ZDONK

At the rate we’re going, it’s estimated in the year 2014, every new movie will actually be an old movie that’s been converted into 3D, and re-released into theaters. Although there is no truth to that statement, the fact that you considered it for a split second is a little scary.

Hollywood has all but given up on original ideas. With the added box office revenues from 3D (30% increase), every studio is set on retooling their slate, adapting to the craze.

We’ve seen what happens when a studio is cash strapped. They become more conservative, green lighting fewer movies with higher budgets that have a built in audience. Disney is making 8 movies next year, and are totally relying on already existing brands and franchises — a safe bet.

If the current model keeps up, and the studios become more conservative, when do you think we will see our first re-release of an older movie that came out in 2D, that got converted into 3D? It’s a sad thought because that doesn’t sound so far off.

Studios own libraries with thousands of movies, what’s stopping them from reaching into their library and converting Independence Day into 3D? What about Jurassic Park? They would spend no money on development, production, and they know it’s a popular movie. Besides the modest conversion costs into 3D, the only cost for the studio is the marketing, but how hard is that? The movie was already a proven hit.

All I know is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze in 3D! would be pretty awesome. I just might buy a ticket to that.

I hope no studio executives are reading this and have a lightbulb moment.

It’s no big surprise to hear that people are consuming content in a variety of new ways. For the movie fan, it’s great — itunes, netflix, redbox — it’s just getting easier to watch movies without going to the theater. But for those companies that always relied on traditional means of distribution, it’s more of a nightmare.

Over the last several decades, Hollywood has been propped up by home entertainment revenues, but now that the DVD business is in the gutter, these companies are scrambling to find a solution, or at least alter their approach to windowing the release of their movies.

Take for instance Disney. Bob Iger has announced his experimental plan to shorten the theatrical run of Alice in Wonderland from 16 weeks to 13 weeks so the movie is released on DVD and Blu Ray before summer time kicks in. Not as many people buy DVDs during the summer, so his idea is to shorten the window to bolster the home entertainment revenues that are often negatively impacted by the summer season. (Check out this Hollywood Reporter article for more).

Why would you ever shorten the release of a 3D visual spectacle like Alice in Wonderland, especially when Avatar had so much success late in it’s run? Like Avatar, this is a movie you must see in theaters to appreciate in full, so shaving three weeks off its theatrical release is like forgoing tens of millions of dollars. I can’t see how this experiment will pay off for Disney, but that’s besides the point — one of the major studios has made a declaration to change the once traditional releasing windows.

Bob Iger’s decision is revolutionary, but also full of controversy. The exhibitors are essentially being deprived of those extra three weeks of box office and concessions. It’s understandable why they’re upset, but what’s not being talked about as much is how talent is getting the shaft. Take for instance, Tim Burton. He worked his ass off to combine technologies and direct a visually stunning spectacle that can only be fully appreciated in IMAX and 3D.

It will be interesting to follow Iger’s decision, and how it will affect the relationship between talent and Disney in the future. It’s one thing to forgo star actors with first dollar gross, and concentrate your efforts on tent poles based upon known brands, but it’s another thing entirely to offend the star directors that make these tent poles possible.

Politics and egos aside, there’s been a lot of speculation and theorizing about digital distribution and releasing windows at this stage in the game, but this decision made by the media giant indicates a major shift in the media landscape.

Avatar, The Blindside, District 9, An Education, A Serious Man, Up, Inglourious Basterds, The Hurt Locker, Precious, Up In The Air — your 2010 Academy Award nominees for Best Picture. (Full list of nominations).

When the Academy Awards expanded it’s Best Picture nominations from 5 to 10, I’m not sure people anticipated that the extra slots would be reserved for movies like District 9, and Inglourious Basters.

Nothing against District 9, or Inglourious Basterds — I liked those movies way more than most of the nominated films — but do either of those films really have a chance at winning the the presitgious Best Picture Oscar? It seems like there was a conscious decision this year to nominate popular movies that don’t necessarily fit the mold. A couple thoughts:

1) Box Office — When a film is nominated for Best Picture, the Oscar buzz might persuade those who originally had little interest to buy a ticket so they can be in on the Academy conversations. By spending marketing dollars on their nominated film, and adding screens all around the country, a studio receives a nice box office push for their movie as they’re able to capitalize on the interest (check out this LA Times article for more). By nominating 10 films, as opposed to 5, you’ve given the public 5 more reasons to go the theaters and spend.

