A proposed sale of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the most powerful and lucrative studio during the golden age of film, drew only meager offers last week, and now Hollywood must confront a troubling question: Are movie studios becoming a financial footnote? Loaded with debt and virtually at a standstill, MGM — now owned by a consortium that includes Sony, Comcast and the investment firms Providence Equity Partners and TPG — put its skeletal remains on the block in a complicated process that allowed potential bidders...

The movie year's ending with a bang (ticket sales have topped a record $10 billion) but there have been whimpers along the way, with a carload of fired executives and an even bigger cargo of catastrophic flops.

District 9 has become one of the biggest surprise hits of the year thanks to its unique alien plot, pieced together with a relatively low budget.

High-quality copies pose a real, and frightening, capacity to take a bite out of the legitimate retail market. bout a week before Christmas, I took a stroll around the Los Angeles Toy District and bought a pirated DVD. As I wrote on Dec. 21, curious about the quality of the merchandise for sale on the street, I shelled out five bucks for a copy of the movie "District 9," which was still days away from being available in your local retail store...

The alien apartheid film likely to snag one of the newly expanded 10 Best Picture Oscar nominations did it in worldwide box office this weekend -- $115M domestic and $85M international so far (with China and Japan to come). And, remember, this indie prod's negative cost was only $30M. By the way, not only does QED Intl have dibs on the franchise, but Sony has first opportunity to lock down the sequel for their territories...

Media Rights Capital has committed to the next film by "District 9" writer-director Neill Blomkamp. The untitled sci-fier will begin production by the middle of next year. Bill Block will produce. Block, the chief exec of QED, was first to commit funding to "District 9" before Sony's Worldwide Acquisitions...

When they release a big action movie starring Will Smith, Hollywood's studio chieftains can be pretty confident that it will sell a lot of tickets in London, Hong Kong and Sydney as well as in the United States. And they expect that a fast-moving adventure with an international setting -- think "Angels & Demons" -- will probably roll up bigger grosses in foreign markets...

How did Sony manage to steal "District 9?" Other companies should kick themselves for missing this one. The obscure import from South Africa registered a $37 million weekend, but here’s the dirty little secret: “District 9” is an absolutely brilliant movie that could easily sneak away with some Oscars. Some critics missed the boat on this one (including Variety), but at a packed Academy screening over the weekend at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, the film received the most applause of any movie in a...

SATURDAY PM/SUNDAY AM UPDATE: Sony is reporting its pick-up of Peter Jackson's low-budget indie prod District 9 was big -- right now $14.2M Friday and $12.6M Saturday (-11%) and a projected $10.1M Sunday from 3,049 theaters. So it's a $37M weekend, much higher than rivals thought possible, and a great ...

For decades — at least since Orson Welles scared the daylights out of radio listeners with “War of the Worlds” back in 1938 — the public has embraced the terrifying prospect of alien invasion. But what if, notwithstanding the occasional humanist fable like “E.T.,” all those movies and television programs have been inculcating a potentially toxic form of interplanetary...

The rock-concert business began the evening of November 6, 1965 outside a loft building on Howard Street in San Francisco. Bill Graham, a thirty-four-year-old frustrated actor from the Bronx, had organized an "appeal" for the Mime Troupe, a radical theater group he managed, whose leader, Ronnie Davis, had recently been busted for public obscenity. Graham was more hustler than hippie, but he understood the kids, and he had arranged for several local rock...

Set in South Africa in the not too distant past, the riveting "District 9" begins nearly three decades after a monstrous spaceship lost power over Johannesburg. There it sits still, suspended over the city like a giant metal thundercloud. These are stormy days indeed inside District 9, the refugee camp just outside...

If you're looking for the late-summer special-effects action fantasy with big franchise potential, forget about G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. (You already forgot? Fine.) Instead, proceed directly to District 9, a grimy little scare-fi thriller from South Africa, hitherto unknown as a production center for really cool movies. The picture bears the imprimatur of another gifted outsider, Peter Jackson, who with The Lord of the Rings made New Zealand...

Four years after his last movie hit the screen, Mr. Jackson, director of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, is gearing up for an extended run at the box office. In recent years, the director’s projects have been shadowed by lawsuits, delays and studio upheavals. Now, working with a stable of filmmakers, from fellow Oscar-winners to first-time directors, Mr. Jackson is turning out a slew of new...

AS STOCKS HAVE RALLIED AROUND THE GLOBE this year, one of the biggest European companies, Vivendi, has yet to be invited to the party. Some investors grouse about slowing growth in two of Vivendi's four businesses: telecom, two-thirds of operating profit, and music publishing. Others apply a big discount for what they view as a conglomerate of partly owned subsidiaries...

Sumner Redstone could soon learn whether the fire sale of much of his family's movie theater chain will raise enough cash to make a looming debt payment -- or force him to resort to a Plan B to salvage his shrinking media empire. Bids for the U.S. theaters owned by Redstone's family firm, National Amusements Inc., are due Tuesday and offers for its British cinemas...

AFTER GOING THROUGH A HORRIBLE STRETCH IN 2008, emerging stock markets have snapped back. The MSCI Emerging Markets Index is up about 36% this year, powered by equities in China and India, among others...

NOT SO MANY YEARS AGO, THE FAVORED CLICHÉS about media stocks were "Content is king" and "Advertising spending always grows faster than the world economy." The cliché du jour is grimmer: "Old media is dead." But, investors should note, it just might prove to be as unassailably accurate, in the long run, as the first two did...

Writer describes how Slim came to lend two hundred and fifty million dollars to the New York Times Company in 2008. In return, the Times awarded him stock-purchase warrants on 15.9 million shares. Slim became the company’s largest creditor and was poised to become one of its largest stockholders. In modern history, no one has dominated a major economy the way Carlos Slim does that of Mexico. Slim and his heirs control more than two hundred companies. His portfolio contains Inbursa, one of Mexico’s most prominent banks...