For those in New York on Friday, the second Open Video Conference kicks off with a packed schedule including academics, makers (from Sally Potter and the Yes Men to Autotune the News and OK Go), enablers (Mozilla, Miro, the Workbook Project, Kaltura, Popcorn.js, etc) and others like the editor of Guardian.co.uk. For those not able to make it, there will be the world's first WebM stream of the eve…

The wettest British summer since records began in 1914 appears to have helped British cinema going reach it's highest admissions in 40 years, up some 25% over an average year, and up 44% on 2000. 50.8m visits were made in June to August, according to the Film Distributors Association, with the 5.5m admissions recorded during The Simpsons' opening weekend being possibly the busiest…

Josh Tyler has written about his experience of watching Sicko in a Texan cinema, where the audience were spurred to action after watching it (via BoingBoing): I’ve never seen anything like it. This is Texas goddammit, not France or some liberal college campus.  When the credits rolled the audience filed out and into the bathrooms. At the urinals, my redneck friend couldn&rsq…

The U.K. posted its strongest first quarter takings in four years, bringing in $379.4 million from 166 films, compared with $346 million in the same period in 2006, according to figures from Nielsen EDI. News of the upturn in box figures coincided with a report predicting a surge of growth in the U.K. cinema market. British cinemagoers are set to pay nearly $2.17 billion for movie tickets…

Piracy and the explosion of video on the web did not impact people's hunger to see films on the big screen last year, with world box office takings up 11% to an all time high of $25.82bn. After a dip in 2005, the US box office also rose 5.5% to $9.49bn according to figures from the MPAA.  The average cost to make and market a major studio film was $100.3 million in 2006.  Th…

The Samuel L Jackson film, Snakes on a Plane, described by one blogger as 'the most Internet-hyped movie of all time' has disapointed in it opening weekend, struggling to hold the top spot in the US ahead of last weeks' Talladega Nights. The film, which went back into production to shoot extra scenes following huge web interest, was hoped by some to show the web's potential…

  Video-on-demand hopes to do for broadcasting what iTunes did for the record industry. In a VoD world, armchair viewers tap into a vast onscreen catalogue and download the film or TV programme of their choice, which can be stored on a hard drive or set-top box, burned on to a disc or rented. Watching films when it suits a viewer rather than a scheduler is already commonplace in the cabl…

  They are timeless cinema classics that have largely been consigned to the late-night graveyard slots on the small screen. Movies such as Taxi Driver, South Pacific, Top Gun and a string of Bond films were the blockbusters that once put bums on velour seats. But in a back-to-the-future move, they are to be seen in their natural habitat again. A new breed of distributor is buying the cin…

Fox's X Men 3 grossed $120m in the US over the 4-day weekend to become the highest grossing Memorial Day weekend film ever, and pushing Da Vinci Code into second place with an estimated $45m over the weekend period. X Men 3: Last Stand, has the fourth highest grossing film opening of all time in the US (for a three day period). Meanwhile in the rest of the world, where the idea…

  Mission: Impossible III, starring Hollywood actor Tom Cruise, has topped the UK and Ireland box office on its weekend debut – and out-performing both the original MI and MI 2.

  The animated sub-zero heroes in Ice Age 2: The Meltdown continued to delight audiences, remaining top of the box office charts for the fourth week running.