Hollywood fears the release of Grand Theft Auto IV tomorrow. And they should. The somewhat controversial game is set for $1 billion in sales the first week. Yes, that’s a ‘b,’ no typo. It will instantly make GTA the biggest entertainment franchise ever.

The game does well with young males and that’s the same target audience a movie like ‘Iron Man’ has. Last year, film Executives blamed the ‘Halo 3′ launch for the relatively low opening of ‘The Heartbreak Kid’ with Ben Stiller. And with the amount of blockbusters this summer, Hollywood doesn’t seem to be waiting for another game like that to compete for their money.

In a recent Financial Times article, Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello said that there’s “more interest today from Hollywood to make movies out of our games than there is interest in our industry to make games out of their movies. There’s a big reset happening now. The rate of change in this industry is massive.“

So this is why Spielberg is making games nowadays.

‘Changeling,’ the new thriller by Clint Eastwood, is one of the three Hollywood titles standing out on the list of competitors for a Palme d’Or award. Then there is the Charlie Kaufman movie we mentioned earlier, called ‘Synecdoche, New York.’ And Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Che,’ a $40 million biopic about Che Guevara.

Outside the competition is Woody Allen, with his spanish comedy ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona.’ And of course the one and only Steven Spielberg with ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,’ still a way too long title.

You can find the full list of movies in competition after the jump.

Continue reading Eastwood, Allen and Soderbergh at Cannes

We know Steven Spielberg doesn’t like the internet because of its spoilers, but Michael Bay is using his new trick to solve this problem. For his new movie ‘Transformers 2,’ he is already releasing several misinformed facts about the blockbuster, so people on the internet won’t know which are true.

“Sorry everyone, everything you are reading (other then we are shooting in Philly) is false,” he wrote on his site. “We are going to give so much disinformation on this film to confuse everyone.”

I’m still not sure why they care that much about spoilers on the internet. Maybe they think people will get the wrong impression? But I do think his new technique can work. People believe the strangest things on the internet. So if he uses it well, people really won’t know what to believe anymore.