Category: media

The online retailer has greenlighted six comedy projects at its studio. “The content production arm of the online retail giant will allow viewers of Amazon Instant Video to see the pilots in 2013, and their responses will help determine which pilots get a series order.”

“One industry watcher said the fact so many people continued to post their own versions of Gangnam Style had played a huge part in the clip’s success.”

“The Russian box office is to reach $1.3 billion this year, a 15 percent increase from 2011, while the local fare’s share is to decline.”

Screenwriter and Academy Award-winning actress Emma Thompson has prevailed in a lawsuit against another writer who penned a script about a love triangle involving art critic John Ruskin, his teenage wife Effie Gray and pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. Thanks to a ruling Tuesday, Thompson can release her film, Effie.”

“You’d think that maybe the one time scared conservatives could stomach the sight of a black man killing white men is in the context of vengeance for an unspeakable crime. But in the world imagined by the extreme conservative web, a world constantly under the threat of race war, there is no acceptable space for righteous black violence.”

“Europe is still way behind the U.S., where the pay TV on-demand sector for movies is worth about $1.2 billion, and the online movie market worth about $728.5 million.”

“The airing of the movie Friday night on China Central Television stunned viewers and raised hopes that China is loosening censorship.”

Reviewing scheduled shows for scenes or jokes that are suddenly too sensitive. Revising or postponing promotions for new action films. And so on. There are now “established procedures for a quandary that has become all too common for Hollywood: how to react with compassion to horrific acts of violence while also protecting a business that often capitalizes on violent and crude entertainment.”

The not-quite-finished documentary We Steal Secrets, starring (in effect) Pvt. Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, is the “first of several Hollywood films about the little-known people who grew larger than the most powerful of governments by using the Internet to broadcast their secrets.”

“Time Warner Cable plans to drop the small Santa Monica-based channel Ovation from its programming lineup at year’s end – a blow to the independent network that has attempted to elevate TV coverage of the arts and contemporary culture.”