Sony Pictures

Sony Pictures Entertainment, grappling with slumping DVD sales and a worsening economy, plans to cut about 300 jobs, or about 4% of its workforce, through layoffs and by eliminating open positions, according to a person familiar with the situation. The cuts could come as early as next week, the person said. A Sony spokesman declined to comment. Sony is the latest Hollywood studio to lay off employees, following cutbacks at Warner Bros., Universal Pictures and Paramount Pictures.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment's new licensing deal with Redbox Automated Retail -- operator of those bright-red $1 DVD rental kiosks in grocery and convenience stores -- adds up to some serious coin. Sony stands to collect about $460 million over the term of the five-year agreement, which extends through September 2014, according to regulatory filings.

Generally, the tortoise doesn't beat the hare in Hollywood. No matter what Aesop's fable suggests, show business winners are deemed to be films like "The Dark Knight," "Iron Man," "Transformers" -- blockbusters that start off at a sprint and never slow down. There's only one small corner for patience in the film world, and you can find it at the Cannes Film Festival. This year's festival gathering opened Wednesday without many U.S.

As the major Hollywood studios line up for and against Redbox, Paramount Pictures is playing it down the middle. The studio, owned by Viacom Inc., has signed a first-of-its-kind trial deal guaranteeing that its titles will be available from the fast-growing $1-a-night DVD rental company through the end of the year. During that time, Paramount will study the effect of Redbox rentals on its total home-entertainment revenue, examining whether there is any decrease in the sales of its DVDs at Wal-Mart stores that house Redbox kiosks.

Sony Pictures hopes "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" forecasts a sunny future for its animation business. The $100-million-budget picture, adapted from the 1978 children's favorite storybook about a town where it snows mashed potatoes and rains fruit juice, opens today in 3,120 theaters. It's the first major computer-animated release from Sony since the 2007 box-office flop "Surf's Up" and signals the studio's latest attempt to enter the lucrative market for family movies. Seven years after launching its animation unit, Sony Pictures is still trying to find its footing in a fiercely competitive environment dominated by more established studios in family entertainment, notably Walt Disney Co.'s Pixar Animation Studios, DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. and News Corp.

As Hollywood continues to look for ways to cut costs amid an array of economic pressures, Sony Pictures has become the latest studio to severely curtail the amount of money it spends to acquire and develop new movie projects. Sony has told in-house producers and the movie community that it will largely hold off on buying new scripts and other source material, such as books, to turn into movies until its new fiscal year begins in April. It also won't be paying writers to start work on many projects recently set up at the studio.

In late July, a month after Michael Jackson died from the effects of a powerful anesthetic plus other medications, Sony Pictures bid $60 million for a movie after seeing just 97 seconds of footage. That brief clip was a glimpse of more than 100 hours that concert promoter AEG Live shot of the late singer during rehearsals for a planned London concert series called "This Is It." "We had a very strong gut feeling that this could be a cultural event despite the fact that none of us really saw any of the footage before we concluded the deal," said Sony's production president, Doug Belgrad.

Sony Pictures desperately wanted to release the DVD of the Michael Jackson concert movie "This Is It" for the holiday shopping season but backed down after movie theater owners complained that it would be too soon after the film's theatrical premiere. That thwarted the latest attempt by a Hollywood studio to shorten the "window" between when movies appear in theaters and when they come out on DVD as the industry grapples with a downturn in DVD sales, which have traditionally propped up the movie business.

Steven Spielberg has found his next project in the past. Hollywood's most famous filmmaker will direct a remake of the 1950 movie "Harvey," which starred Jimmy Stewart as an eccentric who claims to be friends with an invisible 6-foot rabbit. It was based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning 1944 play by Mary Chase. Spielberg is finishing work on the first of a new series of movies based on the Belgian comic strip "Tintin," which are being co-financed by Paramount Pictures and Sony Pictures.

Michael Jackson movie: A Business article Thursday about "This Is It," the Michael Jackson concert film, reported that Sony Pictures had seen only 97 seconds of footage before bidding for the film rights. Some Sony executives viewed 12 minutes before bidding.