ObsessiveMathsFreak writes “Ireland’s own SOPA Act has finally struck home. Today, the Irish High Court ordered all ISPs to begin censoring the The Pirate Bay. After earlier attempts were struck down, this case was brought by EMI, Sony, Warner Music and Universal music under new copyright laws brought in last year.
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Opelaner hoffen auf neuen Job – 32 000 Bewerber wollen zu Porsche nach Leipzig
Mortal Kombat‘s come a long way since it first landed in arcades back in 1992.
Since its initial launch, the brutal (well, by 90s standards) fighting game franchise was subsequently ported to a myriad of home games consoles, from Sega Master System to SNES. And the brand is still very much alive and kicking today on more modern systems, including the PS3 and Xbox 360.
But Mortal Kombat has long since transcended its gaming roots and has found a home on multiple mediums in the past couple of decades. Two movie spin-offs hit the silver screen in the mid-90s, while an animated prequel, comic books, live stage-shows, a techno album (yup), and TV shows have seen the light of day.
Indeed, Mortal Kombat spawned two TV series back in the 90s, an animated incarnation first broadcast in 1996, followed by a live-action version two years later.
But a few years back, Warner Premiere – the now-defunct direct-to-video label of Warner Home Video – opted to take the Kombat franchise into the 21st century digital age. It produced a 10-episode Web series called Mortal Kombat: Legacy, which debuted on Machinima‘s YouTube channel in April 2011.
To say the series was a hit would be something of an understatement. Consisting of nine 8-12 minute videos, the inaugural season garnered somewhere in the region of 65 million views. And last summer, Legacy director Kevin Tancharoen announced that a second season was to be made (plus, a feature film is en-route), with more fight scenes and better special effects. Production started in LA late last year, and the first footage debuted via a trailer in February.
Then, just last week, a TV spot aired during AMC’s The Walking Dead for the upcoming Mortal Kombat: Legacy series – this was the first time a YouTube channel had procured ad space on TV.
As with the first season, the latest series will be broadcast exclusively on Machinima’s YouTube channel (via Warner Bros. Digital Distributions). And at MIPCube in Cannes today, The Next Web was on hand to see what Mortal Kombat: Legacy producer/director Kevin Tancharoen and Lance Sloan (Head of Digital Programming and Development at Warner Bros. Digital Distribution), had to say about the Web-based blockbuster. It’s a pretty interesting story.
Just to recap, Kevin Tancharoen is actually a dancer/choreographer having worked with big names such as Madonna and Britney Spears. He also co-created DanceLife on MTV, and previously made his directorial debut with the film Fame, back in 2009. But it is with a short proof-of-concept made by the lifelong Mortal Kombat fan where this story begins – Mortal Kombat: Rebirth, which paved the way for the eventual commissioning of Mortal Kombat: Legacy.
“It started with this short film, that I did on my own….because I wanted to distance myself a bit from the dance and music world that I was immersed in,” explains Tancharoen.
“So, over the weekend, I produced it with a bunch of my friends, for nothing but favors, and – a lot of folk think I’m lying when I say this – but it was accidentally publicized on YouTube.”
Indeed, Tancharoen says he intended to create a private link to send to his friends and agent, but being ‘new’ to YouTube as a publishing/broadcasting platform, he made the video public, rather than private. “I started seeing stuff on Twitter, and I thought maybe someone had beaten me to make some sort of live-action Mortal Kombat,” he says. “Then I clicked on it…and it was my YouTube page. I then panicked…as I thought there was some kind of legal issue with it.”
Tancharoen’s efforts, which took him the best part of a weekend to create in the summer of 2010, garnered somewhere in the region of 7m views in just a few days and, naturally, it found itself on the radar of Mortal Kombat’s publisher, Warner Bros., which was apparently considering legal moves.
By 9am, Sloane says he suspected that Warner was going to go after Tancharoen for breach of copyright…but by 4pm, once they saw the traction it was gaining on YouTube, they thought better of it and instead invited Tancharoen in for a ‘chat’.
“His video had worked its way around Warner Bros. to the highest level, and we started to see a fan-base form around it,” says Sloane. “Our new CEO was like, ‘who is this guy? This is incredible.’ And four minutes into our meeting, we realized we had to try and realize his vision.”
At this first meeting at Warner Bros. HQ, Sloane led Tancharoen into the CEO’s office who was in a board meeting with more than 20 guys, all in suits. “After a brief introduction, they all jumped up and said ‘that’s him, that’s the guy’,” said Sloane.
