Theater Owners Ready to Retaliate Over Premium VOD

Theater owners are ready to hit back at Hollywood studios if theatrical windows are shortened in favor of premium video-on-demand, TheWrap has learned.

Among the retaliatory measures that exhibitors are weighing:

* Pulling the trailers of offending studios.

* Cutting in-theater signage for those studios’ movies.

* Renegotiating the split of box-office revenues for films that are released on VOD.

Theaters may even refuse to carry a studio’s film, according to an individual with knowledge of exhibitors’ thinking.

Word of a possible counter-offensive comes just days after multiplex operators went ballistic over studios’ plan to distribute films to homes for $30 a mere two months after their release…

https://www.thewrap.com/movies/article/exhibitors-and-studios-gird-window-war-26171

R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe: YouTube Has Replaced MTV

…For me the time of the music video has come and gone. The revolution the MTV brought in the 1980s and ’90s is profound. I hate the word “literally,” but MTV provided a common language for all the countries of Europe to be able to speak English when there wasn”t a go-to language. And MTV did that…

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/risky-business/rems-michael-stipe-youtube-has-171586

SAG and AFTRA move forward

Unions continue progress toward merger

Leaders of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists have taken another step toward combining the performers unions.

The unions announced Wednesday that reps of the SAG-AFTRA Presidents’ Forum for One Union met last weekend in New York City, resulting in “meaningful progress toward the goal of uniting SAG and AFTRA.”

No date has been set yet for a merger vote, which would create an org of about 150,000 members. SAG members voted down merger in 1999 and 2003 amid arguments that SAG would lose its unique identity as an actors union.

Merger proponents have asserted that a combined union would have greater clout…

https://www.variety.com/article/VR1118035094?refCatId=13

Time to declare war on the shaky camera

The obnoxiously photographed “Battle: Los Angeles” shows how utterly bankrupt a movie technique has become

How to describe the aggressive dreadfulness of “Battle: Los Angeles,” maybe the worst-directed Hollywood movie I’ve ever seen? Incompetent doesn’t do the trick, because it implies an inability to master basic craft. That’s not the case here. “Battle: Los Angeles” takes one of the more controversial cinematography fads of recent years — the “shaky camera and shallow focus equals ‘reality'” fad — to noxious new levels of excess. The movie is the work of professionals who decided to make their film look bad on purpose…

https://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/battle_los_angeles/index.html

Power to the People: The Democratization of Film

The media-publishing World is comprised of four massive tectonic plates called audio, video, print and software. These plates rest on a fluid called technology that keeps them in continuous motion. Technology moves these plates at glacier speed, but every so often a bubble in the technological fluid causes a seismic shift that causes plates to collide, retract, rise, fall, emerge, or disappear.

The printing press, radio, film, television, VCR, personal computer and Internet are all examples of tectonic bubbles that created seismic shifts of the media-publishing plates. The collisions of these plates create both shock and awe to all who bear witness. The shock comes from those who can’t see past the destruction of their old world; the awe comes from those who see opportunity in the new world…

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-steele/power-to-the-people-the-d_1_b_829303.html

Hollywood’s hope for a 3D revolution shows signs of falling flat

This year US ticket sales are running 20% behind where they were in the first quarter of 2010, amid a series of 3D flops

The runaway success of 3D films such as Avatar sparked a flurry of similar films, many of which failed to capture audiences.

Mars Needs Moms, according to the title of Disney’s latest foray into 3D animation, but this weekend the “House of Mouse” would settle for a few moms closer to home. Sadly for Disney, last weekend was one of the most embarrassing in recent years for the company: its new $150m movie took just $6.9m in ticket sales…

https://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/mar/20/hollywood-hope-for-3d-revolution-falling-flat

James Bond (Daniel Craig) In Drag: Bad Idea

The James Bond franchise has put Daniel Craig in drag to endorse the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day. Produced by Barbara Broccoli, directed by Sam Taylor-Wood (Nowhere Boy), and written by Jane Goldman (Kick-Ass), this is the very definition of ill-advised:

https://www.deadline.com/2011/03/james-bond-in-drag-is-a-terrible-idea/

Holographic television – the new 3D?

Television and laptop makers are trying to make 3D displays which can be watched without wearing 3D glasses – the thought being that the glasses may put a lot of people off 3D TV in the home.

But there are rumblings which suggest that 3D may have bigger problems – with holographic TV planned to be its successor.

On a holo-TV, images will be projected into the middle of a room as a “cloud” that can be viewed from every angle without 3D glasses, and manufacturers hope they could go on sale in 2012…

https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9393762.stm