Bob and Harvey Weinstein, formerly of Miramax fame, have just signed a deal with the World Wrestling Entertainment to distribute all of the WWE's home video library, which includes past, current, and future releases. Plus, the deal opens up the possibility of theatrically releasing WWE videos, and provides them with a ring full of star material. Bob Weinstein told Variety, "Some of these guys are natural-born talents." That's about when my head exploded. Have Bob and Harvey lost it? Or are they pure and total geniuses? Their Weinstein Company owns a majority stake Genius Products, who signed the WWE deal, which pushes me into the "lost it" camp. Don't call your company "I'm Smarter Than You Are Productions, Inc." unless you are itching for a smackdown. And here I swore I'd get through this post without saying "smackdown," dammit.
Granted, the Rock has enjoyed some modest success in films if you discount the craptacular The Scorpion King, but John Cena's The Marine opened at $7 million this past weekend -- tanking fairly soundly amidst bad reviews and one imdb commentor who quips "We Cena enough!" Natural-born talents my people's elbow -- and these are the same guys who produced films like In the Bedroom and Shakespeare in Love. Although in all fairness they did bring us stuff like Air Bud: Golden Receiver and Phantoms.
Next up, Bob & Harvey sign a worldwide deal for the rights to all NASCAR, tractor pull competition, and Cheaters videos.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-17-2006 @ 11:38AM
rtms said...
The WWE is good money for the Weinsteins. Since they need investment money for their movies, it sounds like a good deal for them. The videos are cheap to make and sell millions of copys.Everybody wins in this case.
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10-17-2006 @ 1:06PM
Cory Strode said...
This isn't for the movies, it's for the DVDs of Pay Per Views and collections, which have sold incredibly well over the last few years. With Vince McMahon owning all of the archives of old wrestling, he's putting out DVDs sets that sell better than some TV series sets.
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10-17-2006 @ 1:57PM
Brent McKee said...
Distributing the WWE videos is going to be a money machine for the Weinsteins. This means more money to make the sort of movies they want to make, like "Shakespeare in Love" and other films that don't make that sort of money. Genius is right.
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10-18-2006 @ 3:26AM
Paul said...
"Shakespeare in Love" made nearly $300-million worldwide... so the Weinsteins have made plenty of movies that bring in the kind of coin WWE PPVs and back catalogues will.
What I'm confused about is how the WWE can so frequently change distributors. Not that long ago it was some smaller company whose name currently escapes me, then Sony got the rights a couple years back, and now the Weinsteins' company? Doesn't this get ridiculously confusing with previous releases and their re-releases?
Needless to say, they do sell bucketloads. And "The Marine" bit it hard at the box office not because it was a John Cena movie, but because it was an awful movie from top to bottom.
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