the Disney-Fox merger and film/TV production/exhibition hegemony in general

via jaymc:

The US domestic box office total for the week of Mar 20-26 was $5,179. The same week in 2019 was $204,193,406.

$5,155 of that was home rentals of an indie shot in Klamath Falls, Oregon, whereby renters can direct $3.25 of their "ticket price" to an independent cinema in a handful of states.

The other $24 was for Lost In America (the new homeless documentary, not the Albert Brooks film).

Kino Lorber is doing something in that vein, VOD of new release indies and foreign films where profits are split with local theaters.

Yeah, Kino did a push for Bacarau last week, and this volunteer-run arthouse in Seattle has switched all possible existing bookings to home rental. I'm guessing that the "Phoenix Oregon" distributor was just canny enough about setting up reporting their takings.

Are you putting together the final pieces to prove that Disney Did Coronavirus, sic?

Disney+ didn't want butts on their platform so they edited Splash with digital fur technology pic.twitter.com/df8XE0G9om

— Allison Pregler 📼 (@AllisonPregler) April 13, 2020

The US domestic box office total for the week of Mar 20-26 was $5,179. The same week in 2019 was $204,193,406

The entire box office last week was $1,710 for Swallow, all at one Florida drive-in.

This week they're showing it in a double feature with Marcel Marceau Vs The Nazis biopic Resistance on one screen, and Trolls World Tour b2b with ET on another, so there could be a top 3 movies reported next week.

An Australian film was #1 for the weekend's US box office!

Jed Kurzel's Peter Carey adaptation The True History Of The Kelly Gang took $9,839 in 5 theatres.

Supposedly it's out on streaming services, but I can't find it in Canada.

this should work afaict

US only

ah, I vpn'd to look but 🤷

It took “Parasite” *nineteen weeks* to get onto 2000 screens. Because it was able to build word of mouth through the awards season.

This is devastating news for mid-size and indie studios.

— Kevin Jagernauth (@jag24fps) July 28, 2020

^ AMC and Universal have signed a deal reducing the theatrical window to 17 days, in exchange for AMC getting a cut of the VOC revenue.

*VOD

jesus christ, no

― mh, Tuesday, November 19, 2019 9:21 AM (eight months ago)
christ

― weird ilx but sb (Doctor Casino), Tuesday, November 19, 2019 9:57 AM (eight months ago)

five-baggers for everyone

― imago, Tuesday, November 19, 2019 9:59 AM (eight months ago)

Bob Iger's erection could cut steel today

― Greta Van Show Feets BB (milo z), Tuesday, November 19, 2019 10:18 AM (eight months ago)

"Given this changing marketplace, the Court finds that it is unlikely that the remaining Defendants would collude to once again limit their film distribution to a select group of theaters in the absence of the Decrees and, finds, therefore, that termination is in the public interest."

:/

damn, man

wow a little naive maybe??

Or, y'know, completely cognizant of the havoc this will wreak.

'We completely trust The Big Bad Wolf to leave this huge, glistening, scrumptious turkey roast on the counter right where it is'

Sure would love to see that judge's stock portfolio.

Also, Disney phasing out physical media, significantly on the format that favours 20th Century Fox catalogue restorations

when Disney bought Lucasfilm, as contract-holder they stopped paying Alan Dean Foster his royalties on the still-in-print original 1970s Star Wars novels (one ghosted adaptation, one pre-Empire sequel). when they bought Fox, they similarly stopped paying his royalties on the adaptations of Alien, Aliens and Alien³.

Having already had the US copyright law rewritten to suit them several times, they are now attempting to break it through precedent for all prose publishing.

They will not respond to Foster's lawyers, to his agents, or to his professional not-a-union org, and have demanded that he sign an NDA before they will respond to him: http://www.sfwa.org/disney-must-pay/

what??? that is... completely fucked up!

It is. I was just reading that last night. Apparently their argument is that when they bought Fox, they bought the assets but NOT the liabilities. Insane.

Crooked as hell. Hopefully they do the right thing

Tracer wait until you hear about the guy who coincidentally started getting a million-dollar annual stipend from a future division of Disney, after he started going to court to testify that authors don't deserve royalties, because if they'd signed non-existent contracts decades before, the contracts probably would have said they had no rights

Does the world need to fall apart completely for Disney to die?

it’s a small world, after all

Apparently their argument is that when they bought Fox, they bought the assets but NOT the liabilities. Insane.

