Category: media

“The report says that Canadians spend 90 fewer minutes per week tuning in to their favourite stations compared to a decade ago. It found that the average person spends 19.5 hours a week listening to the radio. Despite the overall decline, people are listening to the radio more in their cars and at work. In 1995, people spent 56 per cent of their listening time at home; that number has now fallen to 49 per cent.”

The comic book movie Fantastic Four has snapped Hollywood’s losing streak. “The flick about a quartet of dysfunctional superheroes earned an incredible $56 million, leading the box office to its first up weekend after a record 19 straight downers, according to preliminary studio figures Sunday. If estimates hold the top 12 movies will have grossed $140.9 million, a 2.2 percent gain over this time last year when fellow Marvel do-gooder Spider-Man 2 headlined the lineup.”

“Will the 70’s never end? Or are they finally, totally, over? Are we, that is, nearing the end of a pop-culture business cycle that began 30 years ago? Maybe. The summer blockbuster – legend-shrouded mutant offspring of “Jaws” and “Star Wars” – laying waste to the noble traditions of the Old Hollywood even as it trampled the blossoming potential of the New: this has been received wisdom among people who write about movies for as long as much of the current movie audience has been alive.”

It may be a bum year at the box office, but this year’s crop of summer blockbusters suggests that Hollywood may finally be getting over a hump that has plagued it for decades: racial inequality both in front of the cameras and behind the scenes. “Black filmmakers and actors and those who work with them echoed that sense of progress, pointing especially to evidence that white audiences – spurred by the 20-year-old hip-hop revolution – are going to films that might once have been seen as an African-American preserve.”

It had to happen eventually: Paramount Pictures has announced plans to make a big-budget film focusing on the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The director will be Oliver Stone, and the film will star Nicholas Cage. Several smaller films and documentaries have dealt with the attacks and/or their aftermath, but until now, the major Hollywood studios have shied away from what they rightly guess to be a sensitive topic.

Hollywood may be having a rough year, but the French Canadian film industry is raking in the dough. “While box-office receipts across the continent were down more than 8 per cent in the first half of 2005 compared with a year earlier, they fell less than 3 per cent in Canada’s French-speaking heartland. There’s nothing bewitching about the trend. While this year’s crop of Hollywood films is leaving Quebeckers just as indifferent as other North Americans, homegrown movies continue to build their audience, making the province’s film industry the envy of its English-Canadian counterpart.”

“Netflix has what some people fashionably call a “long tail” business. Its catalogue of more than 45,000 titles means that it can cater to almost any interest. Such a depth of movie offerings, plus online features such as movie reviews and recommendations, increases its popularity. Unlike a typical high street video-rental store, which might get the bulk of its revenue from just a few hundred recent titles, Netflix’s revenue comes from a far broader selection: some 35,000 different film titles are contained in the 1m DVDs it sends out every day.”

The BBC has spent £100 million more on programs in the past year, but saw its debt reduced. “The reports suggest the BBC’s four main TV channels saw their combined viewing share drop from 36.5% to 34.6% in the last 12 months. The BBC said it would not comment until the report is published on 12 July.”

A new movie-download site sponsored by chipmaker Intel is promising to allow consumers to legally download films while they are still being shown in theatres. The project was conceived as an effort to avoid the years of infighting and lawsuits faced by the music industry when consumers began illegally sharing digital music files online. Key to the service’s success will be the industry’s ability to convince consumers that it is easy to use, convenient, and preferable to the various illegal methods of obtaining bootlegged movies.

“Whatever the box-office blips, the regular movie audience has been so decimated over the past 56 years that the habitual weekly adult moviegoer will soon qualify as an endangered species. In 1948, 90 million Americans—65 percent of the population—went to a movie house in an average week; in 2004, 30 million Americans—roughly 10 percent of the population—went to see a movie in an average week. What changed in the interval was that virtually every American family bought a TV set, and home entertainment largely replaced theater entertainment. More important than mere numbers, the nature of the audience changed in this secular decline.”