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A 'Fruit Ninja' movie might really happen
Now that the Angry Birds movie has proven to be a financial success, other studios want in on the mobile-games-as-movies trend. New Line Cinema has secured the rights to a Fruit Ninja movie already in development by game creator Halfbrick Studios and producer Tripp Vinson (of San Andreas and Journey to the Center of the Earth). Not surprisingly, this will involve a lot more than watching an off-screen assassin cut produce into pieces -- the project is currently envisioned as a live-action comedy that sees a ragtag group becoming Fruit Ninjas to, naturally, save the world.
Gears of War movie development soldiers on
Variety reports that Legendary Films has ponied up an undisclosed chunk of change to help New Line with the continued development of its Gears of War film adaptation. As the story points out, Legendary – which also helped finance The Dark Knight – isn't known for getting involved with flicks that are in development hell.As we've previously reported, the Gears movie is being helmed by Live Free or Die Hard director Len Wiseman and has the game's designer, Cliff Bleszinski, serving as an executive producer. The film had originally been slated for release in 2009 by New Line before the studio became a part of Warner Bros. Its parent company hasn't offered an updated release timeframe since, but the partnership with Legendary suggests that it remains serious about getting Microsoft's second best selling franchise onto the silver screen.
Little fish, meet big fish -- Warner laying off most of New Line staff
Time Warner has been sending out the pink slips en masse to New Line Cinema employees this week. Only about one month ago, New Line was brought under the Warner umbrella. The layoffs began on Monday, and will cut about 450 employees off the rolls across both New York and Los Angeles offices. We're sad to see the cuts, and hang on to hopes that this will not have not a negative impact on the Lord of the Rings trilogy coming to Blu-ray. New Line isn't disappearing, and will be left with a small team for production, marketing, publicity and business affairs. [Disclosure: Engadget is part of the Time Warner family.]
New Line being absorbed by Warner Bros.
We knew good and well New Line was following Warner out of Purpleville, but apparently, it plans on walking right into Warner Bros.' head office and calling it a career. Yep, New Line as we all know it is officially done, as a company memo has announced that it will soon "become a unit of Warner Bros." Reportedly, New Line will "maintain its own identity and will continue to produce, market, and distribute movies," but it will obviously do so under the Warner Bros. umbrella. The master plan is to enable what's left of New Line to "focus on the creative side of movie-making, while reducing costs and taking advantage of Warner Bros.' distribution systems." So long New Line -- it'll be a little weird without you (fully) around. [Disclosure: Engadget is part of the Time Warner family][Thanks, Perry]
BBC still mulling Blu-ray exclusive decision
We already knew that New Line Cinema (owned by Time Warner, which also owns Engadget's parent companies) and HBO Home Video would be following Warner into the land of the Blu, but it seems as if BBC Video (which also distributes through Warner) has yet to make a decision of its own. According to TVShowsOnDVD, The Beeb has reiterated that it will continue to support both HD DVD / Blu-ray for now and "will evaluate the marketplace before committing to one format." Apparently, Planet Earth has been moving quite well on the red front, and considering just how different its content is compared with New Line / HBO, we wouldn't be shocked to see it stick with both for awhile longer. Still, the cards are certainly stacked in BD's favor, but only time will tell if the BBC will continue to bleed purple.
New Line confirms it'll follow in Warner's Blu footsteps
As if anyone expected anything different, New Line confirmed with Variety Magazine that it'll follow Warner to the Blu-ray promise land. While this is a no brainer considering the relationship between Warner and New Line, (also owned by Time Warner, just like Engadget) other studios remain up in the air. When, and if, Universal makes the switch as well is any ones guess, but at this point we doubt many would expect otherwise. But, as we've learned in the last few days, anything's possible, but the idea of having one HD format to adopt is something even most members of the red camp can get behind.
Is New Line going Blu-ray exclusive, too?
