill Keller on the trouble with one form of aggregation

” ”
Arianna Huffington‘s response to the core problem, as laid out by Keller, that many have with her style of Aggregated Theft.

Yeah, Huffy attacked Keller personally, doing her very best FoxNews-ist taking of his comments out of context to fit her position and to distract from the core of what he was saying. Yeah, Huffy listed all the people she has purchased to hang in her storefront window while the crap in the backroom is what keeps her numbers up. Yeah, Huffy lies in her own defense, citing a Frank Rich column in 1999 that “praised the work of our reporters,” when in fact he cites one detail offered by a HuffPo journalist amongst dozens and simply cites the source… ya know, respectfully crediting information.

It says a lot of about Ms Huffington that she is willing to claim “praise” when none exists and links to the evidence of her misleading statement. She is that brazen and that reckless. After all, no one can touch her. She managed up brilliantly… to a company that has found new and shocking ways to slowly fail into oblivion year after year after year after leading the way to the wired world for the public two decades ago.

I don’t have much respect for Ms Huffington. I see her as a con artist. She’s obviously whip smart. But she uses her intelligence only to serve herself. Her deal with AOL is no different. But her behavior since the purchase by AOL has shown some cracks in her game face. Like I wrote… she doesn’t need to pretend as hard anymore. She’s already won.

Ironically, the “let them eat cake” response to her unpaid bloggers required some tightrope walking. She couldn’t admit that her idea of having people blog for free was not important to the future of the site’s revenues. It isn’t, really. She could pay the 20 – 50 (or pay them in charitable donations) that drive traffic and dump the rest and no one would notice. Providing a forum to be heard is of value to a writer who has no other such forum. And in the media world, not being paid and being paid insulting amounts have become a new norm.

Besides, Huffy has bigger fish to try to fry. She may have bit on her own con and now thinks she can compete with The New York Times. Hee hee. She’s like a Victoria’s Secret model thinking that because millions of men are desperate to pull off her often-seen panties, she can go to Broadway and do Shakespeare opposite McKellan. “But I’m so popular!!!” She forgets that when they do get those panties off, it’s the same bit of anatomy that every woman has. There is, indeed, a skill or a gift in drawing the attention of large numbers of other people. But it’s rarely a skill or gift that aligns automatically with other kinds of skills or gifts.

When people read The Huffington Post on a day like today or yesterday, it’s not for HuffPo reporting on the Japanese disaster. HuffPo is running the AP story combined with a gathering of reports from other media sources (aka watching on TV and reading outlets that have people on the ground).

Drudge is the same way. (MCN too.) Matt Drudge rarely deludes himself into thinking he is a real reporter or that he should have a staff of reporters. He aggregates. And even with a right wing spin and dubious taste in entertainment hacks, he does it fairly, in terms of the sources.

Keller writes, “Buying an aggregator and calling it a content play is a little like a company’s announcing plans to improve its cash position by hiring a counterfeiter.”

As an aggregator and content creator, I agree. Mostly. The ability of an aggregator to draw eyeballs by how they curate a world of information IS content of a sort. There is value created. And as is a fair argument, I think, when it comes to links – not building on actual words from actual stories as a way of building pages – that aggregators are critical to building readership for the originating source, be it the NYT or some tiny blog.

Huffington wants to tell people that she runs a news organization. And a small sliver of HuffPo is a news organization. Maybe 10% of her traffic… maybe.

Going to HuffPo as I write this and there is a headline, “HUFFPOST HILL – Doc Shows NFL Owners Plotted Lockout.” Classic. The story about the lockout… not by HuffPo. From Business Insider. But it gets worse, as the BI piece they link to doesn’t say a word about the NFL Owners plotting a lockout. It’s a piece about the NFLPA self-decertification that sites as sources Twitter and ESPN with no reporting of any kind and no real analysis either. So… the HuffPo headline for their “Huffpost Hill” column is for a story they didn’t write, is factually inaccurate about the story they content-grab from and link to, and that story they connect to is not a reported story either. So, on top of miseleading readers to get them into a story that they didn’t write, the entire thing comes back to some “journalist” watching ESPN and typing up what that network, which is paying its reporters to cover the story closely, is reporting.

It’s breathtaking.

And by the way, the New York Times assigned a reporter and wrote a story.

That’s what they do.

Of course, the New York Times has more than a little responsibility for overhyping HuffPo from the start… another irony. The fear level as we all move into the future, large and small, has made the con artists sexy to media. Going back to the earlier analogy, most people are thrilled with the notion of a world of people lusting for them… and very, very few of them actually want to seriously consider what millions of minds thinking of you in only an objectified sexual way really means. It’s gross. But it’s glamorous. But it’s disgusting. But fame is so exciting. Etc, etc, etc.

But once these people are built up, the NYT as responsible for the hype as anyone, the delusions of grandeur set it.

And that is when they usually choke and die (on a business level).

But as the Old Media gets weaker and the New Media grows, there is a meeting in the middle, for better or worse. The pressure to lower standards in order to build broader popularity is felt in all quarters, not just in those where there is willing leadership.

In some ways, this is a Golden Globes vs Oscar argument. The Globes has done great for itself… but it’s still minor in comparison to Oscar and can only thrive in the light bounced off of Oscar’s success. On the other hand, HFPA is 80soimething people sharing $10 million or so and Oscar is 6000 people sharing 4 or 5 times that. So who’s the sucker? Who’s the winner?

