Vivendi | SpoutBlog

Ghostbusters 3 Game Rescued. Trade Roughage 10/30/08

By Karina Longworth posted 1 year ago

When Activision was bought by Vivendi a couple of months back, the conglomerate declined to release the highly-anticipated Ghostbusters video game written by Dan Ackroyd and featuring vocal contributions from Bill Murray and the rest of the main cast of the film franchise, which was said to pick up narratively where Ghostbusters 2 led off. Now Atari has taken the game off Vivendi’s hands, with speculative plans to release it next year in concert with the first film’s 25th anniversary.
Sam Mendes has been hired to direct a cinematic adaptation of Preacher, Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s graphic novel about a religulous man fighting evil post-apocalypse.
Dylan McDermott, Zoe Saldana, Lake Bell, Nick Stahl, Paz Vega and Shannen Doherty will star in Burning Palms, a satire of Los Angeles stereotypes from writer/director Christopher Landon, which producer Oren Segal says is “kind of like a John Waters version of Short Cuts.”

By Karina Longworth posted 1 year ago

A couple of days ago, the new Ghostbusters video game––which features voice contributions from most of the major actors from the franchise and, for all practical purposes, is as close to Ghostbusters 3 as we’re going to get––was presented at Comic-Con. Today, its release is by no means guaranteed. Its publisher, Vivendi Games, recently merged with Activision; Activision Blizzard, the new company formed by the merger, has declined to exercise options on a number of Vivendi brands, including Ghostbusters.
Shia LaBeouf’s drunk driving incident last weekend hasn’t shut down production on the Transformers sequel, but it has thrown a wrench into the proceedings. Whist Drunky McHearthrob takes a month to recover from an hand injury, Josh Duhamel’s scenes have been pushed up.
Oh, these sound like baaaaad ideas: Howard Stern has hired Alex Winter––Yes, Bill from Bill and Ted––to write a remake of Rock n’ Roll High School. How are these two qualified to trample on the love child of The Ramones and Roger Corman? Well, Winter has also written a film about the inventor of Napster, and Howard Stern is also producing a remake of Porky’s. Of course!
Disney’s overall income and revenues are up, even as their summer grosses are––thanks to Prince Caspian not being about pirates or having anything to do with Keith Richards––way down from last year.

By Karina Longworth posted 1 year ago

Analysts are expecting opening week sales of Grand Theft Auto IV to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million. Why do we care? Because, as Ben Fritz puts it at Variety, that’ll be “close to, if not above, the No. 1 film bow of all time, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, which grossed $404 million worldwide in its first six days. For a taste of what the fuss is about, check out the game’s trailer above.
After the massive success on the site of the film’s soundtrack, Juno became the first Fox film to became available for download-to-own on iTunes yesterday, the same day as its DVD release.
Universal’s Vivendi Entertainment has made its first theatrical acquisition with New York, New York, that omnibus thing with the Natalie Portmans and the Scarlett Johanssons and the etcs.