Articles all over the web, easy to find. But the news is that Warner Brothers, who was expected to close one of its specialty stand-alone units (after also shutting down the separate New Line) is going to shutter both Picturehouse and Warner Independent.

Oscars and Oscar contenders are not enough fo the corporate giants to keep making the smaller, quality films.

As I've been saying, the Oscars are going to increasingly be drawing from a smaller and smaller pool of movies.

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Originally posted by seanflynn:
As I've been saying, the Oscars are going to increasingly be drawing from a smaller and smaller pool of movies.

I hope you're wrong. That will be very sad if only a select handful movies are considered for Oscars.

Or alternately fewer worthy films will be nominated.

Part of the problem is that in pursuing Oscars, whatever profits might be made are blown in the mult-million dollar campaigns each year. Juno and to a lesser extent No Country for Old Men will have ultimately decent or better profits, but I suspect There Will Be Blood, La Vie en rose, Away from Her, Michael Clayton and many other of last year's contenders will make little if no money or actually lose some. And studios aren't really interested in subsidizing these.

On the other hand, Mikead and his Russell Crowe/Ridley Scott world of films likely will have a better chance, so at least one person will be happy with this news.

Well, between the two, Picturehouse actually supported their films. They promoted them, had them on numerous screens across the country and had cared wheter or not they found an audience.

Warner Independent Pictures would pretty much dump their films.

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Warner Independent Pictures would pretty much dump their films.

Two of which were March of the Penguins and Good Night and Good Luck, so that is hardly true.

And there was full support for viable films like The Painted Veil, For Your Consideration, In the Valley of Elah and A Scanner Darkly, all of which were fully supported.

The problem with WI is they had too many films that didn't deserve support. I don't know of a single potential break-out film they didn't support appropriately.

More disturbing news - Cablevision's Rainbow Entertainment, which owns the Independent Film Channel, has bought the Sundance Channel. Although they have said they will both be run and programmed (and having prime cable coverage is no small thing to give up), industry speculation is that they will be merged at some point. And in the meantime, they won't be competing against each other, which means the prices paid for independent and foreign film will be reduced, and again, ultimately fewer will be shown and made.

Well this sucks...

In the Valley of Elah, For Your Consideration, A Scanner Darkly & The Painted Veil were not by any means, box office successes. They were not promoted properly or marketed right. In the Valley & The Painted Veil should have been OScar contenders. They weren't. I believe, and I could be wrong, but none of these films made over $10 million, or close to it. I live in the biggest city in my state and all of these films played on the smallest of screens and were gone within two weeks.

So for anyone to say that these films were treated properly by Warner Indepdent Pictures, is not correct. If Picturehouse could make $10 million dollars for La Vie en Rose, before the Oscars, there's no reason WIP could not have done the same for the above mentioned films.

Warner Independent was fully committed to all these movies.

Many movies - including good ones - fail to succeed for a simple reason: audiences didn't want to see them.

Failure sometimes comes from lack of proper marketing. But failure alone does not mean that a movie was improperly marketed.

The biggest problem with Warner Independent is that they became a place where big Warners cold shift the vanity projects of many of its regular creative people - they quite often weren't films that as stand-alones would have been greenlit, but rather ones which were approved because it was part of a bigger picture. Fox Searchlight, Sony Classics and Focus (Universal) have far more autonomy, while Paramount Vantage is more of a piece with the parent company at least has made smarter choices.

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