Editor’s note: Armando Kirwin is a filmmaker and consultant whose previous work has included Paramount Pictures, Microsoft, several startups, 13 feature films, and a handful of TV shows.
In case you haven’t noticed, wannabe Hollywood analysts, err, I mean tech bloggers the world over are breathlessly opining and propagating news about Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ estimate that Amazon is… → Read More
Last week I wrote about television; this week I’ve been thinking about Hollywood. Not least because a screenwriter with a pretty good track record recently attached himself to my squirrel book1 and is hoping to adapt it into a big animated movie. But it often takes five years or more to go from script to screen, so I can’t help wondering–will Hollywood as we know it still be around by… → Read More
Brent Weinstein and Eric Kuhn stopped by the studio to talk about technology in entertainment, and these guys are worth listening to. Brent is Head of Digital Media for United Talent Agency in Los Angeles, where he oversees the agency’s work in online entertainment, social media, video games, and the agency’s digital consulting practice. Eric is the department’s Head of Social Media. UTA is… → Read More
Apple should not use its $100 billion in cash to buy, or buy into Hollywood. While it would most assuredly (ahem, cough) disrupt the system, it would not spur the kind of creative chaos and innovation that would lead to the Emerald City of any show, on demand, for free, to rent, or buy, or subscribe, and organized by taste or popularity, or you! In fact, Apple buying into Hollywood, would actually… → Read More
Silicon Valley and Hollywood: so close geographically, yet so distant digitally and philosophically. You would think we’d understand each other better. In the Valley, we circulate pitch decks. In Hollywood, they shop around scripts. We strive for exits, while they sell distribution rights. They have record labels, we have venture capitalists. They have agents, we have recruiters. People on… → Read More
It must be an absolute nightmare being a Hollywood executive in 2011. Four big studios (20th Century Fox, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros.) have announced plans to introduce a premium video-on-demand service, to debut on DirecTV next month as “Home Premiere,” that will screen movies a mere 60 days after their theatrical debut. Renting such a movie will set you back $30. And if you think… → Read More
Shocking news: Hollywood is not a fan of Netfix. Movie studios have started to become concerned with the company’s growing influence, and they’re determined to prevent it from becoming the next iTunes, so big and powerful that it can dictate terms. The solution? Turn Netflix into a “swap meet,” where users can only find low-quality movies, that is, not the top-of-the-crop Hollywood… → Read More
Nintendo‘s Satoru Iwata has hinted that it’s not just the usual video game companies interested in the 3DS. Hollywood, still trying to figure out how to replicate the success of Avatar everywhere else, apparently sees the 3DS as gaining traction with consumers more quickly than 3DTVs will. If Hollywood could attach itself to the 3DS, it could try to ride the coattails of Nintendo’s success. → Read More
Guess who’s scaring the pants off Hollywood these days? Nope, not teens in their bedrooms downloading screeners off BitTorrent or from shady release blogs, but Google. Yes, almighty Google has Hollywood feeling weak at the knees over the possibility of Google TV completely upending the television business model. Google vs. Hollywood: now there’s a WresleMania main event that would actually… → Read More
Earlier today on the Ron & Fez show on Sirius XM, the great Ron Bennington made an astute point: Comic-Con may be too big for its own good. It used to be a place where geeks and nerds could get together to talk about storyline inconsistencies in the latest Batman series. Now? It’s just as much about A-list-ish celebrities “being seen” and hawking their trash as it is celebrating the… → Read More
Reminds me of that Penny-Arcade strip… → Read More
Hollywood (the movie studios, the record labels, etc.) sure does have a knack for causing its own problems. You’ll recall that it’s en vogue to call copyright infringers “pirates,” which is an insult to legitimate pirates like William Kidd and Henry Morgan. Just because you can fire up uTorrent doesn’t mean you can take on a Spanish Armada. But, whatever, it’s simply easier for Hollywood and its… → Read More
I could have sworn “piracy” was killing the movie industry. Apparently not, when you actually look at the data! The year 2009 was the single best year in Hollywood history as far as “money” is concerned—if you can find a single decent movie produced by Hollywood last year I’d love to see it—where it made $29.9 billion in ticket sales alone. (Never mind how much Blu-ray and DVD sales… → Read More
Right around the time the world’s financial markets started to collapse, back in 2008, RealNetworks, the folks behind RealPlayer, released RealDVD. It was a short-lived piece of software that made making DVD movie backups fairly painless—too painless for Hollywood, which immediately took RealNetworks to court, claiming all sorts of copyright infringement hokum. That’s all in the past now… → Read More
There’s a story going around that 3D movies are harder to pirate. Really, then what’s this: Coraline.3D.1080p.BluRay.x264-REFiNED? Are people incapable of buying a pair 3D glasses from Target or wherever it is people buy these things? → Read More
