As reported in The Independent:

City financiers have begun a European film-funding drive in an attempt to imitate Hollywood’s global blockbuster machine.

…

Early next month Stewart Till, the current chairman of the UK Film Council and former head of United International Pictures and PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, will hold talks with bankers from Dresdner Kleinwort. They will discuss the formation of a £100m investment fund, which he would lead, to back the distribution and marketing of UK and European films.

…

“This is not about transplanting the US model. There should be a balance between these culturally significant movies and those that can be globally appealing. We need to be able to match those ideas with the appropriate financing.”

Have foreign films, user-generated content, and the video game industry sent the major U.S. film studios into a death spiral?

Kirstin Thompson, writing from her homebase at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, nicely summarizes and critiques two recent articles that explore the demise of Hollywood.

Read her article on David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema. The full post is here.

Photo from davidbordwell.net