While Sloane was thinking positively about the meeting, it seems that Tancharoen wasn’t. ”I thought I would go to Warner Bros., shake everyone’s hand and then the last person would issue me with my legal papers, telling me I’m sued. So the reaction I got was a very welcome surprise.”
The reaction here was a very interesting one. Perhaps only a few years before, Tancharoen may well have been on the receiving end of a take-down notice and some heavy-handed legal action. But it’s credit to Warner that they actually saw the potential in what Tancharoen had created and decided to commission a Web series instead.
“Mortal Kombat has been used as an example of how you can take risk online, incubate it and see how it can progress from that,” says Tancharoen.
And this is echoed from Warner’s standpoint – it seems it’s tentatively feeling its way around this new online world order, and is figuring out how to make best use of it.
“We’re really trying to figure out ways to move platforms,” says Sloane. “From that meeting, we started discussing a feature film, and that evolved to where we are now in the Greenlight Committee at the studio. But in the meantime, we’re able to do a second season.”
In many ways, we’re at a crossroads where studios are still trying to figure out what a ‘Web show’ looks like, in relation to what a broadcast network show looks like. “With Mortal Kombat Legacy, in our discussions, we wanted to just let Kevin do his job,” says Sloane. “And Warner allowed that, which was amazing.”
“I hope that spirit (from the studio) remains intact as this model grows,” chimed Tancharoen. “Because it does allow a lot of creative freedom. It’s still something of a new format, and is a sense of ‘hands-off’, which allows the writers and I to take what we love from the video game, and write it from a fan perspective.”
But is there anything inherently different about creating a Web series such as Mortal Kombat: Legacy, which was a series of 10-minute skits, to creating a network series?
“Purely from a creative, storytelling standpoint, you have to really figure out how to capture your viewer and tell a story in 10 minutes,” says Tancharoen. “This is a very particular style, just as creating a movie trailer is. It’s a very particular art-form.”
As a coincidental side-story, a new Mortal Kombat game was actually due out within four months from the original meeting between Warner and Tancharoen. And it seems the new Web series fits in to the multi-medium franchise rather nicely.
“It’s not just about those 10 minutes – it’s what spawns after, whether it be building the interests to a movie, and getting an audience over time and helping the game sell more units,” explains Tancharoen. “It’s actually a unique form of advertising now, as much as it’s original, standalone content. It is somewhat of a small commercial for a bigger idea. That’s something I’d never been forced to think about.”
On a final note, Mortal Kombat’s co-creator Ed Boon is fully on-board with the series, which Sloane says was pivotal to them proceeding. “That guy protects this brand and franchise with…with his life,” he says. “He’s fiercely protective over it. We knew we had to get his support, and literally within 10 minutes of Kevin and him meeting, they bonded…he realized Kevin knew the game. I mean, he grew up playing it. Ed loved the ideas that Kevin had to take the mythology further.”
And after success of season 1 – which broke YouTube Web show records in 2011 – season 2 has been completed, scheduled to launch imminently, but no exact date has been given yet.
Meanwhile, you can follow all our coverage from MIPTV and MIPCube here.
Feature Image Credit – Thinkstock
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A Baird analyst on Friday initiated coverage of a handful of cable companies, saying that while their finances as a group are strong, their shares are fairly valued. William Power said that said that the …
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After the initial success of the Kickstarter campaign for a movie based on the TV show Veronica Mars (with a goal of $2 million, it has currently raised $3.9, and there are still 17 days to go), I had a chance to interview the show’s creator Rob Thomas and his agent Julien Thuan about what’s next for the movie, as well as what the campaign’s success means for other TV shows and films. There’s been some speculation about whether this could change the funding model in Hollywood. However, Thomas argued that the people putting together the campaign are only “guinea pigs” for “a specialized subset of projects” — namely, cult TV shows with a fan base that wants to bring them back.
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Creator Rob Thomas Calls The Veronica Mars Kickstarter Campaign A Guinea Pig For Cult TV Shows
Mel Gibson “kept raging” about his ex-girlfriend, according to Joe Eszterhas’ letter, published by thewrap.com.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Editor’s note: This story contains offensive language
(CNN) — Mel Gibson frequently spews “looney, rancid” anti-Semitism, has talked about killing his former girlfriend, and is prone to hate-filled diatribes slamming everyone from John Lennon to Walter Cronkite, according to a screenwriter who has been working with him.
Joe Eszterhas, who wrote a screenplay about the Jewish hero Judah Maccabee for Gibson, recounts numerous alleged incidents in detail in a nine-page letter to Gibson published by the website thewrap.com.
