AMC Theaters, the largest multiplex chain in the United States, rolled out its own MoviePass-style service on Tuesday. For $20 a month, subscribers to AMC Stubs A-List can see up to three movies a week. Also last week, the Alamo Drafthouse chain said it would begin testing a service called Season Pass that would offer unlimited movies for one monthly price.
Category: media
Emojis Are Taking Over. So Is This A New Language?
Emoji, which have grown from an original set of 176 characters to a collection of over 3,000 unique icons, present both opportunities and challenges to the academics who study them. Most agree that the icons are not quite a language—the emoji vocabulary is made up almost entirely of nouns, and there’s no real grammar or syntax to govern their use—but their influence on internet communication is massive. By 2015, half of all comments on Instagram included an emoji.
The Motion Picture Academy Greatly Expanded Its Membership. Is It Affecting Oscar Choices?
So how would we know if we were in the middle of a real Oscars revolution? For starters, how about a foreign language film earning a best picture nomination for the first time since 2012’s “Amour”? In this dramatic membership expansion, the academy has, to its credit, cast a wide net, inviting hundreds of international filmmakers, actors and crafts people. (“What it is is we realize now how much talent there is out there,” academy president John Bailey told me last year.)
We’ve Reached Peak Screen. So Tech Companies Are Wondering What’s Next
Tech has now captured pretty much all visual capacity. Americans spend three to four hours a day looking at their phones, and about 11 hours a day looking at screens of any kind. So tech giants are building the beginning of something new: a less insistently visual tech world, a digital landscape that relies on voice assistants, headphones, watches and other wearables to take some pressure off our eyes.
How *Lady Bird* Made A Star Out Of Its Main Character’s Best Friend
Beanie Feldstein played the titular character’s best friend Julie – and she stole most of the scenes she was in, with people tweeting “I want a movie about Julie!” Instead, Feldstein landed her first lead role. “As soon as we saw her in Lady Bird, we knew we’d both found Johanna and seen someone who was going to be a superstar. … From the moment you see her, you root for her.”
Looking For Univision? You Won’t Find It On Dish Or Sling Right Now
Not good for Spanish-language channel consumers (including soccer fans): “Univision has been seeking higher fees to bring its Spanish-language channels closer to those charged by English-language networks, such as ABC, NBC and CBS. But Dish has balked at Univision’s demands and declined Univision’s offer of a two-week contract extension to continue the talks.”
Can British Film Move Into The Modern Era, Or At Least The 1960s?
The bullseye is the 1940s, of course. Why? The audience. “What’s been bubbling for a while, probably since The Iron Lady and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel came out [in early 2012], is the conviction that the most reliable cinema-going audience are the over-50s. And a period movie falls into the category of films that audience will go to see.”
Movie Stars In China Take A Government-Mandated Pay Cut
Actually it’s a pay cap – the Chinese government says it’s necessary to prevent tax dodges and also to curb “excessive paychecks and waste.” Top actors are not exactly thrilled.
Helping Netflix Yield Up Its ‘International’ Gems
The streaming behemoth has quite the foreign film library. It takes a little work to find the films, but they’re worth it for most tastes: “The sheer amount of material may be the most impressive thing about the category. And for a mainstream platform like Netflix, international doesn’t mean art house.”
Podcasts Are The New Documentaries
True crime has outgrown the news magazines in favor of in-depth episodic storytelling. In thinking about whether the stories themselves have changed, it’s important to note the goals haven’t. First and foremost, podcasts, like documentaries, strive to put us in the room, and to explore the context of a murder. True crime audiences need to go deeper than the motives and the method. We’ve seen that summary level story on Dateline for the past twenty-five years.