Los Angeles -- Continuing its rampant buying binge for
high-profile films, Turner Broadcasting System Inc. has acquired rights to a package of 17
movies that includes As Good as It Gets and L.A. Confidential for Turner
Network Television and TBS Superstation, officials said last week at an upfront
presentation here.
TBS has the broadcast-network window for the package. The
deals -- struck with Columbia TriStar Television Distribution, New Line Cinema and Warner
Bros. -- also include I Know What You Did Last Summer, U.S. Marshals, Wag
The Dog, The Wedding Singer, Dark City, One Night Stand, Mad
City, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and The Postman.
In TBS Inc.'s first broadcast-network window agreement
with Columbia TriStar, TNT and TBS will get As Good as It Gets, which won two
Academy Awards for its performances, as well as I Know What You Did Last Summer, The
Replacement Killers and Desperate Measures.
TBS Inc. will share the broadcast-network windows of L.A.
Confidential, for which Kim Basinger won an Oscar, and Mad City with CBS, which
will take one-time premiere runs of both titles. Immediately following their CBS airings, L.A.
Confidential and Mad City will then come to TNT and TBS for subsequent airings
in the broadcast-network window.
It hasn't been decided yet which network, TNT or TBS,
each movie will premiere on, but they will eventually air on both, a Turner spokesman
said. The earliest window on some of the movies is the year 2000.
