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'Get Smart' Adds Anne Hathaway's Man Trouble to Formula For Box-Office Glory
Shame on anyone — anyone! — who would dare trivialize Anne Hathaway's recent break-up with entrepreneur and check-kiting hobbyist Raffaello Follieri as anything but a natural process of hearts drifting apart under the intense pressures of careers, fame and/or state investigations. And can't a nice girl just stay friendly with her notorious ex without facing insinuations she's manipulating their relationship on the week of her new film's release? We mean, really, Page Six — what's so wrong with that? More »
While deposed New Line kingpins Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne haven't given up hope of reestablishing their little corner of low-earning industry autonomy somewhere in our glassy wilds, it couldn't hurt to hedge a bit with the ax-swingers at Warner Bros. Or so we hear today, as the Dyspeptic Duo reportedly is lining up a first-look deal at WB while still attempting to rustle up financing for their replacement shingle to be. They're already keeping their old WeHo and NYC offices, with the four-year WB pact potentially allowing Shaye and Lynne a chance to keep their sputtering maverick assembly line going without having to settle for the sloppy genre seconds Warners plans to channel into the new New Line — i.e. The Last Mimzy really was the last Mimzy. Former New Line executive VP is joining the team as well; good luck and happy fundraising to all involved. [Variety]
trade roundup
Unencumbered By Boob-Job Drama, George Clooney Mulls His Next Step
· Warner Bros. is developing the spy thriller novel The Tourist as a potential George Clooney vehicle which will explode in the first reel and set the entire plot in motion. What about the goat movie? When does that one come out? [Variety]
· The WGA will hold a referendum next month to simplify its credit procedures, hopefully eliminating screenwriter name-gumbo like this. [Variety]
· If you're currently in production, we hope you're shooting in Waiverland, as SAG head Alan Rosenberg doubts any agreement will be reached by the deadline date of June 30. [Variety]
· Jack Black has dropped out of Borat-writer/director Todd Phillips's Man-Witch, a movie about a man who's a witch, supposedly because Black is concerned Phillips will shoot another movie called Hangover, about a bachelor party who wakes up in Vegas and realizes they lost the groom, first. May the best wacky premise win! [THR]
· Universal buys a comedy spec called Raindrops All Around Me, about "a socially inept high school teacher who learns to 'dumb it down' in order to fit in with the people around him." Said a Universal rep, "We think after a few more drafts to broaden the humor, Middle America will really eat this up!" [THR]
bitch session
Studio Players Blame Everyone But Themselves For Multiplex Glut
Jon Favreau isn't the only one haunted by release dates these days, though the execs polled recently by Claudia Eller and Josh Friedman aren't necessarily worried about having less than two years to write all the product placement into Iron Man 2. No, their fears hinge on the surplus of new releases reaching theaters annually — 517 titles in 2007 by the authors' counts (most others put it above 600), up 49 percent from '06. And while the glut has been essentially played out elsewhere, it is kind of rare to see such a studio-friendly perspective on the "crisis," even from the pushovers at the LAT; after all, it's the specialty labels of the world — your Warner Independents, not your Warner Bros. — really battling for life in the cluttered market.
But still, Get Smart versus Love Guru is a hell of a quandary. So just for the hell of it, let's hear what the put-upon, overproducing likes of Alan Horn and even Dick Cook are complaining about today:
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time warner
NBC Time Warner Still A Faraway, Corporate Media Monolith Dream
Time Warner is in many ways a self-sustaining media ecosystem: Their intermittently functioning cable networks and motion pictures wing create celebrities and cultural trends, which then wind up on the covers of their top-tier glossies, migrate online via their internet porthole AOL, and eventually float amidst the other sewage runoff filtered by bad-seed web-holding, TMZ, at which point the entire cycle begins anew. The only pie Time Warner has yet to stick a chubby little finger into is the business of network TV, and recent rumors have indeed suggested that they were hungrily circling NBC Universal. Addressing a media conference yesterday, CEO Jeff Bewkes issued a standard non-denial denial:
More »Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said Monday the media giant has "no agenda" regarding the acquisition of a television network, despite renewed speculation over a possible hook-up with NBC Universal.
