Category: media

“Throwing a lifeline to an entertainment company that has become a symbol of the systemic mistreatment of women in Hollywood would seem like the last thing that feminists like Gloria Allred and Ana Oliveira, chief executive of the New York Women’s Foundation, would be interested in doing. But each is involved with a group holding separate acquisition talks with the embattled Weinstein Company – with the aim of benefiting sexual misconduct victims.”

“Online advertising is looking more and more like a contest that publishers can’t win—not on a large scale, at least. Advertising can help to cover some of their costs, but online ads alone won’t pay for big, serious, high-quality journalistic enterprises the way that print ads once did. The idea that the news business needs to find different revenue models—subscriptions, memberships, events, nonprofit status—is hardly new. But it’s time for online media companies to take a harder look at it than they have before.”

Local reports say that as of 6:57PM on Monday night local time, a total of 1.45B moviegoers had attended cinemas in 2017 so far, a 15% increase on 2016. Last year’s box office saw a severe deceleration in growth, to just 3.7% (RMB 45.7B/$6.58B) after a record 2015 had surged 48.7%.

A state-level boss of India’s ruling party, the Hindu nationalist BJP, is offering 10 million rupees each for the heads of the lead actress and director of Padmavati, a new movie about a legendary 14th-century Rajput queen. A leader of the present-day Rajput clans has threatened to cut off the star’s nose, and violent demonstrations have led to the delay of the film’s release. All this over rumors of a scene the director says isn’t even in the movie.

“Verna, which stars popular actor Mahira Khan, was originally denied a certificate by the Central Board of Film Censors (CBFC) because of its ‘mature themes’ and ‘edgy content’. This caused an outcry among women’s rights campaigners, who accused board members of censoring women’s voices and putting their heads in the sand at a time when … ‘rape is a rampant issue in Pakistan’ … Soon the ban had inspired a Twitter campaign under the hashtag #UnbanVerna, which emerged as Pakistan’s own #MeToo movement.”

Justice League’s underperformance was startling. Studio estimates pegged it earning about $115 million, around what the Superman film Man of Steel opened to in 2013; it came in well below that. Whatever appeal Warner Bros. had hoped would be generated by the union of Ben Affleck’s Batman, Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, and Henry Cavill’s Superman was nonexistent.

They already are – millions of people tune in to watch e-sport championships online, and the players train every day for the chance to become famous (and rich).

OK, let’s do the math. If Apple adds however many series it wants, with its nearly unlimited resources, will our heads explode? “At the time of this year’s Emmy Awards in early September, 342 scripted series had aired or screened on network, cable and streaming services in the United States (not counting PBS, which is not a commercial operation) in 2017. The previous year, at the start of the fall season, 325 series had been offered. Between the Emmys and the last day of 2017, another 80 series are expected to appear.”