REPORT: LUHRMANN NEEDS MORE CASH TO FINISH GATSBY

Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s remake of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby may be facing more serious difficulties than complicated 3D special effects. Earlier this month it was reported that the movie had been yanked from its scheduled awards-season release in December and was being moved to an undisclosed date in the summer, ostensibly because […]

LENO AND TONIGHT: BACK TO 2009

For Jay Leno and the Tonight show, it must have seemed like 2009 all over again. That was the year that NBC decided to move him into primetime as it turned Tonight over to Conan O’Brien. Leno reportedly got a hefty raise — to $25 million — when that occurred, and he also was able […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU’RE EXPECTING

The best thing that What to Expect When You’re Expecting has got going for it is its production budget — it cost only $25 million to make. And although the film’s publicists have been working overtime trying to find a hook that will appeal to men, it has been tracking heavily among females — only. […]

BRANAGH WAITING TO SEE IF THOR THUNDERS

Kenneth Branagh, the improbable director of Marvel’s latest superhero flick Thor, is taking no bets on whether the movie will get Hollywood’s summer season off the ground when it debuts on Friday. “I’m immune to the idea of how to second-guess what an audience would spend its money on,” he told Reuters. “I can only […]

CAN U.S. NETWORKS AFFORD THE ROYAL WEDDING?

After incurring heavy costs with their coverage of the uprisings in Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia as well as the Japanese earthquake and tsunami disasters, it’s unclear whether the broadcast networks and cable news channels will be willing — or able — to devote the kind of resources to the wedding of Prince William and Kate […]

MGM WON’T HAVE TO FUND THE HOBBIT AFTER ALL

MGM has handed over foreign distribution of the two The Hobbit movies to Warner Bros. in exchange for Warners’ putting up the entire $530-million production budget for the movies, the Los Angeles Times reported today (Friday). A previous agreement called for the two studios to split the production costs, with Warners getting domestic distribution and […]

MOVIE BUDGET GOES FROM PARANORMAL TO NORMAL

Paranormal Activity 2, which is being released at midnight tonight, cost $3 million to produce versus $15,000 for the original, despite the fact that the sequel retains most of the look and feel of the original. The difference in cost, according to the Los Angeles Times, can be explained largely by the fact that “Paramount […]

EASTWOOD APPEALS FOR SURVIVAL OF U.K. FILM COUNCIL

Clint Eastwood has a formidable foe in his sights, the British government. Last week, he fired off a letter to George Osborne, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer (analogous to the U.S. secretary of the treasury) appealing to him to reverse the decision to shut down the U.K. Film Council as part of a cost-cutting move […]