While everyone's eyes have been (understandably) fixated on Warner's sudden -- but not completely unexpected -- leap to the Blu-ray wagon, we've been wondering what would happen to New Line (owned by Time Warner, which also owns Engadget's parent companies). As you know, the aforementioned studio is currently format neutral, simultaneously releasing such titles as Pan's Labyrinth on both HD DVD and Blu-ray, but new reports are suggesting that tables could be turning. According to a writeup over at Variety, it outright proclaims that "Warner sister company New Line confirmed it will shift allegiance to Blu-ray only as well." However, a conference call with Warner Home Entertainment President Kevin Tsujihara -- sat in on by High-Def Digest -- reportedly had the fearless leader stating that "[New Line and HBO would] make whatever decision they're going to make," and he concluded by noting that while those decisions should be handed down "very quickly," they "are not covered by the initial announcement." Quite honestly, we wouldn't be shocked in the slightest to see New Line declare its unending love for Blu and turn a cold shoulder to HD DVD, but it seems it hasn't got up the courage to actually do so quite yet.[Thanks, Ben]Read - New Line going Blu-ray exclusiveRead - New Line, HBO not covered in Warner announcement
Xbox 360 Elite and 120GB drive now official
HD nerds and Xbox fanboys, the moment you've been waiting for: the Xbox 360 Elite we alerted you about way back when it was just called the Zephyr has finally been announced. As we previously mentioned, it will be black, it will have HDMI, and it will have a 120GB drive (it'll also come bundled with a one month Xbox Live trial) for $479. Unfortunately, also as mentioned before, it's not going to have the new 65nm CPUs, it still doesn't have integrated WiFi (Xbox said it's because a study showed the majority of their customers use Ethernet to connect -- huh?), and it won't have an integrated HD DVD drive (not that we expected otherwise). Microsoft did make some marketing decisions since our sources spilled the beans on this thing though: it's not going to be limited edition, as we previously had. Instead, the Elite will be a permanent SKU, the third and top-tier Xbox device. On the solo 120GB drive side of things, that unit will cost $179, and will come with a cable and software to migrate from your old 20GB drive. (MSFT wasn't yet sure if that kit would be sold separately for new Elite users -- sounds like it will be though, and will be priced very reasonably.) More info: The console will come with component and composite cables, as well as an HDMI cable. (Take that, Sony and Apple!) The console will come with a black wireless controller and black (wired) headset. Sorry, the new black controller still doesn't have backlit buttons -- don't let the pic fool you. The black controller, black rechargeable batteries, black headset, and black Play & Charge kit will all be available in retail for the same price as the white gear. The HD DVD drive will not be released in black. Xbox didn't know what HDMI version the Elite uses, nor whether it supports PCM 5.1, TrueHD, etc.; it will obviously support 1080p, though. Sorry, no price cuts on the Premium or Core packs. Xbox Live Marketplace will also begin vending content from New Line, Paramount, and Universal (and their properties). It's out April 29th in the US and Canada, people. Ready for your second Xbox? No? Well, it's still cheaper than that other black game console.Update: Added more pics; also, Major Nelson has live hands-on pics, too.%Gallery-2328%
CliffyB will executive produce Gears of War film
Gears of War creator CliffyB will serve as an executive producer to the film adaptation, according to Mark Rein, Vice President of Epic Games. Speaking to Game Invasion at Midway's Gamer Day, Rein also explained that it was Jay Wilbur, the other Epic Game VP, who worked with Creative Artists Agency to negotiate the deal.Having the creator of the franchise in such a prominent position is sure to satiate purists to the game, but so far we have seen only minimal plot that could not be stretched to a feature length. And CliffyB's production role may not give him too much influence, for better or worse -- after serving as executive producer for the latest film adaptation of his work, Frank Miller has decided to serve as director on his roles from now on.No director has been announced, but the treatment was done by Stuart Beattie, scribe of Collateral, which bodes well. New Line won the rights to create the film, but we're still hesitant to call it will still come to fruition or fall through the cracks like Halo did.[Thanks, Frank]
Gears of War movie rights purchased
Look what we have here, another big video game intellectual property destined for the big screen. Variety is reporting that the Gears of War movie rights have been purchased by New Line Cinema with Stuart Beattie writing the screenplay and Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey producing. We figured Gears of War was destined for the movies, you know, since it has sold a crapload of games and is uber popular. Let's just hope the movie does the game justice and doesn't end up like our beloved Halo movie ... which we will be seeing someday (hopefully). Good job Epic Games and feel free to send us pictures of your entire development team rolling around in stacks of your newly earned greenbacks.[Via Gamespot]
Lord of the Rings HD DVD and Blu-ray details
We first learned that New Line would be releasing Lord of the Rings on both HD DVD and Blu-ray during the Warner Total HD press conference last week at CES, but no details were given. Now HD-Insider is reporting some details about the upcoming release -- each movie will be on a single dual layer disc encoded using VC1 and will include Dolby TrueHD 7.1. Release date is still unknown and we can only assume that if the title is released the second half of the year it will be a Total HD disc.
HD DVD supporters talk Q4 '06 and beyond
Microsoft wasn't the only one with something to show off yesterday, the rest of the HD DVD camp was on hand to show off what they've done in the months since launch and what we can expect for the rest of the year. On the hardware side there is of course the Xbox 360 drive, as well as Toshiba's HD-A1 and HD-XA1 players already on shelves. A Toshiba exec stated the cheaper A1 is outselling its more expensive counterpart by a ratio of 5-1, although that may not mean much as it is much more widely available. Depending on who you ask, Warner Home Video exec Steve Nickerson either said there are as many HD DVD players sold as there were DVD players in all of 1997, or that there will be by the end of this year. Seeing as there were about 300,000 DVD players sold in '97 and HD DVD is still in the "tens of" range, we'll go with the latter interpretation.As far as software, Paramount Home Entertainment, New Line Home Entertainment, Universal Studios Home Entertainment and Warner Home Video were all on hand, however New Line does not expect to release any discs on either format until early 2007. Warner will release between 35 and 50 additional titles by the end of this year, 60 total from Universal, while Paramount expects to "probably double" its ten movies currently available by the end of this year. All in all they expect as many as 150 HD DVD discs for consumers to choose from in 2006. We can still look forward to limited availability of interactive additional features on discs this year as the studios continue to gauge customer reaction to the new technology to predict what will work best in 2007.Even with all the positivity and good consumer reactions, it's hard to ignore that HD DVD is still talking thousands, while Blu-ray will be saying millions after the PS3 launch in November. [Via AVS Forum]
