Category: media

Singapore’s small but rapidly expanding film industry is looking to capitalize on China’s growing appetite for film. “Cracking the nascent Chinese film market is becoming a holy grail for many Asian production houses as the Chinese are going to the movies in record numbers. In 2006, box office revenues rose by nearly a third to $336 million.”

The union that represents Hollywood’s professional writers is counting down to the end of its current contract with the major studios, and negotiations are expected to be tense and complicated. The union’s new president will have much to do with how the contract talks progress, and whether Hollywood will see its first extended writers’ strike since 1988.

The planned new home of the Toronto International Film Festival got a CAN$1 million cash infusion this week, courtesy of a Canadian foundation.

“Mexican-born actress Salma Hayek has formed a production company which aims to promote films with Latino themes and talent to a mass audience… She will be the chief executive of Ventanazul, which will release between two and four movies per year” in conjunction with MGM.

Sales of Apple’s ubiquitous iPod rocketed past the 100 million mark this week. 21 million units were sold during the 2006 Christmas season alone.

The movies “Color Me Kubrick” and “The Hoax” concern the same sort of con: the kind that is dependent on a famous but elusive figure. “Those cons probably couldn’t happen today; in a time when no public record or paparazzi snap is likely to stay hidden from snoopy Web sites, the cult of the invisible celebrity has become all but obsolete. The best evidence of that change comes with Oprah Winfrey’s recent announcement that the brilliant, press-shy novelist Cormac McCarthy will do his first television interview on her show….”

“When two leading internet pioneers came together this week to propose a set of guidelines that would filter out offensive and abusive comments from blogs, they were met by a torrent of offensive and abusive comments.” The creators of the so-called ‘bloggers’ code of conduct’ “have posted a seven-point programme that would attempt, they say, to address the plethora of abusive comments on the web, while preserving the free spirit of the medium.”

“The bulls are running in Hollywood. The new year is only three months old, but already executives are beginning to snort and paw the ground in the belief that 2007 will be not only a record year at the North American box office, but may even achieve an astonishing milestone: $10-billion (U.S.) in ticket sales.”

Hollywood is used to hearing regular complaints about the violent content of some movies and TV shows, and the usual response to concerned parents is to point out that no one’s forcing them to consume the objectionable product. But what about those increasingly brutal and violent ads that networks insist on showing during otherwise family-friendly fare?

It wasn’t too long ago that an actor with a British accent couldn’t get arrested in Hollywood. But ever since Hugh Laurie turned the Fox drama House into a major hit, U.S. television execs can’t sign the Brits up fast enough.