New Line Cinema Absorbed

It was anounced yesterday that despite the release of Semi-Pro today and the upcoming Sex and the City film, New Line cinema is being absorbed by it’s parent company Warner Bros. This is due to legal issues regarding the Lord of the Rings trilogy as well as a long string of failures following those films. It appears that the Golden Compass was the movie that broke the camels back. Although New Line still may exist, it is going to be stripped down to a much smaller company and will no longer be allowed to operate indipendently.

So the studio that Freddy Kruger built has been taken down by an armor clad Polar Bear.

Fraid it’s a done deal despite that.

Golden Compass did em in. That movie cost 180mil to make and only made 70 in the US.

Yeah, but with ancillary rights (home video, cable TV, broadcast, etc.) it’s practically impossible for a film to lose money over a 7 year period. WHen a studio claims “losses”, it’s for the one fiscal year, and they make it up as a bulk “catalog” of content and alternate revenues.

Big business… crazy.

Hollywood accounting…3 sets of books, ghost writeoffs, expenses,etc. Who says Hollywood has lost it’s creativity…it’s more creative than ever. I always thought Mario Puzo said it best when he compared Holywood executives with the mafia and the mafia came off looking pretty good.