Word: warner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Aviation Oil of Singapore disclosed that it had lost $550 million in derivative trading and was near bankruptcy. The firm had wrongly bet - and redoubled - that oil prices would decline. A Sharper Picture The future of high-definition TV (HDTV) got some focus when four Hollywood studios (Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros. and New Line) agreed to release titles in the HD-DVD format. Sony, backer of the rival Blu-ray format, was taking solace in its forecast that the European market for sets had been seriously underestimated: HDTV adoption could reach 20 million by 2008 - four times previous industry estimates...
Nonetheless, true to the nature of this story, this movie’s path was still an uphill climb. The ambitious expedition that Fuller proposed with this movie found itself seriously truncated by Warner Bros. Studios, the distribution outlet to whom he—according to legend—presented his four-and-a-half hour finished product...
Fortunately, The Big Red One’s missing footage was not lost forever. While making a documentary about Fuller, film historian and Time Magazine film critic Richard Schickel made it his personal quest to find this lost footage in the bowels of Warner Brothers’ storage. Upon retrieving these long misplaced reels, he restored them to the film in an effort to make the “director’s cut” that—after Fuller’s death in 1997—was no longer truly possible. The recoveries comprised by this restoration...
...direct Phantom in 1990, with the stage show's original stars Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman, who was then married to Lloyd Webber. When they divorced, the film fell apart, and despite rumors casting various stars in the main roles - Antonio Banderas, John Travolta, Hugh Jackman, Keira Knightly - Warner Bros., which held the screen rights, dithered. Meanwhile, the producers of the stage show, who were overseeing its 22-country rollout, worried about killing theater trade if the film was bad. When Lloyd Webber's Evita barely turned a profit in 1996, Phantom seemed doomed...
...Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group bought back the rights from Warner Bros., raised the $80 million budget itself, and brought back Schumacher. By then, more than 70 million people had seen the show, which had grossed more than $2.4 billion and ranked as the world's highest-earning piece of live entertainment. "If half of the people who've seen the show see the film," says executive producer Austin Shaw, "it will gross $350 million. And what about the 2.9 billion people who haven't seen it?" Such confidence might explain the decision not to cast big names...