Time Inc. produces; Nike distributes and Prada advertises

Time Inc. is apparently tired of movie studios riffling through the current issues of their magazines looking for story ideas and is taking control of the situation. The company has announced it will begin producing films, both features and documentaries, based on articles that appear in its stable of magazine titles.

Time is partnering with Collective and XYZ Films to produce the movies, including hiring screenwriters and other talent as well as production staff, and then shop the film around to studios, who will likely handle the marketing.

Three staff members will work on reading everything that comes from Time titles to find stories that seem like they would make for good movies.

Nike is sponsoring the release into five cities of Beautiful Losers, a documentary about the do-it-yourself culture in the early 1990s. Karina carefully considers all points of view as to what this means regarding the state of film distribution, but I’m willing to put the best construction on this and that Nike found a movie that fit with the branding ideal it would like to achieve and so decided it would help it find an audience. Yeah, it buys them some street cred by doing so, but I’m willing to accept just about any situation where worthy films are able to get out and be found to some extent. I’m not saying this is perfect, but unless there’s a sense that they’ve interfered with the artistic direction of the movie I don’t see too much wrong going on here.

I looked at the Beautiful Losers official site, which appears to be built on WordPress blogging software, and found a link to something called Nike Workshops.

That’s in contrast to Prada’s plans to produce their own movie, a film that will tie into an ad campaign they’re running and which will appear on the fashion label’s site. The movie is the result of a process that involved Prada approaching a number of directors to find out how they would visually express what the label means to them. No, I’m not sure what that means either.

Finding the Audience: Distribution Notes for 8/7/08

Hollywood is thrilled that this summer has turned out to be better than expected in terms of not only box-office results but also that the slate of original programming has launched a number of potential future franchises. I’m not so sure the studios want to crow about how “original” their offerings were since, of the five films that are mentioned, Iron Man is an adaptation of a 40-odd year-old comics character and Get Smart and Sex and the City are big-screen versions of popular TV shows. True, they’re not sequels, but let’s not confuse these with actual original films that come born of someone’s imagination and creativity.

LG has announced a new Blu-ray player that will come complete with support for streaming movies directly from Netflix. More than that, the box will reportedly cost less than $500, meaning it could be accessible for the mainstream audience and become a hit consumer item that isn’t stuck in the “early adopter” bucket for too terribly long.

Even the most buzzed-about independent films are having trouble finding distribution deals these days, largely because of the woes that have befallen smaller movies in the last year or two. That’s resulted in the dissolution of many of the studio’s specialty film divisions, essentially taking players out of the market and turning the decisions about every film over to the mainstream executive suite.

That sort of “we love it but we just won’t buy it” attitude is exactly what happened to Bottle Shock and which led director Randall Miller to distribute the film himself. That course of action, though, means the studio-backed muscle is lacking, but it also lets the creative talent handle things like marketing that normally would go to the studio, who might completely mis-sell the film as it tries to appeal to a mainstream audience with a niche-appeal film. Filmmakers going this route, though, face a system that’s stacked against them and is designed to work for studios and not do-it-yourselfers.

Brian Lowry at Variety rebutts an NYT piece that heralded the death knell of the superhero movie genre. Lowry points out that while the flops certainly flop big, there’s plenty of life left in capes and action flicks as studios mine not only the big named characters but the second tier – which is plentiful – as well. But the success of such films is dependent on the studio’s ability to market effectively to the core legion of fans first and the mainstream market second. This very true despite the newfound skepticism toward the “clout of the geek.”

Thank you, Nielsen PreView, for stating what we all know, which is that R-rated films perform worse at the box-office than PG-13 or lower movies. Yeah, it’s not that surprising that cutting off the potential audience will impact who can attend.

The MPAA wants to make sure studio DVD profits are protected as long as possible, of course. Its latest tactic is to petition Congress to plug what it sees as a gap that might allow people to record movies on pay-per-view and other release platforms that come before DVD.

Of course DVDs might not be under as much a threat as has been roundly assumed, which is good news for Blockbuster, which is set to benefit from that even as it also turns around some logistical problems it’s previously had. But VideoBusiness reports delays with DVD-burning kiosks are not as in demand as has been thought, meaning Blockbuster should not put too many eggs in that basket. Unfortunately that comes just as Blockbuster announced an initiative along those very lines with NCR, a technology firm that works on the creation and deployment of those kiosks. Thank goodness, then, that they’re moving forward with beta testing the integration of Movielink’s download and rental service.

Picking up the Spare: The Love Guru, X-Files, Pineapple Express and Slurpees

The Love Guru

In a stretch of credulity, the Hindu groups that were calling for a boycott of Mike Myers’ The Love Guro are now crowing that it was their efforts that crushed the movie’s box-office potential. Mark Caro at the Trib rightly points out that whatever effect the boycott might have had, it probably wasn’t nearly the contribution to the movie’s demise as the fact that it was almost universally panned by critics and audiences alike.

And speaking of the failure of The Love Guru, Deepak Chopra, who was Myers’ model for his character and who appears in the film in a self-deprecating way, says that’s largely because Myer went too often for gross-out humor instead of sticking with lampooning the self-help industry.

Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk

One of the many things the campaigns for these two movies had in common was that they both had Slurpee-based promotions at 7-Eleven. That focus on big-name promotions is part of an overall re-positioning of the Slurpee at the convenience store chain that’s been spear-headed by Stephanie Hoppe, who hopes to make the brand more relevant to the teenage males of the population. In addition to movies, 7-Eleven has been running Slurpee promotions around video games and other things that have appeal to that age group.

X-Files: I Want to Believe

Series and movie creator Chris Carter says he’d be open to another X-Files movie, mentioning that everyone involved had a great deal of fun making I Want to Believe but seemingly driving right past the fact that the movie did not exactly burn of the box-office charts.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

No, I didn’t write a full column about the movie’s campaign, but did want to pass this along. NBC and Universal, corporate siblings, created a series of spots that weaved together footage from the movie with promotional clips for the Olympic Games, seeking to promote both things at the same time. The problem is that the ads wound up being a bit confusing to the audience, with some calling it an odd fit.

Pineapple Express

Some cultural critics say the trailers for Pineapple Express pulled a “bait and switch” by selling a movie that seemed like a good-natured chase comedy about a couple of slackers whereas the movie is something very different. I think they’re overstating their case, though, and that a lot of those concerns are addressed in the red-band marketing elements. But I can kind of see the point, though I don’t think it’s that much differnet than the way any other movie has been sold by creating a not-entirely-accurate portrayal of the plot and characters.