Sony Pictures may be coming off its best year ever at the box office, but its home video division continued to show attrition -- a condition that led it to tell employees Monday to brace for another round of layoffs, this time affecting about 450 people. The studio said that while most of the pink slips will be distributed to employees in the home video division, all units, including film, TV, digital production and corporate operations will be affected. In addition, the company said that it will not fill about 100 open positions. In a video message to Sony employees, Co-chairman Amy Pascal alluded to the battle against piracy and the rise of digital delivery. Those challenges, she observed, have "changed people's DVD-buying habits, which has had a huge effect on our company and the industry at large." She noted that an increase in ticket sales at the box-office wasn't enough to offset the severe slump in sales of DVD and Blu-ray discs, estimated to be around 13 percent for the industry as a whole. »

Legendary film producer David Brown, whose films with longtime partner Richard Zanuck included Jaws, The Sting, The Eiger Sanction, MacArthur, The Sugarland Express, and Driving Miss Daisy (which won a best picture Oscar), has died in Manhattan at age 93. With Zanuck he received the motion picture academy's top honor, the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, in 1991. On his own, he produced such films as A Few Good Men, Angela's Ashes, Chocolat, Deep Impact, and Along Came a Spider. »

Only days after shutting down its New York-headquartered Miramax art-house subsidiary and firing most of its staff, Disney is now attempting to sell the Miramax name and its film library, published reports said over the weekend. The New York Times, which first reported the impending sale on Sunday, said that Disney has put a $700-million pricetag on Miramax and has attracted interest from seven to 10 bidders, including Summit Entertainment -- which produces the Twilight movies -- and Studio Canal, the film subsidiary of Vivendi's Canal Plus, which already owns the third-largest movie library in the world as a result of its acquisition of libraries from a number of other defunct film companies, including Carolco, Embassy Films, and Emi Films. Apparently not among the bidders are brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who founded Miramax and named it after their mother and father. »