In LA, as people lined up for the first screenings of This Is It, a hellacious wind blew across the southland and knocked out electricity in Hollywood and beyond.
It has to be the ghost of Michael Jackson, enraged that he is being raped in death by the Brits, the Japanese, and a guy named after a taco.
On a lighter note, IMAX screens with the film are being limited to evening shows in mostly multiplex-imax houses because the screens are already taken up with Where The Wild Things Are. So keep the kids up late, make then dance like Michael in front of the mall’s Ben & Jerry’s and take them to those late night IMAX shows. And remember, this is all about the art… and it’s what Michael wanted… that is, on the list of what he wanted right after not being dead.
Archive for October, 2009
MJ's Pissed!
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009Trailering Invictus
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009Wilmington on DVDs: Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Il Divo, Z, Whatever Works, Nothing Like the Holidays, The Orphan and more…
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs(Two and a Half Stars)
U. S.; Carlos Saldanha, Mike Thurmeier, 2009
Are those Ice Age wedding bells breaking up that old gang of mine? (more…)
CHANGING LANDSCAPE – 10/27/09
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009PRECIOUS BACKLASH – I am already feeling the urge to lash back at the talk of backlash.
It is the profound arrogance of the entertainment media to delude ourselves that we, not the real movie goers or even the privileged awards voters, decide what should be praised and how intensely. It is the same pathetic mindset that happens when Variety pans a movie like The Road or AntiChrist and other media monkeys line up to suggest that this is a meaningful moment in the history of the film and future audience reaction.
There can be no backlash against Precious because, so far, the entire definition of how the movie plays has been based on a breathless media and Oprah… not necessarily in that order.
Some fools are even wondering aloud whether Lee Daniels is costing himself a Best Director win by being honest in public… when he is a long ways away from getting a nomination, much less a win. (This is true of all the filmmakers in play, not just him.)
STOP!!!! Get some perspective. And stop damaging a movie like Precious by treating it, months before the response to the movie from real people and real voters will be heard, like the Holy Grail.
You know why Up In The Air has gone quiet lately? Because the folks at Paramount marketing get the joke. It’s hard to live up to the endless, screaming hype. Plus it turns a pulpy picture like Precious and really, a smoother-edged pulpy picture like Up In The Air into something an audience has to do… to cross off its list of responsibilities… and disallows the honest discovery of the film.
For me, this goes back to Brokeback Mountain, which actually may have won had so many not assumed that it was a mortal lock to win and that any other result was backlash. This just wasn’t the case. The love for the film, once people saw it, was not universal. Not close. But worse, the positioning of inevitability emboldened Oscar voters who didn’t love the film to feel even more strongly about not loving it. They wanted to kill the hype… the finger-waving “I’m not going” of it all, not the movie.
You can’t tell people, “And you… and you… and you… you’re gonna love me.” You have to let them love you. And that is exactly, by the way, what Dreamgirls says at the end of that song, when the show immediately goes on without Effie.
Let me also point out… the overwrought screeching around this film is not coming from Lionsgate. It’s the media… really a few loud voices. This is not to discount the many people who have seen and love the film or the audience awards. But this is not a film that can march up to the Kodak and demand its Oscar. This is a year of many colors and we are a long way from a frontrunner.
Calm down and let’s get on without talk of frontrunners or backlashes until they are more than a figment of our prideful imaginations.
SOUPY & STERN – I had a thought sitting at the back of my head and finally got to look into whether I was having an aneurysm… I wasn’t. Soupy Sales was Howard Stern’s radio lead-in at WNBC when Stern rose to national fame/infamy and eventually got fired in a flash in September 1985.
When Stern got dumped – I happened to be working in the building at the time – the first rumor was that Sales was behind having him fired. But it wasn’t true. Stern had very crudely attacked the lead anchor of the lead money-making news show on WNBC-TV, which was also in the same building. She was the straw that broke management’s back on Stern.
But remembering back to those days, it amused me to remember that Soupy was still working in the big leagues then and leading into the dark side of modern radio.
SNL KAGAN’S LATEST SILLY STUDY RESULT – I don’t have the study in front of me, so I can’t deconstruct the details, but good gosh a’mighty, this “expensive movies are more profitable than small movies” headline is a load of excrement of monumental proportion.
