Walt Disney Co., looking to rein in costs at its Hollywood studio as it focuses on mainstream movies, is slashing staff by 70% at its Miramax Films specialty label and is substantially reducing the number of pictures it releases. The retrenchment, which has been foreshadowed in Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger’s strategy to emphasize family [...]
HOLLYWOOD — When Meg Ryan and Antonio Banderas signed up to star in an independently produced comedy-action movie called “My Mom’s New Boyfriend,” the film’s backers figured they had a slam dunk — a modestly priced film with bankable stars that would surge at the box office. The producers say the $17 million movie scored [...]
THE new American comedy Smart People has a cast that the director of any independent movie would covet. Dennis Quaid appears as a wearied, widowed university lecturer and father to Vanessa (Ellen Page). He is the brother of Chuck (Thomas Haden Church) and potential squire of a doctor played by Sarah Jessica Parker. Director Noam [...]
MOVIES may be pure entertainment but financing them is serious business, and as movie-making opportunities increase in Singapore and other less-mature markets in Asia, finding the funds to fuel the process will be crucial to the health of the industry. Even as new media emerges on a seemingly daily basis to provide viable alternatives to [...]
A few weeks ago, the Pleasant Street Theater in Northampton was playing “Waitress,” the independent film about a pregnant woman who dreams of escaping from her controlling husband, when owner Bob Lawton noticed that the Amherst Cinema’s Web site featured the film as a coming attraction. “He called me and asked us to take ‘coming [...]
NEW YORK — Just two weeks after “10 Items or Less” opens in theaters Friday, it’ll be available for digital download from Clickstar, a company that Morgan Freeman’s production company and Intel have founded to bring small movies to those who live far from boutique cinemas. What’s Freeman doing rethinking Hollywood’s business models? “I’m just [...]