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Shrek 4 Audio Booth Secrets Are The First Casualties Of Hollywood’s War On Twitter
3:11AM Richard Rushfield | Last week, we reported that Hollywood has begun taking steps to wipe out the first outbreak of free-speech showbiz has seen since the Hays Code, eradicating the threat of stars communicating directly and banally to the public via Twitter. More »
Ron Meyer’s Pissed: A DreamWorks and Disney Wedding Album
8:10AM STV | Disney and DreamWorks today sent out official confirmation of their shotgun wedding, issuing a release around town raising more questions about its relationship than it answers. More »
BREAKING: Universal Just Not That Into DreamWorks
5:45AM STV | Remember all those questions we had last year about how DreamWorks and Universal might bridge the financing gap in their tenuous new relationship? The answer’s simpler than anyone thought: They won’t. More »
DreamWorks Bell-Ringers Lagging on $US750 Mil Holiday Goal
5:41AM STV | Variety today offers a disturbing memo to anyone who had “DreamWorks’ resurgence FTW” in their forecast of industry predictions for 2009: Maybe next year. More »
2:52AM STV | Soloist Silenced Even Longer: Paramount announced Tuesday that it’s pushing back The Soloist yet again, this time to April 24. The studio surprised even its former DreamWorks partners last month by drop-kicking the Robert Downey Jr./Jamie Foxx drama into 2009, culminating in an unceremonious dump-and-run in March and its withdrawal from the opening-night slot at last month’s AFI Fest. The move is yet another slap in the face to the ‘Works, whose loss of an ‘08 Oscar contender is only compounded by The Soloist’s new, utterly insurmountable April competition Vanilla Gorilla. Insult, meet injury. [Variety] More »
DreamWorks Remembers David Geffen as Loving, Studio-Shopping Father
5:22AM STV | A tender postmortem in today’s New York Times reminds the world yet again that seriously — like, really, this time — David Geffen is leaving DreamWorks. Having shepherded the monolith through the Hollywood establishment from conception to its first marriage (and divorce) before giving the frazzled bride away a second time in an arranged marriage to its dashing Indian suitor, Geffen’s tenure is remembered fondly by his ‘Works co-founders Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Not that they’ll admit to knowing what they’re doing without him. More »
Helen Mirren’s House Of Ill-Repute
5:13AM Seth | Taylor Hackford is shopping around Love Ranch—a brothel drama starring wife Helen Mirren (oooh!) and Joe Pesci (ewww!)—to studios in search of a distribution partner. [Variety] Javier Barden has signed on for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s new movie, Biutiful, a Spanish-language film about “a man embroiled in shady dealings who is confronted by a childhood friend.” We smell cattle bolt fumes! [Variety] Netflix, who we dumped since they decided to start charging more to rent Blu-ray (you hear us, Netflix? That’s the reason. It wasn’t us, it was you. Now stop e-mailing, because we found a new rental boyfriend) has hooked up with Samsung, whose new Blu-ray player is equipped to stream their movies. [Variety] After the jump: What director does DreamWorks have on tap to fill Chicago 7 with cameos by his friends? More »
Robert Downey Jr. Saved, Jamie Foxx Doomed in ‘Soloist’ Oscar Oblivion
6:18AM STV | The fallout from Paramount’s recent release-date shuffle continues today, with agents and saber-rattling DreamWorks brass continuing their protest over The Soloist’s move to 2009. While we sustain our first impression that the Jamie Foxx/Robert Downey Jr. tearjerker will in fact be better than the diabetic-coma inducing trailers already in circulation, that’s not much comfort to those who fear the bump from November to March will impugn Soloist’s profile among critics and audiences alike. But now, as a peace offering to the angry gods at CAA who packaged the film for the ‘Works with its clients Downey, Foxx and director Joe Wright, Paramount has forged a silver lining for one-third of that jilted braintrust. More »
The Road to Oscar Hell is Paved With Dead Paramount Movies
6:25AM STV | What a mess: Paramount’s reshuffling of 2008 awards bait including Defiance and The Soloist — the latter of which now won’t open until next March — has left devastated Oscar watchers (including us) tossing out their carefully wrought Trophynomics™ calculations for the American fall movies season. Few are more dismayed than the DreamWorks gang, whose hopes that The Soloist might at least cover the cost of hiring movers were met with the reality check that the ‘Mount has more important, Brad Pitt-y things to do before year’s end. We think this, along with other traumatic developments elsewhere over the last week, calls for an all-new Oscar scorecard; start over with us after the jump. More »