2) Viewership — Slowly over time, The Academy Awards became the ugly, boring sister to the Golden Globes, which is only increasing it’s viewer base. The Globes are a light hearted, pop culture driven award show. Audiences love that crap. It’s loose, it’s fun. Sure it’s not as prestigious, but that’s the point. By including films like District 9, Inglourious Basterds and even the Blind Side, the Academy is trying to add some flare to the program, and give the general viewing public more to talk about.

Up until recent years, the Oscars embraced their perception of high art and elitism, but as soon as people stopped watching because it was slow, boring and drawn out, they thought to mix it up a bit, and nominate movies like District 9 or Inglourious Basterds to expand their reach.

I’m wondering if the Academy honestly thinks that fan boys will be hosting awards parties, passing around hors devours of foie gras, eagerly awaiting Neil Blommkamp to accept Best Picture — no chance.

The Oscars are trying to harness the Globes’ populist message, but it’s totally contradictory to their voting process. You can’t be hip to the masses and elite at the same time. Choose one or the other. The fact that The Hangover (which was incredible) was even being considered at one point is kind of silly.

So, Oscar, I’ll leave you with this piece of advice: Stop trying to be so damn hip. Just accept yourself as the high brow awards show you’ve branded yourself as for decades.

Am I the only one who’s looking forward to all these remakes? The negative connotation associated with a “remake” might have been applicable in the days of old: Studios had steady funding and a variety of tent-poles to rely on. They had sequels, experimental projects and even a steady stream of indies. Action stars like Van Damme and Schwarzenegger could repeat formulaic explosion yarns and still expect a decent audience turn out.  These bountiful times often meant the money and talent rarely got aimed at rehashed franchises from yester-year, superhero movies or geek fetish sci-fi flicks. Those guaranteed audiences of comic book readers, science fiction fanatics and classic sentimentalists were too small to consider seriously. The snobbish disdain these under-developed movies conjured was somewhat justified, as those of us who knew the source material languished the lost potential.

But that was the then! You need only visit the now massively popular comic-con to see that studios are foaming at the mouth to back any potential tent-pole with even the smallest semblance of pre-awareness. With the list of outside capital sources dwindling, no studio is willing to risk investing in original content with no established fan base. No funding is getting poured in for non tent-poles. And with the pre-recession successes of X-Men and Spiderman, comics have become amongst the most reliable source material. For some this might mark the decline of original film-making but, cynicism aside, it really just means that talented actors and directors will be shifted towards the “geek” medium that has always had a loyal fan base in the waiting. Instead of getting a rushed green light with C class talent, these old comic book and sci-fi epics are finally getting the care and attention they deserve from able visionaries and performers.

Of course, we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves. There will always be your simple minded GI Joes and Transformers. And there will be the occasional disappointments like Watchmen, which only offended the most elite of comic book snobs (myself included). But movies like Dark Knight, Star Trek, District 9 and Avatar show us that “geek” genre, when done properly, can entice a far broader audience.

Paramount is pushing comics, Sony has some old franchises like Ghostbusters to re-hash alongside another Spiderman sequel, Disney purchased Marvel and Fox owns the DC rights. Look at the line up of projects for the next couple of years, and the talent attached to them:

- Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins will be heading the cast of the Wolfman remake.
- Kenneth Brannagh will be directing Thor (2011), with Anthony Hopkins and Natalie Portman attached. Look forward to an engrossing plot, rich characters and awesome hammer wielding lighting battles.
- JJ Abrams’ Mystery Tentpole is slotted in between Star Trek 2 (2012) and Mission Impossible IV
- Bryan Synger will be directing X-Men: First Class, and producing Excalibur and Battlestar Galactica.
- Jon Favreau’s Iron-Man 2 with Robert Downey Jr. is looking more and more to be a promising sequel.
- Sam Worthington stars in the Epic Clash of the Titans revamp.
- Johnny Depp in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland should offer a psychedelic experience in 3D.
- Josh Brolin as Jonah Hex will no doubt deliver a dour and stoic hero true to form.
- Tron’s remake looks incredible with Jeff Bridges taking on the roll of grim developer Flynn.
- Paramount is re-envisioning David Lynch’s Dune with Pierre Morel at the helm.
- The Hobbit, A-Team, Robin Hood, Karate Kid, are but a few of the many remakes in the works.
The list goes on…

There’s even a resurgence of quality originals in both superhero and sci-fi cinema: check out the trailers for Kick-Ass and Christopher Nolan’s Inception.

