Choosing not to wait around for Cinar’s fate, Peter Moss has stepped down as the president of Cinar Entertainment, but will remain a consultant for the troubled Montreal-based animation production company.

Toronto-based animation giant Nelvana has secured television distribution rights for the red-hot Japanese animated kids series Beyblade for North America, South America, Europe and Oceania (excluding Turkey, Italy, Greece and Arabic-speaking countries).
The deal gives Nelvana home video and broadcast distribution rights to all 51 Beyblade episodes (produced in Japan by Mitsubishi’s wholly owned subsidiary d-rights). The series will air in Canada on YTV as early as summer 2002.
The agreement also allows Nelvana to act as agent for the importation and distribution of all Beyblade metal and plastic spinning tops from toy licensees Hasbro and Takara.

Vancouver: The USA Network has picked up a full season of 20 hour-long episodes of Lions Gate Television’s The Dead Zone. Vancouver’s Crescent Entertainment will oversee production.
The series, based on the Stephen King novel, will debut in June and will be distributed in North America by Lions Gate and internationally by Paramount.
Anthony Michael Hall, who starred in the two-hour pilot shot in Vancouver in 2001, will carry on with the series about a man who emerges from a long coma with psychic abilities. Nicole De Boer, Chris Bruno and John Adams costar in the series that promises a mix of action, romance, the paranormal and the quest for justice.

David Kent is a partner in the Toronto law firm of McMillan Binch and a member of its Litigation, Knowlaw and Competition Groups.

Vancouver: The Canada Feature Film Fund will undergo an overhaul in its sophomore year now that Telefilm Canada has accepted a handful of recommendations from a 24-member advisory group. But the details will have to wait until the new guidelines are announced early this year.

CanLit is white hot. Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave in Tora Bora or cryogenically frozen for the last decade, that should come as no surprise.

Camelia Frieberg is the Genie Award-winning producer of The Five Senses, The Sweet Hereafter, Eclipse, Exotica and Masala.

As Canadian distribution companies prepare to release a slew of new films at your local multiplex, the challenge to raise Canadian films’ presence on our screens from its current paltry 2% to 3% ensues.

A couple of years ago some industry pundits forecast digital cinema would by now have rolled over traditional 35mm film projection. However, worldwide, there are currently only 35 true D-cinema auditoriums – theatres that digitally project movies stored on a hard drive, offering image quality that meets audience expectation.

Montreal: Guideline changes are underway for the second year of operations for the $100-million Canada Feature Film Fund that could have a significant impact on the coveted performance-based envelopes. Telefilm Canada says it has recommended holding the envelopes at 50% for 2002/03, and raising it to 60% in 2003/04.
A joint Telefilm-CFFF advisory group committee will review the issue at a meeting in February, says Johanne St-Arnauld, Telefilm director, international relations. Both the CFTPA and APFTQ producer associations are also recommending holding the performance component at 50%, although individual advisory group members believe the share should grow if the 5% box-office target – the CFFF’s key policy goal – is to be achieved. In distribution, the performance component in 2001/02 was 85%.
Another major change in the works is a recommendation to give broadcast-affiliate producers access to a maximum of one-third of the CFFF’s performance (production only) envelope. The performance component now includes an expanded list of qualifying production companies, and Telefilm says a producer’s recoupment record will be integrated into the performance calculation in the future.

Montreal: With European coproduction taking on a broader EU profile and producers and distributors looking for more commercially viable product, the market is ripe for Canada to make a concerted effort in Europe, both in terms of public agencies and producers. That was the key message to come out of Immersion 2001: Europe, a five-day feature film networking event held in Paris in late November, and by all accounts the most successful of the Immersion programs organized by Telefilm Canada in the past seven years.
In 2001, Telefilm certified 98 international film and TV coproduction projects with combined budgets of $668.2 million, about 15% less in dollar terms than the 98 projects worth $778.9 million coproduced in 2000. The Canadian share of financing in 2001 is $383.5 million, or 57%, while spending stands at $339.2 million, or 51%.

Snakes, mud and natural disasters best describe the conditions endured throughout the production of 100 Days in the Jungle, a very ambitious MOW for CTV coproduced by Edmonton’s ImagiNation Productions and Vancouver’s Sextant Entertainment Group.