Movies

Online piracy may not be as bad as Hollywood would like you to believe. A new study titled, “Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Film Piracy on International Box Office Sales,” conducted by Brett Danaher, from the Department of Economics at Wellesley College, and Joel Waldfogel from the Department of Economics at University of Missouri, suggests little, if any, loss of revenue on U.S. box office sales after the release of BitTorrent. More… Read More

Amazon is continuing its quest to corner a piece of the content streaming market with its new Viacom partnership. The new deal will offer Amazon Prime members the ability to instantly access TV shows from MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, TV Land, Spike, VH1, BET, CMT, and Logo. Netflix and Hulu are feeling a little pressure from Amazon. By wrapping the amount of content it does into its Amazon Prime service, it’s marketing itself to a wider… Read More

This July, Spider-Man swings back into theaters with a new cast, director, and vision for the famous web-slinging superhero. Rather than continue the franchise after 2007′s overcrowded, budget-busting Spider-Man 3, Sony chose to reboot the franchise with British actor Andrew Garfield (The Social Network, Never Let Me Go) as teenage hero Peter Parker and 500 Days of Summer director Marc Webb behind the camera for The Amazing Spider-Man… Read More

Actor Michael Winslow is probably best-known as the guy who made all of those crazy sounds in the Police Academy movies, but he recently contributed his noise-making talents to a short video looking back on the evolution of video-game sound effects. Produced by G4TV, the two-minute video has Winslow beep-bop-booping his way from Pong to Portal, and offering a timeline of sorts for some popular games' use of SFX. There's an extremely… Read More

With cable subscriptions beginning to decline, everyone wants in on streaming. Though it's late to the game, Verizon is teaming with Redbox (owned by Coinstar) to create a Netflix hybrid service that would offer Redbox DVDs and streaming movies over a Verizon video subscription service. The new service should launch (or be unveiled) later this year (second half of 2012).  According to Verizon, the new service will give users “the… Read More

Ok, so here’s the deal — this is a very specific type of list, designed with a very specific goal. From comedies to super-hero movies, from tearjerkers to period pieces, there is a lot of variety heading to the theaters this year. But this is not just a top 10 most anticipated list, or a list of the movies we think will do well this year. It is a list of the movies we hope don’t suck. These are the movies we hope don’t suck, because if they do,… Read More

During the middle of the 20th Century, Hammer Films made a name for itself with a long list of horror movies that pushed the boundaries of the genre and perfected a formula for giving audiences nightmares on a regular basis. After closing up shop in the 1980s for various reasons, the British studio returned to the spotlight last year with Let Me In, a remake of the Swedish film Let The Right One In. This weekend Hammer returns with its new… Read More

I should start by admitting a personal bias I carried when I walked into Chronicle–I hate fictional movies filmed in the cinéma vérité, “hand-held” style. Documentaries? Cool, all over that. Hollywood movies. Not so much. I liked Cloverfield for the most part, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the shaky cam experience didn’t really add much to it, and was at times incredibly annoying. It created a unique perspective on the monster… Read More

As announced by the Los Angeles Times earlier today, Coinstar's popular Redbox brand has made a decision to ignore Warner Brothers recently announced 56-day plan that would restrict when a consumer has access to renting a new release on DVD or Blu-ray through the popular red kiosks.    Company officials at Redbox have decided to purchase all new Warner Brothers releases in bulk through retailers like Amazon, Target and Wal-Mart, but at a… Read More

Digital music reseller ReDigi is the latest online content distributor (or redistributor) to find itself in legal trouble. The site launched in October 2011 as a service for users to sell old digital music files and gain points toward buying new ones. Digital music has solved many problems with its tangible counterparts, but buyers aren’t able to sell or trade-in used copies. ReDigi capitalized on this problem, and insisted its system was legal.… Read More

Custom cars based on movie or television props have generally resided in murky legal waters, with vehicles often covered by a different set of guidelines than other works due to their ability to serve a wide variety of necessary purposes. It looks like that could be changing, however, as a court recently ruled that copyright rules extend to car design — especially when that car is a replica of the Batmobile. U.S. District Judge Ronald Lew… Read More

Piracy has been in the news a lot recently, thanks to extensive coverage of both the SOPA and PIPA bills, and the ongoing saga of Megaupload.com. Neither unpopular bills or the closing down of services also used for legitimate means are the solution to the problem though, so what is? While a complete solution may not even exist, there are steps that can be taken to cut down on the effects of piracy, provided someone is willing to put in the… Read More

A good heist movie is like a magic trick that lets you in on its secret, pairing a flair for eye-catching drama with a complicated plan that relies on various elements operating in complete sync with one another. When one of those elements feels out of sync or ill-suited for the role it plays in the grand scheme, the heist loses credibility – because in the end, a good heist is about doing the impossible and proving that the odds can be beat… Read More