This is insane enough that, no matter how many high-paid lawyers Disney can throw at this suit, the judge who adjudicates Foster's case needs to award him some sky-high punitive damages. Something so big that Disney stock takes a hit.

They presumably think that the chance of setting legal precedent is worth the risk. And if you're soullessly evil, this is true!

Some discussion over on the "what to watch on streaming services" thread about AT&T, already slashing all their entertainment divisions (and various other ones) in order to make up losses on the botched launch of HBO Max, going day-and-date for all 2021 theatrical releases.

In this Daily Beast interview with Steven Soderbergh, he has several thoughts about this being a moderate move (NB: he has an exclusive deal with HBO Max already):

Is this the beginning of the end for theaters?

No. Not at all. It’s just a reaction to an economic reality that I think everybody is going to have to acknowledge pretty soon, which is that even with a vaccine, the theatrical movie business won’t be robust enough in 2021 to justify the amount of P&A you need to spend to put a movie into wide release. There’s no scenario in which a theater that is 50 percent full, or at least can’t be made 100 percent full, is a viable paradigm to put out a movie in. But that will change. We will reach a point where anybody who wants to go to a movie will feel safe going to a movie.

I think somebody sat down and did a very clear-eyed analysis of what COVID is going to do in the next year, even with a potential vaccine, and said, I don’t see this as being workable in 2021. Because let’s be clear: there is no bonanza in the entertainment industry that is the equivalent of a movie that grosses a billion dollars or more theatrically. That is the holy grail. So the theatrical business is not going away. There are too many companies that have invested too much money in the prospect of putting out a movie that blows up in theaters—there’s nothing like it. It’s all going to come back. But I think Warners is saying: not as soon as you think.

Are you worried that once the genie is out of the bottle, it’ll be difficult to put it back in?

No. I think it’ll finally push the studios and NATO (National Association of Theater Owners) to have some practical and realistic conversations about windowing. Because there needs to be more fluidity. There’s not going to be one template that fits every movie. Every movie is different. You need the flexibility. If you’re in a bad situation, and you’ve got a movie that you opened wide, and you know Friday at 3 p.m. it’s not working, you need to be able to get it on a platform as soon as possible. You spent so much money trying to make this work, and if it didn’t, you should be able to do whatever you want to do. Theaters are going to be pushing you out anyway because you bombed. They’re looking for the next thing that’s going to work. I just think we live in a technological world that allows for fluidity that we’re just not seeing right now. We’re still seeing this broad template that’s supposed to work for everything, and that’s not how it’s going to get solved.

Will theaters wind up being only the domain of big-budget spectaculars?

I think there are a lot of factors to consider when wondering if that’s the way things are going to go. One variable that hasn’t really been scaled up is that, now that we live in an all-digital world, all of these big theater chains have the ability to turn themselves into repertory cinemas in which they screen films from any period of the last 120 years for audiences who’ve never seen them in a theater. There are all these movies from the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, and early aughts that nobody has seen in a theater. Big hits, great movies. And I’m waiting for somebody to go, OK, we’re going to have a program where everybody knows that on these certain nights, or on the weekend, you put them out. When I was growing up, the repertory cinema had the calendar for the fall, and you would know, oh, they’re going to show Deliverance, they’re going to show this. There are options here to get people back into the habit of going to see movies, and giving them something they’ve haven’t seen before, that aren’t being explored at any sizeable scale. So that’s one thing.

The other thing is, every time we think that it’s just going to be tentpoles and blockbusters—and art-house movies on the other end—something shows up in the middle and works. Downton Abbey made a lot of money. That movie was coming out when we were in discussions with Warners about Let Them All Talk, and I pointed to that as an example of what I consider to be our audience. That’s our demographic; that’s the audience I want. And look, they showed up for that.

I’d love for his multiplex repertory idea to take off but that feels like something that already would have. Fathom Events do not get good reviews locally for picture quality.

it's not totally off-base. My local (non-AMC, non-Regal) chains already do one or two rep screenings a month. i do think it just hasn't fully been done right, aside from smaller examples like Alamo

More writers coming out and forming a task force to try to get Disney to pay the royalties they're ignoring.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/28/disneymustpay-authors-form-task-force-missing-payments-star-wars-alien-buffy

This is such nickel and dime bullshit, all the book and comic royalties they could possibly owe would be a rounding error on one page of their books.

