Soaps Looking for the Union Label, for a lot less. Moving television shows from the TV screen to the computer screen is not easy, as the folks who want to give new life to soap operas "All My Children" and "One Life to Live" are learning.
Prospect Park, a company headed by former Walt Disney Co. executive Rich Frank and Jeff Kwatinetz, the former head of the talent management company the Firm, made big headlines earlier this month when it announced plans to take the two soaps, which are being cancelled by ABC, and put them on the Web. "All My Children" goes away at the end of summer and "One Life to Live" ends in January.
Details about plans to do this have been scant, and on Monday the company said it is "in the process of working out the essential terms of our proposed collective bargaining agreements with the appropriate guilds and unions," which needs to be done before other plans can go forward.
The company did not elaborate, but producing the two shows for the Internet will mean persuading the unions, including the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, to swallow a lot of cuts. Soaps have large casts and writing staffs and cost as much as $50 million a year to produce. Those are numbers that probably won't work on a show done for the Internet unless Prospect Park can come up with a subcription model or perhaps a secondary window on a cable network.
Besides trying to sign up the cast and crew -- likely for less money -- Prospect Park probably would also have to find new homes to shoot the soaps. ABC is planning on using the New York set of "One Life to Live" for its Katie Couric
talk show launching next year. Reading the Peter meter. Peter Chernin's first really big movie ("Rise of the Planet of the Apes") and really big television show ("Terra Nova") will have their debuts in the coming weeks. But will running a production company be enough to fulfill one of Hollywood's most respected executives and a former No. 2 to News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch. The
Los Angeles Times looks at Chernin's new company and whether there is something else on his mind.
3D slump is killin' Imax stock. Imax Corp. stock plummeted more than 11% after an analyst raised concerns that the company's digital and large-format screens don't have as much box-office mojo as previously believed.
Stifel Nicolaus analyst Ben Mogil downgraded box-office projections for the second half of the year and lowered his target for the company's stock price to $27, from $32. His report came a week after similar predictions were made by Merriman Capital. The stock was trading at $25.33 late Monday.
"We believe that estimates for IMAX for [second half 2011] are too optimistic given that the [fourth quarter 2011] slate has three kids' films, a genre which this year has seen considerably lower 3D share this year compared to last," Mogil wrote.
Most, but not all, Imax movies play in 3-D, a technology that has been dropping in popularity among domestic movie audiences.
Thor's Hammer more powerful than Captain America? It turns out that "Captain America" wasn’t the fastest superhero out of the gate at the box office this summer after all.
On Sunday, Paramount Pictures
estimated that "Captain America: The First Avenger," the 3-D film starring Chris Evans as the Marvel comic book character, would gross $65.8 million over the weekend. With that figure, it would have had the biggest first weekend of any superhero film released this summer -- just barely topping the $65.7 million debut of the 3-D "Thor" back in May.
But when the ticket sales were accounted for on Monday, Paramount said "Captain America" had actually collected $65.1 million over the weekend. Of course, that's still a solid opening -- one that's more than $10 million higher than the debuts of both "Green Lantern" and "X-Men: First Class" in June.
And even though "Thor" was able to throw down the hammer in the initial box office battle, "Captain America" may ultimately have more power than the Norse god in the long run. Audiences who saw "Captain America" this weekend loved the film, giving it an average grade of A-minus, according to market research firm CinemaScore; "Thor," comparatively, scored a B-plus.
Are you ready for some football? NFL owners and the players have struck a new agreement and are now going to start scrambling to get ready for the football season, which is scheduled to start in about six weeks. The television networks are no doubt happy. Now they have something they know people will watch while the networks promote their news shows. Coverage of the new deal and what it means for television from the
New York Times,
Sports Illustrated, and
Los Angeles Times.
Who will play Chris Berman? 20th Century Fox has acquired the rights to "Those Guys Have All The Fun," which is an oral history of the creation of ESPN and how it became a sports juggernaut. Frankly, I think HBO would be a better place to try to make a movie out of the book, and I wonder whether this will ever get to the big screen. The dirt from
Deadline Hollywood.
No more pay to play. ABC News says it won't find clever ways to compensate interview subjects anymore. The network, like others, has been criticized for compensating subjects for interviews. Although never outright saying so-and-so was paid for sitting down with "Good Morning America," the network would instead strike deals to "license" photos or videos from the subject of a story. It sounds sincere, but let's check back in six months and see if the network is sticking to it. Details from the
Daily Beast.
Leaving HBO. News that DreamWorks Animation
is cutting short its output deal with HBO in order to work with Netflix
sent the "Shrek" producer's stock to its highest point in more than a month.
DreamWorks Animation's current agreement with pay-TV channel HBO was to run until 2014. Under the terms of the deal, DreamWorks Animation movies go exclusively to HBO during the "pay cable window," which typically starts about six months after theatrical debut.
However, DreamWorks Animation has gone to HBO and obtained an exit from the contract so it can instead make its movies available on Netflix's Internet streaming service during that window, a person familiar with the matter confirmed.
The deal with Netflix would only be for DreamWorks Animation movies released in 2013 and 2014. Older movies from the studio would remain available exclusively to HBO for the next several years.
DreamWorks, led by Jeffrey Katzenberg, will be the third independent studio to agree to use Netflix as its pay-cable partner, along with Relativity Media and FilmDistrict.
Investors were apparently pleased with the news, first reported Sunday by
Bloomberg, and sent DreamWorks Animation stock up 4% in midday trading Monday. The Dow Jones industrial average and Nasdaq
composite, meanwhile, were both down for the day.
Not making it a Netflix night. Netflix released earnings Monday that beat projections, but the company still took a little beating from Wall Street over its projections for what's ahead and the continued backlash against its new subscription rates. More from the
Associated Press and
Los Angeles Times. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart has launched its own streaming service, using Vudu, which the company bought 18 months ago. More on that from
Variety.
A legacy of Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination hearings means Americans won't get to use Netflix on Facebook.In a letter to investors that accompanied its financial results Monday, Netflix said that this fall it will launch its Facebook integration in Canada and Latin America but not in the U.S.
The reason: The Video Privacy Protection Act, a 1988 law
IATSE and American Idol reach an agreement. Fremantle, the production company behind Fox's "American Idol" and the upcoming "The X Factor" as well as NBC
's "America's Got Talent," has signed a three-year agreement with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.
The new deal will cover programs made for U.S. broadcast and cable networks.
"This new enhanced agreement underlines our commitment to working with Fremantle Media North America on some of the biggest programming brands on television," said Matthew D. Loeb, international president of IATSE.
Previously, IATSE had agreements with some individual Fremantle shows but not the entire company.
Take me to the river. ESPN's coverage of the World Series of Poker may look a little different to viewers as some of the traditional advertisers -- online poker outfits -- will be missing because the government is going after online gaming. The
Wall Street Journal looks at what the Justice Department crackdown means for televised poker.
Inside the Los Angeles Times: A look at the lasting impact of "
Boyz N the Hood" two decades after its release. The plan to
move ABC soaps "All My Children and One Life to Live" to the Web has hit another hurdle.
-- Joe Flint and others