doll house
Ladies Up, WB Down as 'American Girl' Gets Ready to Storm Box Office
The universe is piling on Warner Bros. today, with the studio bracing itself for its second straight summer misfire while the output from its recently euthanized offshoots New Line and Picturehouse achieved phenomenal successes in consecutive weeks. But NL's opening windfall for Sex and the City and Picturehouse's $27K-per-screen average last weekend for Mongol — the biggest art-house launch of the year to date — might not have anything on the 'House's toy-based, girly-girl follow-up, reports The NY Times: More »
Dept Of Consumers' RIghts
Time Warner Cable To Learn They're Being Sued Just As Soon As Their Service Is Restored
Longtime readers of Defamer no doubt recall the days when our corporate campus was limited to a fifty-acre plot on the Eastside. True, we had all the razor scooters and air hockey we ever dreamed of, but, unfortunately, we were also solely reliant on the unstable intertube-accessing services of Time Warner Cable. This led to frequent outages, requiring the entire editorial department to wander, laptops in hand, from Silver Lake coffee house to coffee house in a desperate search for a working connection—where we'd inevitably be greeted with hastily posted signs of this nature. Why rehash the wounds of the past, you ask? Well, read on:
More »Time Warner Cable Inc. was accused Thursday of lying to Los Angeles subscribers and providing shoddy customer service in a lawsuit that seeks potentially tens of millions of dollars in fines against the city's main provider of cable television.
fun and games
Play Along at Home with the Defamer Imploding Film Industry Scorecard
A range of problems persist this morning for movie distributors large and small, with the Weinsteins predictably suffering the karmic retribution for Fraggle Rock: The Movie and another round of threats, invective and spin making the rounds elsewhere. As such, we're spending a little time this morning cleaning up our Imploding Film Industry Scorecard. Tell us if your results vary:
THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY: Nikki Finke has spent the last two days trying to make something out of the Weinsteins reportedly falling two months behind on their residual payments to the Directors Guild of America. Gasp! Or something: An anonymous, "prominent Hollywood helmer" notified Finke that arbitration could start within "twenty days" if the matter isn't resolved. Harvey Weinstein himself followed up to say he knew nothing about it and that he was looking into the third party that handles the payments. The DGA itself acknowledged the delinquency Wednesday, and it didn't quite sound like the meltdown Finke was praying for:
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unsafe at any speed
Joel Silver Leaving Warners! Except He's Not! Let Him Get Back to You!
As if a third-place opening wasn't bad enough for Speed Racer producer Joel Silver, Page Six today added a liberal dose of existential crisis to the mix when it reported Silver may have flopped for Warner Bros. for the last time. "For the past few months, he's been trying to get his deal extended, but the thinking at Warner is maybe just let his contract run out," its source says — but wait! Silver himself told Nikki Finke yesterday that he's sought no such extension! But his contract still isn't being renewed! We're so confused — help us, Joel! More »
post mortem
The Worst is Yet to Come in 'Speed Racer' Crash-and-Burn
How's this for irony? The same week Warner Bros. reestablished its mainstream priorities by dramatically cutting off Picturehouse and Warner Independent at the knees, the studio opened the summer with one of its biggest bombs in years: Speed Racer, the imperially promoted, poorly received $100 million Wachowskis film that opened this weekend to $20.2 million — if that. A Defamer operative inside Time Warner sent word Sunday that the studio's estimate could be overstating its actual gross by as much as $2.5 million, placing it in third place overall behind the relatively well-received What Happens in Vegas, which Fox is calling at $20 million but is likelier to cap out between $18 and $18.5 million. We'll know the actual numbers later today, but as explained after the jump, it couldn't get much more sobering for Warner Bros. More »
the day after
Guilt, Blame and Other Wreckage From the Picturehouse/WIP Crash
The eulogies are on following Thursday's twin killing of Picturehouse and Warner Independent Pictures by the executioners at Warner Bros. — or perhaps more accurately, by hooded, high-ranking Time Warner axeman Jeff Bewkes, to whom some today are attributing the death penalty that ended in nearly 75 lost jobs between the two mini-majors. While we still suspect that WIP's demise in cosmically linked to its acquisition of the poisonously atrocious Alan Ball film Towelhead (another blogger disagrees, citing Funny Games instead), at least a few other observers have more official diagnoses from the murder scene. More »
rants
The Wachowskis Still in Hiding as 'Speed Racer' Circles the Drain
For all its confectionery imagery, Christina Ricci scene-stealing and the few other things Speed Racer gets right, it still faces a box-office false start that could make Leatherheads look like a hit in comparison. We sketched a few of the hurdles here yesterday (number one being its own studio's resignation to its underachievement), but at this point there's only one that counts: Larry and Andy Wachowski need to climb out of their hole.
