News, Etc.

The Horror, The Horror!

One of the fun things about reading Hollywood news stories is figuring out all the connections between different companies and which divisions have deals with whom. It’s never X is making Y picture, it’s always about X setting up a co-financing deal with Y’s subsidiary and co-producing Z partner to make A film.

With that prologue, follow the trajectory: RKO Studio has launched a new subsidiary, Roseblood Movie Co., to produce low-budget horror movies. But somehow this is tied in to a co-producing deal with Twisted Pictures, which produces the Saw movies for Lionsgate. Although, Lionsgate has nothing to do with this deal.

The main arc of the story is that the Roseblood Movie Co. will be remaking 8 “classic” films that were produced by Val Lewton, the famous low-budget producer in the ’40s and ’50s. IMDB says Lewton only produced 14 films in his career, but I would have guessed he was more prolific than that. I guess that speaks for the strength of his films. Lewton is a legendary name in the film biz, but for really not many movies. Anyway, the films Roseblood is going to remake are:

1) Lady Scarface
2) While the City Sleeps
3) The Monkey’s Paw
4) The Seventh Victim
5) Bedlam
6) The Body Snatcher
7) Five Came Back
8) I Walked With a Zombie

That’s an awful lot of films, though. I wonder how they plan to release them? One a year? Two a year? Also, RKO has one of those interim agreements with the Writers Guild and some of the projects already have writers attached.

And just as the way film companies are intertwined, the blog world is funny. Who to give credit to? I first read about this on SpoutBlog, but they credit Bloody Disgusting for the story, who got the story from Variety. Guess they all gotta get a nod…

© 2008 Cinema Snark.