Trade Round-Up: Breaking! Movie Studio To Distribute Movies
MGM is inviting the press to its "lavish" Century City offices to unveil up to an 18 picture distribution slate from various indie studios, such as Weinstein Co., Bauer Martinez, and Lakeshore. Junket whores, get ready to get your minds blown by the Sony-powered MGM! [Variety]
Anyone who's spent more than a few minutes watching the Nickelodeon family of channels knows that what their networks really need is some adorable thugging up by the Wayans brothers. [THR]
Crash sells 17,500 DVDs the day after the Oscars. Sure, it's a spike, but is that a lot? We honestly have no idea, and we want to know whether we're supposed to be upset or not. [Variety]
They're just going to keep casting pilots until they run out of actors: John Lithgow goes to the NBC pilot Twenty Good Years, Jay Mohr joins NBC's Community Service, and Justine Bateman signs on with ABC's untitled Patricia Heaton project, which to the best of our knowledge is not about how tasty the steaks at Albertson's are. Yet, anyway—we'll see how the network notes go after the table read. [THR]
It took approximately a decade of regular cellphone use for Stephen King to finally embrace the technology as a murderous plot device in one of his novels, and Dimension far less time to commission a movie version of the idea. But do we really need them to tell us that cellphones turn people into zombies? [Variety]