In a letter replying to Eszterhas, Gibson denies the allegations, saying most of the claims are fabricated.
Gibson’s letter says Eszterhas “only had a problem with me after Warner Brothers rejected your (Eszterhas’) script.”
Gibson, in his five-paragraph response, says he won’t respond “line by line,” and that the decision not to proceed with Eszterhas “was based on the quality of your script, not on any other factor.”
A spokesman for Gibson, Alan Nierob, gave CNN a copy of the letter and said Gibson will have no further comment at this time.
Gibson’s bitter child custody battle with former girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva ended last year with a court settlement, but not before the actor entered a “no contest” plea to a misdemeanor battery charge relating to a 2010 incident involving Grigorieva.
The plea deal put Gibson on unsupervised probation for three years.
Grigorieva’s spokesman told CNN Thursday that if the Eszterhas “is accurate and credible, the allegations are extremely serious and must be investigated immediately by the authorities.”
“But it will be up to the authorities and Ms. Grigorieva’s attorneys to react to this revelation,” Steve Jaffe said. He confirmed she has “been in touch” with her lawyers about the matter.
Warner Bros. has put the controversial Maccabees project on hold, the company said. “We are analyzing what to do with the project,” said spokesman Paul McGuire. Like CNN, Warner Bros. is part of Time Warner.
Joe Eszterhas, shown in 2005, insists he worked diligently on his script for a film about Judah Maccabee.
Eszterhas writes in his letter, “I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason you won’t make ‘The Maccabees’ is the ugliest possible one. You hate Jews.” He recounts Gibson repeatedly using derogatory epithets for Jewish people.
Allegations of anti-Semitism are nothing new for Gibson. Concerns that arose among some Jewish groups over his handling of the story of Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ” in 2004 were replaced by widespread condemnations two years later when Gibson was arrested on a drunk driving charge. According to a police report, he asked the arresting officer if he was Jewish and said, “F***ing Jews. The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.”
Gibson later apologized without acknowledging specific remarks.
Eszterhas is a veteran of the industry, having penned such titles as “Basic Instinct” and “Showgirls.”
In his letter, he writes that he hoped Gibson viewed the Maccabees project “as a kind of penance/apologia” — a claim Gibson denies in his response.
Eszterhas says that soon after he began working with Gibson on it, he became “increasingly worried that I’d made a grave mistake by hooking up with you.”
It was not immediately clear how thewrap.com obtained Eszterhas’ letter.
In discussing Jewish people, Gibson regularly used the terms “Hebes,” “oven-dodgers,” and “Jew-boys,” Eszterhas alleges. “You said most ‘gatekeepers’ of American companies were ‘Hebes’ who ‘controlled their bosses.’”
“You said the Holocaust was ‘mostly a lot of horsesh*t,’” the letter says, adding that Gibson made various false accusations, including that the Torah refers to sacrificing Christian babies.
Gibson called Pope John Paul II “the anti-Christ” and “the devil,” the screenwriter alleges.
“You kept raging about your ex-girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva,” mother of their young daughter Luci, the letter alleges, saying Gibson referred to her with sexist epithets. “You acted out for me the scene where you hit her. But you said you’d ‘just slapped her a little bit.’”
Eszterhas claims in the letter Gibson explicitly said, “‘I’m going to kill her! I’m going to have her killed!’”
Addressing Gibson, he says in the letter, “You said you’d become friends with two FBI agents (or former FBI agents) and they were going to help you to kill her.”
Eszterhas recounts times that he, his wife, and his 15-year-old son felt endangered in Gibson’s presence.
The teen taped one of Gibson’s outbursts on his iPod, Eszterhas says.
Gibson once told the 15-year-old that he wanted to perform a sex act on Grigorieva and “stab her to death while I’m doing it,” Eszterhas alleges.
“How can you share a loop from the pornographic snuff film which obviously plays in your head … with a child?” the letter asks.
The bitter battle between Gibson and Grigorieva reached a financial and custody settlement last year. Gibson pleaded no contest to a charge of misdemeanor domestic battery.
Racist and sexist rants against her by Gibson were recorded and leaked to radaronline.com.
Eszterhas also quotes Gibson as saying John Lennon “deserved to be shot,” and that he hated Walter Cronkite, who appealed “to stupid people.”
At one point, Gibson wrote Eszterhas a note apologizing for one of his outbursts, saying, “I have a vast reservoir of rage-filled puss that from time to time spills out” and that “the devil seems to afflict me thru anger and my tongue,” Eszterhas says.