2009 is over, and with half of us losing our jobs and the other half getting the swine flu, we can collectively say good riddance, welcoming in the new decade. 2010 offers us a new era to indulge our geeky joy, and should the foolish executives begin to falter again…well there’s some pretty bad ass wolverine impersonators with home-made claws at the ready.

Jeff Katz – founder and CEO of American Original, Comic Book author, Producer, former Executive at New Line, ZDONK Board Member, etc, etc, etc — has launched the genre consumer’s response to The Huffington Post. GeekWeek is a one-stop shop for everything…well, geek.

The design is an amalgamation of Newsweek and the NY Post. It’s layout is simple and easy to navigate. He’s got writers from all the major Cinephile sites and geek blogs — JoBlo.com, IGN, amongst others — and seems to be the first aggregator that understands a seemingly basic fact…

The worlds of gaming, sports, wrestling, movies, comics, music, tech, etc have a huge crossover in their fan bases. If I knew how to draw a Venn Diagram using Wordpress (help would be much appreciated in the comments) the area where the many circles intersect would be huge. I’d be right smack in the middle.

Now I don’t have to go to wired for my tech news, bleedingcool for my comic news, joblo for my film news, profootballtalk for my football news — it’s all under one roof at Geekweek.com

If you’re a movie fan who loves football and wants to download a cheat code so they can beat their friends in Call of Duty on XBOX Live while talking about Chris Jericho’s performance in Smackdown, then you better check it out.

If anyone can pull it off, it’s Jeff Katz. He was probably doing all of that last night.

(Follow GeekWeek on Twitter)

The LA Times published an article today about the new division Paramount Studios has created to develop and produce roughly 20 films per year with budgets under 100k. The studio hasn’t thought of a name yet, but let’s just call it “Holy Shit, Let’s Find The Next Paranormal Activity” division.

The studio has allocated $1 million of their annual production capital to finance these super low budget movies, and will staff one of their current executives to head up the initiative.

It’s certainly an interesting development for the current studio landscape that’s shifting all their capital and resources toward producing big budget tent poles and re-boots. For Paramount, they’re spending $1 million to hopefully stumble upon the next Paranormal Activity, but even if they don’t strike gold again, they’ll have lots of genre-specific content to pump into their extensive distribution network.

Even in this time of studio consolidation and risk aversion, I think spending only $1 million to finance up to 20 films is justified, especially because they plan to release these films in college towns and mid night screenings, similar to the release of Paranormal Activity. Essentially, Paramount will know if they have a hit on their hands before they dump millions of dollars into marketing.

The real question is, can a studio make a movie for under 100k? The studio system is renown for overspending on development, talent, production — just about everything. But with little cash flow left, Paramount has decided to try their hand in super low budget filmmaking.

The reason Paranormal Activity worked so well was because it was made outside the studio system. Same thing goes for District 9. For some reason or another, studios have a hard time understanding guerilla filmmaking, but it’s about time one of the majors at least tried.

Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis — just some of the names that not too long ago nearly guaranteed the success of a film. But times are changing. It no longer makes sense for studios to pay these upper echelon A listers $20 million plus 15% percent of the gross, when DVD retail is in the gutter. It’s not a sound business model.

Brand name actors will always be highly sought after, but I’m not so sure their agents will be securing the same kinds of ridiculous deals. For instance, Tom Cruise made close to $75 million (his quote + his % of gross) on Mission Impossible, but the studio, who’s responsible for financing, producing and marketing the film didn’t see even close to that number in profit.

The plummeting revenues of DVD sales is certainly influencing the value of these actors, but I have another theory: audiences can see right through a bad story, even if there’s a giant name brand actor attached. It’s actually a refreshing notion — it seems more now than in the past 10 years, studios can actually rely on proper story telling and concept driven movies, instead of throwing a name at a script and hoping people see the film cause they love Will Ferrell.

Sorry Universal, had to go there. Land of the Lost was a disaster. Audiences could smell that thing a mile away, and despite people’s unconditional love for Will Ferrell, it wasn’t enough to sell the picture.

I like to think of it like this: Every time a studio green lights a movie for production, it’s like they’re investing in a company. Some companies are run by charismatic leaders who are proven winners ($20 million actors), but if that company’s agenda and business model (script) are weak, then it doesn’t matter who the CEO is. I have to imagine that every Fortune 500 company started out with a great concept, not some name brand face.

