Category: International

MUMBAI: Lionsgate has acquired worldwide distribution rights of writer-director Stephen Gaghan‘s next film.

Gaghan, who last wrote and directed Syriana will produce and direct the untitled action thriller that deals about an elite deep cover operative who becomes a Brooklyn beat cop and fights a global organization. Gaghan is co-writing the screenplay with Shannon Burke.

Lionsgate executive Wolfgang Hammer brought the project to the studio and will oversee with production president Alli Shearmur.

Gaghan won an Oscar for his screenplay for Traffic. He also wrote and directed Abandon and worked on the scripts for Rules of Engagement, The Alamo and Havoc.

Lionsgate most recently released Gamer and Tyler Perry‘s I Can Do Bad All by Myself which has so far grossed $37.7 million at the box-office.

MUMBAI: Archie has got a hiring agent that will make his passage to the Hollywood and TV world easier. In what could be the golden goose run for comics, 70-year-old Archie Comics has signed up talent agency Creative Artists Agency (CAA).

The timing could be just perfect for Archie who recently proposed to rich girl Veronica, setting aside next door girl Betty. Hollywood‘s appetite to convert comics into movies seems to have grown, evident from Disney‘s recent announcement to gobble up Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion.

The deal will go beyond Archie‘s companions like Jughead. Archie Comics also has properties like Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Josie and the Pussycats.
Hollywood studios are keen to extend comic brands into film properties as they target teen and college age male demographics.

MUMBAI: Sony Pictures Entertainment will release Michael Jackson‘s This Is It on 28 October.

This Is It will be available worldwide for a limited two-week engagement from 28 October.

Of the planned 25 global premieres, more than 15 will be co-ordinated simultaneously across the globe on 27 October.

Said Sony Pictures chairman worldwide marketing and distribution Jeff Blake, “Michael Jackson has an army of fans everywhere around the world. By rolling out this film with simultaneous premieres and special advance screenings on 27 October, we are giving audiences an incredible opportunity to join together in celebration of Michael Jackson‘s incredible career.”

More than 15 cities, including New York, Rio De Janeiro, London, Berlin, Johannesburg, and Seoul will host events simultaneously and three hours after the worldwide celebration of the motion picture, the first public screenings of the film will begin.

MUMBAI: Sony Pictures Classics (SPC) has acquired two titles that were recently shown at the toronto Film Festival. It has taken all US rights of Samuel Maoz‘ Golden Lion winner Lebanon and North American rights of Aaron Schneider‘s Get Low.

SPC and Celluloid Dreams negotiated the deal for Lebanon, which premiered on the Lido and takes place largely inside a tank, where four soldiers are stranded inside enemy territory on the first day of the Lebanon War in June 1982.

“Lebanon is of those important films that will last forever in the marketplace,” SPC said in a statement. “We are honoured to be bringing the film to the American public.”

The distributor also acquired rights to Get Low from CAA. Dean Zanuck and David Gundlach produced the co-production from Zanuck Independent, David Gundlach Productions, Lara Enterprises and TVN. K5 is handling international sales.

MUMBAI

: Sony Pictures Classics (SPC) has acquired two titles that were recently shown at the toronto Film Festival. It has taken all US rights of Samuel Maoz‘ Golden Lion winner Lebanon and North American rights of Aaron Schneider‘s Get Low.

SPC and Celluloid Dreams negotiated the deal for Lebanon, which premiered on the Lido and takes place largely inside a tank, where four soldiers are stranded inside enemy territory on the first day of the Lebanon War in June 1982.

“Lebanon is of those important films that will last forever in the marketplace,” SPC said in a statement. “We are honoured to be bringing the film to the American public.”

The distributor also acquired rights to Get Low from CAA. Dean Zanuck and David Gundlach produced the co-production from Zanuck Independent, David Gundlach Productions, Lara Enterprises and TVN. K5 is handling international sales.

MUMBAI: UK-based distributor Protagonist Pictures has signed a pioneering “manufacture on demand” DVD deal with Amazon.com-subsidiary Createspace for the US.

It will make more than 50 vintage titles from Film4 catalogue available to American consumers. The deal will include titles such as Shekhar Kapur‘s The Bandit Queen, Pat O‘Connor‘s A Month InThe Country, Mike Leigh‘s Life Is Sweet, Mike Newell‘s SourSweet and Alan Clarke‘s Rita, Sue and Bob Too. They will be packaged as part of a branded Film4 Collection.

Nada Cirjanic, head of library sales at Protagonist, said, “We have a huge library. This is a really cost-effective and viable way of reaching potential buyers. This is a way for us to do the best we can for all the films in our library that are cleared and available for use.”

