Tag: Disturbia

Midweek movie news

No promises we’ll have a Friday news dump this week, so you’d better enjoy this edition…

* Well, the big news tonight is most definitely the reorganization going over at the Warner Brothers megastudio. As far as I’m able to suss out, what this amounts to is a consolidation of power for CEO Jeff Bewkes. Reading Nikki Finke‘s current summary of the situation is a bit like reading a Television Without Pity post for a very complicated soap opera you’ve never seen, but Anne Thompson keeps it much, much simpler. On his way out exec Alan Horn is a good guy who Thompson believes was simply superfluous. Another case of a nice guy finishing last?

Warner-Bros

However, Nikki Finke does allude to a very crucial part of the Warners empire, and that’s DC Comics now being headed by the Warners minded and Finke approved Diane Nelson. As it happens, my deep, deep connections in the comics biz were e-mailing me news earlier today — which I was somewhat aware of but failed to properly cover earlier in the week — of an onging reorganization going on over there which certainly ties into the ongoing attempts at Warners to become more aggressive regarding comics adaptations along the lines of what Marvel Entertainment has been doing for some time — and also to try and avoid more flops like “Jonah Hex.”

There was even talk some talk of DC becoming entirely a West Coast operation, but that would be a major breach of publishing industry tradition with some actual problems involved and, in any case, thanks to FedEx and the ‘net, freelancers can live where they want now. Heidi MacDonald’s great comics blog The Beat has been covering this end of the story and you read about some of what’s going on here.

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Today’s secret word is “$”

On an otherwise slow movie news day, Variety‘s Michael Fleming is onĀ  a small role, and the theme is filthy lucre.

* Writers Aline Brosh McKenna and Simon Kinberg have obtained $2 million from Paramount on the basis of a pitch for an unnamed upcoming project to be produced by J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot. Especially in this climate, it’s a surprisingly tidy sum. It sort of brings back to mind the Hollywood of a couple of decades back when the studios were handing out sometimes surprisingly generous money for options to even relatively unknown writers on the basis of a pitch — though McKenna and Kinberg are far from unknown and the Abrams imprimatur surely didn’t hurt.

No details about the story have emerged but Kinberg is associated with lighthearted action pieces, like the upcoming “Sherlock Holmes,” while McKenna has worked on lighthearted feminine-friendly material like “The Devil Wears Prada.”

A Fistful of Dollars

* “The Art of Making Money” is an adaptation of journalist Jason Kersten’s nonfiction account of the career of counterfeiter Art Williams. Director D.J. Caruso (“Disturbia,” “Red Eye”) and Junior James Kirk Chris Pine are “in negotiations” with Paramount for the pic.

* Meanwhile at Fox, any action comedy headlined by Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, to be directed by James Mangold (“3:10 to Yuma“), co-written by busy master scribe Scott FrankĀ  (“The Lookout” “Get Shorty,” “Minority Report,” etc.) and backed up by all-star supporting is likely to be a pricey proposition. You’d think they could afford a better title than “Knight & Day.”

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