HOW HOLLYWOOD OVERHYPES ITS FILMS

From Entertainment Weekly.

both official stage-managed Comic-Con leaks and unofficial long-lens TMZ leaks — is beginning to radically change the way a generation of moviegoers talk about movies. We have become obsessed with pre-release minutiae — casting announcements, plot points, set design. All of this has, I think, taken the focus off the most important thing: The freaking movie.

This is why the blockbuster season of 2011 has felt so particularly uninspired. It’s not that the movies are necessarily worse than they were 10 years ago (although nothing released 10 years ago was even half as bad as Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides). It’s just that very few of the movies were even half as interesting as the chatter that led up to their release. Take, for example, The Hangover Part 2, a film which dominated the news cycle one year ago — remember the Mel Gibson flare-up? Now, the movie was a massive success at the box office. But the only conversation we ever really had about Hangover 2 — and we all had this conversation many, many times — was: “Wow, they really just remade the first one.”

It might sound funny to say this, but the film with the longest cultural tail of summer 2011 didn’t even technically come out in the summer. I’m talking about Fast Five. Yes, it’s a silly film — but for a few weeks in May, it was also the silly film that everyone was talking about it. Part of that can be credited to the film’s surprisingly pitch-perfect over-the-top tone — best exemplified by the sequence when Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson wrestle each other through multiple walls like a pair of shaved grizzly bears. But I would argue a different theory: People were genuinely surprised by Fast Five. It was not a film that had been sold for a year in advance. The film was not at Comic-Con. The trailer did not debut one year in advance. There were no TMZ photos of Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson hanging out off-camera rubbing oil on their biceps, even though God knows that would have torn up the internet.

It is a very interesting article and worth the read. 

AIRLINE DELAYS ON THE RISE

From the AP

More than a dozen planes sat on the tarmac for more than three hours in June, the government said Tuesday. It's the second month in a row that the number of three-hour delays reached double digits since a government rule went into effect over a year ago aiming to limit them.

The Department of Transportation said 14 planes were stuck on the tarmac for over three hours in June. There were 16 such delays in May. There were only 20 in the full year before that. The rule threatening millions of dollars in fines for delays of three hours or more was implemented on April 29 of last year.

DOT hasn't fined an airline for violating the rule, because it says that none of the delays was serious enough to justify the big penalties. Nearly all of them were caused by bad weather.

[snip]

June is one of the busiest travel months of the year and it's also peak thunderstorm season.

You do have to wonder the motivation behind this article sine it clearly states that it was the weather that caused these delays.  Yes I've been stuck on planes for a couple of hours on the ground and its not fun but all of the time those delays were caused by weather.

DOW JONES LOSES 634 POINTS

From CNBC

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 634.76 points, or 5.55 percent, to finish at 10,809.85, well below the psychologically-significant 11,000 mark. The move marks the blue-chip index's biggest point and percent drop since Dec. 1, 2008.

BofA [BAC  6.51    -1.66  (-20.32%)   ] and Alcoa [AA  11.33    -1.46  (-11.42%)   ] were the top laggards on the index.

The S&P 500 plummeted 79.92 points, or 6.66 percent, to close at 1,119.46, its lowest close since Sept. 10, 2010. 

Nasdaq sank 174.72 points, or 6.90 percent, to end at 2,357.69, its lowest close since October 4, 2010.

August is already on track to be the worst month for the S&P and Nasdaq since Oct. 2008.

The CBOE Volatility Index, widely considered the best gauge of fear in the market, spiked above 40 to touch its highest level since Mar. 2009. 

No one knows what tomorrow will bring.

                        

THE GIANT CASINO

From the film "Rouge Trader".

DOW CRASHES 500 POINTS

DREAMWORKS ANIMATION LOOKING FOR A NEW DISTIRBUTOR

From TheWrap.com

DreamWorks Animation is looking for a new home.

The studio’s board of director has rejected a proposal from Paramount to extend its distribution pact for another year, an individual with knowledge of the negotiations told TheWrap. 

DreamWorks' current deal with Paramount expires in 2012. 

Finding a new landing ground for Jeffrey Katzenberg's animation house, however, could be difficult. Most of the studios have animation divisions.
Fox has ramped up its animated output, scoring hits with films such as "Ice Age," and Universal launched its own division, Illumination, headed up by Chris Meledandri in 2007. Sony also has an animation division. 
Warner Bros. is reportedly not interested in distributing DreamWorks Animation's films.

It will be quite interesting to see where Dreamworks Animation finds for a distributor for its films.

THE RULES OF SMURFDOM

 Smurfs U.S. legal counsel Raymond Kurtz

Smurfs U.S. legal counsel Raymond Kurtz has penned a interesting article on how he did the deal to bring the Smurfs to the big screen. Here is a brief excerpt.

The process strung out for three years. My clients were ready to pull the plug a dozen times. But the deal did finally come to fruition. I remember that moment when my BlackBerry buzzed at 2 a.m. with a long-awaited email from a copyright lawyer at Paramount.

But we couldn't exhale yet. We waited for production to start, but years went by and the Smurfs sat in the seemingly endless queue of movies-to-be. Under the terms of our contract, the studio had the option to give the rights back to my client or assign their rights to another studio after several years.

If you want to get a inside view on what legal issues get involved when a major franchise goes Hollywood then here it is.