Disney

Walt Disney Co. DIS -0.10% will shed up to 20% of jobs at its film studio as movie production shifts to its Marvel unit and DreamWorks Studios, Bloomberg News reported Monday citing two people with knowledge of the plans.

The reductions at Walt Disney Studios, in production, business development and other areas, will be made in the week of June 13, the people told Bloomberg.

One of the people said some people have already been laid off, according to Bloomberg.

Paul Roeder, a spokesman for Disney Studios, didn't immediately return Bloomberg's messages seeking comment.

Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert A. Iger has lead a restructuring of the studio to reflect these new business realities, scaling back the number of movies it produces and releases. Disney sold off its Miramax Films specialty movie label last year and consolidated the Burbank studio's marketing and distribution operations.

Helping lower its risk on the production side, the studio now relies more heavily on movies supplied by Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks Studios, which pays Disney a fee for releasing its films, and Marvel Entertainment, which it acquired two years ago for $4 billion.

Disney also gets a steady stream of big family movies from its Pixar Animation Studios unit, which it bought for $7.4 billion in 2006.

Since he was named to the post in 2009, Disney Studios chief Rich Ross has been reorganizing and streamlining the studio's marketing and distribution operations in response to falling DVD sales amid changing consumer habits.

Last November, he consolidated the distribution units of theatrical, home entertainment and pay television into a single group headed by Bob Chapek, the studio's former executive in charge of home entertainment.

Disney isn't alone in making staff reductions in response to the tougher business climate. Sony Pictures laid off 450 people last year, citing changing consumption patterns. More recently, Santa Monica-based independent studio Lionsgate laid off 17 people in its home entertainment division, though it hired several in its digital division. Paramount Pictures also is expected to cut costs in its home entertainment division.

MAJOR Clue

Hand it to Cameron Diaz: she knows how to promote a movie. In a recent interview with Maxim (Bad Teacher his theaters soon), Diaz confides that sex, not baseball, is her favorite sport. I’ve been saying this for years, yet the IOC continues to ignore my letters.

“Sex is the sexiest word in the English language,” Diaz says in the June issue of Maxim Magazine. “Just the word is sexy to me. There’s something to it, don’t you think?”

Left unsaid but understood: The least-sexiest word in the English language is still “Ovechkin.”

Diaz, 38, who is cast as a foul-mouthed school mistress in her new comedy, said she is high on life but down on marriage.

“I don’t think we should live our lives in relationships based off old traditions that don’t suit our world any longer,” said Diaz, who insists she still believes in romance.

They broke up a few days ago. He ended it," the source told People. "However, they have broken up and gotten back together before, so not sure it's forever."

People said a representative for Díaz did not respond to a request for comment, while A-Rod's representative had nothing to say about the report.

Díaz, 38, and Rodriguez, 35, made their relationship public late last year. They appeared to heat up in December when Díaz joined Rodríguez and his daughters on vacation in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. In February, Díaz was caught on camera feeding the baseball star popcorn during the Super Bowl.

Díaz, whose new movie "Bad Teacher" opens in late June, told Maxim magazine just last month that the relationship was "really awesome."

Groupon deals

Chicago-based Groupon, which disclosed plans to hold an initial public offering last week, has been looking at new industries where it can apply its group-buying model in a large-scale way. Recent efforts include national partnerships with Live Nation and Expedia to sell discounted tickets and travel offers.

Groupon has offered deals for grocers in the past. Last year, it offered a discount for upscale market Fox & Obel in Chicago. But the new partnership with Springfield, Mass.-based Big Y is the first time a multi-store grocery retailer has run a Groupon deal. Big Y operates 61 stores in Connecticut and Massachusetts. In addition, Big Y is the only retailer in any industry that has fully integrated Groupon deals into its loyalty card program.

