For Your Consideration: Low-Budget Blockbusters ... Toshiba Exec Reflects on HD DVD ... Theaters Evolve

- Low-budget blockbusters like 'Once' never happen ... until they do. (Movie industry insiders say it's always safer to bet on big budget releases with well-known stars.) Portfolio.com has an analysis of the economics of 'Once,' made for $150,000 and released in the US by Fox Searchlight. The financial returns thus far, Portfolio says, have hit about 10,000 percent. From the story:

After the film opened in the U.S., it grew slowly and steadily. Fox Searchlight had the best marketing that money can’t buy: word-of-mouth buzz and critical acclaim. While summer’s blockbusters came and went, Once stuck around theaters for an amazing 219 days—most of 2007—whereas Spider-Man and Pirates played for 112 and 133 days, respectively.

There's also a slideshow of the top ten movies from a return-on-investment perspective (mostly indies like 'Blair Witch' and 'Napoleon Dynamite,' but all three 'Lord of the Rings' films also make the list.)

- Toshiba's CEO talks to the Wall Street Journal about the impact to the company of losing the high-def format war to Sony and Blu-ray. Atsutoshi Nishida says:

I didn't think we stood a chance after Warner left us because it meant HD DVD would have just 20% to 30% of software market share. One has to take calculated risks in business, but it's also important to switch gears immediately if you think your decision was wrong. We were doing this to win, and if we weren't going to win then we had to pull out, especially since consumers were already asking for a single standard.

- The Detroit News writes about how movie theaters are evolving -- with a big focus on 3-D, live concerts, and videogame tournaments. (Long interviewed me for the piece, and includes a short quote.)Fox

Last Night's Academy Awards: Not on YouTube

Last year, I wrote about how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences requested that YouTube yank any clips from the Oscar telecast...and yet the official Oscar site didn't offer much video to Oscar-obsessed Internet users.

The same thing is happening this year. Oscar.com offers mostly footage from the "thank you" cam, a backstage opportunity for winners to be more profuse in their gratitude.

And on YouTube, nearly all clips from the telecast are being zapped almost immediately. (Someone posted the "In Memoriam" tribute to actors who died in 2007, and it was removed within about 12 minutes.) I wonder if this is YouTube's automatic content filtering software at work...

People clearly want to watch the few highlights of the telecast that are available on YouTube. (A clip of the song 'Falling Slowly' from 'Once,' which hasn't been removed yet, has been seen more than 37,000 times.)

The Academy did launch an official YouTube channel this year (you can find it here), but today it contains only clips from previous Oscar shows, promo spots, interviews with Academy members, and Sid Ganis' pre-Oscars video blog.