Why?
First, the geniuses didn’t factor in marketing costs – which have been the fastest growing cost for theatrical distribution for the last decade, until the last year or so – or foreign box office – which is greater in most studio release cases than domestic – or DVD revenues.
Really? A grown up analyst is analyzing profits and losses based on 35% or less of the revenue stream and distribution costs that are often greater than the cost of production and on the over-$100m titles represent no less than $100m worldwide?
Idiocy.
All a smart person has to do is to read the lead of Variety’s story on the study – “Films boasting production pricetags of more than $100 million actually generate higher returns than mid-range pics, averaging $247 million in net profits per release.”
Seriously. That has to be a typo, right?
Of the Top 30 grossers of 2009 so far, the total domestic gross is $3.127 billion… or an average domestic gross of $184 million. Generously estimating that this represents only 40% of the theatrical gross (foreign, 60%), means an average $460 million gross worldwide. That’s a rental return to the distributor of $253 million. Let’s be even more generous and estimate an additional $150 million NET in post-theatrical revenue.
So we’re at $400 million. Minimum production and distribution cost… $200 million. Realistic but still generous average cost… $275 million. About half of these high-cost titles carry heavy percentage players… but to be generous again, let’s cut it down to 5% of net going out the door to participants. That’s another $20 million.
So… even under this generous and mostly unrealistic scenerio, you’re looking at a $100 million+ cost movie being $105 million into profit.
But what’s the real truth. Three movies will make significantly more profit than $105 million. And five of the movies will lose money. That leaves nine films somewhere in the middle.
And this doesn’t include Land of The Lost or Where The Wild Things Are in this year’s numbers, as neither has gone Top 30 yet. (WTWTA should get there.)
Yes, making The Dark Knight or Transformers 2 or Harry Potter is a better business than making The Proposal or Paul Blart: Mall Cop. But franchise chasing can shut down studios…or at least, get a lot of people fired. In the last decade, no $40 million movie got any major (or even any Dependent) in trouble.
But if you want to know the real truth, simply look at how the business itself has changed. Studios have gotten as far away as possible from funding all but a handful of franchise movies on their own. If there is all this profit in making expensive movies, how come no one other than rich ambitious outsiders are wanting to put the money on the line?
RICKY GERVAIS HOSTS GOLDEN GLOBES – Great for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association… and a completely wrong-headed idea for The Oscars. Equally stoopid, the notion that Neil Patrick Harris should complete the triple crown by adding Oscar hosting duties to the Tonys (great performance) and the Emmys (not so great). The Emmys were easily the worst televised awards show of the year this year. Very little worked… and it was trying so hard that it bordered on Stephen Fetchit.
I love Gervais. But he has a very specific kind of humor. And it is so distinctly not an Oscar kind of humor.
Truth is, Billy Crystal is a middlebrow funnyman. He’s never going to demand much more from the audience than they are going to be happy to give up from their couches. And that is why he is so well remembered as an Oscar host.
The same is true of Jay Leno. He gave up being edgy, which he once was (a bit), to become Middle America’s funny man. And he did it brilliantly. Would I trade an hour of Leno for 15 minutes of Lewis Black? No. 20 minutes of Letterman? No. But I am not the guy’s core audience. Oscar’s TV audiences ARE his core audience. (Note; I do find Leno funny… but it is just a soft kind of funny… every once in a while, he let’s something tough slip in and I remember just how funny he really can be.)
Trailer: The Green Zone
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009The Green Zone
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller is certain that Hussein has been stockpiling WMDs in the Iraqi desert, but in their race from one booby-trapped site to the next, they soon stumble across evidence of an elaborate cover up. As a result, the objective of their mission is inverted, and Miller realizes that operatives on both sides of the conflict are attempting to spin the story in their favor. Now, as Miller searches for answers made ever more elusive by covert and faulty intelligence, the truth becomes the most valuable weapon of all. Will those answers prove pivotal in clearing a rogue regime, or escalate the war in a region that grows increasingly unstable with each passing day?