The first CPG Groupon deal with General Mills in San Francisco and Minneapolis involved shipping a basket of products direct to consumers. That requires bypassing traditional retailers -- a proposition that could rankle CPG players' main distributors -- and a marketer with a broad enough assortment of brands to get consumers to buy a lot of products at once, $40 worth in General Mills' case.

Groupon is working on the project with HaloEffect, a Boston marketing firm that has served as a consultant to the company since 2009, and Incentive Targeting, a Cambridge, Mass.-based promotion analytics and software firm.

U.S. consumers spend $550 billion annually on groceries, and CPG companies spend $35 billion annually on marketing and promotion, said Tom Schneider, president of HaloEffect in a statement, adding that he sees the partnership "having the potential to revolutionize the grocery-marketing landscape."

Other retailers and packaged-goods companies are expected to participate in similar deals in the weeks ahead, said Ben Sprecher, VP-marketing of Incentive Targeting, who said using loyalty cards as a fulfillment mechanism solves a host of problems that prevented use of Groupons at supermarkets or by most CPG players up to now.

Using supermarket loyalty programs eliminates the fraud concerns that have kept some big CPG players like Procter & Gamble Co. from using print-at-home internet-distributed coupons, Mr. Sprecher said, and required approval from a manger for redemption of other high-value coupons at supermarkets in the past.

Using loyalty data also will allow supermarkets and CPG brands to answer another key question that has dogged Groupon in other sectors of its business -- whether these deep-discount deals really pay out in the long run, Mr. Sprecher said.

The retailers, and, provided they're given access to the data, CPG brands, will be able to see how shoppers' prior purchase patterns were altered after using the Groupon.

Jobs head’s rumor scorecard: 2011 edition

Dust from Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference has settled and now we know all about iCloud, iOS 5, and Mac OS X Lion. We also know which rumors from ahead of the show turned out to be true, and which ones didn't.

To Apple's credit, there were very few leaks ahead of this year's show. While a few iOS 5 features came out, as well as functionality that would appear in iCloud, there was a fair bit that was unknown going into it. The one exception being OS X Lion, which Apple had taken most of the wraps off back in October.

Below is a roundup of some of the big rumors, split up by product. Not surprisingly, the more outlandish ones proved not to be true, yet there were a few surprises here and there. Read on to find out how they panned out.

Rumor: iCloud won't be available today, but will be soon.

Outcome: True, iCloud is not available to customers today but will be when iOS 5 launches in the fall. In the interim, Apple is making iCloud available to developers to test.

Rumor: No video in iCloud, just music

Outcome: True. Apple is not syncing video from iTunes across devices, just music files. Though sources have told CNET that Apple has been pushing studios extra hard to let it store user video files on its servers.

Rumor: No music streaming immediately, but it will come later on.

Outcome: True but also false. The system Apple outlined this morning is a sync solution, letting users re-download their files to various devices, not stream them outright, thus saving space on that device. Whether Apple plans to offer that later on in iCloud's life was not disclosed during this morning's announcements.

n the second public appearance since announcing his medical leave six months ago, Jobs, 56, appeared to look “good” but “exasperated,” wrote the popular web site Mac Rumors on its live blog of the event.

“If I acquire a song and buy it right on my iPhone, I want to get it on all my other devices,” Jobs told the crowd. “Keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy.”

The iCloud will let users move their mobile apps, calendar, contacts, ebooks, e-mail, music and photos to cyber storage lockers to be synced across all devices.

Music purchased through iTunes is synced for free, and other music can be synced through the $25-a-year iTunes Match service. Apple reached a deal that gives recording companies more than 70 percent of the new fees.

Amazon’s Cloud Player has a variety of price tiers, like offering 100 GB of storage for $100 a year. Google Music Beta is still in testing phases.

“This has implications not just for the individual consumer but also for families,” said Ben Bajarin, analyst at Creative Strategies. “Jobs’ observation that they are transitioning the hub of the digital life from the PC to the cloud is pertinent here. Think family calendars, photos, music, etc.