Category: media

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ has taken in as much as $117 million in its first five days. “The Passion,” which debuted on Ash Wednesday, rocketed to the No. 1 box-office slot for the weekend with $76.2 million from Friday to Sunday. It was the seventh-best three-day opening ever, behind “Spider-Man” at $114.8 million and such Hollywood franchises as “The Matrix Reloaded” and the first two “Harry Potter” movies.”

Some online movie critics have hundreds of thousands of readers, more than many print publications. But “though their readership is growing, online film critics remain at the bottom of the movie-publicity food chain — far below daily newspaper critics, magazine writers and broadcast reporters. They are the last to be invited for preview screenings, are seldom quoted in movie ads and remain largely off the radar for Hollywood studios.”

At the movies, “2003 was an off year for copy lines, those punchy epigrams printed above or below the film’s title in posters and ads. As studios compete in an increasingly cluttered media landscape, a good line, according to one marketing exec, is needed to reinforce that one iconic image.”

The stars of Seinfeld have made a deal that will allow the release of DVDs of the series. Jerry Seinfeld’s three costars had been complaining because they had been cut out of royalty payments for the series. “I’m not ashamed to talk numbers. I would say in the years that we’ve been in syndication, Julia, Michael and I have probably individually seen about a quarter of a million dollars out of residuals, whereas our brethren have seen hundreds of millions of dollars. Seinfeld has a profit of over a billion dollars.”

A Florida radio host is fired and his station might be fined $750,000 for “indecent” programming. Howard Stern’s show is pulled off the air by six Clear Channel stations. “Cultural conservatives have cheered the moves. But the Stern suspension arrived with little cost to Clear Channel: The often-raunchy show was being carried on just six of its 1,200 radio stations, all in mid-level markets. And some observers say the San Antonio, Texas, company’s moves are politically driven, in direct response to the anti-indecency rhetoric streaming from public officials.”

The US Congress takes up another round of media bashing today, with more hearings on “indecency” on the airwaves…At the least, the spectacle makes for great theatre.

The infomercial is 20 years old this year – what a landmark. “Infomercials were born out of a Reagan administration ruling in the mid-1980s that lifted restrictions on how much commercial time stations could air. As a result, struggling cable networks took hold of the concept and sold large chunks of time to the highest bidder.”

There are too many faceless movie-plexes out there. So many homeowners are commissioning their own home theatres, and some of them are pretty ambitious. “Theaters are not about slapping nice-looking fabrics on walls. You need to make the environment come alive with the architecture. It is the whole definition of the space, the aisles, the stairs to the mezzanine, the kind of memories of old movie palaces that have become part our architectural vocabulary. That’s what I try to instill in my work, the echo of the grand spaces that were meant to dazzle the senses before the movie began.”

The Passion of the Christ opened on 4,643 screens in 3,006 theaters on Wednesday and took in $15-20 million at the box office, a remarkable feat for a movie based on religion that major studios were reluctant to finance.

Drama may be dying on Canadian TV, “but we’re very good at producing performing-arts TV. In fact, we’re brilliant at it, and Canadian productions in the genre regularly awe international audiences. There are complicated reasons for this, partly rooted in the CBC’s role in the Canadian culture. So many performers depend on the CBC for employment that the arts have become interwoven with the TV world. Thus, in Canada we make arts productions uniquely sensitive to television’s needs and nuances. We don’t just film arts performances for TV. We make and create television art…”