With Due Respect…
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009It’s almost impossible to decipher who is the john and who is the whore when it comes to the “Hollywood Film Awards.”
I sometimes wonder why I haven’t launched the MCN Movie Awards and I think the answer is that I’m just not cynical enough yet.
BYOB Monday
Monday, October 26th, 2009Been drivin’…
Salinas is beautiful.
Is Antichrist Art?
Monday, October 26th, 2009 |
Lars von Trier is a fascinating filmmaker. I can’t say that I always enjoy his work — in fact, it’s rare that I can emotionally connect to one of his films — but I like that he’s around. He’s a unique talent indeed and while I don’t always think his movies hit the mark, I’m thankful for his presence in the cinematic world. He always strives to create art and his work is instantly recognizable as belonging to him; there’s no question that he is one of a handful of modern auteurs.
My problem stems from the fact that I admire his intent more than I admire his execution most of the time. I like that a lot of his work is centered around the idea of human anguish and the cruelty that we inflict upon one another for personal gain; he understands that love is not always beautifully, that sometimes love means doing terrible things for one another or to one another. I enjoy immensely that he’s one of the few filmmakers that treats his movies like they are literature, heavy with subtext and allusion, hinging on existential questions of what it means to be human.
But von Trier does very little to make his films appealing to his audience. By that, I don’t mean that his films are dark or depressing; there’s nothing wrong with that. But vonTrier doesn’t seem particularly motivated by what an audience might feel about his work. A filmmaker like Michael Haneke might not be trying to entertain us, but he is at least aware of our existence; von Trier, it seems, doesn’t care whether the audience exists or not. His films are not just personal, but insular. He reminds me a lot of Godard in a way; he’s more interested in playing with the form and making his point than creating something that an audience is attached to or cares about.
Dancer in the Dark – my favorite of von Trier’s films – is von Trier’s Contempt. Both films perfectly marry the director’s artistic sensibilities with characters and story that make us actually feel. Both films are the epitome of their creator’s vision: stranger than their earlier work yet also more empathetic than the work that follows. For both filmmakers, those particular movies were turning points that would eventually lead them to create more experimental work that was focused more on making grand political or personal points rather than creating an actual film.
Von Trier actually made two films in a row that were shot on a soundstage, eschewing things like “sets” or “production design.” One would think that the focus of Dogville and Manderlay would thus be on the emotions of the characters, but nobody resembles an actual person in those movies. It’s hard to see exactly why von Trier would insist upon a film that used chalk outlines to represent homes except, perhaps, for von Trier’s well-documented anxiety and depression; that perhaps he would prefer to work in a controlled environment rather than on actual locations. Either way, the films were trying to make political points about the history of America but those points were either too on-the-nose or off the mark completely. Watching them often felt like watching a grainy filmed play — a shame because von Trier’s films are usually well-shot.
All of this brings us to Antichrist, a film I’ve been trying to make some sort of sense out of. I think it’s clear that von Trier was making this film for an audience of one: himself. It’s not a film that’s easy to shrug off or dismiss because of the artistry and voice behind it. It’s heavy with biblical allusion, which is fascinating but it also obfuscates the emotional center of the story a bit. But when there are metaphors involving the Bible, it makes the audience intuit that this is not just the story of two people, but something much larger.
The story concerns a couple — played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg (both are excellent) — who lose their young child. The child falls to his death by escaping his crib and walking out the window while his parents are having sex in the shower. This scene is truly a tiny masterwork about life and death and the all-consuming nature of passion. The Biblical allusions start here as well, with the child potentially representing the fall of man and the sex between the naked man and woman potentially representing the loss of innocence.
After the death, the woman is overcome with grief and anxiety. Her husband is a therapist and insists on treating his wife himself, taking her out to their country house called “Eden,” in the middle of nowhere. There, he subjects her to a series of exercises designed to help overcome her fears — most of which consist of standing on the earth, the grass. Her nightmares are about being at their country house and being consumed by the earth – to die, essentially and be buried — and her husband decides that it would be best to confront that fear of death head on by taking her to the place she fears. In other words, the husband is taking her to the land of the dead, hell, purgatory, etc.
Writing about the film and its themes and goals is infinitely more interesting than the process of sitting and watching it. The film is dense with ideas about religion, therapy, gender identity, and sex, making it ripe for discussion after viewing it. The film itself, however, is either maddening or disgusting; it alternates between nearly lulling you to sleep and then jolting you awake with a strange mutilation. The difficulty is in trying to piece those sections together.
There is the much-talked-about scene of the dead fox, which comes alive when Willem Dafoeapproaches and then says, “Chaos reigns!” I don’t understand why such a fuss is made about this particular sequence; it’s odd to be sure, but it’s no more strange than anything else that occurs in the film. I don’t really know what it means, per se, but then I don’t know what anything really means in the film; all I can do is offer up a guess.
And therein lies the ultimate problem: Antichrist is rife with imagery and dialogue that can potentially evoke any number of things, but there’s no connective tissue, no thread to bring it all together. So, everybody can venture a guess, but it’s really just a shot in the dark and nothing I can think of can make complete sense of what I’ve seen. A film like 2001 might also be unclear about its meaning, but at least I can come up with an explanation that helps the film make sense to me; with Antichrist, I find it impossible to do that.
As someone who has suffered from anxiety attacks in my past, I think von Trier deftly handles how that works. And it’s a credit to Charlotte Gainsbourg for being able to bring that to life in a way that felt emotionally accurate. But the last half hour of the film where the biblical allusions become overwhelming and there is genital mutilation completely obfuscates the point that I was most fascinated by: what it means to be depressed or anxious.
And that is where von Trier missteps, I think. It’s been well-documented that von Trier was in a deep depression during the making of Antichrist, that he was working out his own demons through the writing and directing of the film. He was in the unique position of making a film about depression while suffering from it himself, but rather than allowing us into the world where we could understand this affliction, it becomes too personal for us to get into. I understand that this is what von Trier feels like inside his head when he’s depressed, but it feels more like art therapy than cinema. Rather than make a movie, he’s instead made the cinematic equivalent of finger-painting his feelings — beautifully, to be sure, as the photography is some of the most gorgeous you’ll see this year, credit to the wonderful Anthony Dod Mantle.
Despite my own misgivings, Antichrist is a film that I root for because it is truly “art cinema.” And sadly, they really don’t make enough of that anymore. I would never dream of telling a visionary like Lars von Trier what he should do as a filmmaker, but I do hope that his next film lets us in a little bit, rather than trying to push us away. He’s made a film that will have critics and cinephiles arguing for years about whether or not it’s brilliant or terrible, trying to decipher clues that might not necessarily be there. I’m comfortably somewhere in between and I can see both sides: part of me thinks its brilliant, part of me thinks it’s awful, but I’m excited to discuss it; that’s a pretty good compliment.
- Noah Forrest
October 26, 2009
Noah Forrest is a 26-year-old aspiring writer/filmmaker in New York City.
The opinions expressed in these columns are the writers and do not neccessarily reflect the opinions of Movie City News or any of its editors or other contributors.
New Clip: 2012
Monday, October 26th, 2009Good days? Bad days? Good days.
Monday, October 26th, 2009
Week later, two million views, still a classic.
Images From A Christmas Carol
Monday, October 26th, 2009Dickens’ timeless tale of an old miser who must face Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Futre, as they help to bring kindness to his otherwise cold, cold heart.
Saw-ed in Half
Sunday, October 25th, 2009The little chiller that could — Paranormal Activity — ascended to the top of the movie-going charts with an estimated $21.6 million. That was bad news for the launch of the latest installment of the Saw horror franchise with its sixth installment drawing less than half the box office of the prior edition with $14.8 million.
The other new national releases also underperformed with the big screen version of Astro Boy grossing $6.8 million, the mawkish Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant a notch behind with $6.2 million and the biopic Amelia airless on a wing and a prayer of $3.9 million.
Limited and exclusive debuts weren’t appreciably better though Lars von Trier’s AntiChrist managed a decent $12,450 theater average at six venues. The steam was running thin from the umpteenth re-issue of The Nightmare Before Christmas and new entries including Motherhood, Ong-Bak 2 and (Untitled) garnered neither critical plaudits nor tidy commercial returns.
Adding it all up, the marketplace experienced rollbacks from last weekend and the comparable frame in 2008.
The bright spot in multiplexes was unquestionably Paranormal Activity. Finally attaining national exposure in its fifth week in release, the film maintained a very impressive $11,120 theater average and while it’s unlikely to attain Blair Witch status, the ultra low budget spine tingler appears to be the most profitable release of the year on a cost to return basis.
The session also saw good holds for last weekend freshmen Law Abiding Citizen and The Stepfather. But the adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are fell precipitously.
The new entries pretty much took it on the chin. The previously robust record of the graphically violent Saw series anticipated a modest slice to $25 million from last year’s $30 million bow of edition V. However, familiarity bred ticket buyer contempt and the ironic juxtaposition of its “show all” with the snowballing appeal of Paranormal’s “let your mind imagine the worst” shouldn’t be lost on the industry.
Also, even low-ball expectations for Astro Boy and Amelia turned out to be buoyant. The former should have been apparent when it was commercially rejected in Japan where the character was spawned. Amelia, on iconographic aviator Earhart, received some of the worst reviews of the year and the core audience obviously took those words to heart.
Overall ticket sales translated into revenues just shy of $120 million. That represented a 13% slide from the prior weekend and an 11% dip from 2008. Last year the openings of High School Musical 3 and Saw V debuted with respective box office of $42 million and $30.1 million.
Among the platform releases, A Serious Man and An Education continue to have effective response on glacial roll outs while Coco Before Chanel is holding steady in limited exposure. And the stealth commerciality of live opera — this weekend the venerable Aida — remains an under-appreciated steady earner.
Weekend Estimates: October 23 – 25, 2009
| Title | Distributor | Gross (avg) | % change | Theaters | Cume |
| Paranormal Activity | Par | 21.6 (11,120) | 11% | 1945 | 62.1 |
| Saw VI | Lionsgate | 14.8 (4,900) | New | 3036 | 14.8 |
| Where the Wild Things Are | WB | 14.4 (3,860) | -56% | 3735 | 54 |
| Law Abiding Citizen | Overture | 12.6 (4,350) | -40% | 2890 | 40.2 |
| Couples Retreat | Uni | 11.0 (3,570) | -36% | 3074 | 78.1 |
| Astro Boy | Summit | 6.8 (2,260) | New | 3014 | 6.8 |
| The Stepfather | Sony | 6.5 (2,400) | -44% | 2734 | 20.4 |
| Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant | Uni | 6.2 (2,260) | New | 2754 | 6.2 |
| Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs | Sony | 5.5 (2,000) | -32% | 2741 | 115.1 |
| Zombieland | Sony | 4.2 (1,730) | -45% | 2447 | 67.2 |
| Amelia | Fox Searchlight | 3.9 (4,800) | New | 818 | 3.9 |
| Aida Live | Fathom | 1.3 (3,210) | New | 403 | 1.3 |
| A Serious Man | Focus | 1.1 (6,430) | 34% | 176 | 3.2 |
| Good Hair | Roadside Attraction | 1.0 (2,110) | 144% | 460 | 2.6 |
| Toy Story 1 & 2 (3D) | BV | 1.0 (1,310) | -66% | 778 | 30.1 |
| The Invention of Lying | WB | .90 (1,120) | -53% | 802 | 17 |
| Capitalism: A Love Story | Overture | .71 (1,120) | -51% | 636 | 12.9 |
| Surrogates | BV | .59 (740) | -59% | 797 | 37.6 |
| Whip It | Fox Searchlight | .45 (1,030) | -48% | 435 | 12.3 |
| Coco Before Chanel | Alliance/Sony Class | .41 (3,980) | 8% | 103 | 2.85 |
| Weekend Total ($500,000+ Films) | - | $114.10 | - | - | - |
