Right now I’m just in the thinking-about-it stages. It’s a really big movie and it’s going to be a great movie no matter who writes it.

– Aaron Sorkin, discussing the possibility of writing a biopic about Steve Jobs for Sony

A report by SNL Kagan said it expects U.S. mobile game revenues to top $1.53 billion this year, which is nearly double revenues in 2010. At that amount, the mobile industry will make up about 7.7 percent of the $20 billion U.S. games market.

Looking further out, SNL Kagan anticipates mobile game revenues to top $7.81 billion in the next decade.

The author, John Fletcher, identified this year’s fourth quarter as a key turning point as consumers download new apps after receiving a smartphone as a gift during the holiday season. During the final three months of the year, he expects U.S. mobile game publishers to generate more than $439.4 million, up 62 percent from $271.7 million in the prior-year period.

He said the revenue growth is being driven by the free-to-play model, which enables publishers to make more than if they were charging 99 cents. While only a few customers actually make in-app purchases, they easily outspend the number of people willing to spend 99 cents on a game they don’t know if they will enjoy.

As the freemium model prevails, he expects newcomers, including Zynga, will make a dent in the space by the fourth quarter. However, Fletcher anticipates incumbent companies, like Electronic Arts and Gameloft, will continue to dominate.

Here’s a list of the Top 10 based on estimated fourth-quarter revenues:

1. EA Mobile
2. Gameloft
3. Ngmoco (owned by DeNA)
4. Rovio Mobile
5. Glu Mobile
6. Capcom
7. Zynga (acquired Newtoy)
8. Sony Pictures Mobile
9. Namco Bandai
10. MocoSpace

The removal of an unspecified number of movies stemmed from a contractual issue between Sony and Liberty Media Corp.’s Starz cable channel. Starz supplies Netflix Watch Instantly with movies from Sony and Walt Disney Co. as part of its deal to show the studios’ movies on its pay-cable television channel.

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The week-long campaign will appear in Zynga’s popular FrontierVille, and is part of the company’s efforts to build up additional sources of revenue beyond relying on the few users who elect to pay for virtual goods.

“Rango,” which debuts in theaters on Friday, is about a chameleon who must save the day in a Western-themed town, much like the atmosphere depicted in FrontierVille.

The placement is being conducted through a partnership between the San Francisco-based social games developer Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies.

Starting this afternoon, the 15 million daily players of FrontierVille will be presented with three Rango-related tasks, if they choose to participate.

Players must find the chameleon, who easily blends into the frontier. Then, they must get their friends to send them 10 buckets of water, and finally they must watch the film’s trailer in advance of the film’s release. If players do all three, they receive a Rango statue to add to their homestead.

The product placement is more overt than some of the ones in the past. It also doesn’t offer much value. For instance, the statue has no secret powers, and will not bring crops back to life, like the Farmers Insurance blimp did last year in FarmVille.

In an interview, Manny Anekal, global director of brand advertising at Zynga, told us that’s not the appeal of the statue. “They are collection-ists and completion-ists, but they also like getting things that are unique, and you can’t buy it,” he said.

For Paramount, he said they’ll be watching the number of people who participate and how much awareness of the brand it creates.

Some critics question whether Zynga’s strategy of doing one-off product placements will be able to scale and be come a large enough business since each offer is so specialized, and the company must work so closely with the advertiser to come up with an appropriate ad campaign.

Anekal said it’s a work in progress. They’ve only had a dozen or so product placements since the second half of last year. “In terms of what we can scale. We are working towards that. We are nascent in the space.”

Zynga has worked to promote two other movies: Sony Pictures Entertainment’s The Green Hornet in Mafia Wars and DreamWorks Animations’ Megamind in FarmVille. The DreamWorks promotion attracted more than nine million people to interact with Megamind’s “Mega-Farm” in the 24-hour period.

Those efforts range from attempting to massage the script, according to one of the film’s producers, to promoting an alternative corporate history.

The movie, “The Social Network,” depicts Mr. Zuckerberg as a socially awkward egomaniac who may have stolen the idea for his company from fellow students while he was an undergraduate at Harvard University.

