SE P T E M B E R/ OC T O B E R 2 0 1 2 (Continued on Page 6) Brazil’s 2014/16: Keeping Track With the London Olympics a thing of the past, it’s now up to Brazil to carry the torch, with Rio de Janeiro playing host to the 2016 Summer Games. The Brazilians are busy readying their city for its international debut, including building four main Olympic sites, new hotels, a new metro line and revamping the airport. (The city will also host some of the 2014 World Cup football tournament, which is scattered among 12 cities) According to reports, city, state and local governments are investing around $12 billion in infrastructure projects to help rejuvenate the city and ease transportation problems ahead of the two international Games. In addition, with only 33,000 hotel rooms, Rio is planning to house 12,000 people on cruise ships to alleviate accommodation shortages. So far, some 65 projects have been completed out of 230 planned. All the facilities built for the 2007 Pan Am Games are considered obsolete for the upcoming Games. Movie Theaters Own Film Studio In March 2011, through a joint venture, the U.S.’s largest theater chains, Regal Entertainment and AMC Entertainment, invested a total of $30 million for the creation of a new film distribution company — the Los Angelesbased Open Road Films. The synergy between movie theaters and studios has been pretty much nonexistent since a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1848 stripped the American studios of their commercial theaters in the U.S. (but today, IFC Films makes use of its IFC Center theater in New York City and Magnolia Pictures serves the Landmark Theaters chain). According to an article in the New York Times, the company focuses on films with modest budgets that can be promoted with cheaper marketing techniques(likein-theatertrailers)rather than expensive media advertising. The company will offer the theaters a larger pool of movies and a piece of the film revenue (or, potentially, the losses). Open Road’s first release was action-thriller Killer Elite, followed by the thriller The Grey. Last August its comedic Hit & Run opened on some of the chain’s 12,000 screens. This was followed by police drama End of Watch and, in November the remake of Red Dawn. By the end of this year, Open Road will distribute a total of seven movies from several producers. For 2013 it has scheduled two releases: The Bitter Pill and The Host, while two movies are still in development. Ultimately, the company plans to release about 10 movies a year, mostly to be used as fillers during the weeks of the year not packed with the majors’ releases. Open Road Films will play across all theater chains, not just those belonging to AMC and Regal. It could also expand its reach with the completion of AMC’s purchase by the Delian Wanda Group of China. Tom Ortenberg, formerly of the Weinstein Company and Lionsgate, is the company’s CEO. RTP Under Political Fire When a country has financial problems, it’s not unusual for its government to attempt to either shut down its public TV stations or privatize them. Portugal is no exception when it comes to publicaster RTP, which runs two of the country’s four main TV networks. The government’s plan to privatize RTP has met opposition from its board (which resigned in protest last August) and from the European Broadcasting Union, the association of Europe’s public stations. RTP gets 59 percent of its funding — the equivalent of U.S.$179 million — from a license fee, $89 million from the state and $32 million from advertising. The government wants RTP to reduce its budget by $70 million and, in order to achieve the cuts, privatize RTP-2. The government has also flirted with the idea of shutting down RTP and V I D E O • A G E 4
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