A new pact between cable channel Epix and Netflix to stream movies online makes the video rental giant a pay TV player, whether it admits it or not.
After Tuesday’s agreement, Showtime and HBO should start looking over their shoulder, because make no mistake, Netflix is playing on their turf…
https://www.thewrap.com/movies/column-post/look-out-hbo-netflixepix-deal-creates-pay-tv-player-20004
Documentary filmmakers won an important ruling Monday, when the U.S. Copyright Office ruled that they could legally circumvent DVD copy protection in order to rip content covered under fair use.
The ruling, which provides an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, not only affects documentarians, but teachers and film students, too.
The exemption allows documentarians and other select professionals to obtain short portions of material from DVDs for non-infringing uses, even when that material is behind encryption and other digital locks…
https://www.thewrap.com/movies/article/fed-ruling-lets-doc-makers-legally-rip-dvds-19579
…And the frenzy has continued. Just last Tuesday came Xumanii.com, which said it was “revolutionizing the way in which live entertainment and social networking come together.”
You get the idea.
But at some point, it’s worth asking: Is this a true boom, backed by serious investors with clear-headed business models? Or has the cost of entry become so low that this is just a false flush? To some, it seems like the latter…
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/business/25steal.html?_r=3&src=busln
NEW YORK — Sandra Bullock was Hollywood’s best-paid actress over the past year ahead of Reese Witherspoon and Cameron Diaz, according to Forbes.
Bullock earned $56 million between June 2009 and June 2010, driven by income from “The Proposal” and “The Blind Side,” it said. “Despite everything that’s gone wrong personally for Sandra Bullock, financially she’s been on fire,” Forbes wrote…
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/film/news/e3ia2bdd85a040b9b01c9a81f8092906353
…At one point, replacing director Paul Weitz with producer-writer John Hamburg was contemplated early on and then rejected after Hamburg visited the set one weekend. That’s because everyone realized what a DGA mess this would result in. Plus, Adam Fogelson had just taken over as chairman and didn’t want to throw the already traumatized studio into a worse funk. So the decision was made to fix the movie in post. For about 4 to 5 weeks now, Weitz, Hamburg, Jay Roach, and Ben Stiller have been going through the footage. The good news is that they just decided that re-shoots aren’t needed. The not-so-good news is that they think a week of pickups with all the principal cast in September is required…
https://www.deadline.com/2010/08/unis-little-fockers-needs-week-of-pickups/#more-59117
Director Matthew Vaughn is hard at work on “X-Men: First Class” in London but he took some time out Sunday to catch a screening of “Inception.” He enjoyed the Christopher Nolan epic immensely — even though it prompted him to scrap a dozen pages of the “First Class” script.
“I saw ‘Inception,’ which I loved,” Vaughn said Monday. “But my heart sank when I saw that a few of the ideas we had were up [on the screen]. So it’s either leave it in and look as if you’re copying or change things. We completely ripped out about 12 pages of the script and the storyboards.”…
Media Derivatives CEO Robert S. Swagger is making good on his threat to try to take the trading of movie box-office futures abroad if the U.S. failed to allow the trading…