Andy Marken News Today

Content Insider #713 – Your Move By Andy Marken andy@markencom.com "Anger is a potent spice. A pinch wakes you up; too much dulls your senses." – Harry Beltik, “The Queen’s Gambit,” Netflix, 2020 We played chess a little bit while in college. It was a way to feel like you were doing something constructive while

Content Insider #630 – Mixed Generations By Miles Weston “- They’re still dressing like little Categories

Oh, come on, for gawd sake! We hardly used last year’s and if this year was going to suck like 2020, we figured why waste the money? Recycle! Despite all the corporate blood-letting in the M&E industry, creative content development, production and distribution survived and is ready to do what it’s supposed to do … serve the consumer. Maybe the reset wasn’t all that bad. When Universal announced they were taking Trolls World Tour DTC last April, it was almost as though the company’s p...

Christmas,New Years didn’t pan out exactly as we envisioned.   Not by a long shot! Valentine’s Day didn’t look too hot either… Even if our local IMAX had been open, there’s no freakin’ way we would have watched Wonder Woman 1984 with 25 + strangers. Of course, we didn’t bother to catch the holiday version on HBO Max  — they’re not one of the streaming services in our family’s entertainment arsenal. Besides, we wanted/needed two sure-fire, holiday flicks that proved we wi...

– Ma Rainey, “ ,” Netflix, 2020 Early in the holiday season, we stumbled onto a news item in the online Maui News that said the Consolidated Theaters on Oahu had a helluva deal for a private showing of Wonder Woman 1984. Each guest in the private screening will receive a free small popcorn. Up to 30 guests will be allowed, and friends and family must be seated by household, with no more than five guests per household within each individual grouping, according to a news release from Cons...

Yeah, been there … done that … don’t want to do it again! It has been a sucky time for everyone in the M&E ecosystem – studios, content owners, producers/directors, crew, distributors, channel folks and consumers. But, as bad as the pandemic “was,” the industry overcame a ton of obstacles and made some tremendous advances. You can almost say the creation of visual stories is better because of it. As someone observed, “The pandemic actually helped (forced) the industry to move f...

Outbreak and Contagion last year, but no one really took this whole pandemic thing serious until mid-to-late March when Tom Hanks announced he and his wife, Rita Wilson, tested positive for COVID-19 while he was in Australia filming an Elvis Presley biopic. Suddenly, people were saying, “Holy S*** this stuff is real…and serious!” At about the same time, folks around the globe were sent home to work, wherever and however. BAM! studios went dark, borders were closed.   With the exceptio...

Let’s see, the pandemic made us shut-ins. The fires (here in California) showed us what the apocalypse was going to look like with the red/orange clouds. Then, what the post life was going to be with grey clouds of smoke, fog, crud. Counter culturist Timothy Leary was right, “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.” People in every country, state/province, city/town had to give up the normal stuff they do – eat out, catch a ballgame, go to a movie. Suddenly, they were rediscovering every nook, cra...

Content Insider Special – Virtual CES 2 Chips are important… DUH, but there’s more to CES than present/future technology. There’s also the practical side for home and the office. While chips are in everything today, most of us feel the first place to experience them is in productivity, personal tools.   At CES, the work/play/communicate device makers were at their best and compute, notebook folks rolled out so many outstanding devices that picking faves wasn’t easy. We zeroed in on ...

— Edward R. Murrow, “ ,” Warner Independent Pictures, 2005 Between the pandemic and M&E heavy hitters/wanna bes racing to capture their unfair share of the new consumer entertainment pot of gold, people at every level have been busy refreshing their resumes.   You can almost smell the fear, smell the blood. Theaters are struggling with their reopening and talking hot/heavy to remain relevant. Content producers/aggregators are checking their cellphone directories to see if numbers are st...