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Seems to have passed all by, but Sniper Elite won Best Action/Adventure Game at last week's TIGA (The Independent Game Developers' Association) awards.

On the slightly sluggish side of decent-ish opening for Dredd in Australia - number 4, $809K (Australian dollars = £521K), although the monster that is Taken 2 shows just how much money there is to make in that market - $17 million in three weeks.

From 2002-2004, there were 18 2000AD audio plays produced - 16 Dredd ones, and 2 Strontium Dogs. (The Rogue Trooper one I wrote for them was never made.) These will be what they've still got some CD stock remaining that they're still offering for sale.

The Crime Chronicles seem to be a lot more recent - 2009 - and are audio books rather than full cast audio plays (which are much more expensive to produce). I imagine these are the ones that you can also buy as digital downloads?

BF's licensing deal with Rebellion lapsed some years ago now. It's likely that the terms of the deal allow them to continue to sell off any remaining stock, but not to manufacture any more. So the ones available are whatever they've still got left in the warehouse.

As to why they aren't available as downloads - Big Finish weren't doing download sales at all at the time they were producing the 2000AD audios, so I would imagine there would be no provision for them in the original contract.

Surely you remember 1980 box office smash Popeye, the film that almost ended Robin Williams' early movie career and pretty much trashed director Robert Altman's for the next 12 years? The Maltese certainly do, since they've kept the set standing for 32 years.

Unfortunately, no-one saw fit to similarly preserve the set for the (also Malta-filmed) 2002 box office smash Swept Away, starring Madonna and directed by Guy Ritchie.

On the positive side, the more I read on the web, the more sure I am that the effect on the comics side of the Dredd operation will be a good one: within the audience that did see it, Dredd's credibility has never been higher, and this is unlikely to fall-off any time soon.

Even though the frequency of the Megazine - the comic that actually bears Dredd's name - has just been downsized from 13 to 12 issues a year?

Don't forget to visit the charmingly named The Pub (Archbishop Street, Valetta) where you can relive Oliver Reed's last moments by drunkenly arm-wrestling some British sailors before suffering a massive and fatal heart attack.

Recommended - Valetta, all of it. The Three Cities. The silent city of Mdina. The catacombs in Rabat, and nearby St. Paul's Church.

Not recommended - the Popeye Village. Malta - the place where they preserve as a tourist attraction the set for a decades-ago flop film that absolutely no-one remembers, yet immediately tear down the Ancient Rome/Collosseum set for Gladiator. Well done, lads!

So if distribution rights are sold to Lionsgate for $7 million, I'm assuming the production companies themselves still get a cut of the box office? Considering the cinemas themselves get roughly half(ish), it must be a small cut of the overall pie.

That $7 million is what the film's UK distributor is supposed to have paid. (And have hence taken a fairly hefty loss so far on their investment.) Lionsgate was the film's US distributor, and would presumably have paid a lot more.

No, it's awful. All throughout the production of this film I've been confident that it was eventually going to do well. This is worse than I ever imagined it could be. Totally depressing considering the film is so bloody good.

Don't mean to wallow in the mire, I'm sure everyone feels the same.

It doesn't get any better here. According to the UK Film Council numbers, the film's currently at 28 in the UK charts (big drop from 13 the previous week) with a UK box office gross to date of £4,322 198. A couple of weeks ago, the Guardian film blog noted that "UK distribution rights alone for Dredd are rumoured to have cost significantly more than The Sweeney's entire production budget." The Sweeney's budget was £3 million, so assuming that 'significantly more' might be £4 million (if it's more than that, the story gets worse) then, once you deduct the cinema chains' cut of that £4.3 million, and add on the UK marketing costs, then the UK distributor is possibly looking at a fairly hefty loss here.

Of course, the UK DVD rights may have been part of the package, which would help significantly later down the line.

Dredd will make more than 10mill which was the total US gross for Drive Angry, it will probably finish with double that.

Dredd almost certainly won't make $20 million at the US box office, not now that the number of screens it's showing on will start to diminish rapidly. (Box Office Mojo had it still showing at 2,500 screens, but pulling in an average of less than $900 a theatre, and that isn't good - by comparison, Looper is making $7000 a theatre, without 3D prices.)

Drive Angry cost slightly more than Dredd, and made $28 million worldwide (they really liked it in Germany, apparently). I'm really not sure Dredd will do much better than that.

As arguments go, "At least Movie A isn't nearly as big a flop as Movie B" isn't the strongest argument for the merits of Movie A.

$4m worldwide - but that's good on a budget of $1m. It'll make a packet on DVD too.

I think that figure's North American box office only - imdb seems to think so. It would have made more worldwide (and probably make its costs back and gone into profit in the Far East alone.)

That 1:4 ratio on production cost to box office is the equivalent of Dredd doing about $200 million on US cinema release...

It's an unofficial but blatant rip-off of the original Slender game. Legal action may be pending, apparently.

So, if you want to financially reward people who have stolen their work from something already freely available to play...

Strange how all those Case-Files sold out in the US.

An oft-quoted fact here that - unless you know how many were in the print run that was sold out - really means nothing at all.

A suggestion - maybe best not to publicly name who's sent you stuff, since it's not too professional, and might discourage others from sending you anything else?

If I were pitching for something, I would't thank any of the other parties involved for announcing it on an open forum.

[you're never going to mistakenly think you've come up with Judge Death off your own bat]

That's thing with these shorter and (no offence to MacManus and O'Neill) less memorable stories -- you're never going to mistakenly think you've come up with Judge Death off your own bat

Unless you're this bloke...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1367972/BBC-sued-Who-drew-evil-Dalek-mastermind-Davros.html