Hobbit Executive Producers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh Tap Pan’s Labyrinth Director To Helm Latest Installments of The Lord of the Rings Saga

LOS ANGELES, CA (April 24 , 2008) – Guillermo del Toro (“Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Hellboy,” “Blade 2”) will direct “The Hobbit” and its sequel, it was jointly announced today by “The Hobbit” Executive Producers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, New Line Cinema’s President and COO Toby Emmerich, and Mary Parent, Chairperson, Worldwide Motion Picture Group, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (MGM).

The Hobbit Movie

“Guillermo is a filmmaker of outstanding ability; he is a genuine storyteller who brings a tremendous amount of passion, energy and imagination to his work. A true original, Guillermo is a cinematic magician who has never lost his child-like sense of wonder. He understands that the fantastic must be grounded in the real and that all stories are only ever a reflection of ourselves,” say Jackson and Walsh. “We have long admired Guillermo’s work and cannot think of a more inspired filmmaker to take the journey back to Middle-earth. We are delighted ‘The Hobbit’ is in such trustworthy hands.”

Del Toro says, “This is a great honor, and I am indeed blessed to become a part of the filmmaking community that Peter, Fran and their extraordinary team of collaborators have created in New Zealand. I want to thank them, Bob Shaye, Michael Lynne, Toby Emmerich and Mark Ordesky for entrusting me with such an incredible project. Contributing to the ‘Lord of the Rings’ legacy is an absolute dream come true.”

Comments Emmerich, “Guillermo has a proven ability to bring fantasy worlds to life in a compelling and emotional way. He is the ideal filmmaker to work with Peter and Fran to bring Tolkien’s beloved Middle-earth back to the screen.”
Parent adds: “As the international distributors for ‘The Hobbit’ films, we couldn’t agree more with Peter, Fran and our partners at New Line, Guillermo is the perfect choice to direct. Audiences across the globe enjoy his unique cinematic viewpoint, imaginative direction and provocative storytelling talents. His vision, in collaboration with Peter and Fran, will ensure ‘The Hobbit’ as a very special film experience for audiences worldwide.”

Del Toro will move to New Zealand for the next four years to work with Jackson and his Wingnut and WETA production teams. He will helm the two films back to back – telling the story of “The Hobbit,” and its sequel, which will deal with the 60-year period between “The Hobbit” and “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

New Line is overseeing development and will manage the production. “The Hobbit” and its sequel are being co-produced and co-financed by New Line Cinema and MGM, with Warner Brothers distributing domestically and MGM distributing internationally. Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh are executive producing the films.

The Oscar®-winning, critically acclaimed “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy grossed nearly $3 billion worldwide at the box office. In 2003, “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” swept the Academy Awards®, winning all of the 11 categories in which it was nominated, including Best Picture – the first ever Best Picture win for a fantasy film. The trilogy’s production was also unprecedented at the time.

For more information about “The Hobbit” films, please visit www.TheHobbitBlog.com.

Del Toro most recently helmed the critically acclaimed “Pan’s Labyrinth,” which was released through New Line’s Picturehouse label and became the highest grossing Spanish language film in US box office history, and among the top five grossing foreign language films of all time. It won three Academy Awards® (Art Direction, Cinematography, and Makeup) and earned six nominations, including a writing nomination for del Toro for the film’s original screenplay. Del Toro also executive produced another Picturehouse release, the Spanish supernatural thriller “The Orphanage,” which, having scored critical success and broken box office records in Spain, has been critically acclaimed and is currently playing in theaters nationwide. Del Toro also previously co-wrote and directed the critically acclaimed Spanish fantasy thriller “The Devil’s Backbone,” and first worked with New Line in 2002 when he directed “Blade II.” His current feature, which he directs and has adapted from the graphic novel series, “Hellboy II: The Golden Army,” is scheduled for a July 11 release.

NEW YORK — The film financing sector has a dark cloud hovering overhead, experts in the sector said Tuesday at the Media and Money Conference in New York, but not one without some silver lining.

Well before the global financial crisis came to a head in recent weeks, market conditions had been brutal for financing movies. Panelists ticked off a litany of problems that are seeing outside investment dry up, including piracy, increasing debt and a supply-demand imbalance between films and distribution.

“What we’re going through in this space is effectively a perfect storm,” Benjamin Waisbren, president and CEO of Continental Entertainment Capital told moderator Georg Szalai, New York bureau chief and business editor at The Hollywood Reporter.

“You’re unlikely to see the go-go years of film financing of the last four or five years which effectively ended last summer,” said Tuna Amobi, senior equity analyst of the media and entertainment group at Standard & Poor’s Equity Research. “It seems to be now we’re at the cusp of a new paradigm.”

Citing recent conversations he’s had with money men at studio-owning conglomerates, Amobi described a “hunkered down” mentality on seeking investment due to Wall Street’s woes. That said, he also noted studios have parent companies with pockets deep enough to fund films without external backing.

“It’s really a very gloomy environment so to speak, but they do have the cash despite the credit crunch,” said Amobi, who warned any self-financing could put a crimp on dividend payouts.

The real test could come as soon as late 2009, according to Amobi, when many of the current slates peter out and studios will have to make decisions. “As you see these film slate deals unwind, there’s going to have to be more creative ways to financing these deals,” he said.

