Variety and others report some disturbing US box office trends:
1. Movie theater attendance went down 6% in 2014 from 2013
2. Young people are going to the movies much less

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Link:
Variety article: http://bit.ly/1xaGKlk

- possible futures for global cinema
- Soderbergh explanation of why studios don’t finance indies
- crowd-funding, a new source of finance for indies
- getting the movie seen, the marketing challenge
- possible futures for indies

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Actor Kevin Spacey speaks eloquently, putting forward his series House of Cards as a business model for television giving people what they want, and predicting that the distinction between features and television will disappear.

watch on YouTube

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I liked the last part of the speech so much, that I transcribed it, on these 2 pages.

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I wrote a simple introduction to the current Hollywood business model: box office, profits, international growth — and published it on my blog on theASC web site.

This helped me understand why future studio movies will continue the trend towards action franchises in 3D and Imax, with Chinese characters & settings.

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- 2/3 of the world box office comes from international, and 1/3 from US/Canada
- Only one film, Hunger Games, in the top 20 made more in the US than overseas
- The top 20 films accounted for about $14 billion, 40% of the total 2012 gross of $35 billion
- The list is dominated by franchise action films, there are 4 animation films, and only 2 live action comedies: Ted (with a virtual teddy bear) & The Intouchables.
- All of the top 8 films are sequels in a franchise.
- It’s wonderful to see a masterpiece on this top 20 list: The Life of Pi
- It’s encouraging to see 2 French films – The Intouchables & Taken 2 – in a list of American studio films
- The most expensive film on the list is Men In Black 3, at $225 million.
- Note that the chart does not include worldwide marketing expenses which can run about $175 million.
- I put this together with data from the authoritative Box Office Mojo site.

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Click here to get the full-blown chart, including the production budget.

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Despite the bad reviews, I had looked forward to seeing Paul Schrader’s The Canyons. I feel that Lindsay Lohan is under-rated, and that she is an easy target for the Hollywood press because of her off-screen drug problems. For example, Lohan’s much-derided performance as Liz Taylor in Liz & Dick was pretty good, and the movie itself wasn’t half bad.

The Canyons does feature good acting by Lohan, and her co-star James Deen is convincing as a creepy sociopath. But the main flaw of the film is its script about amoral Hollywood wannabes. Bret Easton Ellis’ story is a nihilistic melodrama, less violent than American Psycho, but just as soulless. The movie could have been more aptly titled Whatever.

The Canyons has acquired notoriety mostly because its director has heralded the movie’s financing and marketing as a new paradigm for independent, low-budget filmmaking.

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The Canyons is a movie that prides itself on being cheaply made and going straight to video on demand. In Larry Gross’ excellent filmcomment article, director Paul Schrader says the film cost $ 260 000, including $ 170 000 from Kickstarter.

Schrader is the screenwriter for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and also the director of a handful of films. His filmmaking partners include screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho, scandal-ridden actress Lindsay Lohan, and porn star James Deen, with cinematography by John DeFazio. Schrader sees this infamous crew of B-listers as fitting the zeitgeist of an America past her prime:

Bret has this post-Empire idea. He believes that American artists are now in their post-Empire period. Like the Brits were in the previous century. So we’re making art out of the remains of our empire. The junk that’s left over. And this idea of a film that was crowd-funded, cast online, with one actor from celebrity culture, one actor from adult-film culture, a writer and director who have gotten beaten up in the past—felt like a post-Empire thing. And then everything I was afraid of with Lindsay and James started to become a positive. I was afraid we wouldn’t be taken seriously and people would think it’s a joke…

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Schrader states that the current cinematic challenge is not to make the film, but to get people to see it. And it’s clear that he has succeeded in getting the publicity he needs with this potent mix of 2 cultural icons, a bad girl celebrity and a porn star.

The number-one fact of the new low-budget cinema is that it is no longer impossible to get your film financed, but it is impossible to get anybody to see it. Because there are 10,000 people doing the same thing you’re doing, right now. And which one of those 10,000 films is anybody going to see? Fifteen thousand films get submitted to Sundance, 100 or so get shown, eight get picked up, and two make money. Those are the economics. But Bret and I have some cachet. We were in with four different sub-groups of interested people: people who are interested in me, people who are interested in Bret, people who are interested in Lindsay, and people who are interested in James. Lindsay has four million [Twitter] followers, and James has half a million. Bret has 250,000.

Could this really be the model for post-blockbuster Hollywood?

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Paul Schrader interview on Huffpost

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NY Times article entitled
This is what happens when you hire Lindsay Lohan

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Watch the trailer on YouTube

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Update:

Paul Shrader went to facebook to complain of “passively” not supporting for publicizing the film, by not showing up for the Venice film festival, interviews and photo shoots.

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Dear friends,

AATON YESTERDAY
Over the last couple of years, Aaton devoted its energy and resources to the development of a new high-end camera, Delta Penelope. The prototype got rave reviews for its crisp but still velvet image structure, and its outstanding chromatic finesse resulting in exceptional skin tones and subtle hues.
The CCD sensor used, though its imaging was excellent in the prototypes, has not allowed us to ensure the same perfomances in industrial production. This is particularly regrettable, since many orders have been placed for the camera.

AATON TODAY
Aaton is not closed; the company will be taken over by new owners.
At this stage, finance will not in itself solve the Delta Penelope problem, but it will allow us to continue on other developments (based on Aaton patents) already in the pipeline.

AATON TOMORROW
The new Aaton will focus on two new products to start out with:
the CantarX+ audio recorder (the current crop will be maintained), and the D-Minima documentary style reflex-viewfinder digital camera.

Many thanks to those who send me their personal “encouragements”
and to those who offered us their dreams about the new Cantar, I think you will love to play/work with it.

–jp

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UPDATE

We now know that Jacques Delacoux, the owner of Transvideo, has taken over Aaton.

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