Cheryl Boone Isaacs Chosen to Head Film Academy

LOS ANGELES â€" Cheryl Boone Isaacs, a veteran film marketer, was named president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Academy said on Tuesday. Ms. Isaacs is the first woman to hold the Academy's presidency since Fay Kanin, who was president from 1979 to 1983, and is the first African-American to serve as president in the group's 86-year history. She previously held various Academy offices, and was most recently the group's first vice president.

Ms. Isaacs succeeds Hawk Koch, who served for only one year but was precluded by an elaborate term-limits system from running again. A president may serve for four successive terms, but must come from the governing board, and may not run again if â€" as with Mr. Koch â€" the permitted period as a governor has expired.

As she steps into the presidency, Ms. Isaacs, who may serve for as many as four years, faces decisions that include those surrounding the renewal of contracts for the Academy's top staff executives. Those are Dawn Hudson, the chief executive officer, and Ric Robertson, the chief operating officer. She is also expected to oversee the opening of a Los Angeles movie museum, which promises to become the Academy's largest venture to date. The Academy, which includes about 6,000 film professionals, is best known for its annual Oscar ceremony. Custom precludes active campaigning for its top office, though Ms. Isaacs and Robert G. Friedman, the co-chairman of Lionsgate's movie group, were widely considered to be the leading prospects for the presidency.

The election of Ms. Isaacs by the group’s governing board was announced via Twitter, even as the governors continued meeting to elect other officers on Tuesday.

N.F.L. Television Pioneer to Step Down Next Year

Steve Bornstein, a pivotal figure in televised sports for more than 20 years, will step down as president and chief executive of the NFL Network when his contract expires in the spring of 2014.

Joe Namath, left, with Steve Bornstein, the president and C.E.O. of the NFL Network.

He will be succeeded by Brian Rolapp, the chief operating officer of NFL Media since January 2011.

Bornstein, 61, joined the N.F.L. in 2002 and laid the groundwork for the growth of the league’s media operations, in part by establishing the NFL Network, which made its debut in 2003.

Much of Bornstein’s time was spent securing full distribution for the new network on cable systems throughout the country. Known throughout the industry as aggressive, Bornstein engaged in sometimes contentious negotiations with cable operators. When deals finally closed with Cablevision and Time Warner in 2012, the NFL Network was available in more than 70 million households in the United States.

“Steve was great making sure we understood it was not going to be an easy road,” N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell said .

Rolapp was also involved in the negotiation with the cable operators, as well as in the talks for the eight-year deal that will keep “Monday Night Football” on ESPN through 2021. Before joining the N.F.L., Rolapp worked in acquisitions and strategy for NBC Universal in New York.

“Technology is a great opportunity for the N.F.L., and Brian understands that,” Goodell said. “He’s been at the center of what we’ve been doing in technology, and that’s going to be his focus now that we have our broadcasting agreements in place.”

Before it was NBC Universal and when it was still owned by General Electric, NBC figured in one of Bornstein’s biggest accomplishments with the N.F.L. â€" persuading Dick Ebersol, then the chairman of NBC Sports, to bring the N.F.L. back to the network in 2006. The negotiations involved switching the league’s cable TV package from Sunday to Monday nights so NBC could have marquee games for its new “Sunday Night Football” lineup and could take advantage of flexible scheduling late in the season.

In 2006, Bornstein also presided over the first season of games on the NFL Network â€" eight games in prime time, which echoed the first season of eight Sunday-night N.F.L. games carried by ESPN in 1987, when Bornstein was the sports network’s programming chief. Securing N.F.L. games was a breakthrough for ESPN, enabling it to increase the fees it charged cable systems.

Bornstein joined ESPN in 1980, during its first year of existence, and in 1990, at 38, became the network’s president. He stayed through 1997, when he was named chairman of ESPN and president of ABC, its broadcast-network counterpart. In 1998, ESPN began broadcasting its first full season of N.F.L. games.

Bornstein, who will also give up his title as the N.F.L.’s executive vice president for media, said he had not decided what he would do next.

“If you want to talk about what’s on my tombstone, which I hope is far away, both the NFL Network and ESPN would have to be mentioned,” he said. “The difference is, the N.F.L. was going to thrive with or without me. At ESPN, we were faced with a touch-and-go situation. There were no guarantees that business was going to survive.”

Trying to Spice a Recipe for Cinematic Popcorn

With ‘Elysium,’ Sony Hopes to Break a String of Failures

Stephanie Blomkamp/Tristar Pictures

Matt Damon, left, and Sharlto Copley in “Elysium.” The film’s backers are promising that it has taken an imaginative detour from the familiar.

