Variety For Sale: Trade Roughage 02/22/08
Variety's corporate parents decide to get out of the magazine game. Also: On Wednesday, the Best Picture nominees were box office failures, but today, they're huge!
Did you hear? Reed Elsevier is planning to sell Reed Business Information, the trade magazine pubishing division that includes such titles as Packaging Digest, Test & Measurement World, and Variety! No buyers have yet expressed interest, there’s no time table for the sale, blah blah. But I hope they sell to NBC/Universal, because as I’ve said before, Variety would be the perfect subject for a reality webseries version of 30 Rock.- “There’s been an unusually strong awards box office bump this year,” says Pamela McClintock, “With the five best picture contenders combining to gross $97 million domestically since Academy Award nominations were announced Jan. 22.” All the more incredible, when you consider that literally the day before yesterday, this was the year that nobody was going to watch the Oscars because they haven’t seen the movies.
- Alex Gibney has made a deal to have Taxi to the Dark Side shown on HBO in the coming months, as much as a year before the film is scheduled to debut on its original cable home, the Discovery Channel. For whatever reason, Discovery announced after pacting with Gibney that they had no intention of airing the film until 2009; eager to get his film into living rooms befor the election, Gibney then sought out a side deal with HBO.
- Hey, it turns out that writers were actually allowed to write during the strike! But most of them didn’t, and now there’s a lot of hand-wringing because it’s been a week since the strike ended, and there have been no deals.
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