The film—which premieres Friday night and will be widely released Oct. 1 by Sony Corp.’s (SNE) Sony Pictures—takes as its narrative framework two lawsuits over the company’s origins. Facebook later settled the cases.

On Friday, Mr. Zuckerberg will announce on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” that he is donating $100 million to the public schools in Newark, N.J.— his first major act of philanthropy.

According to a person familiar with the matter, Facebook didn’t time Mr. Zuckerberg’s gift for the film’s premiere.
Mr. Zuckerberg, through a company spokesman, declined to be interviewed for this article.

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The tactic, by “Weeds” producer Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., is the part of a more aggressive effort Hollywood is taking to boost online sales of digital movies.

Studios have become bolder in how they push their shows and movies over digital channels. Earlier this month, Sony Corp.’s (SNE) Sony Pictures started making online rentals of its hit movie “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” available for owners of some Sony TVs and other devices, well before the film’s Jan. 5 release on DVD.

A Sony spokesman declined to say how many consumers were taking the offer.

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Since Sony Pictures apparently wants to make a movie from the story of the two men who bought a lion from London’s Harrods department store, it’s a good time to replay one of the many online videos of their reunion a year after they released him into the wild in Africa.

Although the event took place in 1971, the videos of the meeting with Christian the Lion have been hugely popular on YouTube, with millions of views.

Here’s one of the videos:

And so the company has begun offering a video-downloading service for its PlayStation 3 videogame console. Announcing the service at the gaming industry’s E3 conference in Los Angeles, Sony (SNE) said TV-show rentals will cost $1.99 per episode and movie rentals $2.99 to $5.99. Movie purchases will start at $9.99 and top out at $14.99. Not bad for content from Sony Pictures, Fox Film & Television (NWS), MGM (MGM), Lionsgate (LGF), Warner Bros. (TWX), Disney (DIS), Paramount (VIA) and Turner Entertainment (TWX). Certainly a compelling proposition for the 10 million or so PS3 users in the U.S., who no longer really need to buy an Apple TV (AAPL) or Netflix Player (NFLX) to deliver downloadable video to their TV sets.

Still, PlayStation Network’s video delivery service faces stiff competition from those rivals and from Microsoft (MSFT), which on Monday announced a deal with Netflix to stream movies over the Internet to the Xbox 360 game console. That said, Sony doesn’t seem much concerned with Microsoft, which it seems to view as a bit behind the curve. “The Xbox 360 is irrelevant in Japan, and in Europe PlayStation 3 sales have passed the Xbox 360,” said Peter Dille, senior vice president of marketing for Sony Computer Entertainment America. “We have a good dog fight in the U.S. but worldwide, when you look at a global footprint, the PS3 is the only console that can offer developers the ability to amortize costs over three markets. We’re looking at this as a marathon and we’re confident that the PlayStation 3 will win the crown.”

And so the company has begun offering a video-downloading service for its PlayStation 3 videogame console. Announcing the service at the gaming industry’s E3 conference in Los Angeles, Sony (SNE) said TV-show rentals will cost $1.99 per episode and movie rentals $2.99 to $5.99. Movie purchases will start at $9.99 and top out at $14.99. Not bad for content from Sony Pictures, Fox Film & Television (NWS), MGM (MGM), Lionsgate (LGF), Warner Bros. (TWX), Disney (DIS), Paramount (VIA) and Turner Entertainment (TWX). Certainly a compelling proposition for the 10 million or so PS3 users in the U.S., who no longer really need to buy an Apple TV (AAPL) or Netflix Player (NFLX) to deliver downloadable video to their TV sets.

Still, PlayStation Network’s video delivery service faces stiff competition from those rivals and from Microsoft (MSFT), which on Monday announced a deal with Netflix to stream movies over the Internet to the Xbox 360 game console. That said, Sony doesn’t seem much concerned with Microsoft, which it seems to view as a bit behind the curve. “The Xbox 360 is irrelevant in Japan, and in Europe PlayStation 3 sales have passed the Xbox 360,” said Peter Dille, senior vice president of marketing for Sony Computer Entertainment America. “We have a good dog fight in the U.S. but worldwide, when you look at a global footprint, the PS3 is the only console that can offer developers the ability to amortize costs over three markets. We’re looking at this as a marathon and we’re confident that the PlayStation 3 will win the crown.”

