Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

I wouldn’t have thought so . . . but then again the Weinstein brothers have made a lot more money in show business than I ever have. (A lot more.)

From Variety:

The Weinstein Co. will turn the Jim Henson series “Fraggle Rock” into a live-action musical feature. [ . . . ]

Just like the series, the film will be populated by a mix of human characters and Fraggle Rock puppets. TWC co-chair Harvey Weinstein, who has been steering his company more aggressively into the family film arena, made the marriage with Lisa Henson, who runs JHC with her co-CEO brother, Brian Henson. [ . . . ]

Pic will take the core characters Gobo, Wembley, Mokey, Boober and Red outside of their home in Fraggle Rock, where they interact with humans, which they think are aliens. The show premiered on HBO in 1983, ran five seasons and was broadcast in more than 80 countries. It posted strong sales recently when the first three seasons were released on DVD.

If you say so.

*scratches head*
*shrugs*

Again, this is why I’m in the business I’m in, instead of the producing-movies business.

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(Hat tip to EW; photo courtesy of The Jim Henson Company.)

My wife and I joined some friends for an Iron Man double-date on Saturday night. Our verdict: A fun, well-done flick all the way around.*

And, oh, by the way, a blockbuster in the making for Marvel:

‘Iron Man’ Forges Historic Box Office Win

The 2008 summer movie season started off on a historic note as Iron Man opened with huge box office numbers that propelled it to a weekend win and landed it in the company of the most impressive movie premieres of all time. The Marvel comic adaptation grossed $101 million from Friday to Sunday, according to early estimates. When Thursday evening’s screenings are added in, the film’s full weekend total comes to $104 mil. . . . [W]hen you consider just superhero flicks, this movie scored the fourth top opening in history, following those of Spider-Man 3 ($151.1 mil), Spider-Man ($114.8 mil), and X-Men: The Last Stand ($102.8 mil) — all of which are Marvel properties, though Iron Man is the first film to be fully financed by the comic studio. […]

To call this the biggest opener ever for star Robert Downey Jr. is an understatement: The actor has never even fronted a movie that grossed $100 mil during its entire run, let alone in one weekend.

Here are two lines of thought about Iron Man that extend beyond the film itself:

1. Which stars have redeemed themselves more thoroughly than Robert Downey Jr.?

I’m the last person to follow celebrity gossip, but even I couldn’t fail to be drawn in by the horror of Downey’s collapse into addiction. The pretty-boy druggie of Less Than Zero became what he had portrayed, and I feared that he would be a broken man after his stint in prison.

But now, Downey is a clean-living family man — albeit very much after his own fashion. His id still overflows nonstop — along with his R-rated language — and his conversations zigzag from the philosophical to the practical to the scatalogical in the span of a few sentences. All of this comes out clearly in a brilliant cover feature from Esquire’s March 2007 issue:

He’s looking at me as a car cuts us off, and I reflexively reach for the wheel as he hits the brakes and the spring-loaded Buddha on the dashboard starts bobbling madly. He waves off my apology — Downey, not Buddha. Buddha can go f*** himself.

“I want you to feel completely free to let all your codependent neuroses out,” he tells me. “You can grab the wheel, you can ask me if my tummy hurts, you can give me a foot rub later, anything. Enmeshment is really okay in small doses.”

Small doses? A dab of Downey — trust me — would fill this magazine cover to cover. Which makes a couple of hours sitting and talking at the Chateau Marmont perfect; we have only met, and I’ve brought — just in case conversation lags — my carefully researched notes.

“Me too,” he says.

You have notes? “I do, yeah. I actually already printed out the article if you’d like to read it. It really went great.”

But I’m worried about the lead. I need to redo the lead.

“You don’t need a lead,” Downey purrs. “Dude, the lead’s about to happen.”

Even better, as this post from Jason Craft points out, Downey is channeling all of this hyperkinetic energy and all his crazy foibles into his roles:

[Downey] took his issues past a point where we understood them within a revival or “bad boy with a heart of gold” narrative: he got bothersome, and let us give up. He didn’t publicly apologize in the mode we’re accustomed to now. He didn’t get Christian: he just hit rock bottom. We figured he’d be in jail until we forgot about him.

But he then lived. What’s more, he understood himself as the man lost and found again, the prodigal, and performed it.

