Variety states that Eric Warren Singer, writer of The International, will be involved in writing the Splinter Cell screenplay. No studio has claimed the Splinter Cell movie yet, though “preliminary talks” were had with Warner Bros and Paramount.

Ubisoft, the publishers of the Splinter Cell series, already have an Assassin’s Creed movie in the works with New Regency Productions. Michael Fassbender has signed on to produce and act in that project, and will be playing Altaïr.

Hollywood is still trying to catch fire by adapting popular video games into movies. No video game movies ever made have gained critical acclaim, though some, such as the Resident Evil movies, make money for studios. The video game movies with the best Rotten Tomatoes scores (though they are all under 44% are Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and Mortal Kombat. With video games becoming more mainstream, however, it’s only a matter of time until a video game movie hits on the right combination of writer, director, and cast to become a success.

Penske Media Corporation, which owns publication/blog brands like BGR, Deadline, Hollywood Life, HollyBaby, ENTV, MovieLine, TVLine, and OnCars, has now acquired Variety, the entertainment news publication that has been around for over a century.

Variety was founded in 1905 by Sime Silverman, and now it has been purchased by Penske from Reed Elsevier for an officially undisclosed sum (though the New York Times is reporting $25 million). Reed Elsevier has owned the publication since 1987.

Variety President Niel Stiles said, “We are enthusiastic that PMC will become the new steward of the great Variety franchise, which Reed Elsevier has built over the past 20 years, and the Silverman family for the 80 years before that. PMC is uniquely positioned to preserve and build the market presence of Variety. Their shared values and complementary assets provide for many new opportunities for the business model and brand.”

Jay Penske, Chairman and CEO of PMC, said, “Since 1905, Variety has been the world’s premier entertainment news source, and is today one of the most recognized global media brands. We are thrilled to welcome Variety and its exceptional team into the PMC organization. As a company we plan to rapidly build upon Variety’s foundation, while extending this invaluable brand’s presence across web, broadcast, mobile, and international markets.”

Brooks Barnes at the NYT reports, “There was some trepidation in Variety’s genteel newsroom on Tuesday about how Deadline, known for its aggressive reports, might affect news-gathering; other Variety staff members were glad to be free of Reed, which rarely invested in the newspaper.”

The Variety business currently includes Daily Variety, Weekly Variety, Conferences & Events, and Variety.com’s archives, which include film and TV information dating back to 1914.

Variety.com gets about 320,000 unique monthly visitors according to comScore data, compared to Deadline’s 2.4 million. Variety.com, however, has a paywall. It will be interesting to see if this is lifted under Penske.

Regardless of how “last month” Draw Something may seem now, television studios have been in a bidding war to adapt the game for TV. Variety announced today that CBS has put in the highest bid, and will have Ryan Seacrest host the new show.

Now, if you haven’t played Draw Something, here’s a quick rundown. Two players compete at drawing various concepts using the touchscreen of a smartphone. One player illustrates a word for the other player to guess. Sound familiar? That’s right, it’s Win, Lose, or Draw, that late 80′s game show featuring a huge notepad, a marker, and celebrities. It’s the TV show that was based off of the board game Pictionary, which is what Draw Something was based on.

If you want to know exactly what the show will be, take a look at the video below, but imagine it with Ryan Seacrest:

Variety did mention that CBS has ideas about incorporating social media and “play along” aspects into the show. Let’s face it, though, this is a reboot of Win, Lose, or Draw. Here’s hoping CBS has Burt Reynolds lined up for the pilot.

(via Variety)

Instead he sent out mailers with the above on the front and this image on the inside:

This follows the 2010 mailer MacFarlane ran that featured Peter dressed as the girl from Precious and the slogan “Vote For Us Or You’re Racist”. This one sparked some controversy at the time, but that was most likely MacFarlane’s intention.

He followed it us last year with a mailer read, “You have to vote for us. We did a Holocaust episode”

The inside cover read, “Celebrating diversity – written by 8 WASPs, 6 Jews, 2 Asians and 1 Gay.”

Although the ad was released as a mailer, accompanying a DVD screener sent to the voting members of the Emmys, MacFarlane tweeted the pictures a couple of days ago, saying they refused to run them in the trades.

Family Guy is competing in the best comedy series category. It has been nominated four times in a row since MacFarlane changed the category from best animated series in 2009. That year Family Guy became the first animated comedy to win a nomination for best comedy series.

Modern Family received 17 Emmy nominations last year winning best comedy series and best supporting acting awards. Here’s their mailer:

[Deadline Hollywood]

The Weekly Fizz10, Fizziology’s proprietary chart of the 10 ten movies in social media, will appear every Wednesday on Variety.com. The partnership also includes the use of additional Fizziology social media data.

The Weekly Fizz10 tracks and ranks movies starting four weeks before release through their third week of release.  The rankings are determined by Fizziology’s social media analysts who read and score a sample of social media chatter to grade sentiment, spot trends, and find out what is driving conversation.

"The industry has been using social media to promote, but a lot can be learned from listening. These millions of online conversations are impacting entertainment,” Ben Carlson, President and co-creator of Fizziology.

“We help marketers, content creators and other entertainment decision makers understand what people are talking about – spotting challenges and opportunities."

The site focuses on three main areas.  Connect: Find colleagues, peers and mentors in the entertainment industry. Networking made easy. Careers: Meet professionals directly inside entertainment. Recruit new talent. Search for jobs, promotions or projects.

