Category: media

“On opening weekend – and perhaps the second weekend of a big picture – the split is 70 percent to the distributor and 30 percent to the exhibitor. The studio’s share declines by 10 percent each week: first to 60 percent, then to 50 and 40, until it levels out at 30 to 35 percent for as long as the theater keeps the film. The studio wants a film to open huge, even if it doesn’t last long. Theaters, which earn much of their revenue from concession sales, prefer movies that will run all summer to full houses, with the theater ultimately taking 65 percent of ticket sales.”

Comic book superheros are everywhere in the movies today. “The cachet of comics – and I mean the old, cheap, pulpy kind, not “comix” or “graphic novels” – is all the more remarkable given that for most of their history, they could count on provoking the disdain of literary intellectuals, the panic of moralists and the condescension of mainstream show business, which saw them as fodder for cartoons and campy kid shows. The days when a film critic could wish that comic books would just go away – as Robert Warshow did in a brilliantly ambivalent 1954 essay on his young son’s fandom – are long gone. The superheroes demand to be taken as seriously as they have always taken themselves.”

“Over the past decade, as media conglomerates dumped public-affairs programming in favor of “infotainment” and tabloid trash, NPR recognized the void and moved to fill it with high-quality news reporting. That news-oriented model, by drawing in listeners hungry for substantial coverage of politics and public affairs, has enabled NPR to thrive: Today, it continues to add correspondents and bureaus at a time when most other major news organizations are trimming them. A fair-minded evaluation must conclude that if NPR has turned its back on some of the values enshrined in its original mission statement, it has also, in other ways and despite enormous political pressure from its detractors, remained true to them as well. But a price was paid on the road to respectability.”

After decades as cash cows for American TV networks, the daytime soaps are losing audience fast. “Nielsen Media Research had found that in the first three months of the season that began in September, CBS, ABC, and NBC network soaps lost 18 percent of their female viewers ages 18 to 34, another blow to broadcasters reeling from the rise of cable and satellite services.”

Could entertainment content long promised for mobile phones be derailed by anti-piracy measures? “At issue is a set of technologies aimed at protecting music and other content from being indiscriminately copied after being sold through mobile phone networks, a critical component of the new content services if record labels and movie studios are to sign on.”

A group of Canadian indie bands wants the federal government to revise broadcast rules for Canadian content on the airwaves. “The Toronto-based Indie Pool, which says it represents more than 40,000 indie artists in Canada, wants developing artists to get more CanCon “weight” than established ones, so that up-and-comers are not squashed by the big stars. The reason why CanCon is failing is because it worked.”

A new poll by the advocacy group TV Watch says that Americans are overwhelmingly against government regulation of on-air content. 75% of respondants “strongly agreed that they would rather decide what programs to watch instead of having government censors decide.” (It is worth noting that TV Watch was founded to combat the FCC’s recent crackdown on American broadcasters, so the questions asked in the survey may have been of the leading variety.)

One of America’s largest cinema chains has bowed to public pressure and agreed to publish the actual start times of its films. You know, the time that the actual movie will begin showing, after the now-obligatory barrage of ads and previews. Loews Cineplex says that it will begin noting that feature presentations begin “10 to 15 minutes after the published showtime” in all its newspaper and online listings.

Come July, American TV programs will carry a digital flag that producers hope will deter piracy. “The flag will be attached to ‘over the air’ digital content–both network and local station programs, such as movies or prime-time series on NBC. Any device with a digital TV tuner can grab that content, whether it comes over an antenna or through a cable or satellite set-top box. The flag, basically a piece of code, will travel with any show that the broadcaster wants to protect.”

“In pop culture, we approve of rogue heroes saving the day by any means necessary. It’s all about getting the job done, and in getting the job done, there will always be casualties of war. And anyway, the bad guy deserved it.” And if that means a little torture? Well… So are those attitudes bleeding into the way we conduct ourselves as a nation?