Category: media

“Forget Milk Duds and popcorn. Welcome to the movie theater industry’s equivalent of the first-class tourist cabin: the luxury theater. Betting that moviegoers will pay triple the average price of a U.S. movie ticket to be pampered like Hollywood moguls may seem odd at a time when the bargain mentality is gripping consumers.”

“Box Office Mojo said attendance so far this year was about 1.39 billion, already a 3 percent increase over last year, even before counting many holiday blockbuster releases. That is still off about 12 percent from 2002, the attendance peak for the decade, but a far better showing than 2008, when attendance dropped 4.5 percent.”

“By 2012, the ceiling for ad airtime will fall 18% to 12%, and will apply to satellite and terrestrial channels, communications minister Paolo Romani said, adding that the move was in viewers’ interests.”

“In a true Christmas episode–one that centers around the holidays, as opposed to an installment that just happens to take place around the winter solstice–something threatens to wreck the celebrations before the inevitable happy ending. That menacing force, furthermore, always seems to fit one of three boilerplates.”

“The last decade has witnessed the studios’ gradual and nearly complete abandonment of the adult audience. You may or may not trust anyone over 30, but the reality is that getting people in that age group into movie theaters on a regular basis has become too herculean a task for Hollywood to attempt on a regular basis.”

Her “Britain’s Got Talent” videos attracted more than 120 million views worldwide. list released Wednesday marks the first time that YouTube has ranked its most-watched videos in any year since its 2005 inception.

“They sent me emails that said ‘Now that we’ve seen what can be done with 300 dollars, let’s see what you can do with 30 million,” Alvarez told Agence France-Presse.

Nancy Meyers “is one of those rare people in or out of Hollywood for whom power is not an end in itself but a means to an end – in her case, the ability to get films like What Women Want, The Holiday and Something’s Gotta Give made precisely as she envisions them.”

“His early films in the 1980s, unsparing epics about political misrule and poverty, won him global fame but put him on a collision course with the censors. Yet in the 20 years since the Tiananmen Square protests, he has been transformed into the regime’s favourite artistic son, creative director of the Olympics opening ceremony.”

“[T]here was the … comedy of seeing a gawky animal enjoy the sacraments of postwar culture. Ed submits to psychoanalysis, goes to costume pageants, orders shoes over the phone. The joke is not just that he acts human; it’s the implication that the better part of early-’60s home life could be managed, quite adeptly, by a horse with a vocabulary.”