>Not widescreen then?

Alas, no.

The reason that WB was able to release B5 wide is that TNT had paid to have
them re-telecine'd to that format. It would take about two hundred grand to go
through and do that with Crusade...and even though they've now grossed about
half a BILLION dollars on the B5 dvd's to date, they don't seem inclined to
want to spend that.

(Needless to say, my last profit statement showed the show still in the red,
which gets increasingly hysterical as time passes.)

jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2004 by synthetic worlds, ltd.,
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine
and don't send me story ideas)

>How does it actually work out that that is the case? If WB-at-large
>posts no profit, the shareholders will sue. Do all shows produced by
>WB (or any company like it) produce profit statements for show-runners
>which depict a loss?

No, studios as a whole always show a profit from a corporate perspective. But
it's what the people who make the shows get, which is never factored into the
corporate statement, that is flexible.

It's all an issue of what's called "cross collatoralization of revenue
streams." What that means is what elements are allowed in to define what makes
net profit. If net profit means the studio can hold back only the costs of
production, PR and film distribution costs, all of which can be
tallied...there's a net.

But all too often there's a category called "miscellaneous overhead" which can
be, well, ANYthing, any expense can be counted against the revenue from a show
or movie. If a set burns down on movie Bbeing shot in Latvia, they can put the
costs of that against show A's profits.

At the end, by putting those costs against the show's profits, by golly the
studio shows a profit...it's the individual component of that, the show, that
doesn't.

jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2004 by synthetic worlds, ltd.,
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine
and don't send me story ideas)

>Just to clarify a point of general confusion - can you let us know
>what ratio the CGI effects were rendered in for Crusade? Was it the
>same as for B5, with essentially a 4:3 image designed to be cropped
>top and bottom for widescreen?

Yes...at that time the EFX companies we used only had the tech to pump out 4:3
efx for us to use.

jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2004 by synthetic worlds, ltd.,
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine
and don't send me story ideas)

>In Canada here, we saw them as "widescreen" (well, black bars on top and
>bottom of the screen). I know this because I have 4 episodes on tape
>(unfortunately, I was unable to tape any of the others :( ). So... will
>they be black barred

In one of the dumbest decisions in the history of...well, dumb decisions, some
places did that to keep continuity with the widescreen B5 eps, figuring no one
would notice that it wasn't really wide.

jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2004 by synthetic worlds, ltd.,
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine
and don't send me story ideas)