In his response letter, Gibson says “the great majority of the facts as well as the statements and actions attributed to me in your letter are utter fabrications. I would have thought that a man of principle, as you purport to be, would have withdrawn from the project regardless of the money if you truly believed me to be the person you describe in your letter.”
“I will acknowledge like most creative people I am passionate and intense,” Gibson adds.
He said he was frustrated at Eszterhas’ failure to produce a script in timely fashion.
“I did react more strongly than I should have. I promptly sent you a written apology, the colorful words of which you apparently now find offensive. Let me now clearly apologize to you and your family in the simplest of terms,” he says in the letter.
Eszterhas insists he was diligent and produced a script that received high praise.
But Gibson writes, “In 25 years of script development I have never seen a more substandard first draft or a more significant waste of time.”
Eszterhas could not be reached immediately on Thursday.
When plans were announced last year for Gibson to helm a movie about the Maccabees, Jewish leaders assailed the idea.
“I think it’s, quite frankly, preposterous,” Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles told CNN in September. “Judah Maccabee is one of the greatest heroes in Jewish history. Mel Gibson is an anti-Semite. … I don’t know what Warner Bros. was thinking.”
Maccabee was a Judean priest who commanded the resistance to Greek forces around 165 B.C. Hanukkah celebrates the story of the Maccabees.
“Casting him as a director or star of Judah Maccabee is like casting Bernie Madoff to be the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission,” Hier said at the time.
A representative for Gibson, who asked not to be identified at the time, said, “It’s an amazing story that should be told cinematically” and that there were no plans for Gibson to act in the film, although he might direct.
In his letter, Eszterhas says he believes Gibson is in need of medication and “extensive psychiatric counseling.”
“You live in extreme isolation from the real world,” Eszterhas wrote. “You don’t read newspapers or magazines, you never have the TV on except to watch movies — often your own. You rarely go out. Even the church where you worship, built at your own personal expense, is attended only by family and friends. The priest there is your hire and works for you, not God. You are truly extraordinarily and uniquely self-absorbed in a town where self-absorption is common.
Noting that “there are as many guns around your house as crucifixes,” Eszterhas wrote, “I worry for you and those around you.”
CNN’s Alan Duke in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
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Mel Gibson ist angeblich Antisemit. Und der Tod von John Lennon bereitet ihm offenbar Freude. Das behauptet zumindest ein ehemaliger Partner des Schauspielers. In einem Brief packt er ber Gibsons Rundumschlag aus.
Joe Eszterhas, der Autor des Films “Basic Instinct”, hat den US-Schauspieler Mel Gibson beschuldigt, einen gemeinsamen Film der beiden zu sabotieren, weil er judenfeindlich sei. Das berichtet die Onlineausgabe der britischen Zeitung „Daily Mail“.
Gibson habe unter anderem gesagt, ein Groteil der Entscheidungstrger in amerikanischen Firmen seien „Hebes“, ein abwertendes Wort fr Juden, die ihre Bosse kontrollierten und dass die Thora Verweise auf die Opferung christlicher Kinder enthalte.
Die „Daily Mail“ zitiert
, in dem Eszterhas schreibt, der Schauspieler habe ihm auch gesagt, es sei gut, dass John Lennon erschossen wurde. Der Beatle habe einen Jesus-Komplex gehabt. Seinen Song „Image“ wrde Gibson wirklich hassen.
Das Drehbuch fr den gemeinsamen Film der beiden, “The Maccabees”, war von den Warner Bros. abgelehnt worden. Der Film soll die Geschichte eines jdischen Kriegers erzhlen, der im zweiten Jahrhundert vor Christus ber die Griechisch-syrischen Armeen siegte.
Gibson hat die Vorwrfe seines frheren Partners als Lgen zurckgewiesen. Eszterhas habe ein Problem mit ihm, seit der Ablehnung durch Warner Brothers. „Ich gebe zu, dass ich wie die meisten kreativen Menschen leidenschaftlich und intensiv bin“, sagte er. Doch die allermeisten Aussagen in dem Brief seien nicht wahr.
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Brief mit schweren Vorwürfen aufgetaucht – Mel Gibson lästert über Juden und John Lennons Tod
Mel Gibson ist angeblich Antisemit. Und der Tod von John Lennon bereitet ihm offenbar Freude. Das behauptet zumindest ein ehemaliger Partner des Schauspielers. In einem Brief packt er ber Gibsons Rundumschlag aus.
Joe Eszterhas, der Autor des Films “Basic Instinct”, hat den US-Schauspieler Mel Gibson beschuldigt, einen gemeinsamen Film der beiden zu sabotieren, weil er judenfeindlich sei. Das berichtet die Onlineausgabe der britischen Zeitung „Daily Mail“.
