Stuff You Need to Know, Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Dawn Treader has no Disney. Hollywood Reporter does an analysis of the situation fairly well, showing that the Narnia franchise is on a downward slope and Disney feels like it’s time to get while the getting’s good. Of course, what they leave out is that the reason Lion did well as compared to Caspian is that fool us once shame on you, fool us twice shame on us. Your Caspian audience, I think, were the kids who just didn’t know any better. But of course, Hollywood, since it can’t accept responsibility when it fucks up something, will simply show this as waning interest in fantasy flicks for kids. Morons.

Clive Owen will star in Cartagena a story about the fit hitting the shan for an undercover agent who’s in the middle of the Colombian drug cartel scene. Source: Hollywood Reporter.

Interesting. Rather than screw around with the censors and so forth in China, Warner Brothers just isn’t releasing Dark Knight in China. Which means that those who haven’t already purchased a pirated copy in that country will now. Source: Variety.

Hollywood Reporter has an analysis of the performance of online content provider Hulu, which is NBC-Uni and News Corp’s answer to YouTube. It’s doing better than people thought it was but perhaps not as good as the hype might lead you to believe. Here’s a tip, Hulu people: get your content available worldwide. I would love to embed your vids here and get you some play, but that would be rude as hell to my international audience–so once I realized you were U.S. only I just don’t even go to your site anymore. I’m sure I can’t be the only one. Get that shit straightened out: the world is a big place.

The Shaw Brothers going private? Sir Run Run Shaw–we met him on a Monday and our hearts stood still before he plucked it out and showed it to us–wants to spend $172M to pull the 25% of the stock in the company he doesn’t own back in-house. Shaw is 101 years old. Doc and I have decided among the two of us that if Shaw is trying to sell off Shaw Brothers he could do so to a consortium of American artists who appreciate the company–Tarantino and Sam Jackson sprang to mind–in order to turn it into the fu equivalent of United Artists. Who’s with us on this thought? Why, I think Doc got a little misty-eyed at the notion. Source: Variety.

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