It might be self-serving of us to suggest they publicize their films, and in a way, we empathize with their reclusion; Larry Wachowski has been the subject of sex-change and dominatrix-dating speculation since a feminized version of himself — earrings, plucked eyebrows, manicure — showed up on the Matrix Revolutions red carpet in Cannes five years ago with mistress Ilsa Strix (née Karen Winslow) on his arm. The siblings later sneaked into the New York premiere of V For Vendetta (which they wrote and co-produced), and last week in Los Angeles they went positively presidential with subterfuge at the debut of Speed Racer. "They did not do the red-carpet press line at the Nokia Theatre on Saturday, and were well-camouflaged during the after-party," wrote Borys Kit in The Hollywood Reporter. "Photographers were sworn to secrecy as to their whereabouts, and Warner Bros. assigned handlers the mission of keeping journalists off the scent."
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engine problems
'Speed Racer' Just Fine With Second Place, Thank You Very Much
With the buzz of The Dark Knight clearly audible a month-and-a-half behind it, this week's Speed Racer isn't a make-or-break summer tentpole for the gang at Warner Bros. That said, it's not really in the market for embarrassment, either, and the long-circulating word-on-the-street got a bit of trade-paper legitimization today in The Hollywood Reporter. To wit: The Wachowski Brothers' first non-Matrix film in 12 years is currently tracking in second place for the weekend behind defending box-office champ Iron Man: More »
strictly business
Two Months After Its Oscar Win, Could Picturehouse Be Closing Its Doors?
A few notes kicked under the door at Defamer HQ hint that the end may be near for Picturehouse, the Oscar-winning art house shingle plunged into limbo in February after its parent company New Line was absorbed by the Warner Bros. mothership. We have yet to hear where company president Bob Berney will wind up, though a popular rumor has him sharing power at Warners' other struggling boutique outpost, Warner Independent Pictures, with current WIP boss Polly Cohen. We posit at least one more underdog alternative as well — plus a prognosis for the remaining Picturehouse output — after the jump. More »
download lowdown
Why Don't We Feel Better About All These New Movies on ITunes?
The inevitable grouping of the major studios under the iTunes roof finally occurred today, when Apple officially announced it had reached agreements with Universal, Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros., Sony and Lionsgate (along with previous bedfellow Disney) on day-and-date downloads of their new DVD titles. The studios had made most releases available for rental since earlier this year (with catalog titles for sale before that), but this marks the first time users can buy and download new releases on their DVD street dates.
The good news: You can wait and watch Made of Honor on your iPod in about three months! The bad news: It'll cost you $14.99 to download it. (Or $9.99 three months after that.) And for digital media that costs exactly nothing to reproduce, package or distribute, we think that amounts to little more than information highway robbery. And just in time for the studios to stonewall SAG on new-media revenues!
More »
bacterial marketing
Quick! Catch This Nausea-Inducing, Bootlegged 'Dark Knight' Trailer Before WB Takes It Down!
Say you have a sincere interest in catching the latest The Dark Knight trailer—but not one so burning that it would require you to dash around Hollywood Blvd. counting the number of holes in aggro Chinese Theater Batman's costume, only to then learn via text message that the massive fire at Basque nightclub was in fact "The Joker's doing," before eventually corralling you and 500 other movie blog interns right back to where you started, so that you can file into a Mann's theater for the two-and-a-half-minute, viral experience of a lifetime. More »
trade roundup
D-Listers To Fly Through The Air With The Greatest Of Difficulty
· Here's what we can tell you about NBC's Celebrity Circus, possibly the most significant televised amateur circus event in recent history: Joey Fatone will be ringmaster. Scheduled to appear: Christopher Knight, Rachel Hunter, Antonio Sabato Jr., Blu Cantrell, and Jason "Wee Man" Acuna, whom we'll assume will be fired at some point from the Lil' Caesar's Cannon of Doom™. [Variety]
· Fox is sitting atop the big studio heap entering into the summer box office season (OMG! It's almost the summer box office season! Who's excited?!), but Warner Bros., with its one-two-three punch of Speed Racer, Get Smart, and The Dark Knight should comfortably take the lead. (Especially when you look at Fox's roster: Eddie Murphy's Dave and The X-Files: I'm Trying As Hard As I Can To Buy This Alien Mumbo-Jumbo, Mulder.) [THR]
