LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Universal brought Snow White, Bourne and a battleship to CinemaCon on Thursday in the hopes of astonishing theater owners, but all it really needed to pack was a pot-smoking teddy bear. With a reported budget of $65 million, Seth MacFarlane’s “Ted” was made for a fraction of what it cost to blow up half the Navy in “Battleship,” but the resounding laughter that greeted the extended footage indicates the studio might have a huge R-rated hit on its hands. The film centers on a boy whose Christmas wish comes true after his teddy bear comes to life. …
BERLIN (Reuters) – A film by Hollywood director Roland Emmerich portraying William Shakespeare as a fraud won six German Film Prize trophies on Friday at the world’s most lucrative movie honors with total prize money of around $4 million. But the top award, best film, went to Andreas Dresen’s “Stopped on Track” (“Halt auf freier Strecke”), a portrait of a man dying from a brain tumor. It won in four categories overall, including director, actor and supporting actor. …
NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – Warner Bros. has all but ended its longtime production deal with Joel Silver, one of Hollywood’s biggest producers and a mainstay at the studio. Silver’s deal with Warner concludes at the end of 2012, and the studio has no intention of renewing it, a studio executive told TheWrap. The producer of iconic franchises like “Lethal Weapon” and “The Matrix” has a relationship with the studio dating back to the 1980s and founded his own Silver Pictures in 1985. …
NEW YORK (Reuters) – “War Witch,” a sensitive drama about a 12-year-old girl abducted by vicious armed rebels in sub-Saharan Africa, and a nonfiction film that examines the plight of women in modern India, won the top awards at the Tribeca Film Festival on Thursday. “War Witch” picked up the jury prize for best narrative feature and best actress for Rachel Mwanza who plays the girl forced to become a child soldier, while “The World Before Her” that parallels women in the Miss India beauty pageant and a fundamentalist Hindu girls camp won best documentary. …
Imax misses profit estimates by a cent
(Reuters) – Imax Corp’s quarterly net profit missed estimates by a cent, even as the Canadian giant movie screen maker posted higher recurring revenue and continued to expand its global footprint. The company expects to install 17 to 21 new theatre systems in the second quarter, with a backlog of 261 theatre systems at the end of March. Imax, which also designs and produces cameras and projection equipment for its namesake motion picture film format, installed 16 new systems in the first quarter. The company recorded a net income of $2. …