There are 315 million reasons to think what Huffy has built is real. There is no return policy for the guy who spent the money. The hundreds who lose jobs to Huffy’s ego will not get them back if her vision fails. And if AOL’s really lucky, Huffy will overinflate the entire company’s value, as she did hers, and they will sell to some even bigger schmuck for billions.

Meanwhile, the New York Times will still, day in and day out, make comparisons to HuffPo laughable, simply by doing the work of one of the most important news organizations in the world. It won’t ever get hot the way that HuffPo has. And they may embarrass themselves trying to do so. But the core will be there. And it will have a value greater than all the hype.

Snarling at Keller won’t ever change that, Huffy. You can’t ever win that legitimacy without doing the real – and expensive – work. And you won’t ever do the heavy lifting because you don’t have the inner strength to let anyone see you work. You’re all facade, no house. That doesn’t mean that facade building isn’t hard work. It can be… even if you aren’t mentally disturbed, like some. But you don’t won’t scream at Keller, “Respect this facade I built! I am the most powerful facade builder in the business!” You still want people to think there’s a whole house there behind those beautiful window treatments.

No wonder you’re so angry.

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Friday Estimates by Battle: kLAdy

Analysis by David Poland

The question at the box office this weekend will be whether Battle: LA plays well on Saturday or fails to hit $40m for the weekend. Are people seeing enough destruction on TV to send them looking for something else at the movie theater. Or does a Godzilla movie (of sorts) comfort us when faced with real disaster? Hard to know.

Red Riding Hood offers a combination of “Is she really a rising star?” and more f-ing werewolves. WB added a dewey-camera, pillow lips parted shot of Seyfried entranced by the werewolf to the TV campaign late in the game… a piece of red meat for teens of both sexes. The result looks to be slightly stronger than Letters to Juliet and about half of Dear John. I personally think – having not seen the film – that the element missing from the sell was a claim of powerful romance in the piece. That’s what got girls to Twilight and Dear John alike. Though there was day that this wasn’t true, the prospect that Ms. Seyfried could suddenly look up at the face of a newly defanged suitor and find that she’s been diddling Gary Oldman, not Stud Boy McSteroid, is not as attractive to girls. Seyfried seems to be a one-quadrant player for now… and trying to sell two may have been one too many.

Mars Needs Moms looks okay. But it seems to be in Zemeckis-vision, which still leans to Scary Eyes instead of Giant Eyes. And unless it’s R-rated and the Joan Cusack being save is the one in Shameless, there isn’t enough being done to make that interesting. The marketing seems to lean on the cute elements and the wow factor.. and it obviously never took. What is the story?

I am not a fan of trailers and ads that tell you everything. But I am convinced, year after year, that a successful marketing campaign is, at the core, about telling the audience what experience they are being asked to buy tickets to feel. What is that central idea? If it’s Mars Needs Moms, is Mars benign or hostile? Why do they need moms? Is the kid going to be a hero and save another planet by finding a way for them to have what they need and for earth to keep it’s moms? Is it all just an excuse for the kid to have an adventure?

Rango‘s hold should end up in the mid-high 30s before the weekend is over. Beastly will pass Extraordinary Measures today, so it won’t be CBS Film’s worst grosser, but it may have a hard time cracking $20m or passing Faster, the current #2 worst.

If you want to know where we are with all the “box office slump” shite, here are some details. We never had a single $35m opening in March before Ice Age in 2002. There wouldn’t be another one until 2005, when there were two. There would be just one in 2006 and 2009 and two each in 2005, 2007, 2009, and 2010. After two weekends this March, we will have two. And we have a chance for a record-breaking third one with Sucker Punch.

Yes, you heard that right. March may have more $35m+ openers than any year in history. But week-by-week, 2011 has an Alice in Wonderland problem, the way 2005 had a Passion of the Christ problem. The analysis is so skewed by a freak success that people who want to see a big problem can pretend, with this one misused stat, that there is a big problem. And then, when the numbers turn back up and we end the year with the normal 2% or 3% drop in box office, they will return to the bottom of their rocks until they can come out and scream, “Slump!” again.

The thing it is time to start understanding about television’s threat to movies in the 50s and 60s was that it was different programming. What you got at the movies, you couldn’t get at home and vice versa. Still, the world changed, because you could get something visual in your home. The challenge now, more than ever, is that the same content as is in theaters is widely available for home viewing in a shorter and shorter window… one that most adults aren’t driven to overcome. So it is truly remarkable that, against a wave of availability of the same product, theatrical has held up as well as it has. The only real threat to this is studios trying to further break down the windows… because then they are messing with how the product is valued from the start. What is TV and what is film… and why would you care anymore?

But as things now stand, it’s the movies, stupid. If Alice was in the market now, it would be doing all that business. If Battle: LA was in the market last March, it would likely be doing about the same business it’s doing now. Why would anyone really think differently? It’s like journalists are so anxious to report that “the next thing is finally here” that they gild the lily, selling the idea of the last thing being dead. And they get all exciting about Inception on Facebook, as though it wasn’t just another way -the second (r)evolutionary step in the last month – the very aggressive Warner Digital team is finding to do exactly the same thing… charge people to have a movie delivered and viewed on a variety of platforms. It’s fine, but it’s not an important moment in and of itself. It won’t kill Wal-Mart, but retail DVD is dying and digital delivery is coming. The question is not whether a movie is available through Facebook, but whether WB and everyone else can get more people to pay for Home Ent content and at what price point. The same question that’s been on the table for YEARS.

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DP/30: I AM, director Tom Shadyac

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BYOB 31011

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The Hot Blog

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon