COMING ATTRACTIONS

Those video-rental vending machines beginning to pop up around the city will be a lot more visible by Christmas, when an estimated 5,400 of the machines will be ready to dispense this week’s big video movies to those with the hankering (and a credit card, of course). Los Angeles-based Group One Entertainment is working with Diebold Inc. (the nation’s largest automatic teller-machine maker) to get large numbers of Movie Machines (as they’re called) placed in supermarkets, gas stations, college student unions, hotels and businesses’ employee lounges. Group One president Brandon Chase told Daily Variety that the number of machines hasn’t yet reached the point where his company is working out revenue-sharing agreements with the movie studios, but added, “It can’t be far off now.”