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CinemaCon: Hollywood’s Male Focus Shortchanges Women And Box Office Sales, Panelists Agree

By DAVID LIEBERMAN, Executive Editor | Thursday April 18, 2013 @ 2:15pm PDTTags: Amy Miles, CinemaCon, Geena Davis, Nina Jacobson, Paul Feig

“It is a decades-long trend,” actress Geena Davis, who founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, said at a luncheon panel on the subject. “We want to believe that things are getting better. But the evidence shows that it’s not.” The conventional wisdom is that “women will watch men but men won’t watch women…It’s not true.” Director Paul Feig said that he faced “enormous” pressure to have his film Bridesmaids succeed. Casting women in lead roles “was always shut down so quickly. ‘We can’t have a woman as a lead.’ It was almost a rule…I was terrified.” Hunger Games producer Nina Jacobson says the problem is exacerbated by popular culture. She cited a reader survey by the blog SFGate that deemed Anne Hathaway as the year’s “Most Annoying Celebrity” to illustrate that misogyny is “a sport in the media.” She adds that women have been shortchanged by “franchise fever” which has “squeezed out the variety of movies that are made” and by efforts to reach boys with PG movies. The trends are bad for business says Regal Cinemas CEO Amy Miles. “Our customers were wildly excited about Bridesmaids,” she said adding that “they’ll also be there for The Heat” — the upcoming buddy movie starring Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy. How should studios address the problem? Feig says execs need to develop more female stars. “Studios should want to take a chance…by casting women in great roles and letting them do what they do.” Panelists tread lightly when asked whether the upcoming movie from the book Fifty Shades Of Grey will help the cause. “There are many women who love that book,” Jacobson says. “Is it good for women or not? I’ll leave that to another panel.”

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Annapurna And Color Force Win ‘Where’d You Go Bernadette’

By MIKE FLEMING JR | Tuesday August 28, 2012 @ 10:27am PDTTags: Annapurna Pictures, Big Deals Film, Nina Jacobson
Mike Fleming

EXCLUSIVE: UPDATED: In a pre-holiday bidding battle, Annapurna Pictures has paid $200,000 vs. $500,000 (escalating to $1 million depending on the budget) for Where’d You Go Bernadette, a new serio-comic novel … Read More »

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Nina Jacobson Inks First-Look Deal With FX Prods.

By NELLIE ANDREEVA | Wednesday August 8, 2012 @ 11:48am PDTTags: Nina Jacobson
Nellie Andreeva

FX Prods. has signed a first-look deal for cable television with Hunger Games producer Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson and their production company, Color Force. Color Force will develop series projects as well as secure the rights … Read More »

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Producer Nina Jacobson Denies Variety’s 50 Shades Of Bullshit

By NIKKI FINKE, Editor in Chief | Sunday June 17, 2012 @ 2:39pm PDTTags: 50 Shades Of Grey, Nina Jacobson, The Hunger Games

One of the main reasons Variety is currently for sale is that it’s no longer read by the Hollywood community. And one of the main reasons for that is because it’s no longer trusted by the Hollywood community. … Read More »

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Filmmakers Delve Into The Future Of Franchises: Produced By Conference

By DOMINIC PATTEN | Saturday June 9, 2012 @ 6:17pm PDTTags: Debra Martin Chase, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Nina Jacobson, Produced By Conference, Todd Phillips

The future of Hollywood franchises is international and it is female, producers agreed this afternoon on the Studio Tentpoles panel at the PGA’s Produced By Conference. “I think Hollywood was too stupid to figure that out for a while” said The Hunger Games producer Nina Jacobson, citing the recent success of the her own new franchise and The Twilight Saga as examples of female-driven blockbusters. “I think that there will be something really big that will reverse engineer itself for the American market,” said Transformers and Red producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, taking a different perspective and noting the changing nature of the French film industry toward more populist fare. “It’s going to come at us and I think that will be a good thing.” Jacobson also lamented Hollywood’s pursuit of what she called the “fanboy” audience. “Can you think, between movies, TV, video games and porn, any audience that has a shorter attention span?” she asked. She pointed out that women are the primary economic decision-makers in most households. Di Bonaventura and Jacobson were joined on the panel by The Hangover movies’ director Todd Phillips and “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” producer Debra Martin Chase. Former Warner Bros executive Kevin McCormick, producer of the upcoming Gangster Squad, moderated the panel. Philips declined to say anything about the plot of The Hangover 3 except that it is “not going to be another forgotten night.” Read More »

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