LOS ANGELES â€" It’s been a dismal season at the box office for Hollywood blockbusters billing themselves as creative, original â€" anything but the standard summer sequel.

Matt Damon and Alice Braga in “Elysium.” Sony needs the new film to deliver fat profits and send a message that its moviemaking operation is not broken.

Big-budget washouts like “R.I.P.D.,” “After Earth” and “White House Down” were promoted as imaginative and new. But critics mostly panned them, and audiences stayed away, apparently recognizing that the films’ plots and themes were simply reassembled parts from blockbusters past.

Now comes another film promising to take an imaginative detour from the familiar formula: “Elysium,” starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, from the director of “District 9,” Neill Blomkamp.

On its surface, at least, “Elysium” sounds awfully familiar: a world-in-ruins story, lavish computer-generated visual effects, robots and production and global marketing costs of more than $200 million.

But the film’s backers and stars vow that it is different. Really.

“Ours is not a film that goes down the middle,” said Sharlto Copley, who plays a maniacal South African assassin in “Elysium,” which arrives in theaters on Aug. 9. “When you do that, it weakens everything.”

“Our movie is a political statement,” Mr. Copley added. “It doesn’t shy away from controversial ideas. No studio person was saying, ‘Oh, people won’t understand that accent you’re doing, so you had better do half of that.’ Or if there was, we didn’t listen.”

Despite its surface similarities to the pack, “Elysium” indeed works hard to veer into more creative terrain, starting with the fact that it aims to make audiences think. “Elysium” comments on present-day socioeconomic inequality by spinning a futuristic tale about a squalid Earth and a glorious space habitat where the superrich have retreated.

There is no sex. There is no goofy sidekick. It will not be released in 3-D. It is rated R. And the screenplay leaves questions unanswered, like how Mr. Damon, as an injured factory worker on Earth, survives a brutal back-alley operation to affix an exoskeleton to his spine and head. Don’t expect to see the obligatory camera shot of a ruined New York City.

“There were certain factions on the movie pushing for those global shots,” said Simon Kinberg, who produced the film. (Yes, “Elysium” has only one fully credited producer; “White House Down,” by comparison, had six.) “Neill ignored them.”

Mr. Blomkamp, who also wrote the script, does tend to do exactly what he wants â€" a right that he earned, Mr. Kinberg contended, with his first feature film, “District 9.” That R-rated alien movie, made for about $30 million, took in about $211 million in 2009 and was nominated for four Academy Awards, including best picture.

“ ‘Elysium’ was definitely allowed to be as original and provocative as it is because of the success of ‘District 9,’ ” Mr. Kinberg said.

Mr. Blomkamp, 33, who declined to be interviewed for this article, may have also been able to execute his vision fully because of the involvement of Media Rights Capital, or MRC, a production and financing company that split the expense of “Elysium” with Sony Pictures Entertainment. MRC has a history of finding success through creative risk; it backed Universal’s “Ted” and Netflix’s “House of Cards,” which both met resistance from entrenched studio and network executives but ended up as home runs.

“The only way to be successful is to be original,” said Mordecai Wiczyk, MRC’s co-chairman. “Playing it safe is the fastest way to ruin.”

Sony has learned that the hard way this summer. While other studios have suffered bigger misfires â€" Disney’s “Lone Ranger” was the most expensive single dud, by far â€" Sony is the only movie company to have two big-budget films fail to connect. “After Earth,” starring Will Smith and his son, and “White House Down,” with Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx in the lead roles, both fizzled at the box office.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 31, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trying to Spice a Recipe For Cinematic Popcorn .

ABC’s Evening News Bests NBC in Coveted Age Group

ABC’s evening newscast, “World News With Diane Sawyer,” bested the longtime leader, “NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams,” among 25- to 54-year-old viewers last week, ending a nearly five-year-long streak by NBC and renewing interest in the once-predictable ratings race.

“NBC Nightly News” remained No. 1 among total viewers, which is traditionally the bragging rights category in television. But ABC’s win is significant because television ads on news programs are bought and sold based on the coveted age group of 25- to 54-year-olds. Ms. Sawyer has been seeking to snap Mr. Williams’s streak in that category for years.

For ABC, it was a narrow victory: just 38,000 viewers ages 25 to 54 separated the two shows. Partly for that reason, people at NBC News cautioned that ABC’s evening show victory could be a one-time aberration. Last spring and summer, though, those same people saw their prized morning show “Today” fall to second place behind ABC’s “Good Morning America,” first in total viewers and then in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic. The “G.M.A.” streak is now nearly one year old.

