“The DVD isn’t dead yet, but it’s definitely looking a little peaked, at least in the eyes of the home-video industry. Sales continue to decline (volume is down about 40 percent from this time last year for the Top 20 titles.”
Category: media
Study: People Underestimate How Much TV They Watch
“Industry figures suggest people watch more than 30 hours of TV a week but the 2,066 adults in the online survey said they watched an average of less than 20 hours of TV a week in January.”
Film – The Way We’ll Get To Understand The Middle East?
“The Middle East is developing a rich film culture, which offers opportunities for more equitable intercontinental connections. Compared with the one-way dynamics of another regional phenomenon, Western museum franchises (Guggenheim and Louvre outposts are under development in Abu Dhabi), film has a greater potential for reciprocity. As a medium, film resplendently promotes cultural identity and exchange.”
Where Are The Young Black Men Of Hollywood?
“The scarcity of black roles in 2011 is partly a function of fewer movies being made, and certainly fewer serious-minded movies at the studios. When Denzel Washington and Will Smith were coming up, there were routinely chances to make those types of films.Now you need to go indie or wait for lightning to strike at a studio.”
The Parlous State Of How Movies Are Decided In Hollywood
“It’s really bad news when the industry essentially rejects a success, when a movie that should have spawned two dozen taste-based gambles on passion projects is instead greeted as an unanswerable anomaly. That kind of thinking is why Hollywood studio filmmaking, as 2010 came to its end, was at an all-time low.”
Poll: Americans Oppose Cutting Public Broadcasting
Those polled opposed cutting public broadcasting, “including 83% of Democrats, 69% of Independents, and 56% of Republicans. More than two-thirds (68%) of voters say that Congressional budget cutters should “find other places in the budget to save money.”
Downside: Oscar Attention Increases Piracy
“With all those movies suddenly in demand, illegal downloads jump dramatically as well. According to Variety, in the week after nominations were announced on Jan. 25, illegal daily downloads of True Grit increased worldwide by 34 per cent, The Fighter by 23 per cent and Black Swan by 6 per cent.”
DreamWorks Acquires Rights to Make WikiLeaks Film
“Steven Spielberg looks set to oversee WikiLeaks: the Movie after securing the screen rights to WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, the book by Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding. Reportedly conceived as an investigative thriller in the mould of All the President’s Men, the film will be backed by DreamWorks.”
Canada Rejects Challenge to Law Requiring Newscasts to Be True
Following a public outcry, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has rejected a proposal – said to have been pushed, behind the scenes, by the office of Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper – to change the provision in Canadian law forbidding license holders from broadcasting “any false or misleading news.”
Why Don’t French Canada’s TV Successes Translate to English Canada?
“Quebec has a powerful TV culture well endowed with homegrown hits … It’s tempting to think that sharing shows with Radio-Canada might provide ratings fodder for the CBC, and even financial efficiencies.” But since one bilingual show from the 1980s (which lasted only two seasons in English), “the model has never proven itself.”