In Iron Man, Downey’s Tony Stark is a louche billionaire playboy who develops a sense of morality after seeing human suffering up close. Yet even after this transformation, Stark/Iron Man remains as impulsive as ever. It’s just that now his impulses are channeled to better ends — something like Downey himself.

Besides the celebrity-redemption interest, I think there’s a general-purpose career lesson hiding in Downey’s story: You’ll be at your best not when you’re stifling all your impulses and personality, but when you’re channeling everything you have — both the virtuous and the weird — into positive efforts.

2. What the heck took Marvel so long bringing these characters to the screen?

I spent many, many hours of my childhood poring over comics. (I was profligate: I absorbed Marvel and DC stories in equal measure.) Tim Burton’s original Batman hit theaters when I was still in high school, but it would be many more years before Marvel took Spider-Man — surely one of the most bankable characters ever — and made a huge movie franchise out of it.

A quick tour of IMDB’s listing of all-time worldwide box office receipts reveals a LOT of Marvel:

11. — Spider-Man 3 (2007) — $885,430,303
18. — Spider-Man (2002) — $806,700,000
22. — Spider-Man 2 (2004) — $783,577,893
67. — X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) — $455,260,014
182. — X-Men (2000) — $294,100,000
248. — Hulk (2003) — $241,700,000

Even Daredevil, which was not nearly so well regarded, grossed nearly $180 million worldwide.

If you know of any analysis that explains Marvel’s long delay, please leave a comment that points me to it. Whatever the cause of the delay, Marvel sure seems to have its act together now. Without giving away the ending of Iron Man (and uh, be sure to stick around through the end of the credits), it’s clear that the film is ripe for a sequel. And Marvel is also queueing up the second installment of its Hulk series for next month, this time bearing the imprint of Transporter director Louis Leterrier and heavyweight actor Edward Norton.

In related news, director Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale will follow up on their 2005 hit Batman Begins with its sequel, The Dark Knight, in July.

Could be a very good summer for old comic-book geeks like me.

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* A caveat: I’m glad I didn’t take my under-13 kids to see it, because some of the scenes are pretty intense.

(Photo: EW via Gizmodo.)

It’s hard to believe, but nearly two years after its release, the Wii phenomenon is still building. Just yesterday I was talking to a colleague who’s had real trouble running down a Wii to purchase, and then comes this story in the morning’s news:

Nintendo Forecasts Profit Will Rise 26% This Year

April 24 (Bloomberg) — Nintendo Co., the world’s biggest maker of handheld game players, forecast profit will rise 26 percent this year as its Wii console outsells rival machines. […]

“Wii console sales are still on an upward trend,” Koki Shiraishi, an analyst with Daiwa Institute, said before results were released. “I don’t expect them to peak this fiscal year.”

I love how the mighty-mite Wii is kicking the butts of Microsoft’s Xbox360 and Sony’s Play Station 3. Why? Because the Wii is just . . . plain . . . BETTER.

Now, all the hard-core gamers in the audience will immediately say, “Nuh-uh!” — because the Xbox and the PS3 have demonstrably higher-tech components. More “horsepower,” in other words.

But pesky little Nintendo thought differently and figured out that they were trying to sell a more competitive gaming system — one that more people like better, instead of one that’s “better” in terms of component specs. The result has been a monster hit — surely one of the greatest products in the history of consumer electronics.

We’ve talked about this before:

• The best thing I’ve read about Nintendo’s Wii. (Links to a great article from Fortune.)
• Company of the Day, current edition: Nintendo. (Back when we were doing Company of the Day.)
• The Wii little dragon-slayer of the video game industry. (Most detailed entry; Chris Huston nailed the appeal of the Wii on the first take.)

As I was writing this entry, I talked about the Wii phenomenon with a different colleague. As he and I were talking, we came to the idea that the Wii might be something like the original Model T. Henry Ford’s great insight was that his company could use then-cutting-edge manufacturing processes to lower the price — and increase the ease of use — of automobiles to the point that they would appeal to a mass audience.

In comparison to Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo has done the same thing for the gaming-console business. History in the making, at least for this one niche.

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(Photo via Wikipedia.)

My son is thrilled: today is the 50th anniversary of the Lego brick, which the boy rates as one of the lofty peaks of human inventive skill. More details:

From TIME: Lego Celebrates 50 Years of Building

It was at 1:58 p.m. on January 28, 1958, that then-Lego head Godtfred Kirk Christiansen filed a patent for the iconic plastic brick with its stud and hole design. Since then, the company has made a staggering 400 billion Lego elements, or 62 bricks for every person on the planet. And if stacked on top of one another, the pieces would form 10 towers reaching all the way from the Earth to the Moon.