I’m not going to sit here and say Will Smith is overrated. Absolutely not. Besides Seven Pounds, which was his least commercial film, he’s a sure fire winner. But the laundry list of $20 million actors is being trimmed down, because in today’s Hollywood, the A list actor with their gluttonous contracts isn’t as valuable to the studio as a marketable concept. (Check out Forbes’ List of Hollywood’s Most Overpaid Stars).

If I we’re a studio executive, I’d be thinking story first, talent second — a scary thought, I know, but one that will need to be embraced, especially with the fiscal pressures the studios are facing from their struggling conglomerate parent companies.

At some point in time in the last two weeks, every studio executive jealously watched the box office per screen average of the seemingly indie movie Paranormal Activity. To date, it’s made almost $10 million, and only recently has Paramount upped the number of screens to 200 (they plan to go wider this weekend to 800).

In today’s box office, and especially this summer with hits like Transformers, Star Trek and Harry Potter all making over $250 million domestic, $10 million doesn’t sound like a crazy number. But what if I told you that the film costs…wait for it…$11,000.

Paranormal Activity has already raked in 909 times what it cost to make the movie in the first couple weeks of it’s limited release. Absurd, I know. Check out this Variety article for more details.

Ok, so it’s made $10 million thus far at the box office, but how much did Paramount spend to market and distribute it when the average studio film has a marketing budget anywhere from $25 to $150 million? So far, Paramount has only trickled about $2 million in marketing dollars into Paranormal Activity. Damn.

Sure the movie must be awesome, and content will always be king, but Paramount’s strategy should not be overlooked, as it could be an indication of how to successfully market to your audience, at a price.

So how did they do it? How did they run an effective marketing campaign, and cut costs in doing so?

The answer: Fans. To start, Paramount released the movie in select college towns, and screened midnight showings only. If you heard from a buddy at NYU about this awesome horror movie, you could rally your peers to essentially petition for the movie to come to your town. WOM (word of mouth) is a powerful thing if you can harness it.

Paramount facilitated the demand through the film’s website, paranormalmovie.com, which does a great job with copy and language to make it feel as if this movie belongs to you, the fan: “The First-Ever Film Release Decided By You”.

The success of this movie has a lot of studio executives asking themselves, how do I speak to my fans, and empower them to market the movie for us? It’s clear that reaching the core movie going demographic through traditional media is loosing it’s grip on audiences, so it’s time the industry man up and look toward innovative and fresh models to build an army of brand evangelists, without force feeding them the message that you want them to hear.

If you haven’t read the survey released by Stradella Road about the internet, and how it influences film audiences, definitely take a look. I’ve attached the link to Variety’s analysis, as well as a link to David Poland’s “Hot Blog”, where it’s broken down well:

Variety Article

The Hot Blog

Love this quote: “So perhaps it is time for studios to start being less paranoid about bad reviews and more aggressive of finding heroes for their films, in real life and in criticism circles.”

I read on Bloody-Disgusting.com that Oren Peli finally managed to get a theatrical release for his low budget horror movie Paranormal Activity. The movie originally premiered two years ago at Screamfest in Los Angeles, and has since screened at film festivals across the country, scaring the crap out of audiences. The film’s buzz didn’t go unnoticed either — Paramount picked it up and slated it for a September 25th limited theatrical release, just weeks away.

I can see why Paramount is backing the film directed, produced, written and edited by Oren Peli — it looks absolutely terrifying. But what’s surprising is how quickly they plan on releasing it.

Usually there is a highly strategized, well funded marketing initiative that starts months before a film’s release, not a couple weeks. However, with a movie property that’s so identifiably genre, it seems Paramount is relying on the hard core fans to spread WOM and raise awareness, essentially mobilizing the fanatics to do their marketing for them. Paramount even created a Twitter page that lists when and where Paranormal Activity is playing (because it’s limited release).

By targeting such a niche demographic, and choosing a limited release, Paramount won’t have to dump $50m + into a campaign, but, instead, they’ll gauge how well it’s doing amongst its core audience and infuse marketing dollars accordingly.

If Paramount has a hit, it will be because of the fans and WOM, not because they bet the house and went for a $25m opening weekend.

Kudos to Paramount, and to Oren Peli whose film is already being called one of the “scariest ever”. Check out the trailer below — it’s like Blair Witch and Ghost Hunters had a baby…