So there will be no Golden Compass 2, unless the movie goes into
turnaround and is financed by another studio.

The Golden Compass is another movie that managed to single-handedly
shut down a movie studio, in this case New Line Cinema. There are
other examples of one flop leading to the demise of an independent
film studio. In 1995, Cutthroat Island had US box office receipts of
$10 million versus a negative cost of $90 million, dooming Carolco
Pictures, the independent movie producer that 4 years earlier had its
biggest hit, Terminator 2, which cost just over $100 million and had a
domestic box office of just over $200 million. In 1987, Sylvester
Stallone earned about $20 million to star in Over the Top, a movie
about an arm wrestler. Golan-Globus Productions US box office was $16
million, and soon the Cannon Group was out of business as an
independent studio. Even Dreamworks SKG felt the effort of an
expensive flop. When 2006’s Flushed Away has a US box office of $65
million versus a production cost of over $140 million, Dreamworks
arranged a buyout deal with Paramount. After the takeover, Paramount
cut staff at Dreamworks and used the merger as an excuse to dump some
long time high priced Paramount executives, claiming redundancy.

When the corporate accountants at Time-Warner (TW) looked at the The
Golden Compass numbers, a negative cost north of $180 million versus
$70 million in domestic box office earnings and no foreign box office
earnings, the die was cast. To cover the production cost, TW pre-sold
foreign distribution rights. Whatever the amount TW got, it was too
little, The Golden Compass had tremendous overseas earnings, over $300
million, breaking BO records in Japan and the UK.

Thanks to The Golden Compass's red ink, close to $50 million even
after crediting the payments for overseas rights and the tax write off
New Line got for filming the movie in Britain (with financing from the
Royal Bank of Scotland), new TW CEO Jeffrey L. Bewkes dismantled New
Line Cinema, firing 350 of the studio's 450 employees last month. New
Line just had its 40th birthday in October 2007 right around the time
that former Citibank account executive Bewkes took over as CEO at Time
Warner. Bewkes is what business calls a "bean counter," a cheapskate
who somehow landed a job at HBO when it was taking off over 20 years
ago. Now he is dismantling Time Warner, cutting costs and selling off
TW's cable companies in advance of Verizon's FiOS cable system
decimating TW's cable customer base.

So there will be no Golden Compass 2, unless the movie goes into
turnaround and is financed by another studio. New Line Cinema is
history, the windfall profits TW made from the Ring movies forgotten.
For maybe 15 minutes of screen time, Nicole Kidman made over $15
million for appearing in The Golden Compass. She was paid this large
a sum in part to guarantee her appearing in the next two movies in
this planned trilogy, money for nothing. Another big payday, another
big American flop for Ms. Kidman. And now 350 New Line employees will
learn about hard and expensive it can be to get health insurance on
their own, with no corporate health plan to subsidize most of the
cost.

The Golden Compass is another movie that managed to single-handedly
shut down a movie studio, in this case New Line Cinema.

On Sun, 4 May 2008 20:26:25 -0700 (PDT), williamhow... at (no spam) yahoo.com wrote:
The Golden Compass is another movie that managed to single-handedly
shut down a movie studio, in this case New Line Cinema.

It is cold and heartless, and perhaps evil-minded of me to say in view of
how this movie will so adversely affect the lives of thousands of people I
will never know, but I am glad it tanked.  If there is such a thing as an
evil movie, this was it.  Good riddance to bad rubbish, as they used to say
in my 'hood ..