The Age (of Australia): Children build on as Lego turns 50 today

. . . the traditional eight-stud brick, said Lego’s Australian marketing manager, Caroline Squire, is still the foundation of the business.

“(The brick) is a product that’s never changed from the moment it was conceived in 1958. The bricks that were sold then are still compatible with the bricks we sell in 2008,” she said.

“And, I think, for a product, in light of the way things have changed in the past 50 years to still be in the marketplace … still be a huge hit with kids and adults alike, is a massive achievement.”

Bloomberg News: Lego Marks 50th Anniversary With Reintroduced Building Bricks

Lego, which estimates that children spend 5 billion hours a year playing with its bricks, was founded in 1932 as a maker of wooden toys. The company has made more than 400 billion of the plastic blocks since they were patented in 1958 by the father of current owner Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen. Its name comes from the first letters of the words “leg godt,” Danish for “play well.”

The 5 billion hours figure might seem out of whack to me if I didn’t regularly see my son — and, for that master, his older sister/partner-in-crime — plowing hour after hour into their Lego constructions.

Two things about Lego’s marketing strike me as clever:

1. The company does a great job of turning its fans into BIG fans. My son, for example, gets three different catalogs or magazines from them regularly — something he loves since he’s seven years old and otherwise rarely gets mail. As though the bricks themselves weren’t enough fun to play with, he gets a new jolt of enthusiasm with each new mailing that Lego sends him. The effect is magnified since two of the publications (the fan-club magazine and the Brickmaster program magazine) are only for “members” of select groups. When you’re seven, it’s really, really cool to be a member of a club that sends you glossy full-color magazines — especially when the club also has a slick Web site complete with Bionicle video games.

2. Lego also continues to introduce one new tie-in series after another. These range from Bob the Builder and SpongBob SquarePants to Star Wars and now Indiana Jones. (My son and I are both excited about the Indiana Jones sets — and the wee motion picture that will soon accompany them — but given my druthers I might want this for my birthday. Which, by the way, is in June.) These themed toys coexist peacefully alongside Lego-invented series like Bionicle and EXO-FORCE, as well as the classic brick sets used to build fire stations, grocery stores, and the like. In short, Lego has given its fans many, many points of entry for enjoying their toys — a play that works even better because all of the sets have parts that work with all of the other sets.

These moves have helped Lego to shake off the financial doldrums that beset them in recent years. Given their renewed health, it won’t surprise me if I’m be celebrating the 100th anniversary of Lego with my great-grandkids 50 years from now.

Last week I mentioned Sheldon Adelson, head of Las Vegas Sands, in a post I made from the convention floor in Las Vegas. In fact, I slept that night in Adelson’s signature hotel, The Venetian. Now Gary Rivlin of the New York Times offers an insightful profile on Adelson, the ultra-rich, ultra-combative mogul behind the twin booms of Las Vegas and Macao.

When 3rd Place on the Rich List Just Isn’t Enough

Few Americans have made as much money in China as Mr. Adelson, and he is a major donor to the Republican Party. Yet Mr. Adelson may well be the richest American that most people have never heard of. . . .

Certainly people in Las Vegas know Mr. Adelson, a querulous figure who has existed in a near-constant state of embattlement since building the Venetian in the late 1990s. . . . Read more

No comments

(For full effect, say that title aloud in your best Charlton Heston / Soylent Green voice of pathos and outrage.)

Myself, I don’t watch horror movies — I’ve always been too squeamish. But even I am intrigued by the marketing surrounding the upcoming monster-attacks-New-York movie Cloverfield, which is the brainchild of Lost and Alias creator J. J. Abrams.

The multifaceted marketing campaign for the movie has included standard fare like thrilling trailers, but it has also broken new ground by using social media methods to create an entire mythology around the movie’s characters.

Now Chris Thilk of Movie Marketing Madness has posted an insightful and highly detailed (= long) piece tracing how the marketing campaign has unfolded. If you’re interested in cutting-edge online marketing, it’s well worth your time.

