Why Hollywood kowtows to China. Censors and sensibility … MGM's soon-to-be-released Red Dawn has changed its axis of evil from China to North Korea.
Photograph: Allstar/MGM/Sportsphoto Ltd Last week North Korea threatened America with a nuclear strike. This week sees the UK release of Red Dawn, which features a North Korean invasion of the US. An impressive instance of Hollywood's far-sightedness? Not quite. Festival Scope: Festivals on Demand for Film Professionals World Wide. Erik Lundegaard: Are Critically Acclaimed Movies More Popular? They Were Last Year. British cinema's golden age is now. Compared to theatre, cinema is an entirely portable medium – think what our view of film would be like if all we saw were British movies, with occasional touring productions of foreign work.
No Hollywood blockbusters, no Korean ultra-violence, no Iranian minimalism. Nothing old, either – no Italian neorealism, or Czech new wave, or French poetic realism. Imagine what life for the British filmgoer would have been like, say, in 1978 – the highlight of your year would probably have been Death on the Nile, or Watership Down.
BSkyB to face no action over TV film monopoly. BSkyB was handed a reprieve by the competition watchdog after a ruling over the broadcaster's stranglehold on pay-TV movies was reversed.
Photograph: David Jones/PA BSkyB is to face no action from regulators over its monopoly of UK pay-TV film rights, after the Competition Commission decided that video on demand rivals such as LoveFilm and Netflix provide a vibrant market for consumers. The decision marks a U-turn by the competition regulator, which provisionally determined last August that BSkyB's contracts with the six major Hollywood studios – Disney, Warner Bros, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures and Universal Studios – were anti-competitive and needed to be weakened to allow rivals to flourish. The regulator has decided that as a result, consumers now have more choice. Capital, capital: the Arts Council and the art of economic rebalancing. James Corden at the National Theatre – three London Southbank institutions receive more in grants than the north and Midlands combined.
Photograph: Tristram Kenton Does the arts and culture community, and indeed even this network, need to be saying anything to Arts Council England (ACE) and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) before the second round of capital funding applications due this summer? Report from MEDIA Desk UK's Creative Europe seminar » MEDIA UK. Is the Hollywood remake dead? Exposed: the hundreds of City millionaires in film tax loophole - Business News - Business. Alain Grisay, chief executive of F&C Asset Management, and Lance Uggla, who runs the financial data firm Markit, are among representatives from big business who are members of the Eclipse 35 film investment partnership loophole, an analysis of the accounts by The Independent has found.
Coverage of Eclipse 35, which was ruled against in a tax tribunal this week, has focused on Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson, former England boss Sven Goran Eriksson and Nobby Solano, the ex-Newcastle United player. Other football stars including Bolton Wanderers' Jussi Jaaskelainen and the former Ireland international Graham Kavanagh are also named as members in the documents. US film industry set for four years of strong growth, predicts report. Stand by for the sound of clinking champagne glasses chiming around the Hollywood hills.
A leading accountancy firm has predicted that the US film industry is set for four years of healthy growth, defying predictions of a downturn due to internet piracy and waning DVD sales. Revenue is set to grow from box office returns, internet streaming services, cinema advertising, Blu-ray sales and home video kiosks, not only in the US but across the globe, according to the report by PricewaterhouseCoopers. The upturn is predicted to last until at least 2015. In north America, the film industry is anticipated to generate $50.3bn in four years' time compared to $40.8bn this year, growth of almost 20%. The Hobbit boosts New Zealand film industry.
Peter Jackson's two-part fantasy epic The Hobbit helped New Zealand's film industry contribute more than $2.4bn to the country's economy in 2011, according to a new report.
Figures released this week by Statistics New Zealand detail a 4% rise over 2010's headline figure. Www.culture.gov.uk/images/publications/DCMS_film_policy_review_report-2012.pdf. Screen International News - Film industry news from UK, US, Europe, Asia and The World. Www.iconoval.fr/publicmedia/original/109/90/fr/tax_incentives_films_france.pdf.pdf. Is not available. Introduction to independent Film Financing. Author: Malcolm Ritchie Joint Managing Director, Qwerty Films Overview Financing independent films is becoming more difficult with banks becoming more cautious about to whom they will lend money, and international sales and television licences both being less lucrative sources for pre-sales than in the past.
There is an increasing reliance on "soft" money from tax shelter funds and public subsidies. In these difficult market conditions, most independent producers are having to give away most of their potential upside from the success of their film simply to get the film financed in the first place. The US studios are also looking for new ways to finance films to feed their distribution slates to keep the production costs off balance sheet and enable them to spread their own resources further.
Why Hollywood Is Losing the Public Relations War on Piracy (Analysis) Getty Images.
Quotas and levies. This section is still under construction.Numbers in square brackets after entries link to the list of references.
Screen quota A quota was introduced in June 2004 to protect local production, requiring all exhibitors to show at least one local film in each quarter year for each screen. Thus a 16-screen multiplex must show 64 Argentinean films a year. Faces of Globalization - Filmmakers in Korea. Cinema restrictions protect local film industries, but may slow globalization.
SEOUL, South Korea -- Cha Hyun-kyung has grown up watching Hollywood movies in which a U.S. hero takes revenge on the bad guys or Julia Roberts-style "pretty woman" falls in love with a handsome Caucasian guy. She sometimes got tired of Hollywood blockbusters but had no alternatives because locally made South Korean movies were unpopular and their quality was low. Local cinemas are required to fill 40 percent of their programs with homegrown movies, but filmmakers turned out low-cost productions to meet the quota, while enjoying their licenses to import foreign movies.
But not any more.