Word: studio
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...Steven Spielberg. His DreamWorks SKG is waiting for a $500-million deal with Indian entertainment conglomerate Reliance to close. It would allow the company behind movies like Tropic Thunder and Transformers to abandon an unhappy partnership with Viacom's Paramount Pictures and produce six films a year at another studio. The hitch keeping DreamWorks and Reliance from sealing the deal is the challenge of raising an additional several hundred million dollars in debt financing at a time when Wall Street is feeling pretty stingy about extending credit...
...silent era, plenty of wealthy investors with stars in their eyes had lost big money in the high-risk business of financing single films. But in 2004 banks like Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs found themselves with a glut of capital and no place to put it. Studios, meanwhile, were looking for a way to please their fiscally conservative corporate parents and share some risk. Some financial whizzes matched supply with demand and came up with a new way to bankroll films: institutional investors could take a portfolio approach to film financing and buy a stake in several...
...stars with 13 Oscar nominations between them paired up for an R-rated crime drama. The actors, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, and the movie, Heat, received a glitzy, year-end push from a major studio and breathless media coverage. The New York Times likened Pa-Niro's six minutes of shared screen time to "Ben Hur sitting down and acting with Spartacus...
Thirteen years later, the same two actors have paired up for another R-rated crime drama, Righteous Kill, this time sharing almost every scene as veteran police partners pursuing a serial killer. But instead of a major studio, a young company called Overture Films is releasing the movie. And rather than giddy anticipation, advance press has included references to "How the mighty have fallen" (Los Angeles Times) and "Grumpy old cops" (MSNBC). (Read Richard Corliss' review here...
Those economics are very different from the ones now governing the major studios, including Warner Bros. Pictures, which made $67 million off the domestic box office of Heat. (TIME and Warner Bros. are both subsidiaries of Time Warner). Warner Bros. Pictures Group President Jeff Robinov told the Wall Street Journal recently that the studio is "focusing on bigger films that require a bigger commitment." Translation: they're making fewer under-$50 million movies starring men with Oscars and more over-$200 million movies starring men with capes. This summer Warners closed its specialty divisions that handle smaller-budget films, Picturehouse...