Community: Exchange ideas. Projects or test your latest big pitch among peers. Industry experts are here to bounce ideas. Your big break starts here.

The site allows users of Facebook or Linkedin to import their existing profile information. Users can upload photos, videos or resumes to their profile. The Biz is powered by Jobster and allows users to search for jobs and for recruiters to post job openings.

"The Biz will give our readers a unique new way to interact and forge relationships with their peers in the community," Variety president and publisher Neil Stiles told the magazine.
 

Yahoo Music Exec Goes Country

When it rains, it pours, goes the saying on the Morton’s Salt box. Yahoo has been raining executives, as yet another decided to switch careers to another company.

This time it’s Country Music Television enticing a highly-placed Yahoo out of Sunnyvale. Frank had served as vice president of music programming and label relations for Yahoo Music.

CMT said Frank will have broad responsibilities at the network. “He will oversee CMT’s music and talent division and all of the network’s on-air and digital music initiatives across multiple platforms, including films, games, touring and other program enterprise businesses,” the network said.

Frank will also serve as a liaison to Music Row and the rest of the country music community, similar to his label relations duties at Yahoo. He had an impressive track record at Yahoo, according to Variety:

At Yahoo, Frank was integral in securing music premieres and performance exclusives for Yahoo Music from such artists as Madonna, Faith Hill, Big & Rich, Toby Keith, Eminem, Nelly, Linkin Park, 50 Cent and Coldplay. Frank oversaw Yahoo’s radio programming and coordinated artist relations. He was instrumental in helping break a number of acts.

The move leaves Yahoo with another tough act to follow. The music industry has a lot of ambitious people working in it, and replacing Frank should not be as challenging as filling other roles at Yahoo, like the CTO position founder and new CEO Jerry Yang holds in addition to his executive duties.

However, FeedFlare is a great addition to any FeedBurner feed as it builds interaction and social media links into each post.

FeedFlare allows publishers to easily build “interactivity” into the content they create, making it simple for subscribers to tag, email or share their content with others. Publishers can include a variety of services including a live display of the number of comments to each post, the ability to email the author directly and show the number of blogs that link to their item.

To enable FeedFlare, login to your FeedBurner account, go to the Optimize tab then choose FeedFlare from the left column. You can then check items that you want to display in your feed.

I suggest adding at least the following:

• Email This – Send the post via email to a friend or a co-worker.
• Comments Count – You may be able to increase click thoughs if people know there are comments on your post.
• Save to del.icio.us – Del.icio.us is one of the biggest social bookmarking sites, lets make it easy for readers to save your posts there.
• Digg This – Ahh Digg. Everyone is obsessed with getting in Digg. This nice part about this button is it also shows you the number of Diggs and if there are any Digg comments.
• Stumble It – StumbleUpon is quickly becoming a great way to find new sites. If a users bookmarks your post in StumbleUpon, you’ll have a better chance of getting additional StumbleUpon traffic.

There are many other FeedFlare choices too. The trick here is to pick the 5 or 6 that will best work for your blog. Don’t go overboard and put as many as you can as it might deter people from reading the feed. Also, don’t just put the Digg button on because everyone else does. If you don’t feel a FeedFlare will work well for your blog, don’t add it.

By adding FeedFalre to your FeedBurner feed, you are making it easier for users to interact with your posts. Visitors don’t always make it to your site to read comments or hit one of the social bookmark buttons. Brining the options to the readers will increase the chances of them sharing one of your posts and getting you additional exposure.

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Other movie industry-focused blogs try to delve deeper into the soft white underbelly of Hollywood, and race to the Internet with what they find. As to how well they do this, Bart and a couple of noteworthy blogs disagree.

“While the blogosphere has its share of heroes, it’s also populated by pseudo-journalists who have never done a fact check or apologized to a public figure whose career may have been damaged by their bizarre rants,” Bart said of bloggers. “They pose a challenge to the gatekeepers and the high priests of publicity who must figure out how to deal with them.”

Alex Billington at FirstShowing.net called Bart’s article “full of lies about publication dates that they break themselves,” and suggested Bart’s rant stems from Variety running out of steam.

“Don’t scrap the rules entirely, but adapt them to fit into this new world,” said Billington. “Press has changed, and it no longer allows for months of publication time and extensive fact checking. Grant access to everyone, don’t be so restrictive to only

Much speculation centers on the company making a cell phone and even selling its own service plan. But many others expect Google will stake its claim in telecom with a Wi-Fi phone that transmits calls over the Internet rather than over cellular networks. Google didn’t return calls seeking comment.

“A Wi-Fi phone makes more sense to me,” said analyst Jack Gold of J. Gold Associates. “I could see them put out a phone with VoIP (Internet calling) and a good Web browser, then make money through search-based ads like they do now on desktops.” (From Any Google Wireless Handset Might Be Of The Wi-Fi Variety)

A Wi-Fi phone would be interesting, but hardly a mass market product in the near future. It would be a long-term play by Google – cell phone coverage is finally getting fairly pervasive in the U.S., but is far from perfect and not nearly as universal as in Europe. Wi-Fi, by comparision, is almost non-existent. Municipal Wi-Fi networks are coming in a few areas, but coverage is likely to be very limited for years.

I’d be surprised by a Google Wi-Fi only phone. If Google wants to impact the mobile phone/mobile search market quickly, conventional cell technology seems like the only option.

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