And so the company has begun offering a video-downloading service for its PlayStation 3 videogame console. Announcing the service at the gaming industry’s E3 conference in Los Angeles, Sony (SNE) said TV-show rentals will cost $1.99 per episode and movie rentals $2.99 to $5.99. Movie purchases will start at $9.99 and top out at $14.99. Not bad for content from Sony Pictures, Fox Film & Television (NWS), MGM (MGM), Lionsgate (LGF), Warner Bros. (TWX), Disney (DIS), Paramount (VIA) and Turner Entertainment (TWX). Certainly a compelling proposition for the 10 million or so PS3 users in the U.S., who no longer really need to buy an Apple TV (AAPL) or Netflix Player (NFLX) to deliver downloadable video to their TV sets.

Still, PlayStation Network’s video delivery service faces stiff competition from those rivals and from Microsoft (MSFT), which on Monday announced a deal with Netflix to stream movies over the Internet to the Xbox 360 game console. That said, Sony doesn’t seem much concerned with Microsoft, which it seems to view as a bit behind the curve. “The Xbox 360 is irrelevant in Japan, and in Europe PlayStation 3 sales have passed the Xbox 360,” said Peter Dille, senior vice president of marketing for Sony Computer Entertainment America. “We have a good dog fight in the U.S. but worldwide, when you look at a global footprint, the PS3 is the only console that can offer developers the ability to amortize costs over three markets. We’re looking at this as a marathon and we’re confident that the PlayStation 3 will win the crown.”

Yesterday, Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeffrey Bewkes said that Warner Bros. plans to experiment with VOD releases day-and-date with DVD later this year. And now this morning, Apple (AAPL) announced that a number of major and independent movie studios have agreed to make their films available on iTunes day-and-date with DVD–$9.99 for library title purchases and $14.99 for new release purchases. Among the studios participating in the deal: 20th Century Fox (NWS), Walt Disney Studios (DIS), Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures (VIA), Universal Studios Home Entertainment (GE), Sony Pictures Entertainment (SNE), Lionsgate (LGF), Image Entertainment (DISK) and First Look Studios (FRST.PK).

An impressive lineup and one that clearly heralds a shift in the movie industry’s view of digital distribution. A shift in iTunes movie purchases as well–upward. The removal of Hollywood’s typical 30-day lead time on DVD releases will no doubt boost new-release sales on iTunes, assuming customers don’t mind paying $14.99 for films that lack the extra features and picture quality of their DVD counterparts. It will boost movie studio revenues as well. With no manufacturing and reproduction costs to speak of, margins from day-and-date download releases are presumably quite high.

So much for that hard-fought DVD format war …

From top to bottom, Blockbuster is deliberately and willfully infringing on our patented methods. Netflix invented a 100 percent better mousetrap that Blockbuster copied.
- Netflix spokesperson Steve Swasey, April 5, 2006

Apparently, Blockbuster isn’t as hopelessly tethered to its VHS rental-business past as you might think. Yesterday, the video-rental retailer acquired studio-owned movie download service Movielink and with it a potentially significant foothold in the video-on-demand market. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but early this year when rumors of an acquisition first began to circulate, analysts had estimated that Blockbuster might pay as much as $50 million.

Founded in 2002, Movielink is backed by Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Universal Studios and Warner Bros. Studios. But while its impressive catalog makes it one of the Web’s largest digital-movie libraries, the service hasn’t caught on because of its strict digital-rights management software and prices (roughly the same as a typical DVD). Still, it’s likely a good acquisition for Blockbuster, whose market value has declined to just over $800 million from $8.4 billion, largely because of its failure to buy Netflix when it had the chance.

Blockbuster chair and CEO Jim Keyes called the deal the next “logical” step in the company’s transformation. Presumably, that means the next phase in Blockbuster’s re-creation of the Netflix business model, which the video-rental chain has been diligently following for the past few years. Netflix, of course, is spending some $40 million this year on its own VOD service, which is already up and running.