KCRW's The Business Brief

The Iraq Movie Surge

webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW.com) — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 19:44:00 EST

The $100 million action thriller Green Zone opened the weekend before last, and so far it's brought in an unimpressive $24 million domestically. But perhaps even before executives at Universal green-lit Green Zone, they had to have known that it wasn't going to make a lot of money...

Trade Wars

webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW.com) — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:44:00 EST

For years and years, the business has been the happy battle ground of two trade papers ? Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. But in recent years, the fight has stopped being between the two rivals, and turned into a fight for survival...

Distribution Is Marketing

webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW.com) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:44:00 EST

I'll spare you the Oscar talk; I?ll just report that it looks like ratings for the telecast are up and James Cameron got smacked down, so all is right in Hollywood. Instead I want to talk about movie distribution....

Water Cooler Talk

webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW.com) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:44:00 EST

In 1994, 204 million Americans watched the winter Olympics in the picturesque Norwegian town of Lillehammer. The games that just ended in Vancouver had an 8% smaller audience. Which seems even worse considering that there are something like 20% more Americans now than there were in 1994.

Rating the Raters

webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW.com) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 19:44:00 EST

Nielsen, by far the biggest of the media ratings companies, proudly announced last week that they will start counting on-line and DVR-TV watching this fall. To which I say to Nielsen, "Welcome to 2008..."

Black Blockbuster

webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW.com) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:44:00 EST

As the nation celebrates the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, the name of President Obama is coming up an awful lot. But the folks in Hollywood are not talking much about the remarkable fact that their most bankable movie star these days is also black. They're just not sure what to do with that reality...

Everybody Hates Jay

webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW.com) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:44:00 EST

If you've just woken from an extended bout of unconsciousness, you may not have heard that NBC moved Jay Leno to 10pm last fall, and that now that grand experiment in prime-time is over. Well, fear not. You'll have plenty of opportunity to catch up on the juicy details as the debacle is dissected with great glee over the next few weeks after all, this is not only a major story, but a delicious opportunity for schadenfreude. But I would say that schadenfreude could be as costly to the TV business as a whole as the grand experiment could be costly to NBC...

The New (Entertainment) World

webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW.com) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:44:00 EST

"Nobody knows anything." That's the line lifted from William Goldman's 1983 Hollywood memoir adventures in the screen trade that has famously come to describe the entertainment industry. It's become a cliché, but it's a cliché, of course, because its true. And if it was true then and it was imagine how true it is now, as the entertainment industry does the herky jerky into a wildly uncertain future. I thought I'd outline some of the terrifying thoughts that are going through the heads of show biz bigwigs as they go back to work in the new year...

How Is $400 Million like $100,000?

webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW.com) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:44:00 EST

Avatar is finally coming out this week. At a cost of $300 or $400 million, James Cameron's sci-fi action epic is one of the most expensive movies ever made. At the same time, a studio is talking about starting up a new division to make movies with budgets of less than $100,000. Kind of makes Hollywood look like a cartoon character running towards a fork in the road and trying to go both ways at once. And yet Avatar has more in common with a tiny movie like Paranormal Activity than you might think...

Tortoise and the Hare

webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW.com) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:44:00 EST

Slow and steady wins the race is the moral of the famous fable about the tortoise and the hare, but the folks in Hollywood clearly aren't big on Aesop. A better analogy might actually be baseball. The studios like the home runs, even though a lot of singles are arguably a safer and surer way to score points...