As is the custom in these bitterly contested ratings competitions, NBC’s news release about the ratings made no mention of ABC’s gains; it simply excluded the 25- to 54-year-old viewership totals and emphasized that “Nightly News” has been winning among total viewers for years. “We are grateful for another consecutive win in total viewers and are focused on producing the best newscast for our audience,” an NBC News spokeswoman said Tuesday morning.

Among total viewers, “Nightly News,” which had an average of 7.54 million viewers last week, beat “World News” by about a quarter of a million. Among viewers ages 25 to 54, “Nightly” had about 1.88 million, 38,000 fewer than “World News.”

ABC said this was its first win since the week of Nov. 17, 2008, shortly after the election of President Obama.

The victory is shared between Ms. Sawyer, who has been the anchor of “World News” since 2009, and David Muir, one of her principal fill-ins. Last week Ms. Sawyer anchored on Monday and Tuesday while Mr. Muir anchored the rest of the week. Mr. Muir and another ABC anchor, George Stephanopoulos, are widely seen within the television industry as the two possible successors to Ms. Sawyer.

OWN, Winfrey’s Cable Channel, Turns Around Financially

After several grueling years, Oprah Winfrey’s cable channel OWN has turned the corner toward profitability, her business partners at Discovery Communications said on Tuesday, six months ahead of a previously stated goal.

In the second quarter, OWN was cash-flow positive for the first time, said David M. Zaslav, Discovery’s chief executive. He credited investments in programming, including two new shows from Tyler Perry, and increases in subscriber fees from cable and satellite providers.

OWN, which is a joint venture between Ms. Winfrey and Discovery, is now “starting to pay down the investment Discovery has made in the venture,” Mr. Zaslav said.

When the channel was announced in mid-2008, Discovery said it would provide the cable shelf space for Ms. Winfrey (by converting the Discovery Health Channel into OWN) and $300 million in loans.

Amid the hoopla that accompanied its debut on the first day of 2011, Discovery briefly predicted that the channel would make a profit in its first year. But the ratings soon sagged, resulting in lower-than-expected advertising revenue and no small amount of soul-searching by Ms. Winfrey and Mr. Zaslav. Discovery repeatedly chipped in more money; its loans now total $510 million.

Throughout 2012, industry analysts described OWN as a flop or an outright failure. Some predicted that Discovery would have to write off some of its investment.

But a series of changes that year, including the layoffs of some staff members and the scrapping of an expensive talk show by Rosie O’Donnell, helped lay the groundwork for a turnaround. Shortly after those steps were taken, Mr. Zaslav started predicting that OWN would break even sometime in the second half of 2013.

On Tuesday, he noted that the channel’s breakthrough was “ahead of the originally anticipated second half of the year goal of cash flow break even.”

“I want to congratulate Oprah and the entire team at OWN for this significant milestone,” Mr. Zaslav said. “We remain very bullish on its long term trajectory and our ability to drive continued asset appreciation in the future.”

The addition of Mr. Perry’s sitcoms was particularly important. Mr. Perry agreed last fall to direct all his future television production to OWN, in exchange for a small equity stake in the channel and other undisclosed payments.

His first two shows, “The Have and Have Nots” and “Love Thy Neighbor,” had their debuts in the second quarter. Mr. Zaslav called them “bona fide hits” and said that they, along with new seasons of existing shows, had helped improve ad revenue at OWN.

As always in cable, subscriber fees were also crucial. In January â€" shortly before Ms. Winfrey’s biggest interview in several years, that of Lance Armstrong, who confessed to use of performance-enhancing drugs â€" OWN started receiving higher per-subscriber fees, 20 cents a month in some cases, thanks to long-term contracts with cable and satellite providers.

A Discovery spokesman declined to say how much OWN earned in the second quarter, making it difficult to predict how long it might take the venture to repay its loans. But one person with direct knowledge of the business, who insisted on anonymity to share closely held financial information, projected that OWN would come out “tens of millions of dollars” ahead for the full year. The person acknowledged that it would take “a few years” for Discovery’s full investment to be recouped, and noted that it was earning interest in the meantime.

The positive earnings announcement for OWN came amid a somewhat disappointing quarter for Discovery over all. While its earnings â€" $300 million in the quarter, 82 cents a share â€" were up 2.4 percent from the period a year earlier, analysts were expecting profit of $328 million and 90 cents a share on average. The company also trimmed its full-year outlook.