Gibson habe unter anderem gesagt, ein Groteil der Entscheidungstrger in amerikanischen Firmen seien „Hebes“, ein abwertendes Wort fr Juden, die ihre Bosse kontrollierten und dass die Thora Verweise auf die Opferung christlicher Kinder enthalte.
Die „Daily Mail“ zitiert
, in dem Eszterhas schreibt, der Schauspieler habe ihm auch gesagt, es sei gut, dass John Lennon erschossen wurde. Der Beatle habe einen Jesus-Komplex gehabt. Seinen Song „Imagine“ wrde Gibson wirklich hassen.
Das Drehbuch fr den gemeinsamen Film der beiden, “The Maccabees”, war von den Warner Bros. abgelehnt worden. Der Film soll die Geschichte eines jdischen Kriegers erzhlen, der im zweiten Jahrhundert vor Christus ber die Griechisch-syrischen Armeen siegte.
Gibson hat die Vorwrfe seines frheren Partners als Lgen zurckgewiesen. Eszterhas habe ein Problem mit ihm, seit der Ablehnung durch Warner Brothers. „Ich gebe zu, dass ich wie die meisten kreativen Menschen leidenschaftlich und intensiv bin“, sagte er. Doch die allermeisten Aussagen in dem Brief seien nicht wahr.
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Brief mit schweren Vorwürfen aufgetaucht – Mel Gibson angeblich froh über Mord an John Lennon
The controversial film & TV streaming portal Cuevana suffered another setback today as one of its administrators got detained in Chile.
The 26-year-old student Cristián Alvarez Rojas is now free, but remains indicted for infractions to the Intellectual Property Law and cybercrime. The investigators also seized 198 pirated DVDs, a computer and two hard drives, the Chilean newspaper La Tercera reports.
As we reported, this Argentine site has gained considerable popularity among Spanish-speaking Internet users across several countries, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the content it links to is pirated.
Unlike their ‘competitors’, Cuevana’s founders don’t hide their identity. Alvarez Rojas aside, its other 8 administrators reportedly live in Argentina, and its co-founder Tomas Escobar is the venture’s public face on Twitter. When attacked, the site’s line of defense has always been to point out that it doesn’t host the videos on its servers, since it is only providing links to content which is hosted elsewhere.
Yet, Megaupload’s case serves as a warning that sites probably have to put an even wider distance between copyright infringers and their own activities if they want to stay out of trouble.
As a matter of fact, the noose has been tightening around Cuevana for quite a while. In its home country, a judge ordered Cuevana to remove several of Warner’s series from its site, and certain ISPs have been blocking the website altogether, although it is still live:
Besides Warner Bros, HBO is also accusing the site of copyright infringement. Quoted by La Tercera, a PR person for the company said that it “applaudes the Chilean justice’s actions and is confident that authorities in other countries will take action to guarantee the respect of HBO Latin America’s intellectual property rights.”
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The noose tightens around movie portal Cuevana as Chilean administrator is briefly detained
Apple’s iCloud service could soon welcome more movie content after Time Warner-owned paid television network HBO said it is in talks with studios to loosen its licensing terms for exclusive video content, the Wall Street Journal reports.
HBO, which pays millions of dollars to exclusively broadcast movies during certain ‘windows’ after they are released, had previously stopped studios from offering content to subscription and digital marketplaces, including Apple’s ‘watch anywhere’ iCloud service.
Simply put, if a studio sent certain pre-licensed videos to an iCloud customer, it would violate HBO’s exclusive rights.
However, an HBO spokesperson has told the WSJ that the company will be “relaxing terms to let users of iCloud and other services send movies they already own to other devices during those windows.”
At last week’s iPad keynote, Apple announced that it had opened its iCloud platform to allow customers to sync movie and TV show purchases between Apple devices. However, it was unable to reach a deal with Universal Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox, meaning some studio content could not be synced between Apple devices.
HBO doesn’t plan to do away with its exclusive windows but it has already relaxed licensing for Warner Bros. and is in talks to do the same for Universal and Fox.
The licensing deal is the latest in a long line of traditional agreements that have been amended to cater for the expanding digital market. Apple led the charge in pushing the move to digital music sales and the company hopes to do the same with TV shows and movies.
Rumours have suggested the Cupertino-based technology giant is looking to launch its own video subscription service, but reports remain speculative at best.
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WSJ: HBO to relax its exclusive video licensing and help bring more movies to Apple’s iCloud