Ben Affleck started his day with critical raves for his movie "Argo," but he's still concerned about how it will perform at the box office.

"This is a hard movie to sell," Affleck told TheWrap on Friday. "I think this movie has to hold to be successful. If it doesn’t, I won’t be happy. It needs good word of mouth. If it doesn’t happen I’ll be disappointed."

Affleck has a lot invested in the movie about the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. 

At the beginning of the week, Warner Bros. downgraded its projections following weaker-than-expected tracking for the film, which opens on 3,232 screens. Studio executives are hoping...

Nikki Finke’s silence is deafening on the day that her boss, Jay Penske, bought the trade publication Variety.

Finke, who chose to be on vacation when the deal was done, had been agitating for weeks to get Penske to buy the trade for her to run. She blanketed the town with phone calls weeks ago when she believed TheWrap was about to buy it. (She needn’t have worried: We looked, we passed.)

Also read: Deadline Owner Penske Media Buys Variety

In the end, Penske appears to have shut her out from having much to do with Variety, and that will ultimately marginalize her. This creates the challenge he is going to face going forward: owning two competing brands that cover the exact same subject matter.

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The story of late-'60s folk rock singer Rodriguez’s fall into obscurity and poverty, told movingly in the documentary “Searching for Sugar Man,” is remarkable.

Just as his surprising is the story of his resurrection since the movie debuted at Sundance in January, winning the audience and special jury prizes, and its release in theaters this summer.

Since then, Rodriguez’s music has found its way onto iTunes, and the movie soundtrack hit No. 3 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart. Rodriguez is playing concerts across the country  and is booked to play Carnegie Hall and Coachella next year. He’ll be the subject of a segment on “60 Minutes” on Sunday.

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Universal has pulled the editing of Japanese epic "47 Ronin" from its director Carl Rinsch as the budget of the project has ballooned to $225 million, individuals close to the project told TheWrap.

The troubled 3D megaproduction has been taken over by Universal co-chairwoman Donna Langley, who is now overseeing the editing of the movie instead of the director, one of those individuals said.

The movie wrapped up a series of reshoots in London about one week ago, the purpose of which was to recapture key close-ups of lead actor Keanu Reeves and put him back in the center of the action in the film's most climactic scene.

The individual described the production process as a "nightmare."

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