CBS Corp is exploring a possible entry into the movie business, with a view toward producing a handful of smaller-budget films annually, Chief Executive Les Moonves said on Wednesday.
“We are exploring it,” Moonves said at a PricewaterhouseCoopers media event in New York. “We’re not looking to do Superman.”
Moonves did not provide details on how CBS would set up a movie venture, whether through acquisition or building up its own properties.
But he said the television and radio broadcaster would be interested in producing six to eight movies a year on smaller budgets of US$20 million to US$30 million.
“We could get in in a small way, doing six to eight movies a year in a risk-free way,” Moonves said.
CBS, home to the tele-vision network of the same name, separated from corporate parent Viacom Inc. at the beginning of the year. Viacom retained the Paramount Pictures movie studios.
Hollywood writer/producer Aaron Spelling, who has helped create some of America’s most popular and beloved television shows, suffered a stroke in his home over the weekend and is recovering, his publicist said Wednesday.
Spelling, whose credits include Beverly Hills, 90210, Starsky and Hutch and Charlie’s Angels, suffered a stroke on Sunday in his Los Angeles home.
“He is now at home resting with his wife under a doctor’s care,” Kevin Sasaki, Spelling’s publicist, said.
A filmmaker who made one of France’s biggest domestic box-office hits, The Choir, on Wednesday lost a court fight against several Internet companies he accused of promoting illegal downloading of movies.
Christophe Barratier had alleged that AOL France, Telecom Italia France, Neuf Telecom, Voyages, financial firm Finaref, and the state lottery company La Francaise des Jeux were complicit in the activity by putting illicit download sites on poster ads.
But the Paris court, while recognizing that such sites were illegal, refused to convict the companies, saying that Barratier’s claims “relied purely on hypotheses”.
It added: “No evidence shows their intention to commit the infraction they are accused of.”
Several of the companies themselves blamed the
presence of the offending sites on their posters on advertising management companies.
Barratier had been seeking a symbolic, rather than financial, court victory to make an “example” of the companies.
His movie The Choir, about a group of boys in a harsh boarding school who are transformed by a teacher who introduces them to singing. It generated more than US$8.5 million in ticket sales in France and was nominated for an Oscar last year.
Tom Cruise’s next mission may not be impossible, but it could be difficult: He wants free run of downtown Tokyo for a week to shoot action sequences for a future movie. “I’d like to shoot in Tokyo, if I could have downtown for a week. Just at night,” Cruise, in Tokyo for the premiere of
Mission: Impossible 3, told a news conference on Tuesday.
Piracy in China cost film makers US$2.7 billion last year, with
domestic firms shouldering more than half those losses, according to a study commissioned by a trade group representing the major Hollywood studios. China’s film industry lost about US$1.5 billion in revenue to piracy last year, while the major US studios lost US$565 million, according to data released on Monday by the Motion Picture Association, whose members include the studio units of Time Warner, Walt Disney Co and Viacom Inc.
Bollywood superstar Salman Khan and four other Indian film personalities were earlier this week charged with poaching endangered black buck during a movie shoot, a court official said.
Khan, who is out on bail after being convicted of shooting a gazelle in a separate case, was in court in this western Indian city to hear the fresh charges, the official said.
Charged with Khan were fellow stars Saif Ali Khan, Sonali Bendre, Neelam Kothari and Tabu.
Khan, one of Bollywood’s most popular actors, was charged with shooting the black buck or
antelope while the others were booked for encouraging him during the film shoot eight years ago.
The 40-year-old Indian actor is no stranger to
controversy and faces charges of manslaughter over a road accident in 2002 that left one person dead and four others injured.
The actor has denied allegations that he was at the wheel, drunk and without a license, when his car ran over people sleeping on a sidewalk in western Mumbai, home to the country’s prolific Hindi-language film industry.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless