I plan to do posts on public domain every year and I really should have last January for this clip alone, but the year got away from me early. Now that was last year, and most of you already know about the Winnie the Pooh horror movie soon to be out in the world? So what’s in store for 2023 and all the goodies from 1927 now in the public domain in the U.S.? As…
For my work, I’m often focused on continuous improvement — and the silver lining of broken processes means there’s always room for improvement. On the one hand have you ever met those people for whom 99.9999% just isn’t close enough to 100%? Can more optimization be too much of a good thing? Derek Thompson over at The Atlantic feels that might be the case, starting, with that most American of statistics obsession: baseball. If you…
For whatever reason, I get a lot of hits for my “Future TV” posts especially the one about the future of Netflix in the Fall of 2017. Well it’s a whole new world out there in media-land these days because Netflix is far from the only streaming game in town. Heck, traditional Big Media aren’t the biggest of companies in media these days either. To learn more, check out the graphic below and the article…
Thinking of Monday’s post regarding Rod Serling, I’m continuing to read up about showrunners and industry trends in the wake of COVID. And if you’re wondering what a ‘showrunner’ of a TV show actually is, well, that’s changing too — as covered in this very long form article for Vice by Katharine Trendacosta. Perhaps from my time studying anthropology and perhaps my dayjob role of analyzing business processes, but I love detailed articles like these…
Top Gun: Maverick performed some “best of the best” box office maneuvers when it opened Memorial Day weekend and continues to do well. The original film proved to be as much a recruitment commercial as popcorn movie… and this sequel’s premiere aboard an aircraft carrier, Midway (now a museum ship), hints that this newest film will perform similarly. As a cinemaniac who’s seen more than a few military-themed movies over the decades, Hollywood’s connection to…
Thanks to several area theaters offering ridiculously good deals for students, I started regularly attending theaters in the 1980s. Almost from the get-go, I was exposed to what is generally termed “non-traditional casting,” including a production of Macbeth with a cast that included actors who, at the time, I would not have instantly guessed as “Scottish.” Any preconceived notions I might have had of what the Scottish characters “ought to look like” were retired by…
While it seems that not everyone liked the latest screen version of Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi novel Dune, it’s the first film in a long time that I finished watching and wanted to immediately watch again. I’m up to seeing it five times now, so it’s safe to say I’m a fan (I find much to love in the other two screen versions as well, but that’s for another post). One of the most striking…
Many of you have seen the sentiment expressed in the title above, but it’s always worth remembering… and remembering we, as a species, will likely figure out how to go faster than the speed of light before we break the above constraints. A post by writer Mark Evanier reminded me of how these constraints can often come into play in the writing world, which led to a good musing on his part: How does one…
Lest any of you think I’m going to populate the blog with repeatedly grim tales of people being sucky (as I have for a couple Wednesdays and this morning), I just wanted to highlight the Patton Oswalt interview I linked in last week’s post about film distribution. Really, if you are at all interested in his career or perspective on things (he is a tremendous film geek in addition to his other geekdoms), the hour…
Last Wednesday’s post about how some film distributors led to some discussion amongst friends on the Interwebs and elsewhere. One colleague who’s been a filmmaker and exhibitor pointed out how there are so many sticky problems with film distribution, it’s a difficult problem to handle — and there are definitely some issues with some of the smaller distributors. However, that made me think of how the major distributors engage in creative accounting that’s about as…