Lionsgate/Roadside
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Lionsgate Fights Hostile Takeover, Apatow Loves Pee Wee, Mel Gibson in Trouble
Lionsgate is avoiding a hostile takeover with a re-implementation of a poison pill tactic. That's the tactic of selling shares to current shareholders at a price substantially reduced from market value, usually aimed against one shareholder, in this case billionaire investor Carl Icahn. Basically Lionsgate is offering cheaper shares to everyone but him, in an attempt to make a possible takeover too expensive, explains the LAT. Icahn currently holds 37.9% of the company's stake. Lionsgate swallowed the pill once before against Icahn, but the move was invalidated by Canadian authorities. Icahn is also attempting to replace the board of directo...
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Weekend Box Office: Summer Fizzle Leaves Shrek 4 On Top
Last weekend's horrific box office numbers continued into this weekend, which returned animated family film Shrek Forever After--in its third week--to the top of the fray, the only film to crack the $20-million mark! The lucrative summer season is when the studios send their surefire top guns to do ...
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Must-See Winter's Bone: Granik Digs Deep with Breakout Lawrence
Indie filmmaker Debra Granik did it once with the 2004 low-budget drama Down to the Bone, which showed what Vera Farmiga could do (she won best actress from the LA Film Critics). This January at Sundance, the director did it again, showcasing Jennifer Lawrence in a star-making role as a smart young ...
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Lionsgate Poison Pill Rebuffed in Canada
Lionsgate Entertainment, which is incorporated in both Vancouver and Santa Monica, is trying to fend off shareholder Carl Icahn's efforts to take over the company. But Lionsgate has met a setback, reports the LAT and Bloomberg News:
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Kick-Ass Takes Number One After All
For the second weekend in a row, the top two films were in such a neck-and-neck race that the Sunday box office estimates were turned around on Monday. So this weekend, Lionsgate's Kick-Ass, while not scoring the $20-30 million weekend some were forecasting, did win the weekend b.o. derby. UPDATE: A...
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Dragon Trumps Kick-Ass
Picking up word-of-mouth as it continues to pull audiences, Paramount/DreamWorks Animation's How to Train Your Dragon bested all comers at the weekend box office, kicking Kick-Ass to second place. TOH box office analyst Anthony D'Alessandro reports:
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Kick-Ass Rides Buzz for OK Opening, Reveals Critics' Divide
Controversy sells, and Lionsgate rode a swell of debate over the R-rated superhero action comedy Kick-Ass to a robust box office lead on Friday, an estimated $7.5 million in 3,065 runs. It may or may not make the $20 million opening benchmark some predicted; Date Night could wind up number one. This...
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Kick-Ass Stars Johnson, Mintz-Plasse, Moretz Talk Super Heroes
Lionsgate previewed Kick-Ass Monday night in L.A. with a cast-and-writer Q & A to follow. David Lewis was there:Hollywood got a short preview of Comic-Con madness last night at an advance screening of Lionsgate's kinetic comic book adaptation Kick-Ass at the Mann Chinese 6. Fanboys (and a few fangir...
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WonderCon Sneak Peeks Inception, Sorcerer's Apprentice, Toy Story 3, Prince of Persia
This weekend, San Francisco played host to a big multi-studio fan press junket at WonderCon, a pint-sized adjunct to July's giant ComicCon in San Diego. Disney imported producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Nic Cage and Jake Gyllenhaal and screened footage from Sorcerer's Apprentice, Prince of Persia: The San...
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Things I Learned at Lunch This Week, from Black Swan to Bono
In recovery from awards season, I'm back to eating the occasional meal with folks like Phoenix Pictures honcho Mike Medavoy, who met me for lunch at Fraiche in Culver City. He brought along production exec David Thwaites (a one-time child actor in Britain who started as assistant with Medavoy) and F...
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