Search

The article reports on the response of movie theater owners in some states to requests by some Republican governors to reopen cinemas sooner than later during the COVID-19 pandemic. Topics mentioned include films that are scheduled to debut in June and July 2020, Phase 1 of the broad federal guidelines by U.S. President Donald Trump to restart the economy, and efforts of lawyers to sort out what kind of liability theaters could face if audience members get infected with COVID-19.

The article discusses the sparse attendance in movie houses in the U.S. due to the coronavirus outbreak. Topics covered include the decision by film studios to delay the openings of their most imminent releases, the closure of several theaters as precautionary measure, and the low prospects for theaters if they continue to keep their doors open in the coming weeks.

The article reports on the goal of the U.S. film and television production company Vice Studios to expand its operation. Vice Studios chief executive officer (CEO) Nancy Dubuc has mandated Danny Gabai, head of Vice Studios U.S., to increase the number of television shows for outside buyers and to continue to produce feature films. The company has decided to lay off 10 percent of its work force.

The article reports on a 6 percent increase in box office revenues for Hollywood films in 2018, compared to 2017. It discusses the factors that contributed to this growth including the higher ticket prices and increased attendance. Also mentioned is the impact of streaming services on the film industry.

The article discusses about the movie "The Hunt" released by Universal Pictures mentioning the criticism faced by it due to the premise of the movie in which liberals kill conservatives for sport and the release of the movie despite outcry over it.

The article informs on gun safety debate surrounding Warner Bros. when relatives of those killed during the2012 movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado sent a letter to the studio expressing disquiet over its coming film "Joker," which is a character study of the title comic-book villain.

The article offers information on the venture between Sony and HarperCollins which will make literary films.

The article discusses the presence of British and other foreign actors in the motion picture industry based in Hollywood, Los Angeles California. Emphasis is given to Oscar award nominations for actors such as Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender, the training of British actors, and Hollywood's interest in foreign markets.

The article discusses the topic of motion pictures that are based on real life people or events. The authors discuss criticism that some films have faced for not being truthful enough as they portrayed real life events. Films that are mentioned include “Concussion,” starring Wil Smith, "The Big Short," starring Finn Wittrock in “The Big Short” and "Truth," starring Cate Blanchett.

The article reports that according to studies, gun violence in PG-13 movies has increased exceeding what is shown in R-rated films and mentions that such movies often get a PG-13 rating by omitting the consequences, such as blood and suffering.

The article offers news briefs on arts topics including appointment of Mitzi Angel, publisher of Faber & Faber in London as the new publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux (FSG) succeeding Jonathan Galassi; appointment of filmmaker Jon Favreau by Disney to produce and write a live-action ``Star Wars'' television series and announcement by Warner Bros. about release of feature film ``The Sopranos'' by masterful story teller, David Chase.

The article presents news biefs on movies and art culture which includes singer-songwriter Lady Gaga to replace singer-songwriter Beyoncé at the Coachella music festival, film "Moonlight" entry into fifteen hundred theaters, and the film "Beauty and the Beast" based on gay theme.

The article reports on the impact of the Academy Awards or Oscars nomination to art-house films wherein research reveals that nominations from the award giving body significantly boost ticket sales, and highlights the movies vying for recognition including "Split," and "Moonlight."

The article offers cultural news briefs including the altered 'Hollywood' signboard reading 'HOLLYWeeD' , film audiences' continued interests in superheroes, and Vogue editor Anna Wintour and actor Mark Rylance being named on this year's New Year's Honors 2017.

The article profiles the career of John Goldwyn, the American film producer of the film and television production studio Paramount Pictures. An overview of the films that Goldwyn was involved in producing, including "Forrest Gump," "Hot Rod," the documentary "I'm Not There" and "MacGruber." The role that Goldwyn's personal name plays in his ability to gain employment as a producer within the film industry is discussed.

The article discusses the role of data analysis in the motion picture industry as of May 5, 2013, focusing on the process of analyzing of film scripts in order to predict a film's financial success. Topics addressed include statistician Vinny Bruzzese's analysis of scripts, and screenwriters' attitudes towards statistical analysis of scripts.

The article discusses the financial aspects of entertainment company Walt Disney Company's film "Oz the Great and Powerful," directed by Sam Raimi and starring James Franco and Michelle Williams. Topics discussed include the marketing of the film in relation to the film "The Wizard of Oz," financial difficulties related to other Disney films, and audience reactions to "Oz the Great and Powerful."

