Category: media

As various contract and payouts get renegotiated, everyone is in shock. The worry: This decision “could irrevocably rewire moviegoers’ ticket-buying patterns, forever changing the way people turn out for films.” – Vulture

Hollywood thrives on hyperbole. But it would have been right to describe this move as unimaginable less than a year ago. While some moviegoers and studios have wanted for a long time to make it easier to see movies at home, the movie theater industry has hated that idea and has been able to prevent it from happening. – Vox

“Subcarriers are, essentially, hangers on, areas of frequency that weren’t being used for the primary signal, but could find secondary uses in more specialized contexts.” Some FM subcarriers were used to provide a second channel for stereo, but “with secondary signals that may not be directly accessible at all by the primary receiver, completely unrelated, niche services were offered.” Those services have ranged from the original Muzak to specialized radio for doctors’ offices to services that read newspapers and books aloud for the blind to foreign-language broadcasts to GPS. (And there was one ill-fated Microsoft endeavor). – Tedium

“Late last month, after the list published online, [Manohla] Dargis and [A.O.] Scott discussed notable disagreements, that Meryl Streep exclusion” (had it been a list of 20th-century actors, she’d have been there) “and the importance of representing performances from around the globe.” – The New York Times

Like Times critics Charles McNulty and Mark Swed, many of those who responded to the survey had mixed feelings about remote or distanced shows. The consensus? Some options are better than no options, but many lamented the loss of a shared, visceral experience of seeing art in person with others. – Los Angeles Times

“Unlike the near universal acclaim the first two movies enjoy, Part III is remembered as the Fredo of its family — the one that doesn’t really measure up. … For a new theatrical and home-video release this month, Coppola has rechristened the film as Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. … The director has changed its beginning and ending and made alterations throughout to excavate and clarify the narrative that he always believed it contained about mortality and redemption.” – The New York Times

Just a year ago, a movie like Host was barely imaginable; now it seems almost inevitable. Director Rob Savage’s thriller — about a group of teens marooned at home during lockdown, who decide, just for kicks, to gather on Zoom and conduct a séance — inventively plays on our new anxieties, using face filters, software glitches and connection problems as plot devices. Host drew hundreds of thousands of new subscribers to the streaming platform that commissioned it, got Savage three new directing gigs, and is even about to get a theatrical run. – BBC

“Amid the backdrop of the pandemic and the ongoing, years-long digestion of several mega-mergers, from Disney-Fox to ViacomCBS to AT&T’s WarnerMedia, pretty much every legacy entertainment house in town is in the process of maneuvering a massive ship-turning effort to better point their armadas in the direction of streaming.” – Variety