Sony Pictures Entertainment

Penney Finkelman Cox, a veteran animation executive who helped launch Sony Pictures' foray into animation, is stepping down to become a producer for the division, the company announced Friday. The management shake-up follows mounting tensions between Finkelman Cox and Yair Landau, vice chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, over creative control of the animation division.

Sony Pictures said Relativity Media would provide funds to co-finance the studio's films over the next five years. Relativity Media Holdings I will provide revolving credit to invest in "a majority" of films released by Sony's Columbia Pictures studio. The agreement comes less than a week after Los Angeles-based Relativity Media, led by Ryan Kavanaugh, announced the creation of a film finance fund with money provided by Citigroup Inc.

You can't stop the Sony Pictures team on Super Bowl weekend. You can only hope to contain them. For the seventh straight year, the weekend's No. 1 movie belonged to the studio, as the horror flick "The Messengers" topped the romantic comedy "Because I Said So" to lead the U.S. and Canadian box office. The PG-13 movie, produced by Sam Raimi's Ghost House Pictures and released through Sony's youth-oriented Screen Gems label, hauled in a better-than-expected $14.

In the upcoming "Casino Royale," the British secret service sends in its best card shark -- James Bond -- to clean out a private banker to the world's terrorists in Texas hold 'em. Sony Pictures Entertainment is in a high-stakes poker game of its own with the movie. Having pushed about $250 million of its chips onto the table, the studio will release its first Bond film next Friday in the biggest bet yet in the franchise's 44-year history.

Techies, get ready to be scared out of your wits. Pegged to Halloween, Comcast Corp., in partnership with Sony Pictures Entertainment and Lions Gate, today unveils a horror-movie network called FearNet. Fans will be able to watch movies through Comcast's video-on-demand service and on the Web at FearNet.com, where they can blog about, search and tag the spooky flicks. Cellphone users will get free ringtones and wallpaper and eventually be able to watch video clips.

Benjamin S. Feingold, who led Sony Pictures' foray into the lucrative DVD market, has been ousted as head of the studio's home entertainment group after 12 years in that job. Sony announced Feingold's departure in a statement released Thursday, saying that the executive would be pursuing other opportunities. The company promoted David Bishop, Sony's domestic video chief, as the new president of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, which employs 900.

After a decade of creating digital characters for such live-action movies as "Spider-Man" and "Stuart Little," Sony Pictures Entertainment is drawing on a new electronic canvas. On Sept. 29, the company will formally plunge into the crowded world of computer-animated features when it premieres the first of four movies, "Open Season." The comedy, featuring the voices of actors Martin Lawrence and Ashton Kutcher, chronicles a ragtag pack of animals turning the tables on a group of hunters.

Sony Pictures Entertainment movie chief Amy Pascal is being rewarded for her contributions with a bigger title and a longer contract. Pascal on Wednesday was named co-chair, signing a deal aimed at keeping her on the studio's Culver City lot until 2011. The moves follow a turnaround this year for Sony that included such hits as "The Da Vinci Code," starring Tom Hanks, the Will Ferrell comedy "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby" and the Adam Sandler film "Click."

Sony Pictures Entertainment today is expected to join Hollywood's new-media mash-up by buying online video service Grouper Networks Inc. With its $65-million acquisition of Grouper, the movie and television unit of Sony Corp. becomes the latest traditional media company to vie for a growing -- and potentially lucrative -- Internet audience that prefers its entertainment short and, often, stupid. Video-sharing sites such as Grouper and category leader YouTube Inc.

The tensions between Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. and its studio investor resulted in a board vote Tuesday that will end the fabled company's reliance on Sony Pictures Entertainment as a distributor of its DVDs and television shows. News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox Film Corp. will now release MGM's DVDs worldwide. Previously, Fox had split the distribution of MGM's home entertainment properties with Sony, which had handled the domestic sales.