“‘In a weird way, the strategy seems to write itself: Like, huh, we have all this stuff, we already own, it, people seem to want it,’ [MTV exec Erik] Flannigan says of MTV Classic. It helps, of course, that MTV’s vintage programming, for many millennials, coincides with ‘that window of your life that’s so formative and so meaningful.'”
Category: media
Is The Cult Film On The Way To Going Extinct?
“In today’s fragmented, ever-churning pop culture ecosystem, the long tail of home video that once gave oddball movies a shot at a glorious cult afterlife has shortened to the point of vanishing. With even big-budget commercial films often struggling to break through the endless clutter of content, the challenge for smaller, quirkier fare is that much harder.”
China Passes New Law: Movies Must ‘Serve The People And Socialism’
“It forbids content that stirs up opposition to the law or constitution, harms national unity, sovereignty or territorial integrity, exposes national secrets, harms Chinese security, dignity, honour or interests, or spreads terrorism or extremism. Also banned are subjects that ‘defame the people’s excellent cultural traditions’, incite ethnic hatred or discrimination, or destroy ethnic unity.”
Why Movie Romantic Comedies Are A Problematic Genre
“The common knock against rom-coms—besides their being too often glibly hetero-normative and horrendously lacking in diversity and ironically ambivalent about the women who generally watch them—is that they are fantasies, in the worst way as well as the best.”
Media Exec Comes Up With Provocative Proposal To Fund Canadian Content (In Canada)
“His plan would fold Telefilm Canada (which invests in film) and the Canadian Media Fund (which supports TV and some digital) into a single new agency that would rely solely on tax credits to encourage the production of any Canadian content. If a Canadian online service wanted to produce a series, it wouldn’t need a broadcasting partner to trigger funding; if a newspaper wanted tax credits for the Canadian articles it published, it would be eligible.”
A Glut Of TV – So Much Production, In Fact, That Hollywood Is Overwhelmed
“The TV business is facing its biggest explosion of new productions in the medium’s history, sparking a billion-dollar arms race between established TV networks and a deep-pocketed insurgency of online streaming giants. That boom is reshaping the industry from Atlanta to Hollywood, where even washed-up actors are suddenly in high demand and open studio space is the holy grail.”
Why Movie Comedies Are A Dying Genre
Ten years ago, the blockbuster comedy was a key to any studio’s profit margin, given their relative cheapness to produce and propensity to linger in theaters on good word of mouth. Now, as worldwide box office becomes more crucial to the studio’s bottom line, comedies are vanishing from the schedule—because, in the words of one distributor, they don’t “travel well.”
When VHS Tapes Were New, These Two Opened A Video Store. Here’s What It Was Like To Be On The Cutting Edge
Customers were fascinated. “They didn’t ask for a specific movie, just something to play on their VCRs. People weren’t sleeping – they would rent 10 movies at a time, only to bring them back the next day, jonesing for more.”
For ‘Saturday Night Live,’ The Blessing And The Curse Of This Election
Sure, Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump is so mimetic that he’s drowned out the actual candidate in our minds, and sure, Kate McKinnon’s Hillary Clinton is a “savage yet sympathetic portrait of political thirst,” but the best SNL moments came on the edges of the election.
Where, Aside From The Presidential Candidates, Did Hollywood’s Money Go This Election?
Initiatives to legalize pot are quite popular among the, er, show business set.