The panelists agreed that the multi-picture slate deals of recent years are likely a thing of the past, but single-picture deals will still find traction.

Hanson believes that single-picture deals will likely only increase with overseas backers, noting that his firm obtained financing for new film “W.” from British, Chinese and Swiss investors. However, he noted that didn’t mean that American investors weren’t interested, too. “The first group in our syndicate of potential investors who happened to raise their hands happened to be offshore,” Hanson said.

However, Amobi noted that the advantage much of the global enjoys over the American dollar in currency is starting to evaporate, too. “My sense is that sourcing money from those regions is going to get increasingly difficult,” he said.

But the panel was not entirely bleak. Waisbren noted the very volatility of the sector presents opportunity for investment, particularly among the technologies poised to grow into film distribution platforms in the long term.

“It’s not all doom and gloom,” Waisbren said. “You have to be patient, you can’t be a one-year investor.”

Amobi noted Tuesday’s announcement of a $250 billion financial rescue package for banks will help the industry as well. “These are the same banks that Hollywood is primarily looking to,” he said.

LOS ANGELES, June 22 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Rentrak Theatrical, a
business unit of Rentrak Corporation (Nasdaq: RENT), today announced the
weekend theatrical box office estimates for the weekend period of June 20
through June 22, 2008 according to the company’s Box Office Essentials(TM)
theatrical box office data collection and analytical service.

    The twelve estimated top producing motion pictures for the weekend, per
data collected as of 9:30AM Pacific on Sunday, June 22 by Rentrak Theatrical
include:

    Rank  Title      Weekend Gross                (Locations)
    1     Get Smart     $39,155,000                (3911)
    2     Kung Fu Panda     $21,700,000         (4053)
    3     The Incredible Hulk    $21,556,660  (3508)
    4     The Love Guru     $14,000,000         (3012)
    5     The Happening     $10,000,000        (2986)
    6     Indiana Jones Kingdom Crystal Skull $8,414,000  (3171)
    7     You Don’t Mess With The Zohan  $7,200,000  (3278)
    8     Sex And The City    $6,465,000        (2442)
    9     Iron Man      $4,002,000                   (1912)
    10    The Strangers     $1,948,830            (1578)
    11    Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian $1,708,000  (1462)
    12    What Happens In Vegas   $770,000  (708)

    Weekend of 06/20/2008 to 06/22/2008

    (C) 2008 by Rentrak Corporation

    About Box Office Essentials

    Box Office Essentials provides each studio with password-protected,
real-time, web browser-based and 24/7 access to data pertaining
specifically to their movie release titles. A sophisticated toolset allows
studio distribution executives to view and analyze the information at
different levels of detail and across a multitude of attributes (by theatre
circuit, DMA, time zone, etc.), enhancing their ability to make faster, and
better informed decisions. Additional features include online school
calendars (K-12 and college), interactive release schedule and 24-hour
subscriber support.

    About Rentrak Corporation

    Rentrak Corporation, based in Portland, Oregon, is an information
management company serving clients in the media, entertainment, retail,
advertising and manufacturing industries. The company’s Entertainment
Essentials(TM) suite of services is redefining media measurement in the
digital broadband era. Entertainment Essentials provides customers with
near-real-time, actionable insight into performance of content distributed
over a wide variety of modern media technologies. Available by license or
subscription, each Entertainment Essentials application allows executives
to analyze detailed industry-wide and title-specific data to make decisions
that enhance the bottom line and provide competitive advantage. For further
information, please visit Rentrak’s corporate Web site at
http://www.rentrak.com.

     Contacts: Rogers & Cowan for Rentrak Corporation
               Sallie Olmsted                       Amanda Bartz
               (310) 854-8124                       (310) 854-8151
               solmsted@rogersandcowan.com          abartz@rogersandcowan.com

A recent story has surfaced at the Sun tabloid entitled “From Heroin to Heroine” that has Angelina Jolie understandably upset when a part of her seedy past immortalized on video tape has now resurfaced. Smoking a cigarette the 32-year-old actress Anelina Jolie looks wide-eyed and rundown, and is seen with a woman smoking heroin in the pictures The Sun newspaper captured from a video.  Jolie is allegedly shown in a “drugs den” in images published by a British tabloid.

In the video footage, believed to be taken in the 1990s, the ‘Tomb Raider’ star allegedly reveals her drug use:

“I’ve done coke, heroin, ecstasy, LSD, everything.”
But she reportedly adds: “I gave them up long ago.”

The actress’s trip to the Cannes Film Festival to promote her role in kids’ film Kung Fu Panda was overshadowed after a shocking video of Jolie was leaked to The Sun newspaper. The footage, filmed in a New York drug den, shows a young Angelina discussing her experiences with drugs and admitting that she killed her childhood pets. A source close to Jolie told the Daily Mail: “The timing couldn’t be worse, particularly as she’s here to talk about a kids’ film.

Jolie also allegedly discusses bizarre sex games, revealing that it is “just a cool thing” to take part in sexual behaviour where people get hurt.

Angelina, who has a daughter Shiloh, one, is pregnant with twins. She and actor BRAD PITT, 44, also adopted Maddox, six, Pax, four, and Zahara, three.

A fellow den regular said: “Even back then I remember her talking about how she’d adopt a huge family from around the world.”