By Kevin Lally
The National Association of Theatre Owners' new CinemaCon convention debuted on Monday atCaesars Palace in Las Vegas, a step up from the old ShoWest home base of the Bally's and Paris Hotels. Caesars is a more spacious and spread-out location, offering the decided advantage of a larger theatre that can accommodate the show's estimated 6,000 attendees rather than dividing them between the two smaller performance spaces at Bally's and Paris. Delegates were still getting a feel for the expanded headquarters on the first day, but they seemed comforted by the roominess of the immense Octavius Ballroom that was the site of the opening night party hosted by Christie, Deluxe and Imax Corp.
The international market was the focus of opening-day programming, reviving an old ShoWest tradition. And no wonder: As Warner Bros. International Cinemas president Millard Ochs pointed out, foreign box office is now double that of the domestic market. He also predicted that China alone will surpass North American box office within ten years, noting that three new theatre complexes are opening every week in China.
Paramount Pictures International president Andrew Crippscited the rise of China from the lower depths of movie territories to the top ten, and India's ascension from number six overseas territory to number three in the past decade. A seminar later in the day pinpointed four "looming box office giants": Brazil, Russia, India and China. Hollywood product may still dominate the international box office, but North America is now just another territory when the final numbers are tallied.
Cripps also mentioned the increasingly frequent casting of non-American actors in American studio productions as a reflection of this reality, and cited the surprising fact that 10 of the top 20 international box-office titles of 2010 were directed by non-Americans.
Opening night was given over to Paramount Pictures and a generous preview of their slate for summer and beyond. J.J. Abrams showed two key scenes fromhis upcoming nostalgic thriller Super 8,a repeat of the exclusive New York presentation Sarah Sluis reported onfor Screener last week. We'll second her opinion that thislooks like a very potent coming-of-age tale blended with sci-fi horror, expertly directed by thegifted Abrams, who is fastbecoming the heir apparent to his producer on thisproject, Steven Spielberg.
Marvel Comics' Kevin Feige was on hand topresent sequences from his two summer movies, Captain America and Thor, and both looked exceptionally promising with truly top-notch production values. The big surprise was Thor, which I had dismissed as a potential camp-fest. But the script appears to find real humor and pathos in Thor's plight as a supernatural god suddenly forced to cope with mere mortals here on Earth. How curious, though, that Natalie Portman's first post-Oscar screen appearances would be in this comic-book movie and the frivolous Your Highness.
It's also curious that Paramount's summer lineup would include not one but two startling examples of male pulchitrude at its most buff extreme in the form ofCaptain America Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth as Thor. Could this be the new secret to a studio green light?
Anything but buff, Jack Black made a surprise appearance to promote DreamWorks's Kung Fu Panda 2, singing "My Heart Will Go On" in tribute to Caesars' Colosseum theatre, which normally is the home to Vegas' Celine Dion show. Black also insisted on showing off his kung fu moves, complete with back rolls, and emerged comically winded--for the next four minutes.
The action sequences in Kung Fu Panda are virtuosic, but the heartiest audience response to Jeffrey Katzenberg's DreamWorks Animation preview was to the Shrek spinoff Puss in Boots. The conceit of the diminutive feline as ahaughty swashbuckler got big laughs at CinemaCon, and the cat-lover demographic alone assures success for Antonio Banderas' 3D adventure.
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