There doesn’t seem to be any denying that the buying of movie ads in newspapers is starting to taper off and that the studio marketers are looking more and more to digital ads on niche internet websites. In last week’s Nikki Finke column (“Hollywood to Newsosaurs: Drop Dead”) in the L.A. Weekly, it was asserted that “every major movie studio is rethinking its reliably humongous display ad buys in [newspapers] because those newsosaur readers are, to quote one mogul, ‘older and elitist’ compared to younger, low-brow filmgoers — so it makes no sense to waste the dough.” Finke also claimed that “at least two Hollywood movie studios have decided to drastically cut their newspaper display ads as soon as possible.” And then came a report by Joel Topcik in today’s New York Times that pounded the nail in further. Topcik observed that while “web advertisements will not eclipse print and broadcast ads anytime soon” (the industry spent about 2.2 percent of its 2004 ad budgets online), there’s a kind of sea change underway in which “blanket ad purchases seem ready to decline in tandem with box office receipts with studios [looking] more and more to the internet to find audiences. Westport, Connecticut-based marketing consultant Joseph Jaffe says buying online ads with the right sites is “the opposite of buying a spread in a newspaper or a slew of 30-second slots on TV…studios need to stop trying to reach the most people and focus on reaching the best people.”

Matt Damon doesn’t want to hear about Ben Affleck going through any career slump. “People forget that Ben is a terrific actor,” Damon tells Chicago Sun Times reporter Cindy Pearlman. “And maybe through some fault of his own, Ben hasn’t made the best choices in the last couple of years. I ust think it’ll be funny when his new movie, Truth, Justice, and the American Way, comes out and he plays George Reeves [TV’s ‘Superman’]. Everyone will be like, ‘Ben, it’s a comeback!’ I’ll sit there and say, ‘What the f—? The guy has always been great. He never went anywhere.” Loyalty and support is what friendship is all about, but Affleck’s stock has been sinking since the Bennifer/Gigli/Paycheck dog days of ’03 and Surviving Christmas only underlined the problem. Wearing those blue tights and then shooting himself in the head in Truth, Justice, et. al. may bring him back (I hope it does) but there’s also Mike Binder’s Man About Town (done and, I’m told, waiting to make a big debut at Sundance ’06) and Affleck’s direction of Gone Baby Gone, whenever that’s supposed to happen. Will it? Calling Patrick Whitesell!

Screenwriter Josh Friedman‘s blog, “I find your lack of faith disturbing.” is a well-written, refreshingly frank look into his struggle to get credit for writing War of the Worlds, his face off with David Koepp, and his epiphanies about the industry. “Because if there’s a lesson it’s this: you can be David Koepp or Josh Friedman or f***ing Shakespeare…If you’re a screenwriter you’re a screenwriter and if you want people to give you love at your premiere you better bring ’em with you.”