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…
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/
…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…
Kodak restated an unwavering commitment to film this morning, with an announcement that it has added two new films to its Vision3 family…
https://celluloidjunkie.com/2010/06/01/kodak-reaffirms-its-commitment-to-film/
…The video features Universal President Ron Meyer narrating why the backlot is so important to Universal and how films like Back to the Future and Blues Brothers were filmed in the area that burned down. Shortly after, Steven Spielberg talks about how he got involved in the rebuilding and he explains how when he heard about the fire, he immediately rushed down to the studio. Of course the video has a positive ending as the studio just spent a lot of money making the New York backlot even better…
https://www.collider.com/2010/05/28/universal-studios-new-york-street-backlot-video/
A mere four or five years ago it was all but unheard of for a Hollywood studio not to screen a major blockbuster in advance for critics. Back when I first started reviewing movies, in the early aughts, I could count on one hand the number of major theatrical releases which weren’t screened for the press each year. Since then, studios have discovered that potential moviegoers are easier to manipulate into seeing bad movies, if there’s no one around to warn them, and refusing to screen movies for critics has become commonplace whenever Hollywood has a real stinker on its hands. Word of mouth will kill these movies eventually, but only after they’ve made big opening weekend box office generated by tricky advertising campaigns…
https://www.cinemablend.com/new/Killers-Not-Being-Screened-For-Critics-18774.html
When Alice in Wonderland this week became only the sixth film to cross the $1 billion gross mark, it certainly bolstered Johnny Depp’s case for being the biggest movie star in the world. He’s the only guy who has reached the $1 billion mark with two films. The other, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, is the fourth highest grossing film ever…
https://www.deadline.com/2010/05/johnny-depp-only-star-to-hit-the-billion-dollar-gross-mark-twice/
Regional branches back idea of single union
In a preliminary step toward merging SAG and AFTRA, the leaders of the Screen Actors Guild’s regional branch division have endorsed the creation of a single union to cover all performers…
https://www.variety.com/article/VR1118019800.html?categoryid=13&cs=1
…Once independent filmmakers have unfettered access to every television set in America – and eventually the world – the gatekeepers will have lost the war. It will also mean the death of the middleman…
https://www.thewrap.com/blog-entry/google-changing-equation-independent-filmmakers-17648
It has been big news everywhere that “Shrek Forever After” took a big tumble at the box office this weekend, barely scraping together $71 million in revenues, a dramatic fall from the grosses of the franchise’s past sequels. What happened? The reviews weren’t so bad…