Los Angeles Hollywood

Kanye Performs New Songs at Facebook HQ

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

No word yet why he was at Facebook headquarters, but we get to hear material from Good Ass Job! Rumor is he and Mark Zuckerberg were having a meeting together, who knows what they could be up to. Kanye performed what sounded like 'Chain Heavy' and 'Sweat on My Face'. Looks like that tracklist that everyone thought was fake may actually end up being real. September 14th better hurry up goddammit.

Statistics: Rich People watch Mad Men

Monday, July 26, 2010

Turns out Mad Men has the wealthiest fans in all of cable TV land, according to The Hollywood Reporter: Nearly half of its viewers make a household income of more than $100,000 a year. Though other cable hits garner much higher ratings, none come even close to the acclaimed AMC drama in terms of what portion of their fan base is loaded. For instance, USA’s Royal Pains averages 6.9 million viewers each week, but only 29 percent of them make more than $100,000 annually; TNT’s The Closer garners 5.1 million viewers a week, with only 27 percent passing the $100,000 mark.

It comes as no surprise, really, that Mad Men would blow everyone else out of the water when it comes to its viewers’ bank accounts: It is the TV-taste status symbol of the moment. Drop a Mad Men reference at a cocktail party and watch people trip over themselves to show you that they get it; admit you don’t watch the damn thing, and you’re in for 30-45 minutes of people either implying you’re an uncultured boob or belaboring how you really should immediately consume every single episode lest you miss out on the cultural event of our times. (I have friends who have actually learned just enough about the show to “pass” as viewers, for the explicit purpose of avoiding these uncomfortable confrontations.) People who watch Mad Men are a small but impassioned and homogeneous bunch. It’s the kind of show that, if you watch it and hang out with people who do, you can’t believe it has only 1.9 million viewers. Doesn’t everybody who’s anybody watch it? Well, no — only everybody who makes 100-grand a year.

'Salt' vs. 'Wanted': Angelina's action heat cools off the second time around

I don't know about you, but like so many other moviegoers, when I was trying to figure out if I really needed to rush out and see "Salt" right away, I checked out the trailers for the Angelina Jolie action thriller and basically said -- does this really look better than "Wanted?" And like millions of other moviegoers, I suspect I reached the same conclusion, "Ah, no." As you may remember, "Wanted," which came out in the summer of 2008, was another special-effects and over-the-top stunts-studded thriller that not only gave Jolie lots of action heroics but surrounded her with classy (but non-threatening) male actors (in "Salt," it's Liev Schreiber and Ejiofor Chiwetel, in "Wanted," it's James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman).

Sony has been trying to put as positive as possible a spin on the opening weekend box-office equation, but if you compared the two movies -- since they are so eminently comparable -- you'd have to say that this is yet another example in which trying to recapture the same excitement and revitalize the same action beats doesn't inspire an overwhelmingly positive audience response. You just can't go back to the well that many times. According to CinemaScore, fans gave the film a B-plus, which is a solid grade, but not one that guarantees great second or third weekend legs at the box office.

"Wanted," which cost roughly $75 million, had a $50.9-million opening weekend. It ended up making $134 million in the U.S. and another $206 million overseas. Pretty impressive stuff. But "Salt" cost considerably more to make -- roughly $130 million, according to my colleague Ben Fritz, roughly $100 million according to Variety -- and opened to only $36.5 million. That gives it a long, uphill climb to get into "Wanted" territory, especially with "Inception" siphoning off huge chunks of younger, thriller-oriented moviegoers.

The lesson? If you're going the genre route, and you're spending more dough to bring the movie to market, you're trapped in an arms race where you have to deliver more thrills and more spectacular stunts each time out -- or you're looking at a diminishing series of returns. This will be especially true if Universal ends up making "Wanted 2," which will really have to deliver some serious goods to triumph over what is beginning to look a little like Jolie action fatigue.

Source: LAtimesblog