“Our main product used to be film,” it says in a new five-year strategic plan, presented this week to TIFF board members. “Now, our main service must be transformative experiences through film.” Used to be film? Isn’t that like the Toronto Blue Jays saying their main product used to be baseball?
Category: media
This Summer’s Movie Box Office Is Dramatically Down. But There’s Good News?
Movie ticket sales in North America are running roughly half a billion dollars behind last summer’s box office, making this one of lowest-grossing summers in years. The 12.4 per cent downturn comes at a critical juncture for Hollywood, with constantly swirling fears about the impact of streaming, television and the bazillion other entertainment options out there.
Study: Millennials Don’t Watch, Don’t Like, Classic Movies
A new study finds that less than a quarter of millennials have watched a film from start to finish that was made back in the 1940s or 50s and only a third have seen one from the 1960s. Thirty percent of young people also admit to never having watched a black and white film all the way through – as opposed to 85 percent of those over 50 – with 20 percent branding the films “boring.”
Hulu And Netflix Are Banking On Nostalgia Making A Comeback
Digital platforms are creating new audiences for old TV shows – as when this 25-year-old from Houston says “I know ‘Game of Thrones’ is all the rage — and I watch it too, sometimes — but it doesn’t have me hooked like ‘Golden Girls.’ … I’m on my third round of watching the series right now.”
How One Filmmaker Captures Natural Rhythms While Telling An Intense But Low-Drama Story
Lina Rodriguez takes her cues from things like a painting of a cow. “In the 1963 painting, a placid Holstein is framed against a night sky marked by wispy clouds and a full moon. The effect should be pastoral, but instead it is faintly alarming. ‘There’s this calm, blue, unnerving light,’ Rodriguez observes. ‘It captures this idea of uncertainty that I see in his paintings. You see something that is quotidian but there is a threat.'”
A High School Student’s Film About Transgender Youth In China Gets Popular, And Gets Banned
Does the film “violate socialist values”? Well, it’s been screened several times in the past few weeks, but wider circulation “is proving challenging in a country where gender identity remains a sensitive topic. Chinese law allows individuals to change their gender on personal identification cards, but only if they have undergone sex reassignment surgery, and this is illegal for people under 20.”
It’s Such A Golden Age For TV That Writers Are Ending Up In The Emergency Room With Panic Attacks And Worse
The substance use and abuse is becoming legendary for some who are on severe deadlines. Why? “A record 455 original scripted series aired last year, and by the time 2017 comes to a close that tally is expected to top 500.”
MoviePass Is Trying To Be The Netflix Of Movie Theatres. It’s A Daft Plan. (Or Is It?)
“AMC has come out guns blazing, even going so far as to include a solid alchemy burn in its press release trashing the company’s plan. As AMC points out, MoviePass — which buys tickets directly from the exhibitors, then redistributes them to its subscribers by way of a MoviePass-specific debit card — will lose money on every customer who sees more than one movie a month. So what’s MoviePass’s angle here? Is this a strange form of cinematic philanthropy? Or do they have a plan?”
Web Journalism’s ‘Pivot To Video’ Is Not – **Not** – Because Of Audience Demand
In a much-discussed Twitter thread, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo reminds us that online news consumers, including Millennials, prefer their news in print (otherwise, why would so many sites resort to autoplay?) and explains why media company after media company is ignoring that preference (and laying off countless journalists in the process).
Steven Soderbergh, David Lynch, Hayao Miyazaki – Why Are All These Retired Directors Unretiring?
“Miyazaki has nothing left to prove. But for the other directors it’s hard not to suspect that the old retirement hokey-cokey – in, out, in, out – is at least partly driven by PR reasoning. … If that’s what’s going on, then these vacillating retirees have been forced into it by the tumultuous state of cinema. They’re taking action on a commonly voiced complaint: that the studios’ franchise addiction has sucked financing out of mid-range-budget films.”