Category: media

“Although the last Star Wars movie came out three years ago, the battle over rights and ownership of the costumes used in the films is still raging. George Lucas, the director who dreamed up the lucrative series, is suing the prop designer who made the stormtrooper helmets and suits for the original 1977 film because he is selling replicas to fans for £1,800 a time.”

“Disney and Pixar are to make eight new 3D animated films over the next four years, Walt Disney has announced… They include newly converted 3D versions of the hit movies Toy Story and Toy Story 2, out in 2009 and 2010.” In fact, six of the eight films will be in digital 3D – the remaining two will be hand-drawn.

“Teenagers with televisions in their bedrooms eat more fast food, consume more sweetened drinks, read or study less and are less engaged with their families than those who don’t have a TV where they sleep… A national Kaiser Family Foundation study in 2005 of children aged 8 to 18 found that 68 percent had TVs in their bedrooms.”

The term “chick flick” is a double-edged sword in Hollywood, describing everything from romantic comedies to period dramas – all the stuff women love and men (supposedly) don’t get. But predicting just what will actually attract women to buy movie tickets isn’t as easy as the formula makes it sound.

Just as in the US, it’s rare that France comes together around a single cultural experience. But a new film focusing on a tiny corner of the northern part of the country, typically derided by the rest of France, has now been seen by fully 25% of the country’s residents, and “this weekend, it became the most popular French film of all time.”

Britain’s telecommunications regulator is considering a plan under which the BBC would lose its exclusive access to revenue from the license fee Britons pay for owning a television once broadcasters convert to digital signals. “The rationale is that the BBC has lost its unique role by competing commercially with rivals” and abandoning its commitment to the arts and education.

“A television critic inevitably spends a fair amount of time bemoaning what is on television. My mother, especially after illness made it increasingly hard for her to read novels, was a reminder of the immense gift television can be. She had friends, visitors, and telephone calls, but there was also a continuous visual (she was a painter) and informational thirst that only television could assuage. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without television,’ was a sentence I often heard her utter.”

One of the advantages of satellite radio is that its bandwidth is nearly unlimited, allowing providers to add and subtract new stations as often as they wish. Lately, both XM and Sirius have been experimenting with temporary channels, offering topical or seasonal content for only as long as it is suspected listeners will be interested.

The CBC is imploring Canadians to give the revamped Radio 2 (less classical music, more jazz and pop) a chance before judging it to be unworthy. “Thousands of Canadians are worried that CBC Radio is giving up on classical music, that the musical offerings will be the same as the meagre fare being offered on commercial radio, and that the broadcaster is not living up to its public mandate.”

Only one US TV network has unveiled its plans for the fall schedule, and in the wake of the writers’ strike, there are plenty of whispers concerning the changes that could be coming to traditional Hollywood ideas about television. “What is certain is that next fall there will be fewer new dramas and comedies premiering across the networks.”