For once, marketers have told the truth: Modern Warfare 2 really was the entertainment industry's biggest launch ever.
First-day sales: 4.7 million copies, $310 million in North America and the U.K. Hollywood's biggest movie launch was The Dark Knight, which pulled in $158.3 million (and took three days to do it).
It wasn't an idle boast this past June by marketers that MW2 would blitz the world. Videogames are the future, movies are the past, at least in money terms.
Whatever happened to 9/11 and Bush's War on Terror? In MW2 you can even play a terrorist and shoot civilians at an airport massacre! And see Washington, D.C., go up in flames! Life's good.
Of course, there is the debate (see here and here) over whether such games contribute to real-life violence. Ho-fucking-hum. We're already an extremely violent society.
The multicultural collision of Ikea, indie actors,"reality" shows, and web-only vanity projects is a big step in marketing, but what about the shit it's leaving on our shoes?
Call it advertainment, though the ad industry calls these things branded webisodes. It's kinda the opposite of product placement: In this case, the stars — Illeana Douglas, Keanu Reeves, Jeff Goldblum, Justine Bateman, and other Ikeans — are products that are placed inside other products. Like those Russian or Ukrainian nesting dolls.
Detailed report on hyperlocal tool Foursquare, which gets people together via smartphones at various restaurants and bars. As a potentially powerful advertising tool for such places, it's yet another threat to newspapers that are trying to survive on online ads. Potentially, restaurants and bars could completely bypass newspapers and other online ad outlets.
More bad news for the print media: People magazine's mobile site is drawing 18 million page views monthly. Ad Age's take is smarter than that, of course, noting that skeptics who think mobile sites can't build massive audiences for content and ads are wrong. My only question is why People's home page lists "celebs" as a separate section of the mag.
Ruling "could help break open the tight controls that have crippled the ability of filmmakers, musicians, videogame designers and other artists to widely market their creations at reasonable prices." Other major trade clashes between China and U.S. are also coming to a head.
Sheryl Weinstein, former chief financial officer at Hadassah, a major Jewish women's organization, fesses up to an affair with Bernie. She and her hubby (and Hadassah) not only lost their asses to Bernie, but she personally lost hers to him. Now we know that Bernie made at least one deposit.
When it comes to the battle of dead pop stars, Elvis has left the building, and MJ has taken the stage. In the 48 days since his death, Michael Jackson has earned $100 million in film and merchandising deals, and his handlers expect another $100 million by the end of the year. Co-executor says, "Clearly that's a new record for estates that likely will not be broken."
Maybe Michael Jackson's will really did run out, but the estate documents he left behind may live forever.
Curious about MJ's will and the fight over his estate? Don't stop till you get enough info from Death and Taxes - The Blog ), where Chicago-area estates lawyer Joel Schoenmeyer breaks it down.
While you're at it, click on the above video for MJ and James Brown sharing a stage.
Bad news the other day at the Supreme Court for the media conglomerates NBC, ABC, CBS, 20th Century Fox, and Universal. In seemingly great news for DVR consumers and time-shifters, the content companies (grown fat on advertising revenue) lost a major battle with the Dolan family's Cablevision.
One hazard: We (and our movies and TV shows) might wind up being force-fed with so many product placements and logos — remember Malcolm McDowell's "reconditioning" in A Clockwork Orange?
Cablevision now has the green light to set up remote-server DVR service. Everything in your life (especially if your life revolves around TV) will be on-demand.
Federal prosecutors are supposedly focusing on Bernie Madoff's "close associates." Other people may speculate — not Madoff, who didn't speculate at all, considering that he didn't make a single trade — but the feds know that Madoff couldn't have pulled off his scam alone. At the very least, lots of his fellow traders and other outsiders on Wall Street knew that Madoff's claims of a steady return, year after year, no matter how the market was doing, were bullshit. All credit to Harry Markopolos, but he couldn't possibly have been the only person to have figured it out.
Unraveling the finances of both Madoff and MJ may take forever. Lawyers around the globe are trying to figure out how much money Madoff made off with (and who's got it now). They're searching for documents. MJ's finances are even more complicated, but lawyers already have most of the documents — too many of them, no doubt.
Who's going to wind up with Madoff's wealth? His money spigot has finally been turned off, but there are billions already out there. The only thing we know for sure is that trustee Irving Picard is in line for a 3 percent commission. As law prof Lawrence Velvel says, "Were Picard to recover ten billion dollars in these suits and distribute it to Madoff victims, his personal share, at three percent, would be 300 million dollars. Nice work if you can get it."
Aside from the complex question of lawyers' fees, who's going to wind up with what share of the rest of MJ's wealth? "The settling of his estate will be complicated," the L.A. Times understates. Especially because the spigot is wide open, and the cash keeps gushing out.
Of all the people unhappy about Michael Jackson's death, no businessman is suffering as much as Philip Anschutz, the secretive, right-wing Christian tycoon from Colorado who controls a sports and entertainment empire.
The heavily in-debt Jackson's death wipes out the extremely expensive MJ comeback already financed by Anschutz's AEG Live concert-promotion behemoth and set to kick off July 8 in London.
Despite the millions of dollars that his empire had a chance to make off the King of Pop, Anschutz didn't even want to get involved: Jackson's very existence — not to mention the star's so-gay behavior (and his ambiguous sexuality and various molestation accusations) — had to have deeply offended Anschutz. He had to be persuaded by private-equity pal Tom Barrack of Colony Capital to invest in Jackson.
Part of that tale was told only a few weeks ago in an L.A. Times piece about Barrack's rescue of Jackson, "To this financier, Michael Jackson is an undervalued asset."Chris Lee and Harriet Ryan lay out an interesting yarn about Barrack, who controls casinos, hotels, et al. around the world, stepping in to buy Neverland and rescue Jackson:
In Jackson, Barrack saw the sort of undervalued asset his private equity firm, Colony Capital, had succeeded with in the past. He wrote a check to save the ranch and placed a call to a friend, conservative business magnate Philip Anschutz, whose holdings include the concert production firm AEG Live. ... Barrack said the prospect of helping Jackson, given his recent criminal case, gave Anschutz, a devout Christian, pause.
(Yeah, no doubt. Anschutz has been a heavy contributor to various anti-gay and other "morality" causes; his money played a crucial role in the passage of Colorado's anti-gay Amendment Two in 1992.)
But Anschutz agreed, and he put Jackson in touch with his AEG subsidiary. The rest was going to be history: the biggest, baddest career re-launch ever. And a series of deals by which Anschutz and Barrack would have raked in millions — concerts staged by an Anschutz subsidiary and appearances in venues controlled by Barrack.
The reviews of a new movie being made about Bernie Madoff aren't as bad as the reviews of Bernie's real-life behavior. But the film (a long ways from being completed) is not looking too good, apparently. The N.Y. Post, in "The Worst Movie of 2009? Maybe Madoff: Made Off With America," previewed what it calls "a hugely unpromising clip."
Investors beware.
No matter how perfect the lead actor Paul Cohen's lips are (according to last month's hype), the movie (headquartered at satanofwallstreet.com) looks to be a scheme unto itself. You can't even see those supposedly perfect lips when an angry investor punches, kicks, and stomps "Madoff."
The Post invokes the name of Ed Wood in its brief review. So in an homage to Glen or Glenda, we may get Bernie or Bernice? Probably not, but it would be fun to see Madoff in a tight skirt. And the film would probably be better. But as a historical document about the history of the Madoff scheme, the clip itself is already perfect.
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