The Tale of Two Cloverfield Campaigns

. . . The two-pronged campaign certainly was a great decision by Abrams and the studio. I don’t think, even if things had kicked off as they did with that initial trailer, that potential fans online would have been as engaged and enthused if there had just been a poster, trailer and Website just like every other movie out there, no matter how cool the movie looked. It would have been subject to the same level of “insider” reports and spy leaks as every other movie.

But by, essentially, giving the online audience a regular supply of new rawhides to chew on Abrams and Paramount were able to earn their loyalty and turn them from casual or even devoted fans into surrogate marketing agents. The bloggers who write about movies in general or this movie in particular were the ones selling the movie, broadcasting the new material that was given to them all over the Internet.

Some friends of mine who are movie buffs say they’ve heard bad things about the film itself — i.e. that the payoff when you’re sitting in the theater isn’t going to be as good as the marketing campaign has been. But I’ll bet that Cloverfield rakes in the money when it debuts tomorrow.

While I’m at it, let me mention this great video of a talk by Abrams at the TED conference. In it, he talks about how he’s been motivated as a storyteller by the “mystery box” — the conundrums that keep you engaged with a story as it unfolds. It’s worth your time if you do any sort of creative work that must intrigue an audience.

Abrams certainly seems to have succeeded in making Cloverfield a series of “mystery boxes.”

(Hat tip to Geoff Livingston for putting me onto Thilk’s post.)

After more adventures than we might have liked with the nation’s air-travel system, we are live and in person at the ShowStoppers event held at the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas.

Steve Wynn is only the second-richest man in Las Vegas (rival Sheldon Adelson has him beat, for now), but as much as anyone, he has shaped modern Las Vegas with his vision of hospitality.  He has topped himself again and again, and given what I’ve seen of the Wynn, it will be fascinating to see what Wynn Resorts uncorks when it opens the Encore hotel / casino / resort in 2009.

Wynn himself is fascinating — check out this item from the current issue of Esquire magazine:

“What I’ve Learned”
If you don’t have a voice that forces you back to basics, you’re a dangerous person. Or to put it another way: You’re at risk, and the people with you are at risk. I’m not a daredevil. I don’t fly without a safety net.

~~

Happy New Year! Here are some short items I’ve been thinking about as I ease back into the saddle of regular posting.

● ● ●

Climate alarmism.

In the interests of fair (I don’t say “balanced) coverage, I offer this John Tierney column from the New York Times as a counterpoint to my own comments in two recent posts (here and here).

In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm

If Tierney is a little backhanded with his treatment of climate alarmists in the media, they themselves are a little underhanded with their opportunistic reporting, which Tierney rightly derides.

Better than overwrought alarmism, or overwrought rejectionism, about climate change would be a more sober assessment of the whole issue. If the climate is, indeed, changing as a whole and over the long-term, then seemingly contrary data points (Antarctic cooling, the fact that it’s snowing outside my window, whatever) don’t change that. And if it is changing over time, the fact that you or I do or don’t “like” Al Gore doesn’t change anything, either.

The media critic in me isn’t too optimistic that we’ll see this balance anytime soon — and especially not in a presidential election year.

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Will Smith strikes again.

Last month we talked about Will Smith’s “sickening” work ethic — which is tied to serious insight into how the movie business works. After seeing the so-so I, Robot on cable over the holidays, I was newly impressed by Smith’s ability to carry a showy but insubstantial picture.

Like each of Smith’s last four pictures, his current release I Am Legend has grossed more than $300 million worldwide, this despite some pretty harsh pans. (My favorite comes from David Denby, whose snippet review opens like this: “In 1973, when ‘Day of the Dolphin’ opened, Pauline Kael wrote that it was ‘the most expensive Rin Tin Tin picture ever made.’ Alas, this is no longer true.”)

Smith has earned his fair share of good reviews over the years, especially for his work in Ali, but in general it seems he won’t go down as a great dramatic (or comedic) actor. But he surely will go down in movie history as a huge box-office success.

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Clutter isn’t a storage problem; it’s a thinking problem.

That’s the lesson — which ties in with what I said the other day about information overload — of this NYT piece:

A Clutter Too Deep for Mere Bins and Shelves

. . . But experts say the problem with all this [shopping for new organizing bins, shelving, etc.] is that many people are going about it in the wrong way. Too often they approach clutter and disorganization as a space problem that can be solved by acquiring bins and organizers.

Measures like these “are based on the concept that this is a house problem,” said David F. Tolin, director of the anxiety disorders center at the Institute of Living in Hartford and an adjunct associate professor of psychiatry at Yale.

