Film reviews, interviews and blogs from Little White Lies Magazine. How To Keep A Brand Alive From The Creators And Cast Of "The Walking Dead" As AMC’s The Walking Dead embarks on the second half of its juggernaut season two on February 12, it’s hard to believe just six months ago, the apocalyptic genre drama had encountered a roadblock more foreboding than any zombie: the unexpected departure of beloved leader Frank Darabont, reported budget cuts (which the network denies), increasingly vocal fans, and threatened morale among the unnerved troops.
The series not only went on to break cable ratings records last fall, but earned a 16-episode order for a third season--three more than season two. It will now anchor a night, leading into the new Kevin Smith reality series Comic Book Men, a second WD airing, and The Talking Dead, a talk show highlighting WD actors and scenes. But how the WD team rallied could be a case study for businesses finding themselves in similar straits. Know Your Core Principles And Stick To Them “Most new shows are difficult to get up and running, so you have some behind-the-scenes drama.
Listen to Consumers. Hollywood flop sweat: What caused the latest box-office duds? What do A-listers Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, David Milch and Andrew Stanton have in common as of late?
If you said major Hollywood duds, you’ve been paying attention. Disney on Monday said it expects to lose $200 million on Stanton’s “John Carter” — a huge disappointment from the wizard who co-wrote or directed an amazing string of Pixar hits, including the “Toy Story” films, “Wall-E” and “Finding Nemo.” HBO canceled “Luck” last week after the death of three horses during production. Making matters worse, the costly racetrack drama by the veteran TV writer Milch (“NYPD Blue,” “Deadwood”) and filmmaker Mann (“Heat,” “The Insider”) wasn’t connecting with viewers, with recent episodes drawing 500,000 viewers, barely half of what HBO gets for its unsung “Eastbound & Down” comedy series. Have all these guys been drinking from the same poisoned well? How One Response to a Reddit Query Became a Big-Budget Flick.
With just a handful of posts about a hypothetical time travel scenario, James Erwin went from web commenter to professional screenwriter.Photo: Robert Maxwell James Erwin, 37, works for a financial services firm in Des Moines, Iowa, writing software manuals.
He’s been doing that for a couple of years, and he enjoys it. It’s a pretty low-stress job for a person with a methodical turn of mind—good pay, short commute. He’s home by 5:30 every night to spend time with his wife and 1-year-old son. One Wednesday last August, Erwin rose from his desk around noon. Reddit is a sprawling news site, where “news” is defined by its tens of millions of users—one of the largest communities on the Internet.
Ursula K. Le Guin on the TV Earthsea. On Tuesday night, the Sci Fi Channel aired its final installment of Legend of Earthsea, the miniseries based—loosely, as it turns out—on my Earthsea books.
The books, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, which were published more than 30 years ago, are about two young people finding out what their power, their freedom, and their responsibilities are. I don't know what the film is about. It's full of scenes from the story, arranged differently, in an entirely different plot, so that they make no sense. My protagonist is Ged, a boy with red-brown skin. In the film, he's a petulant white kid. When I sold the rights to Earthsea a few years ago, my contract gave me the standard status of "consultant"—which means whatever the producers want it to mean, almost always little or nothing. Months went by. The Inside Story of How John Carter Was Doomed by Its First Trailer. This weekend, eight months of indifferent and often confused chatter culminated in Disney's John Carter — which cost just shy of $250 million to make — grossing only $30.6 million domestically.
(Insiders tell Vulture that for the film to break even, it would have had to have opened at nearly twice that amount.) The reviews were the very definition of middling, with a 53 rating on Metacritic.com, and yet critics rarely doom a family-targeting blockbuster this big: Just a week earlier The Lorax got a 47 Metacritic rating and grossed $70.2 million in its debut weekend, and another $39.1 million this weekend.
No, this high-leaping hero was grounded from the moment the movie's first disastrously impotent, muddled, and largely action-and-effects-free teaser trailer debuted last July and left audiences saying, "What was that? " By the time its not-much-better Super Bowl ad played, the film had become a punch line — to those on whom it managed to make any impression at all.