Slightly Longer Quick Takes 6/21/07

• Defamer has a pretty funny picture from Captivity’s TV commercials and how it warns on frightening bear-on-Cuthbert violence. That’s the problem with movie productions with women: Bears are attracted to menstrual blood. I know because Brick Tamland told me so.
• Part of Warner Bros. build-up for the big screen Speed Racer will be a new TV show that will debut on WB-owned Cartoon Network next year. The two project, the film and the show, are part of a larger Speed Racer brand-relaunch Warners has in mind for 2008.
• While I agree in part with Jeremy Knox’s diatribe against the independent theater experience I still think that the less of these there are around the poorer we all are. When large companies control every link in the distribution chain we’re all potentially denied exposure to new and interesting content, whether we’re talking movies or books or anything else.
• Cinematical got a cool little bit of solar trivia sent to them from directory Danny Boyle as part of the promotional push for his upcoming Sunshine.
• BlogCritics finds a postcard book that’s part of the overall Simpsons campaign for their new movie fun but ultimately wanting in originality and execution. Expect a ton of this kind of stuff to hit stores in the next few weeks.
• Dreamworks teased a select crowd of New York celebrities and journalists with about 30 minutes of footage from Jerry Seinfeld’s animated flick Bee Movie and it seems, based on the MTV Movie Blog’s reaction like the movie is going to play extremely well.
• The MPAA and NATO (the dangerous one, not the military alliance) have teamed up to fight in-theater camcording with the best weapon they have at their disposal: Posters. One-sheets that remind people of the penalties associated with recording movies will appear in theater lobbies alongside regular movie posters.

LOTD: 6/21/07

• Arianna Huffington and Jay Rosen are partnering on a new citizen journalism site called Off the Bus that focuses on the 2008 campaign cycle. The site aims to bring a new and fresh perspective to the campaign beat that just isn’t possible with mainstream reporters. (CT)
• Media planning tool provider Telmar will be launching a new vertical search engine to help people find media industry research studies and other statistics. (CT)
• If you were getting jittery without your hourly fix of Jessica Britney Alba Timberlake Diaz news it’s because Perez Hilton’s web host inoculated itself against an eventual lawsuit took down the site for a short while yesterday, citing the site’s continued usage of copyrighted photographs. (CT)

PWC: Entertainment revenue to reach $2 trillion by 2011

The entertainment industry will grow significantly in the next five years, with revenues reaching $2 trillion by 2011, reports Variety.

But what’s most interesting isn’t so much the growth itself but where the forecast pegs most of that growth coming from:

Spending on convergent platforms — defined as the coming together of the home computer, TV and wireless handsets — will account for almost 72% of the total growth in entertainment and media during the next five years.

While the U.S. will still be the largest market for the entertainment media’s product it’s also expected to grow at the slowest clip, just 5.3 percent per year in that five year span. That’s compared to the Asian Pacific region, which is expected to grow at a 9.6 percent per year rate.

The growth that will come from new distribution platforms should be a sign to companies to get innovating in those areas quickly if they’re not already doing so. But it’s even more important that they come up with sort of a Grand Unified Plan for how their content is distributed instead of making it up as they go along with each project or waiting until after they decide on a new media strategy t figure out how it fits in with everything else. Doing so will make for a more pleasant user experience and, I suspect, create better branding opportunities for the company in question.