Archive for March 14th, 2008

Don’t rule out a New Kids on the Block reunion. That’s the word from Joey McIntyre, who’s back in town for tonight’s theatrical release of “On Broadway.” While Joey Mac was mostly mum on persistent rumors that Boston’s mega-selling boy band is contemplating a comeback, he did offer this: Never say never. “I will say that it was really nice to see the positive reaction to the initial word that it might happen,” said McIntyre, a successful song-and-dance man who recently became a father. “It’s nice to know people are so excited.” Along with Mike O’Malley, Eliza Dushku, and Will Arnett, Joey Mac is one of the stars of “On Broadway,” director Dave McLaughlin’s feel-good flick about an Irish-American playwright who stages a show in the back of a pub. “Anything I can do to help promote this movie, I’ll do it,” McIntyre told us. “It’s not ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ but it’s a really nice story.”

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China isn’t exactly a stranger to video game piracy, but you’d think a major undertaking like the upcoming Beijing Olympics would be able to avoid association with this unseemly process. Not so according to Cadin Batrack, who noticed some extreme similarities between his 2006 flash game Snow Day and the Olympic site’s Fuwa Fight the Olympic Clouds.

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Frito-Lay’s Doritos brand and MTV are in the final days of their nationwide search to find some spicy girls and sweets guys to participate in a short-form dating reality series debuting in April.

People 18 and older can compete for a chance to appear on the show, “When Spicy Meets Sweets,” by registering and building a profile at http://spicyandsweet.nextornot.com through March 16. Contestants are selected based on the amount of time people spend on the profile pages. The microsite taps into MTV’s existing NextorNot.com community that is based on the popular reality show “Next.”

The promotion, in part, originated as part of Doritos’ recent product launch, Spicy Sweet Chili tortilla chips. It plays off the experience of combining two opposite things that complement each other. So, Doritos decided to take that notion a step further into the world of dating with MTV.

“We wanted to come up with a way we could articulate the chip and product experience into something that is mirrored in real life,” said Kristen Colonna, associate director of national TV investment for OMD, the agency handling the promotion.

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USA Today has launched a new Web campaign to help promote the newspaper’s online community features. The campaign, developed by Arnold Worldwide, will place banners within Web portals, social networks and ad networks including Yahoo, AOL, Digg and Advertising.com. The online effort is part of an ongoing trade and consumer campaign that USA Today launched last year under the tagline “We’re all in this together,” to highlight newer online initiatives including its reader participation tools, blogs and widgets. It also coincided with events surrounding USA Today’s 25th anniversary.

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HOLLYWOOD - Pop star Nick Lachey is making a return to reality TV after signing up to produce a new show for MTV.

The Newlyweds star–who split from Jessica Simpson in 2006–is behind a new series based loosely on 1980s TV series Fame, which followed the lives of a fictional group of teens at a performing arts school in New York.

Lachey reveals the show will be a “reality show version of Fame” at the School for Creative and Performing Arts in Cincinnati, Ohio, which he attended in his youth.

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AUSTIN, Texas - John Cho thinks he has a cult following now as Harold in the “Harold & Kumar” movies — he ain’t seen nothing yet.

Cho will co-star as Sulu in J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek,” due out next summer. He’s shooting his last scenes this week as the Starship Enterprise’s helmsman, just as he’s promoting “Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay,” the “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” sequel that premiered over the weekend at the South by Southwest film festival.

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MOSCOW — Russia’s leading state broadcaster, the First Channel, is joining forces with a Kazakh banker to develop a $1.4 billion “media park” to the south of the Russian capital.The deal was signed Tuesday with Kazakh developer and banker Muhktar Ablyazov at an international property expo Mipim 2008 in Cannes, France.

It could be a prelude to Russia’s biggest television channel moving much of its production and broadcast production out of its aging Soviet-era Ostankino complex in Moscow’s congested Northwestern suburbs.

The state-of-the-art 140 hectare media park facility will be a key feature of an ambitious $15 billion Eurasia City new town development slated to break ground near Moscow’s second airport, Domodedova, in 2009 or 2010.

The film and television production center — close to a busy airport but far from Moscow’s traffic gridlocked streets — is part of a much larger project to build a new town with capacity for 150,000 people on a green-field site currently occupied by isolated villages, summer residence “dacha” communities and forests.

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NBC UNIVERSAL HAS PARTNERED WITH LimeLife to launch “Law & Order: Celebrity Betrayal,” a mobile game based on its long-running crime drama, “Law & Order.”

Players work to solve the latest celebrity crime in New York, investigating the crime scene, interrogating witnesses and bringing their key suspect to trial. Cast members like Alana De La Garza offer advice and feedback to help move the case along, and mini-games like Warrant Race (where players rush to try to secure warrants) are also included.

“Creating mobile games based on popular television series like ‘Law & Order’ is one way NBC Universal is looking to extend our audiences’ experience with the brand,” said Jeremy Laws, senior vice president, mobile and broadband, Universal Pictures Digital Platforms Group.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Walt Disney Co. expects to collect $1 billion in revenue from online content this fiscal year, a significant rise from estimates for fiscal 2007, CEO Robert Iger said Monday.Iger told analysts the company has been “fairly aggressive” in expanding onto the Internet to extend consumer contact with its most popular franchises and create new revenue streams.

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TOKYO — Sony plans to start a contents distribbing biz, digitally screening plays, musicals, operas and other stage perfs, as well as sports, music and other events, at theaters across Japan, in cooperation with rights holders, the company announced on Monday.

The first screenings, skedded for May, will be of “Riding on the Metro,” a musical that was presented by the Humanity Design company last December in Tokyo. The screenings will start in the Tokyo metro area, then spread out to the rest of the country.

To record the perf of “Riding on the Metro” Sony subsid Sony PCL used nine HDC-F950 model CineAlta digital cameras. Sony PCL also edited and processed the film.

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