UNDER THE DOME REMAINS ON TOP OF RATINGS

There was little change in the make-up of the top 10 shows on the Nielsen ratings list last week, nor in the number of viewers for each of them. The Stephen King/Steven Spielberg sci-fi drama Under the Dome on CBS remained the most-watched show of the week with 11.6 million viewers. NBC’s two installments of […]

DID U.S. GIVE NEW ZEALAND INFO ABOUT REPORTER’S CONTACTS?

Raising new concerns about the collection of metadata concerning contacts between reporters and their sources, the McClatchy newspaper chain on Tuesday asked the Obama administration to explain New Zealand news reports that U.S. intelligence agencies tracked the phone records of a New Zealand journalist who reported on “possible war crimes” committed by New Zealand special […]

SAUDI BLOGGER AND TALK-SHOW GUEST SENTENCED TO SEVEN YEARS

A Saudi blogger, who has criticized the role of religion in his country on his Internet site and on local television, has been sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes for violating Islamic values, propagating liberal thought and disobeying his father. Raif Badawi, editor of the Free Saudi Liberals website, had been held […]

WILL FAMILIES RETURN TO THEATERS AGAIN THIS WEEKEND?

This weekend will reveal whether families are mostly all-movied-out for the summer. Add to last week’s Turbo from DreamWorks Animation and Fox and Universal’s Despicable Me 2, which is going into its fifth weekend, Sony’s Smurfs 2, which is opening today (Wednesday). Tracking reports indicate that it will earn around $35 million, about the same […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: THE SMURFS 2

Last time around The Smurfs got lousy reviews but managed to take in $563.7 million worldwide. This time around, The Smurfs 2 is getting even worse reviews but is still expected to win big at the box office, particularly overseas. It may, of course, be critic-proof. After all, what three-year-old reads reviews? But critics have […]

WILL DEADLINE.COM, VARIETY OWNER BUY NEWSWEEK?

Barry Diller, who recently conceded, “I wish I hadn’t bought Newsweek — it was a mistake,” may have a buyer for the 80-year-old publication: Jay Penske, who also bought Deadline.com in 2009 and Variety in 2012, the New York Post reported today (Wednesday), citing unnamed sources. Penske declined to comment on the report. The newspaper […]

FIRST AFRICAN-AMERICAN TO HEAD MOVIE ACADEMY — AND SHE’S A WOMAN

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hands out the annual Oscar awards, has selected veteran film marketer Cheryl Boone Isaacs as its next president. Isaacs will become the first African-American to serve as AMPAS president in its 86-year history and the first woman to head up the organization since Fay Kanin, who […]

NOW YOU DON’T SEE IT (CBS, THAT IS); NOW YOU DO

At about midnight Eastern time last night, a message appeared on the screens of Time Warner Cable subscribers on the channels that had been presenting CBS programming beginning with the words, “CBS has demanded an outrageous increase in the amount we and our customers pay for programming that CBS delivers for free over the air […]

AWKWARD FOX INTERVIEW OF AUTHOR BOOSTS SALES OF HIS BOOK

A clearly inept interview by Fox News anchor Lauren Green of biblical scholar Reza Aslan about his new biography of Jesus has boosted sales of the book after the interview went viral on the Internet. Green began the interview by asking, “You’re a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of […]

UNDER THE DOME‘S DOME WON’T BE LIFTED THIS SUMMER

When CBS launched the Stephen King/Steven Spielberg series Under the Dome this summer, it was referred to as a 13-week miniseries. That description seemed to imply that the series would have a 13-week arc and that the mystery of the dome would be revealed at the end. Well, forget that notion. After becoming the biggest […]

Next Page »