Lion's Gate Roars

A fascinating article in the NYTimes about Lion's Gate, the last true indie studio:

On Oscar weekend, Lions Gate's "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" was the No. 1 film at the nation's box office, with ticket sales of $21.9 million in only 1,483 theaters. On the same weekend, the company's "Saw," a gruesome serial killer film, was on top of the DVD charts, with sales and rentals reaching almost $80 million after its Feb. 15 video release.

Lions Gate's Oscar weekend market share was anything but a fluke. Five years after joining Lions Gate, its chief executive, Jon Feltheimer, and its vice chairman, Michael Burns, have forged the largest vertically integrated competitor to the major studios, with a production facility, television unit, foreign sales arm and - most important to Wall Street media watchers - an 8,000-title library. The library, which collects titles for the home entertainment market, generates nearly half of Lions Gate's revenues.

A side question, but one that generated some heated discussion from a photographer friend last night. If home-video is the format that most people will see a movie on, why shoot on anything with a higher resolution than HD (i.e. film)? Of course, film is insurance against an even higher resolution format in the future, but that hasn't stopped Lion's Gate from picking up movies like Open Water which frankly look horrible when projected on a movie screen.