“It isn’t a house problem,” he went on. “It’s a person problem. The person needs to fundamentally change their behavior.”

I’ve heard people say that the big problem with their e-mail overload is that they need more disk space — not that they need to recalibrate how they think about their stuff altogether. And there are plenty of businesses that look for technological solutions to problems that are really problems in their organizational culture or psychology.

The more I look, the more convinced I become that individual and institutional psychoses are often the same problems — not just similar, but exactly the same, merely expressed at different scales.

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The Hawaii Warriors get seats at the grown-ups’ table — where they are promptly served their own heads.

This follows up our earlier bowl-season commentary: I have friends in Hawaii who have rooted all year for the University of Hawaii football team to go undefeated. The Warriors carried that off until they ran aground of the University of Georgia in the Sugar Bowl last night. For “ran aground of,” you could substitute something like “got run over by” or “got beat up by.” The Bulldogs shut down the Warriors totally, winning 41-10.

Give credit to star Hawaii quarterback Colt Brennan, who admitted flat-out that Georgia “was the fastest team I’ve probably ever seen.”

Football fans can hope that someday there will be a true national playoff that will allow all the Hawaiis of the country to see how they stack up against the big programs of the SEC, the Big Ten, the Big XII, and the Pac-10 — whether that means beatings like these or the shocking upset victory that Hawaii’s conference-mate Boise State pulled off last year against Oklahoma.

But — since this is a business blog — I’ll advise you not to hold your breath for that. Because the powers-that-be who run, and profit from, the various bowls don’t want to upset the apple cart that now brings them so much money every year, even if doing so would satisfy fans across the country.

His post is interesting, fairly short, and well worth a read. Here’s the crux:

In the end, this strike is not about DVD and digital royalties. Ultimately, this strike is about the massive and traumatic erosion of privileges afforded the middle-ranking factory workers. But of course, there’s not a damn thing they or their bosses can do to bring those privileges back. The landscape of media is moving away from large studios, to college dorms, downtown lofts, and suburban garages. Like Madison Avenue, Hollywood won’t disappear. But also like Madison Avenue, it’ll never command the cultural vanguard like it once did.

(Emphasis in original.)

Here’s a sketch of what I’ve been thinking about television and where it’s headed: Read more

And not just when it comes to camera angles and CGI special effects.

Here, have some Hobbit.

The prime mover behind the triple-decker blockbuster Lord of the Rings films has settled his differences with (and his lawsuit against, for an undisclosed sum) New Line Cinema. This opens the door for him to bring The Hobbit and a sequel to the silver screen circa 2010 - 2011.

John Scalzi guesses that the timing of settlement — which ends a long-running feud between auteur and studio — may have a little to do with

the very expensive The Golden Compass cratering very badly at the box office ($40 million in two weeks, with a nearly 66% dropoff in the second weekend — not good news when your production budget is $180 million and you’ve sold off the foreign rights). . . . I can’t imagine that Mr. Jackson and friends will not profit handsomely from this either, so well done to him indeed. And all he had to do was wait until New Line needed him more than he needed New Line. Sneaky.

That Jackson is a shrewd one, he is.

If you’re interested about the the voyage of The Golden Compass from explicitly anti-religious book to would-be Hollywood blockbuster, try this Atlantic Monthly feature by Hanna Rosin:

How Hollywood Saved God

. . . Movies that deeply offend Christian sensibilities do get made from time to time: The Last Temptation of Christ, Dogma, and, last year, The Da Vinci Code, a major Sony release. The last one lends credence to Pullman’s idea that a faithful translation of his books could have been commercially viable. It’s possible that New Line’s executives once thought so too. New Line, after all, has a reputation for picking up edgy projects, like Boogie Nights and Se7en. When the studio bought the rights to The Golden Compass, in 2002, it was flush with the success of The Lord of the Rings, and perhaps its leadership imagined making something less anodyne. If so, a more nervous mood has since prevailed.

Apparently, it’s the kind of mood that leads New Line to settle with Jackson so he can get cranked up on another crowd-pleasing Middle Earth epic filmed against New Zealand’s gorgeous scenery. As a fan of the Tolkien books and the Lord of the Rings films, all I can say is goody!

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In other film news, Will Smith continues his run of box office success with I Am Legend. As we’ve discussed before, he’s pretty canny, too.