| % Change (Last Year) | - | -11% | - | - | - |
| % Change (Last Week) | - | -13% | - | - | - |
| Also debuting/expanding | |||||
| An Education | Sony Classics | .37 (12,330) | 51% | 30 | 0.94 |
| Tim Burton’s A Nightmare Before Christmas 3-D (reissue) | BV | .13 (1,280) | New | 105 | 0.13 |
| More Than a Game | Lionsgate | .11 (1,040) | -45% | 107 | 0.76 |
| AntiChrist | IFC | 74,700 (12,450) | New | 6 | 0.07 |
| The Boys Are Back | Miramax | 72,600 (670) | -53% | 108 | 0.69 |
| Motherhood | FreeStyle | 55,500 (1,160) | New | 48 | 0.06 |
| The Maid | Elephant Eye | 43,200 (7,200) | 153% | 6 | 0.07 |
| Ong-Bak 2 | Magnolia | 23,800 (2,380) | New | 10 | 0.02 |
| (Untitled) | IDP | 18,100 (6,030) | New | 3 | 0.02 |
| Killing Kasztner | GR Films | 4,200 (4,200) | New | 1 | 0.01 |
| Stan Helsing | Anchor Bay | 2,200 (70) | New | 30 | 0.01 |
Domestic Market Share: To October 15, 2009
| Distributor (releases) | Gross | Mrkt Share |
| Warner Bros. (29) | 1676.2 | 20.00% |
| Paramount (14) | 1375.9 | 16.40% |
| Sony (19) | 1109.4 | 13.20% |
| Buena Vista (18) | 967.9 | 11.60% |
| Fox (15) | 963.8 | 11.50% |
| Universal (18) | 770.7 | 9.20% |
| Lionsgate (11) | 310.2 | 3.70% |
| Fox Searchlight (10) | 247.2 | 3.00% |
| Weinstein Co. (8) | 186.3 | 2.20% |
| Summit (9) | 177.9 | 2.10% |
| Focus (9) | 146.3 | 1.80% |
| Overture (7) | 78.3 | 0.90% |
| Paramount Vantage (4) | 67.6 | 0.80% |
| MGM (4) | 64.3 | 0.80% |
| Miramax (7) | 52.8 | 0.60% |
| Other * (267) | 186.2 | 2.20% |
| * none greater than 0.4% | 8381 | 100.00% |
Top Limited Releases – January 1 – October 22, 2009
| Title | Distributor (releases) | Gross (millions) |
| The Wrestler * | Fox Searchlight | 25,068,864 |
| Under the Sea 3D | WB | 18,177,676 |
| Milk * | Focus | 17,246,974 |
| The Hurt Locker | Summit | 12,582,593 |
| Sunshine Cleaning | Overture | 12,062,558 |
| Away We Go | Focus | 9,552,776 |
| Du Pere en flic | Alliance | 9,115,014 |
| Deep Sea 3-D | WB/Imax | 5,341,642 |
| Whatever Works | Sony Classics | 5,304,618 |
| Moon | Sony Classics | 4,951,090 |
| Food, Inc. | Magnolia/Alliance | 4,401,009 |
| Entre les murs (The Class) | Sony Classics | 3,766,810 |
| Bright Star | Apparition | 3,689,076 |
| The Brothers Bloom | Summit | 3,531,756 |
| The September Issue | Roadside Attractions | 3,396,485 |
| Two Lovers | Magnolia | 3,149,034 |
| Magnificent Desolation * | Imax | 3,037,110 |
| Cheri | Mrmx | 2,715,657 |
| Space Station * | Imax | 2,709,897 |
| The Trailer Park Boys 2 | Alliance | 2,700,496 |
| * does not include 2008 box office |
Movie Biz Myopia
Sunday, October 25th, 2009It drives me CRAZY… all the time… when smart writers who have been around forever get involved in trend stories that so utterly miss the point they are trying to explain. I just don’t f-ing get what the major malfunction is.
Well, maybe I do… a bit. Hollywood’s journalistic corps have a very bad tendency to get sucked into believing the bullshit being fed to them by studio execs, agents, and idiot financial analysts and then, when something happens, they see the story in the reflection of the bullshit, unable to get any real perspective on what’s happening.
And so, Michael Cieply writes a story like, “The Skinnier Look of Studio Management,” which somehow takes the various firings and reductions of The Seismic Industry Economic Destruction of the lack of anticipation of the DVD downturn by the studios and turns it into some silly (and essentially inaccurate) bit about head count at studios.
