Category: The Biz
2015’s “Inspired By a True Story” Event Movies Haven’t Fared So Well at the Box Office
Over the summer, for some reason most of the movies I saw came with the same three trailers: Everest, In the Heart of the Sea and The Finest Hours. Sometimes The Walk would be thrown […]
Box Office: Star Wars: The Force Awakens & Sisters – You Can See Them Both!
Thanks to Sisters and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip, Star Wars is not the only new movie coming out this week. The question, though, is why. Why would anyone dare challenge the box […]
The Business of Bond: Everyone Wants the Movie Rights, But at What Cost?
The new James Bond movie, Spectre, is officially the franchise record holder for product placement. 17 different brands show up on screen throughout the film, each one of them representing millions upon millions of dollars […]
Horror Movie Profitability & How It’s Made Jason Blum The Least Cool Kid in Hollywood
The most recent Paranormal Activity movie will be the lowest-grossing in franchise history. Eh. That’s a shame. They had a good run. When does the next Conjuring come out? And that’s exactly how turnover happens […]
How Did Hollywood Not See Jurassic World’s Big Debut Coming?: The Sorry State of Movie Tracking
Expectations versus reality. So often, that’s what Hollywood box office reporting boils down to: comparing how much money a movie made in its opening weekend to how much it was expected to make. It’s a […]
Tom Rothman’s Strategy to Save Sony Pictures: “What’s Going to Galvanize Audiences Who Aren’t Interested in Comic Books?”
In Variety’s recent profile of Sony Picture Entertainment’s new chairman Tom Rothman, we learn that the studio has basically mirrored the way sports teams often transition from a nurturing player’s coach to a hard-nosed taskmaster. […]
Why Is The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Considered a Failure, But X-Men: Days of Future Past Is Not?
A little over 6 months before X-Men: Days of Future Past came out we learned it had become the second most expensive film in the nearly 80 year history of 20th Century Fox, trailing only […]
Community: Age of Yahoo Is Almost Upon Us, But, Seriously, What the Heck Is Yahoo Screen?
If not for a 40-minute phone call between Kathy Savitt and Dan Harmon last June, what I am about to say would have never been possible: The new trailer for season 6 of Community is […]
Box Office: Will Smith’s Focus & The Creeping Death of the Movie Star
There is a funny little thing actors sometimes have to do that I call the “Please like me again!” press tour. It’s the this-time-will-be-different-I-swear dance of promoting a new movie after your last movie bombed, […]
Oh, Now I Understand How Netflix’s Business Operates – They’re Deeply In Debt
In an interview with KCRW’s The Business, Boyhood director Richard Linklater discussed the often shady realities of dealing with private equity funds and random producers to secure film financing, “There are so many people – […]
