Category: media

“While overall DVD sales are robust – last year retailers sold $15.5 billion in discs – the low-end market is positively booming. Recently, 19 of the 50 top sellers on the Nielsen VideoScan national sales charts were budget DVD’s.” How budget? There are plenty on offer from 99 cents to $1.99.

Hollywood is full of excuses why movie box office is down so much this spring. But. “None of the half-dozen excuses is sufficient, nor as convincing as the most obvious explanation: The current movies are particularly bad. Though popular success and quality have no direct relationship (The Pacifier and Hitch both made more than $100-million), audiences may have finally got tired after a particularly lousy string of weekend releases.”

Canadian movie box office grosses are down even more than those in the US. “Figures compiled for the Toronto Star by the Nielsen EDI box-office tracking firm show that since the slide began in February for weekend movie attendance in North America, the drop has been worse in Canada for 14 of the 18 weekends. The average weekend drop during the slump is 12.9 per cent for North America and 17.36 per cent in Canada.”

A report commissioned by Corporation for Public Broadcasting head Kenneth Tomlinson on the political bias of public broadcasting shows is “amateurish.” The report labels guests on these programs “liberal,” “conservative” or “neutral,” or categorizes them by such descriptions as “pro-Bush,” “anti-Bush,” “support administration,” “oppose administration.”

Raids were carried out wednesday in 11 countries, as agents targeted suspected digital pirates. “Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as investigators around the world, took part in 90 searches that resulted in the arrests of four people. The U.S. Justice Department ‘is striking at the top of the copyright piracy supply chain – a distribution chain that provides the vast majority of illegal digital content now available online’.”

“The BBC has commissioned four new arts shows, which it has hailed as major additions to its cultural output amid accusations of dumbing down.”

Can “War of the Worlds” send people back into the movie theatres? “In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Hollywood was squeamish about making any movies that touched on the themes of 9/11, even tangentially. Any number of movies about terrorists were either scrapped or rewritten. As time went by, though, a group of filmmakers realized that 9/11 played such a dramatic role in the nation’s psyche that ignoring it would be foolish.”

The movie theatre business is so spooked by declines in box office in recent months that AMC, one of the biggest chains, is offering a money-back guarantee. If you don’t like “Cinderella Man” you get your money back. “The no-hassle money-back guarantee is a rarity in the business, where fans who sit through awful flicks usually leave with little more than bad memories. But AMC’s results are encouraging enough that CinemarkInc., another big exhibitor, is planning a similar promotion for the three-day weekend.”

Lots of film aficionados would like to make the argument that movie ticket sales are down because of a decline in quality, but that’s a tough sell, since Americans have embraced cinematic mediocrity (and worse) for years. A more likely explanation has to do with the steadily rising cost of tickets, a trend which stands in stark contrast to the dropping price of DVD rentals and on-demand movies. A family of four wanting to see this summer’s big blockbusters can expect to drop at least $34 ($23,971 if the family lives in New York,) and that’s before popcorn and soda pop.

Turning away from the immediate legal implications for a moment, the Supreme Court’s ruling holding Grokster liable for the actions of its customers may hurt the very industry that is celebrating victory. “By helping maintain the status quo, the ruling could further delay the death of the old way of doing things and postpone the birth of new strategies that successfully build on unstoppable peer-to-peer technologies… It’s time for the entertainment industry to accept the inevitable and stop trying to use the courts to put a leash on unpredictable new technologies. In the end, the business model in the entertainment industry is going to change, and these companies can either find a way to insert themselves into the new order, or risk finding themselves frozen out forever.”