Can a guy who has been around as long as Cieply really believe that John Lesher was dumped by the man who hired him as the result of the studio making a strategic choice to make fewer movies? Is he kidding? The absolute failure of John Lesher as big studio chief followed directly on the heels of significant, but not absolute failure of Lesher as Dependent chief. But the reason he was fired was the same reason he was hired… to provide cover for the boss. And why hasn’t Paramount ramped up production under Brad Grey in the ENTIRE time he has been in the job? Well, good question. But it’s not a strategy of 2009.
Disney is a completely different thing. Bob Iger has decided on a major shift in corporate strategy. But getting rid of Dick Cook was most certainly NOT about getting rid of a salary or head count. Like Lesher and Universal’s Shmuger & Linde, there will be massive payouts for years to come to get rid of these guys… if there is any financial malfeasance, it would be in how recklessly the post-firing deals are made and how many tens of millions are thrown away on execs that studios either no longer wish to follow or who are massive failures.
And about Universal… again… the notion that dumping Linde & Shmuger was some sort of $ issue is just plain stupid. For one thing, both of the jobs that Langley and Fogelson had will be filled… and on down the line. But moreover, the idea that firing the co-chiefs was about their salaries in any way… really… are you kidding? Does the NYT know how little money their salaries are in the big picture? Let me put it this way… NYT is bleeding more red ink quarterly than double the combined annual salaries of those two men… and life goes on…
And was I clear enough? The move to move two top execs up, much like the same exact move that brought in the regime that this new one is replacing, is about covering Ron Meyer’s ass. It is not like the LA Times making Betsey Sharkey (and I really don’t mean to be picking on you, Betsey) a film critic because she already had a job slot with TribCo and so they didn’t need to manipulate a way to hire from outside. (This is also how Turan’s previous partner, Ms Chocano, was slotted in as film critic, having already taken a slot as TV critic.) This is Meyer, in a time of pressure, dumping his familiar old guys to bring in some new familiar slightly less old guys to show that they are not going to make the same mistakes again. That’s what the top dogs do.
And the New Line dump… again… not about dumping bodies… about a short-sighted idea of how to tighten things up as the division was having a couple of rough years after being an absolute cash cow for the previous five. And as it turned out, was a major profit center in 2009 for WB – with films made by the old team – after the company was absorbed into the bigger studio.
And this crazy irrelevance about whether Horn and Meyer will be replaced by one person instead of two… Cieply has been around long enough to know that the guys they replaced, Semel & Daly, were the only two man show in their day. It worked. And WB maintained the tradition when they left. But the idea that it will or will not continue based on payroll considerations is just plain dumb.
Seriously… Fox is the fattest studio in town by this standard, not just with a two-man crew leading the studio, but with divisions below and across. Is Cieply going to theorize that Peter Rice was not replaced, as such, at Searchlight because they didn’t want to pay someone? Crazy. He was not replaced because the machine was built so that it could keep going and going effectively without him and with the team he worked with and showed complete respect to during his tenure. And if it ever crashed and burned… guess what… they would go find their next Peter Rice.
Vantage was shuttered because it lost a shitload of money. Warner Indie was shuttered because it was never a serious interest of the larger company and it lost the big studio in-house talent that needed a Dependent platform. Miramax is going small because the “middle business” is not anyplace anyone wants to be and Battsek can do 90% of what he’s been doing without that part of the business in place. And the definition of what Focus will continue to be is being defined daily now.
Studios are shrinking because they got FFFAAAATTTT. But people, even very expensive people, are the cheapest commodity in the movie business. If your movie studio is going through $1.5 billion in production and marketing a year, a $5 million salary is NOT going to change the dynamic or the bottom line much.
Yes, it matters a lot to the people who have those salaries and are dead afraid that those jobs will be going away. (Well, mostly THEIR jobs going away scares them. Fuck everyone else.) The same overhype is true when studios push back against out of control agents demands and want to pay huge, but almost reasonable prices for talent. “Woe is us… the whole business is collapsing…” Silly. A $8 million payday against only 6% of the gross instead of $20 million plus 8% is not the end of anyone’s world, even if it means that someone who is already too wealthy can’t buy their 4th vacation house in cash this year.