The article discusses an investigation from the U.S. Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission into possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by motion picture industry officials attempting to trade motion pictures with China. According to the article, U.S. motion picture executives are concerned that the investigation may impede collaborations with the Chinese film industry.

The article discusses collaboration between American movie studios and Chinese government censors in order to ensure that films may be shown in China, and examines the importance of the lucrative Chinese film market to the American film industry. The process of gaining approval from censors including pre-screening films and changing elements which cause concern is also explored.

The article reports that the motion picture "The Golden Compass" had a disappointing performance at the box office in its opening December 7-9, 2007 weekend, continuing a run of several poor months for the motion picture industry. Ticket revenues are down six percent for the 2007 holiday season which began on November 2 compared to 2006 and attendance is down 10 percent.

This article presents information about Ron Meyer and his management of Universal Studios Group for more than 10 years. Meyer is the longest-serving head of a major movie company and Universal hasn't had a megahit since "Jurassic Park" and "Backdraft." Meyer prefers to stay away from the flashiest and most expensive products. The studio recently produced a flop in "Evan Almighty," but it has had success with "Knocked Up."

The article offers news briefs related to films as of January 26, 2015 on topics including the screening of film "American Sniper" by Clint Eastwood in North America, stage debut of the play "Fish in the Dark" by Larry David, and 2015 Live Ideas Festival.

The article offers arts news briefs in North America as of September 1, 2014 including one on motion pictures, one on a lost chapter of the book "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and one on singer Taylor Swift.

The article offers information on the films about Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, playwrights David Henry Hwang and Lynn Nottage to join the faculty of Columbia University's School of the Arts, and the world premiere of the theatrical production "Killer Road," by Patti Smith, Jesse Smith, and the Soundwalk Collective.

The article reports on the launched of the Disney Movies Anywhere, a digital movie service that allows consumers to buy a Disney, Marvel or Pixar movie once and watch it on any web-ready television, mobile device or computer developed by Walt Disney Co.

The article discusses the screening of political films at the U.S. Senate House. It also mentions Senator Al Franken's presentation of Academy Awards at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' awarding of films in 2012. The plea made by actor and filmmaker Ben Affleck before the Armed Services Committee in aiding the protection of human rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo is noted.

LOS ANGELES -- For one of his next roles Tom Cruise is planning to play a soldier who refights the same battle (with aliens) in an endless loop, getting better and better at it. More and more, it appears, that's the story of his life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

LOS ANGELES - It's starting to look as if the movie ticketing war in the United States has been won, with MSN's switch to Fandango as the latest evidence. Fandango, now part of NBCUniversal, and MovieTickets.com, owned by a consortium of companies, both arrived in 2000 and have spent the years since locked in a bitter rivalry. They do the same thing - sell movie tickets on the Web, via mobile apps and by phone - and compete by locking theaters into exclusive contracts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LOS ANGELES - Alan F. Horn, a former movie chief at Warner Brothers who was responsible for guiding that studio's highly profitable ''Harry Potter'' franchise, was named chairman of Disney's movie studio on Thursday. Mr. Horn's responsibilities at Walt Disney Studios will extend to the Marvel, Pixar and DreamWorks Studios brands; the job also includes oversight of Disney's music label and Broadway division. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