Shocking news, friends. You know the guy who plays Edward in Twilight, Robert Pattison? (Note: I didn’t know the guy until just this very moment. I don’t watch TV, you see.) Well if Sony has its way he will play Peter Parker in the new Spider-Man 4 movie. You’ll recall that the new movie is going to be a reboot of the franchise (why not just let the franchise die, it had a good run?), and this guy… → Read More
On the face of it, today’s story that 2009 was Hollywood’s best ever (so thanks for rewarding creativity, America), raking in some $10 billion, should be good news for a few people. It should be good news for the movie studios, which will now invest that money in yachts, caviar, human growth hormone, and sequels to today’s sequels. It should be good news for theatre owners, who were concerned that… → Read More
Not a day goes by without coming across one or more stories related to The Pirate Bay. Today is no different, with OpenBitTorrent (a tracker that Hollywood has accused of being The Pirate Bay’s spiritual successor, serving some 550,000 “works”) being given a new lease on life by a Swedish court. The gist is, Hollywood wanted the tracker shut down, but said Swedish court denied the action. → Read More
So we’re all in agreement: the movie 2012 is terrible, and we’d all be better off if it didn’t exist. What we should also acknowledge is that, no, the year 2012 will not, in and of itself, mean the death of mankind. Maybe we’ll blow ourselves up before then, but 2012 isn’t some magical year that you should all be afraid of. → Read More
What’s wrong with sites like Hulu? Well nothing, per se, except for the fact that they can’t be used anywhere outside of the Unites States. As if other countries don’t want to watch… um, really great shows like “Extreme Makeover” and “The [American] Office”! Perhaps that’s why, then, BitTorrent site EZTV has seen traffic double, mainly from non-American IPs, in the past year? For… → Read More
Think long and hard: what was the last movie based on a video game that was worth the film it was shot on? My mind immediately races to Silent Hill. It wasn’t great by any stretch of the imagination, but at the time of its release (April, 2006) I was very much into the Silent Hill world (Silent Hill 2 is still in the top three games I’ve ever played), so my bias is palpable. But beyond that, I… → Read More
I’m much too “handy,” wink wink, with a computer to personally care about Epix, the movie studios’ latest attempt to take the Internet head-on. It’s part cable TV channel and part 720p Internet streaming, and it’s run by Paramount, MGM, and Lionsgate. No cable companies have announced that they’ve signed up as yet. → Read More
So is 2009 the year of the 3D movie? James Cameron’s Avatar comes out in December, and everything I’ve heard is all, “Oh my God, we’ll need to knock down the Jefferson Memorial and replace it with a Cameron Memorial this movie is so great.” And the Cannes Film Festival opens today with Disney’s Up, which is another 3D film that’s supposed to knock our socks off. → Read More
This is tremendous. It’s an application for Android called BarTor that you use to automatically download movies using BitTorrent. You simply hold the G1′s camera to a movie’s barcode, presumably while at Best Buy or something, then the software sends the movie title to your computer, which you’ve already set up to run uTorrent or Vuze. And off it goes! → Read More
Hey! Hollywood has a bone to pick with you, you filthy customer. It seems that rampant online movie piracy—via BitTorrent, Usenet, streaming, etc.—is responsible for as much as 40 percent of Hollywood’s piracy-related loses. (So, offline, Canal Street-type piracy accounts for 60 percent, I guess.) This isn’t exactly breaking news to us here—I feel like I write 8 million piracy… → Read More
It has come to our attention that creatively bankrupt Hollywood has decided to make another Tomb Raider movie. All of us here at CrunchGear—we stay crunchy, even in milk—think this is just another example of Hollywood admitting that, not only has it run out of ideas, but that it has no problem tarnishing the image of its forebears. (See the upcoming Pink Panther 2 the most revolting… → Read More
3D movie technology, as it stands, is a load of go-nowhere rubbish. If Hollywood thinks that the tech will convince moviegoers to leave the comfort of their homes, filled with HDTVs and Blu-ray (or upscaled DVDs), it’s got another thing coming. → Read More
The RealDVD saga continues, quickly becoming one of the more interesting tech stories of the past few months. As we already know, both RealNetworks and the MPAA have been suing each other left, right and center over the past two weeks. Well now Real has issued an official statement, one sure to send shivers up the spines of the MPAA’s lawyers. We are confident that the Court will determine… → Read More
Today should be a happy day for Real, having just released RealDVD, the DVD-copying-for-the-masses Windows app. But now there’s lawsuits involved, and lawsuits make Baby Deity unhappy. RealNetworks has gone to court to get a judge to declare RealDVD A-OK. This comes after some saber-rattling by several Hollywood studios, several of which threatened RealNetworks over the sale of RealDVD. → Read More
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