Hollywood has a new player and he’s in Abu Dhabi. Edward Borgerding, CEO of the Abu Dhabi Media Company (ADMC), will spend $1 billion making movies over the next five years. Last week at the Toronto Film Festival, he revealed his first partner to be Participant Media, representing $125 million of that investment.
In a telephone [...]

Hollywood is challenging the hegemony of Apple in digital distribution.
A consortium of major studios — excluding key Apple ally Walt Disney Co. — is teaming up with leading retailers and consumer-electronics firms to essentially transform the paid download into an experience akin to buying a DVD. The goal is letting video purchased at any outlet be played on any device worldwide.
Known [...]

Twentieth Century Fox has set up an Asian unit specialising in local production, starting with India, becoming the latest Hollywood studio to venture into Asian movies.
The new studio will take the form of a joint venture with the Asian satellite broadcaster STAR called Fox STAR Studios.
Both companies are units of media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News [...]

Whatever else comes to mind in connection with the actor Mark Wahlberg, who first gained national attention by dropping his pants as Marky Mark on stage during rap concerts and posing in Calvin Kleinunderwear ads, one thing now stands out in the public’s mind. “I don’t care what I’m doing, what filmmaker I’ve worked with,” Mr. Wahlberg [...]

Man, you know the debt markets are something awful when even Steven Spielberg is having a tough time getting a loan.
But that’s exactly what’s holding up the DreamWorks co-founder and his cohorts from launching their new movie company with an equity infusion from India’s Reliance Big Entertainment. Although Reliance is poised to invest $500 million [...]

No one ever said the meek shall inherit the movie industry. But as Hollywood’s blockbuster films continue to soar critically and rewrite box-office records in 2008, the American independent sector is on life support.
The factors that were meant to boost independents - including new private equity investment, the relative accessibility of digital filmmaking and studio [...]

When Meg Ryan and Antonio Banderas signed up to star in an independently produced comedy-action movie called “My Mom’s New Boyfriend,” the film’s backers figured they had a slam dunk — a modestly priced film with bankable stars that would surge at the box office.
The producers say the $17 million movie scored well in test [...]

Abu Dhabi will today lay out plans to become one of the biggest movie producers in the world, with $1 billion to invest in productions from Hollywood to Bollywood, the Financial Times reported.
Abu Dhabi’s government will provide enough funding to support up to eight films a year over the next five years, Edward Borgerding, chief executive [...]

Mathieu Kassovitz is pissed off. The French auteur, who first made waves in 1995 with La Haine, is supposed to be celebrating the passion project he’s been nursing for the past five years. Instead — the week before Babylon A.D. hits theaters — he is nursing a grudge. “I’m very unhappy with the film,” he says. “I never [...]

Film buyers will be able to access hundreds of new films at the touch of a button, just one aspect of the Dubai Film Market, an initiative of the fifth Dubai International Film Festival. 
Cinetech will make its Middle East debut later this year, enabling industry buyers to watch and shortlist films, contact filmmakers and producers.
The [...]