LOS ANGELES -- What happens when movie studios stop making the kind of movies you know how to make? If you're the comedic screenwriter Robert Harling, and you've ruled out making a living as a Norma Desmond ''it's the pictures that got small'' drag queen, as he said the other day, you take your bag of writing tricks and go to television. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a year in which nine of the top 10 movies at the box office have been sequels, perhaps it was appropriate that Ricky Gervais served up a slightly less compelling version of last year's Golden Globe Awards. NBC said on Monday that its live Globes telecast on Sunday night drew 16.8 million viewers, down a whisker from last year's 17 million. About 4 percent fewer people in the target demographic, adults age 18 to 49, tuned in, as measured by raw ratings points. (A 5.0 this year compared to a 5.2 last year.) NBC had heavily promoted Mr. Gervais's acerbic comedic style as a reason to watch. As promised, he delivered a crude monologue - a repeat performance of 2011, when his remarks drew gasps - but shocking people twice with the same shtick is hard to pull off. Other factors possibly affecting interest in the show: NBC has limited ability to promote itself (the network's overall schedule remains in the ratings basement), and the Globes also celebrated a batch of smaller films like ''The Artist'' that have produced limited box-office results. Still, the telecast was a win for NBC, delivering the network's biggest audience, excluding sporting events, since last year's Globes. This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LOS ANGELES -- Hollywood has had enough of the sharp consumer shift toward renting movies through Netflix. Desperate to raise home entertainment profits, studios want people to start buying movies outright again, either digitally or on little silver discs. But what's the best way to force that pendulum to swing? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theater owners are furious with movie studios for speeding up the release of movies on DVD and video-on-demand services. Except when they're not upset about it at all. That would seem to be the case with a new 3-D version of ''The Lion King.'' On Friday, Walt Disney Studios will release it in theaters. A lightning-fast 18 days later, new ''Lion King'' DVD and Blu-ray sets, two including 3-D versions, will arrive in stores. And theater owners, who normally get an exclusive period of about 120 days to show a film and have been forcefully protecting that privilege, are totally fine with that plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LOS ANGELES -- Power in Hollywood is usually telegraphed in the least subtle way possible. People hopscotch to meetings by helicopter (Ryan Kavanaugh of Relativity Media), camp courtside at Lakers games (Jeffrey Katzenberg) and build HBO series around their antics (the superagent Ari Emanuel). Then there is Kevin Feige's approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

LOS ANGELES -- And now we know the spell for raining cash. Harry Potter and his wizarding friends ended their decade-long film career by selling a staggering $476 million in tickets around the world over the weekend, breaking major box office records and leaving Hollywood executives shell-shocked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paramount Pictures entered the big-screen cartoon business on Wednesday by establishing an in-house unit devoted to the genre. The move ratchets up a rivalry with one of its business partners, DreamWorks Animation. Paramount Pictures, a division of Viacom, said it planned to release one animated feature a year starting in 2014. The films will cost up to $100 million each, it said. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CORRECTION APPENDED WEST HOLLYWOOD TO become a Green Lantern, and there are 3,600 of those intergalactic peacekeepers in the movie that opens Friday, you must be able to overcome fear. It also helps to have a dorsal fin growing from the top of your head, as a Lantern voiced by Geoffrey Rush does. Owning the rippled abs of Ryan Reynolds doesn't hurt either. But getting past fear, that's the principal prerequisite. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

LOS ANGELES - One of Hollywood's top film financiers and producers is making a big push into China. Legendary Entertainment, which is affiliated with Warner Brothers and has backed hits like ''The Dark Knight'' and ''The Hangover,'' completed a deal on Thursday with the Huayi Brothers Media Corporation of Beijing to form a new movie and television company. Their ambitious goal is to make English-language films and TV shows in China that can be exported to the rest of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TOKYO -- The March 11 earthquake and tsunami probably pushed Sony to a $3.2 billion loss in the just-ended fiscal year, the electronics and entertainment giant warned Monday. It was the latest Japanese manufacturer to report a huge financial hit from the disaster. The annual loss would be Sony's biggest in 16 years -- when problems in its movie business, as well as the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, took an economic toll. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LOS ANGELES -- The Walt Disney Company took several financial blows in its most recent quarter but largely managed to contain the damage: profit dropped just 1 percent from a year earlier, to $942 million. Disney, reporting financial results for its fiscal second quarter, had setbacks in three important areas -- movies, theme parks and interactive media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LOS ANGELES -- A maxim of the movie business is that worn-out film franchises cannot be rehabilitated on the side of the road. Once sequel fatigue sets in, they have to be towed into the shop and sold for scrap or fully retooled. That is what should have happened to ''The Fast and the Furious'' car-racing series five years ago when a third installment, ''The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,'' sputtered, selling about $62 million in tickets in North America, or 50 percent less than its predecessor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LOS ANGELES -- A two-year effort by YouTube, owned by Google, to get major Hollywood studios to offer their new-release movies for rental is coming closer to reality. Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Pictures and Warner Brothers have agreed to rent movies via YouTube, according to two studio executives who spoke on condition of anonymity because they said YouTube wanted to make the announcement. Rental fees are expected to be comparable to those charged by rivals like iTunes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

