Infinity and Beyond

For most everyone in Hollywood these days the Veteran’s Day holiday means they can take a day off from picketing. The strike is only just starting and it’s picking up steam with every passing day as more and more TV shows and films get shut down. From 24 to Grey’s Anatomy, the biggest shows on TV are just simply running out of scripts to shoot. Then like a moth to the flame Michael Eisner comes back to toss in his two cents on the matter. Eisner has called the current strike “stupid” and “misguided”.  Here is what appeared on Thursday’s ’studio briefing’ on imdb.com:

“In an interview with Fox News’s Neil Cavuto at a media conference in New York on Wednesday, Eisner maintained that the writers, by demanding a residual plan for movies and TV shows downloaded from the Internet, are asking for a piece of “nonexistent” revenue. He predicted that revenue from digital media will remain “nonexistent for the next three years” and that the WGA was jumping the gun. “For a writer to give up today’s money for a nonexistent piece of the future — they should [strike] in three years, shouldn’t be doing it now — they are misguided.” Asked why, if the studios aren’t making money on digital distribution, they simply don’t give in to the writers’ demands since a bigger piece of nothing is still nothing, Eisner responded: “They don’t know what to give. … Digital will eventually be the dominant medium for distribution but not yet.” Eisner also suggested that the studios were partially to blame for the current situation since “they’ve been talking about how great [the Internet] business is, and now they have to open their books and explain that there’s no business.”

In other news. ‘Lions for Lambs’ opened on Friday and critics aren’t exactly rejoicing depsite it’s stellar cast. Tom Cruise resurrected United Artists with Paula Wagner and this was to be the studio’s triumphant return to cinema. Unfortunately for Cruise and Wagner the film hasn’t done so well on it’s opening weekend. Taking in an estimated 6.7 million the film continues the trend of underperforming Middle-East-conflict films. ‘The Kingdom’ went on to make 47.2 mil while ‘Rendition’ made 9.5 mil and has practically gone in and out of theaters in 3 weeks.

Cruise has been on somewhat of a downward spiral as of late and this leads me to bring up my ‘creators’ post about personal lives getting in the way of the content the actors help create. It would seem that since Cruise’s fiasco his popularity outside the gossip rags has waned a bit. We shall see if United Artists can survive Cruise as their next film, Valkyrie, is also a Cruise picture.

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