None of the big executive salaries cut end up trickling down to people who work for a living… under $400k. Never!
You know, ass covering and tap dancing and fear of losing the platinum diamond-studded ring is part of the game and really, I don’t mind it that much. It is what it is. But using that whining to distract NYT readers from the very real change that is coming/here that does/will have a major impact on everyone and the general disposition of movies that reach the public just pisses me off.
There was nothing shocking about The Hangover getting made… except that studios were making so many similarly dumb comedies for twice and three times the budget! Why?!?! I’m not taking anything away from the success of that film. But that is why they have always done cheap comedies. When they pay off, they are massive successes. (Todd Phillips personal payday will be over $45 million on the film.) But the question is not about trying to make more films like that one, but why any comedies are made for more than the $38 million that one was made for.
But media so often gets distracted by the wrong question. The idea of Hangover 2 being made is a no-brainer. That ship has sailed. It’s a distraction. Imitation is death. But what steps will studios take to put themselves in position for the next one… the one they don’t see coming… because no one can see them all coming, just as no one can see all the ones that miss.
It will not be about how much the person in the job makes or how many persons are in the job slot. And that you can take to the bank.
DP/30 – Paul Schneider, Bright Star
Sunday, October 25th, 2009
Weekend Estimates by Klady – Oct 25
Sunday, October 25th, 2009
Paranormal has clearly found normal, holding for what is estimated to be 3x Friday over the weekend… which is better than most horror genre films do. More congrats to Paramount marketing.
As for WTWTA, not sensational, but not deadly. You have to go back to July to find a movie other than Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs that opened to $30m or more and dropped less than 49% in the second weekend. My sense is that its still rather blurry about who the movie is for. But the door is closing on WB after this next weekend. $80m domestic is going to be a fight and foreign is going to define whether the film is profitable.
The most interesting number on the board, for me, is $1.3m for Aida Live… 1 screening… 4 hours long… in just 403 theaters. I have never been much of a believer in event programming satellited to theaters. But this is very interesting.
There is a certain amusement about An Education and AntiChrist having about the same per screen.
Trailer: Dare
Saturday, October 24th, 2009More From The Men Who Stare at Goats
Saturday, October 24th, 2009Breakfast In Beautiful Santa Cruz
Saturday, October 24th, 2009
Friday Estimates by Klady – pre-Halloween
Saturday, October 24th, 2009
The Friday before Halloween is stunningly consistent for horror/kill movies… $14 million has been the magic number. It started before Saw ever happened.
2002 – The Ring (wknd 2) & Ghost Ship – $10.2m – interrupted a little by Jackass opening
2003 – Scary Movie 3 & Texas Chainsaw Massacre (wknd 2)- expanded by comedy
2004 – The Grudge (wknd 2) & Saw – $14.2m
2005 – Saw II & The Fog (wknd 3) – $13.1m
2006 – Saw III & Grudge 2 (wknd 3) – $15.6m
2007 – Saw IV & 30 Days Of Night (wknd 2)- $17m
2008 – Saw V – $14m
So… $14m for Paranormal Activity & Saw VI combined is not terribly surprising. The question was always how those dollars would be split up and whether the duo would expand the market.
Lionsgate can’t be happy. And really, Paramount may have cost both companies money by doing their big expansion directly against the Saw franchise… but not for sure. Paranormal is a created phenom and how the timing works on it is, honestly, a bit of a mystery. What works works… what doesn’t doesn’t. And this is already a win for Spielberg & Paramount Marketing.
Astroboy and Amelia should not be too surprising to anyone either. Astro is an improvement on the Fly Me To The Moon opening, but they also spent a load more on marketing and there is a known character, even if the young generation has no idea who he is. But it’s easier to sell Iron Man meets Pinocchio than astronaut insects.
But Universal’s flop with Cirque du Freak seems like a seriously missed opportunity. Yeah, the world is a bot vampired out. But the film never seemed to find a clear sell. And that’s always a bad thing.
And let’s not go crazy on the WTWTA drop. It is not a great hold. It will get better over the whole weekend. But it is also going right into the face of two new strong openings, plus Astro.
