warner bros.

Chris Knight's avatar

This has got to be the stoopidest marketing maneuver in the history of anything…

The folks at Warner Bros. are planning to remove all the Harry Potter movies from store shelves come December 29th. After that date, your only chance of getting Harry Potter on the shelves of your personal library (legally ‘course) is to buy it secondary market a’la eBay.

Apparently Warners thinks that Disney’s “Vault” model is the way to go with a film series that has already generated $12.1 billion. That should be enough money for anyone, right?

I haven’t watched a Harry Potter movie since the fifth one, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, came out in theaters. Guess I could be honest and say that I’ve just been… waiting for the right time to revisit that film franchise (for a number of reasons). If that time comes in the near future, ...

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What is regarded by many as the greatest Batman story ever told may be getting the DC animated treatment very soon…

Entertainment website Bleeding Cool is reported that The Dark Knight Returns is being adapted by the same team that worked on All Star Superman and the upcoming animated rendition of Batman: Year One.

Hailed as the defining treatment of Batman for the modern era, Frank Miller and Klaus Janson’s The Dark Knight Returns is as bold and striking today as it was when it first hit comic book stores in 1986. The tale of Bruce Wayne – now 55-years old and having stopped being Batman ten years earlier – having the ultimate mid-life crisis and coming out of retirement into a world indifferent and even hostile to justice, not only broke new ground: it put Batman back on track to where he was perhaps always supposed to be....

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Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze is coming to your living room… and he’s bringing a few thousand of his friends with him. The 1975 action film based on the classic pulp hero is just one of many movies that Warner Brothers is making available via a first-of-its-kind “on-demand DVD” service that’s launching today.

By visiting warnerarchive.com you can select from many films that have previously not been made available in the DVD format. You pay twenty bucks and a week later a custom-made DVD – complete with nice case – comes in the mail. I just scanned through the catalog (only a fraction thus far of the complete library that Warners aims to make eventually available) and there are some real gems in there, including Abe Lincoln in Illinois and Countdown, the 1968 pre-Apollo 11 flick starting James Caan as an astronaut caught up in a mad race ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Warner Bros. is pushing back the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from it’s originally scheduled date of this November… to July 17th, 2009!

Why? Officially the word is that the writers strike several months ago means that there will be a dearth of “tentpole movies” next summer and Warners wants to make up for it somehow.

It also means that by the time the adaptation of Half-Blood Prince comes out that there will have been two years since its release and the previous movie in the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. And it’ll be two years still after that before the series finally wraps up with Part Two of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

I’d hate to be the poor lady who’s answering the phone at Warner Bros. when more people start hearing about this later this morning…...

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Chris Knight's avatar

NOW can we see a wider release for this thing?

After its first week out, Transformers: The Score, Steve Jablonsky’s orchestral soundtrack for the blockbuster movie, has debuted at #172 on the Billboard 200 chart and is #13 on Billboard’s Top Soundtracks. This comes in spite of what MTV has noted was a limited store release with about 4300 scans at the cash registers.

Meanwhile, the Transformers score CD continues to do well at Amazon, where it is now #39 in overall music (having increased in rank in the past few days) and is currently #5 in soundtracks.

Someone… probably a lot of someones… at Warner Brothers Records needs to very strongly consider getting this thing out to a lot more outlets. They are sitting on a goldmine with this CD and the demand is only going to get bigger now that the DVD is out and ...

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Okay, let’s try to make sense of this…

Earlier today reports came in that Transformers: The Score was being found at a number of stores across the United States. I’m wondering how many copies those places got though ‘cuz I’ve been asking these same folks who wrote in then and they all said that they got the last or next-to-last copy on the shelves. So some went out. But were they enough?

Apparently not ‘cuz the vast majority of people who’ve written me are saying that they can not find the CD anywhere where they live. Count me among those ‘cuz I haven’t been able to find it either. I’m going to Greensboro tomorrow (the “big city” south of us here in Reidsville) and will be checking out Best Buy, Target and other stores, to see if it turns up there.

Like I said before, I’m not going to be ...

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Warner Bros. Records will “shortly” be releasing the album of Steve Jablonsky’s orchestral score from the movie Transformers, according to a Senior Vice President in the Music Department at Paramount Pictures.

The Knight Shift blog received this confirmation a short while ago. And you’ve no idea how happy I am about being able to report this!

The word comes from a source wishing to identifying himself as “Sam Witwicky all the way from New Zealand” (and in case you’re wondering, I already asked if his eBay username was “ladiesman217” and he said that it’s not :-). “Sam Witwicky” was able to correspond directly with the good people at Paramount Pictures: the studio which along with DreamWorks was responsible for producing Transformers. Our man Sam told them about the interest there’s been in a CD release of Jablonsky’s score and he mentioned the online petition (which may hit 5,000 ...

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