This situation is no longer hypothetical. Fox had licensed the comics rights to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Dark Horse. After Disney purchased Fox, they withdrew those rights from Dark Horse and granted them to Boom! Comics. When one Buffy author contacted Boom! about missing royalties they were told that “royalties don’t transfer.”

Disney is one of the owners of Boom! Comics.

Surely this is... illegal behaviour?

....from Disney?

Not long ago, in one of the John Carpenter threads, sic gave an overview of how fucked-up Boom is as a comics publisher.

Big Trouble is a film that revels in physicality, I can see light 2D-styled drawing not connecting with someone trying to evoke the film in their reading (the text on that page said Eric Powell, but the image clearly wasn't Powell).

fyi Boom is one of the most outrageously exploitative publishers in the field, reading their output from your municipal library is a better option if you have it.

― grab bag cum trash bag (sic), Friday, March 5, 2021 7:26 AM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

That's a bummer - I've really been enjoying Something is Killing the Children. How outrageously exploitative are they?

― peace, man, Monday, March 8, 2021 12:04 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

They pay $35 a page for scripts, $100 a page for writing & drawing. Make t-shirts and merch of artists' work without compensation. Underpay invoices, pay months late, sometimes ghost artists altogether. Recruitment model is largely to give young artists their first jobs so it's easier to rip them off. "Some shady stuff in their contracts, and sometimes tries to secretly annul contracts by slipping extra clauses into the fine print of their payment vouchers," per one former worker.

(I assume Tynion is treated better, likewise John Allison - but I have also assumed that Allison stopped drawing Giant Days himself when it went to Boom bcz their rates weren't worth it.)

― armoured van, Holden (sic), Monday, March 8, 2021 2:24 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

Oh wait, you just posted here in the hour that I've had this thread open. lol.

Ouch. I had no idea they were so bad (or that they were even owned by Disney, before this article) - a shame because I like a lot of their output.

Disney doesn’t own them in whole: 20th Century Fox bought a piece of them in 2017, and Disney inherited that in 2019.

Amusingly enough, Boom! had the licence for Disney comics c. 2009-2010, but it was pulled after repeated contract violations, including sending stories to print without getting them approved by Disney.

great news!

Amazon is weeks into negotiations on a deal to acquire MGM for about $9 billion, industry sources tell Variety.

Chatter that Amazon (and other tech giants) have been sniffing around MGM has circulated for some time. But sources indicated that Amazon’s interest in acquiring the studio has taken on a new tenor beyond the usual rumor mill. The deal is said to be being orchestrated by Mike Hopkins, senior VP of Amazon Studios and Prime Video, directly with MGM board chairman Kevin Ulrich, whose Anchorage Capital is a major MGM shareholder.

https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/amazon-mgm-acquisition-talks-9-billion-1234975168/

https://nitratediva.wordpress.com/2021/05/16/dave-kehr-fox-film-interview/?fbclid=IwAR1XOJwqx0_LtfpfuOAtsWOz0TXS3hY5UGPvN6I8WBRGGCr_C9pQPi04lUM

THIS is why I was afraid that Disney would put the surviving pre-1935 Fox films into the vault next to Song of the South, never to be heard from again. Some of these titles, when I saw them at AFI or Capitolfest, are as jaw-dropping as this interview claims.

Does anyone here have access to MoMA's Virtual Cinema? I hesitate to spend $110 a year for a plethora of artist documentaries that lack the entertainment value of paint drying, in order to access two or three Fox pre-Code films.

$110 a year isn't THAT bad compared to other services, but on top of everything else I'm paying for...

Exactly--I already pay $90 a year for the Criterion Channel, plus whatever ungodly sum per month for cable in order to get TCM.

https://harpers.org/archive/2021/06/stages-of-grief-what-the-pandemic-has-done-to-the-arts/

"We need an art movement like the one we have for food, a movement for responsible consumption."

Okay, but how about transparency and responsibility in art distribution? If I buy a theater ticket/book/concert ticket, how much of what I am paying goes to the creator, how much to venue/production overheads, and how much into corporate coffers?

Amazon Buys MGM

https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/amazon-buys-mgm-studio-behind-james-bond-for-8-45-billion-1234980526/

Does this seem like an actually wise move, or just something Amazon did to prevent Apple or someone else from doing it first?

Didn’t something come out last year that Bezos pushed into expanding Amazon Video because he wanted to meet actresses?

The pre-1980 MGM movies are owned by WB, right?