North American audiences spent about $138 million on movie tickets during the Easter weekend, a 39 percent increase from the same three days last year (which were not a holiday), according to Hollywood.com, which compiles box office data. ''Rio,'' an animated 3-D film from 20th Century Fox, was No. 1 for the second weekend in a row with an estimated $26.8 million in sales ($81.3 million total). ''Tyler Perry's Madea's Big Happy Family,'' released by Lionsgate, underperformed in second place with about $25.8 million, about 38 percent lower than the opening weekend in 2009 for the previous entry in this franchise, ''Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail.'' (But ''Big Happy Family'' cost only about $25 million to make.) The $40 million drama ''Water for Elephants'' (Fox) did better than some analysts had predicted, at $17.5 million for third place. The Easter-bunny-theme film ''Hop'' (Universal Pictures) was fourth with an estimated $12.5 million for a four-week total of about $100.5 million. ''Scream 4'' (the Weinstein Company) rounded out the Top 5 with about $7.2 million for a two-week total of $31.2 million. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

LOS ANGELES -- Four major movie studios plan to let some of their biggest new films play in living rooms just two months after their theatrical debuts, and theater owners are livid. The gambit threatens to rupture relations between important players in the film industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Has Hollywood just found another big teenage film franchise? Media Rights Capital, a prominent film financier and production company, has snapped up the rights to the Trylle Trilogy book series by Amanda Hocking, the 26-year-old self-publishing wunderkind. The company plans to make three novels into two movies, and Terri Tatchell, a co-writer of the hit science-fiction film ''District 9,'' is already at work on the screenplays. ''Amanda has created such a fresh, unique, fabulous world, and I am absolutely dead set on bringing it to the screen without compromising any of that,'' Ms. Tatchell said by telephone from Vancouver, Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LOS ANGELES -- In the movie business, sometimes a flop is just a flop. Then there are misses so disastrous that they send signals to broad swaths of Hollywood. ''Mars Needs Moms'' is shaping up as the second type. Walt Disney Studios spent an estimated $175 million to make and market ''Mars Needs Moms,'' which sold $6.9 million in tickets at North American theaters in its opening weekend. That grim result puts the 3-D animated adventure on track to become one of the biggest box-office bombs in movie history, on par with such washouts as ''The Adventures of Pluto Nash,'' ''Cutthroat Island'' and ''The Alamo.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LOS ANGELES -- Two big film festival operators, Tribeca Enterprises and the Sundance Institute, are about to greatly expand their efforts to use technology to bring specialty movies to a national audience. For years, the business function of festivals was straightforward: create excitement for independent films, and hope that distributors acquire them for release. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When you're hot, you're hot. Natalie Portman, steaming toward the Academy Awards for her disturbing portrayal of a deranged ballerina in ''Black Swan,'' helped power the romantic comedy ''No Strings Attached'' from Paramount Pictures to No. 1 at the North American box office over the weekend. The movie, which also stars Ashton Kutcher (above with Ms. Portman), sold an estimated $20.3 million in tickets, an unexpectedly firm performance. All of the others in the top five were holdovers. ''The Green Hornet'' (Sony Pictures Entertainment) was second with about $18 million for a two-week total of $63.4 million, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles box-office statistics. ''The Dilemma,'' a buddy comedy from Universal Pictures, sold about $9.7 million in its second weekend ($33.4 million total) for third place. ''The King's Speech'' (the Weinstein Company) was a close fourth with roughly $9.2 million ($58.6 million total), while ''True Grit'' (Paramount) chugged away in fifth place with $8 million, lifting its five-week total to $138.7 million. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PARK CITY, Utah -- Hollywood is back in the mood to buy indie films -- even if not at the old prices that came with inflated expectations. Heading into the Sundance Film Festival, which opened in this ski town on Thursday, if you couldn't quite feel the crackle of commerce in the air, you could certainly hear it in the voices of purchasing executives. They privately (no sense in tipping the competition) rattled off films they were circling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LOS ANGELES TAKE two former pop princesses -- Debbie Gibson and Tiffany -- and cast them in a television movie involving illegally imported snakes and alligators on steroids. Stir in gobs of gooey cheese -- a ''Dynasty''-style cat fight here, a trio of fisherman eaten alive there. Most important, make liberal use of computer-generated creatures and effects. Pythons blown up with dynamite! Thousands of hatching reptile eggs! Alligators the size of skyscrapers! [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]