The DVDs will sell at between $15 and $20. To recoup its set-up costs, Protagonist said it only needs to sell around 20 copies of each film.
Till date, about 40 per cent of the Film4 library, which dates back to the launch of the channel in 1982, has been remastered.

MUMBAI: In its opening weekend, animated 3D comedy Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs has topped the North American box-office romping in $30.1million.

The film beat The Informant! that stars Matt Damon as a whistle blower with bipolar disorder. It opened in the second position with $10.5million. Last week‘s number one, Tyler Perry‘s I Can Do Bad All By Myself dropped to the third place garnering $10million.

Jennifer Aniston romantic comedy Love Happens opened in fourth place.

The film, co-starring Aaron Eckhart, grossed $8.5million.
The top five was rounded out by horror film Jennifer‘s Body – also on its opening weekend – with $6.8million.

Animated film 9 dropped to the number six position while Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds slipped four places to number seven. All About Steve slipped to eighth position while Sorority dropped three places to number nine and The Final Destination dropped to number 10.

MUMBAI: Louie Psihoyos, the director of award-winning documentary The Cove about Japan‘s dolphin slaughter, has said that he would attend the screening of the film at the Tokyo film festival which opens on 17 October, knowing fully well that he could be arrested.

Japanese police are of the view that the director and other members of his crew violated trespassing laws when they documented the hunt in the seaside town of Taiji, where 2,000 dolphins are killed every year.

The film shows fishermen on small boats banging on poles to frighten the dolphins into a cove, where they are then killed with spears. The cove is closed off by barbed wire, and the film crew had to film much of the footage covertly.

The Cove has won more than a dozen awards and led to an outpouring of outrage at the hunt. Initially, it wasn‘t part of the program for the Tokyo International Film Festival.

Psihoyos said he wasn‘t concerned about getting arrested if it was for the right cause, saying he sees covert filming as a form of civil disobedience. He also says he disagrees with how Japanese authorities were defining trespassing, because the cove is in a national park.

MUMBAI: The 12th annual Arpa International Film Festival will present over 50 films, post-screening receptions, and a star-studded closing night awards ceremony when it goes underway from 23 to 25 October at the legendary Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood.

On October 23, the festival will present the long anticipated North American premiere of Haik Gazarian‘s Venezzia that stars two of Latin America ‘s hottest talents, Alfonso Herrera and Ruddy Rodriguez.

Joining Gazarian at the red carpet premiere will be co-stars Herrera, one of Mexico‘s most popular actors and former member of the Grammy-nominated pop group RBD, and Rodriguez, a former Miss World Venezuela, whose more than two decades in television and film have garnered her a legion of devoted fans in the Spanish speaking world and beyond.

More than 50 feature films, shorts, documentaries, music videos and animations will screen during the festival. “There‘s an incredible buzz around the films we‘ve been able to get this year. Our programming department tracked the global film festival scene for the last year and singled out the exemplary films relating to Armenians or made by Armenian filmmakers, says Arpa Festival director Alex Kalognomos.

The documentary line up includes Anjar: Flowers, Goats and Heroes a film about the history of the people of Musa Dagh by Canadian-Armenian filmmaker Noura Kevorkian, Autumn of the Magician an homage to legendary Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra and Armenia‘s official selection in the Best Foreign Language Film category for the 2010 Academy Awards; Komitas Hairig that tells the story of the beloved Komitas Vardapet; Husher a film which documents the testimony of Armenian Genocide survivors who settled in Italy; and Whispering Memories the story of a community of Armenians in Turkey who stayed behind during the genocide and silently converted to Islam.

Among the competitive short film category are films like Hove starring Olympia Dukakis. Actor-Writer-Director Shant Hamassian‘s Spaceman on Earth, which debuted at this year‘s Cannes Film Festival will be featured in a program of shorts by Los Angeles filmmakers.

MUMBAI: Virgin Media has signed an agreement with Disney featuring a raft of new kids‘ content to be made available across Virgin Media‘s three entertainment platforms.

The deal includes the addition of the recently launched Disney XD channel, TV on demand content including HD programming, as well as rights for a wide range of Disney shows to be made available online and via the mobile screen.

With the addition of Disney content, Virgin Media will have over 300 hours of kids‘ content on demand from a broad range of content providers. Virgin Media has also secured rights for all three TV channels and on demand content to be to made available online.

The TV on-demand offering will give families many popular shows to watch from all three Disney channels, including hit programmes such as Hannah Montana, Phineas and Ferb and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

A whole range of original movies available on demand, including hits such as High School Musical

, Camp Rock and the forthcoming Skyrunners are also part of the deal.