Month: June 2010

11 WRITERS LATER: How 20th Exec Alex Young Lost Control Of ‘The A-Team’

…the Writers Guild recently decided the credits on The A-Team, the movie based on the ’80s TV show and opening this weekend. There were 11 screenwriters who worked on the film — 5 single writers and 3 teams of two: Kevin Broadbin, Bruce Feirstein, Jayson Rothwell, Laurence M. Konner and Mark Rosenthal, Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, Skip Woods, Joe Carnahan & Brian Bloom, Mathew Carnahan. And that’s with the interruption of the writers strike. The final credit now reads: “Written by Joe Carnahan & Brian Bloom and Skip Woods. Created by Frank Lupo & Stephen J. Cannell.” In other words, 11 writers, and in the end, the director and his partner get first position credit…

https://www.deadline.com/2010/06/11-screenwriters-later-how-alex-young-lost-control-of-the-a-team/

Does movie marketing matter?

When a movie hits big, almost no one cares what was spent; when a release fails to make opening-weekend estimates or has a 60% drop-off during its second week, everyone begins pointing fingers.

Consider MGM’s $30 million to tub-thump “Hot Tub Time Machine,” which cost about $35 million to make: First-week gross was $20 million, dropping 60% the following week and winding up with $50 million in domestic gross. Or Disney’s $200 million production “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” which has raked in $63 million domestically to date against a prints-and-advertising spend stateside of $75 million.

On the other hand, Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland,” similar in cost and marketing budget to “Prince,” has grossed $334 million domestically and $1 billion worldwide…

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/film/news/e3i2b61a0dd47969d0fdd259101a964987c

3D and HDTV to Comprise 42 Percent of Internet Video Traffic by 2014

Internet video traffic will exceed peer-to-peer for the first time this year, according to the latest forecast from Cisco. The IP router maker predicts that video will account for 91 percent of global consumer Internet traffic by 2014, driving a four-fold increase.

“Improvements in network bandwidth capacity and Internet speeds, along with the increasing popularity of HDTV and 3DTV are key factors expecting to quadruple IP traffic from 2009 to 2014,”…

https://www.televisionbroadcast.com/article/101724

TiVo Loses Patent Ruling

TiVo lost a ruling with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in its ongoing dispute with Dish Network and EchoStar. The USPTO issued a final ruling rejecting TiVo’s patent claims regarding its time-shifting technology. The decision marks the second review of TiVo’s claims by the Patent Office and comes as a federal appeals court reconsiders its own previous ruling in TiVo’s favor…

https://www.televisionbroadcast.com/article/101688

Disney Gets Social With Facebook App For Movie Tickets

While tech industry pundits and media outlets have spent the past several weeks throwing stones at Facebook over its privacy policy, Walt Disney Studios may have figured out a way to exploit the popular social networking website to sell movie tickets to their films…

https://celluloidjunkie.com/2010/06/05/disney-gets-social-with-facebook-app-for-movie-tickets/

Why did Memorial Day turn into doomsday for the movie business?

…if you account for ticket price inflation, the number of tickets sold during the holiday weekend (about 23.4 million according to Hollywood.com) was the lowest total in 17 years. That’s bad. Really bad…

https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/the_big_picture/2010/06/why-did-memorial-day-turn-into-doomsday-for-the-movie-business.html