Category: media

MoviePass has taken the sector by storm, attracting nearly 2 million new subscribers over the past year. But as its executives claim to be sending droves of new customers to theaters, MoviePass has prompted worries in the industry about a devaluation of the movie ticket and a monopoly on customer data.

With its 636th having aired last weekend, The Simpsons now holds the record for most episodes of any scripted prime-time series. Said Groening, “I actually sometimes meet a famous actor and say, ‘Aw, you should do The Simpsons sometime.’ And they say, ‘I already did.'” But that’s not where he put his foot in it – his comment about the Apu controversy is what has Twitter a-twitter.

“The Weinstein Company on Tuesday named a Dallas private equity firm as the winning bidder in its bankruptcy sale, spurning an offer by the Broadway producer Howard Kagan. The victor – for now, at least, as a bankruptcy judge still has to sign off and the decision could be challenged by creditors – is Lantern Capital Partners. It entered the sale as the studio’s prearranged bidder, or ‘stalking horse,’ which set a price floor. Lantern offered $310 million plus the assumption of about $115 million in debt.”

Director Quentin Tarantino, whose relationship with the Weinstein brothers goes back more than 20 years, claims that he’s owed well over $4 million in royalties for his four most recent movies; numerous major film actors say they were never paid promised back-end profits from their Weinstein-produced titles. All are objecting to the bankruptcy sale of the company, fearing that the transaction will leave them unpaid.

I don’t want to sound like an old stodgy codger (even though I am an old stodgy codger) but it seems to me that this lack of narrative finality really hampers the genre. Like video games they can be stimulating and exciting, but only at the expense of denying the emotional engagement other forms of art offer.

“There was a moment, somewhere in the nexus between Game of Thrones and The Crown, where it felt as if [Nina] Gold’s name was gliding through the credits of every high-end show on TV. Her 167 credits include many grand British success stories – The King’s Speech, The Theory of Everything, the Paddington movies and every Mike Leigh film since Topsy-Turvy. But in the past few years, she has ascended into Hollywood’s mega-franchise league (the Star Wars saga, sequels to Jurassic World and Mamma Mia!). Gold is partly responsible for the impression that British actors have colonised Hollywood.”

Internationally, Infinity War dislodged Jurassic World ($316.7M) at No. 2 (that movie also had China at open). In comps that did not include China at the bow, Infinity War‘s overseas start blew past Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows – Part 2 ($314M) and Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($281M). Worldwide. Only three movies had previously topped $500M in their openings: F8, The Force Awakens and Jurassic World.

Behind the aphorism’s sudden ubiquity lies a long and surprising history—one that yields a fresh perspective on our present technocultural moment. It suggests that Facebook’s business model is neither as novel as it might seem, nor as deterministic of its values as critics assume. The pithiness that makes “you are the product” so quotable risks obscuring the complex pact between Facebook and its users, in ways that make social media’s problems seem inevitable and insoluble. They’re not—but if we want to fix them, the first thing we need to do is redefine our relationship.

Why? It’s obvious: “More than 50% of U.S. consumers aged 18-49 in U.S. are ‘light’ TV viewers (in the bottom one-third of the total TV audience based on minutes viewed), according to Nielsen. However, 90% of that group watches YouTube videos.”