'Noah’ to flood theatres

Will all the controversy and all the press awarded the controversy reap dividends at the box office this weekend? That’s the question facing Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. The director’s Biblical epic (action movie? Disaster flick? Faith-based offering? The latter seems the most unlikely…) opens in 3,500 theatres today. The familiar story of a man, a flood, and a host of animals boasts a trio of recognizable names: Jennifer Connelly, who is aces at playing crazy Russell Crowe’s supportive wife; Emma Watson; and of course, Crowe himself. Aronofsky, who directed 2010’s Academy Award-winning Black Swan, also brings a formidable fanbase to the table. All told, Paramount is expecting returns to tally out to between $30 and $33 million. Noah is already performing well overseas, in South Korea and Mexico specifically, where it bowed last week. Even if the movie fails to gain traction in the United States, international sales should help keep it out of the red.

Cesar Chavez, about the life and work of the iconic Mexican civil-rights activist, and Sabotage, starring the iconic (of a different sort) Arnold Schwarzenegger, also open this weekend, though neither is expected to do boffo business. Playing in 2,486 locations, the latter is Schwarzenegger’s most recent attempt at a big-screen comeback. His last two efforts, 2013's The Last Stand and Escape Plan, barely made a splash at the box office and didn’t do much to revive his acting career. With poor reviews (21 percent rotten on Rotten Tomatoes) and a rote drug-cartel-and-kidnapping plotline, it would be surprising if Sabotage proved the hit Arnold has been waiting for. Expect an opening weekend gross of under $10 million.

Cesar Chavez has also received poor reviews (37 percent rotten), however, a strong Hispanic turnout could propel the film to modest success. Opening in 644 locations, Chavez could pull in as much as, or even more than, $5 million.

Building momentum like a snowball racing down one of those mountains framing The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson’s specialty hit expands yet again this weekend, to 1,000 theatres. Jason Bateman’s Bad Words finally gets its wide release (800 theatres) today, but having disappointed in limited release the past two weekends, expectations for the movie’s broader national performance are low.

Deadline looms for 35mm

Two recent blog postings take impassioned stands on the film vs. digital debate. Kyle Westphal's excellent roundup 2013 in Review: Whose Film Is It, Anyway? considers the consequences to artists and viewers when film is no longer available. Don't Worry About the End of Film, argues Richard Brody in his New Yorker blog, The Front Row.

Both writers agree that the era of theatrical projection of 35mm features has passed. (It was hard to ignore recent news articles announcing that Paramount has stopped distributing film prints.) But they reach different conclusions about what this means for moviegoers.

Westphal points out that 35mm projection was supposed to continue in art houses, museums, and other niche theaters, but finds that digital has dominated those markets as well. The last New York Film Festival screened mostly digital, the Chicago International Film Festival exclusively digital. Even To Save and Project, the Museum of Modern Art's annual film preservation festival, had to resort to some digital for its 2013 series.

This despite the fact that the actual people who make movies still want to work with and watch film. Of this year's nine Best Picture nominees, four were shot on film: American Hustle, Captain Phillips (on 16mm!), 12 Years a Slave, and The Wolf of Wall Street (both Wolf and Phillips have some digital shots).

Westphal cites a Joel Coen comment that Inside Llewyn Davis might be the last project he and his brother Ethan make on film. (J.J Abrams said something similar about why he used film for Star Trek Into Darkness.) And as I pointed out in my piece on The Grandmaster, Wong Kar Wai would still shoot on film if he could. It took months for the director to see The Grandmaster projected on film.

Digital enthusiasts keep insisting that a DCP (Digital Cinema Package) delivers an as good as or better image than a 35mm print. There's no question that DCP's are cheaper in the long run than film, which degrades a little (or a lot) with each projection. And after years of viewing poor quality commercial prints projected poorly, most customers probably prefer the rock-solid, spliceless, scratchless digital experience.

For Brody, "ultimately, what matters is not film or video but the idea." He points out that artists have manipulated film since its origins, and brings up the dirty secret that's often missing from this debate: just about every feature* is digitized for post-production work, usually with 2K scans. (*I can't think of a recent feature that was edited by hand, but one could exist.) Basically all the movies we see in commercial theaters have already undergone a digital conversion.

I don't think anyone can argue for a return to 35mm distribution and projection. It doesn't make economic sense, and in almost all cases it doesn't make artistic sense. That doesn't mean digital is superior or even preferable to film. It only means that seeing 35mm in a theater will become more and more difficult.

Try this analogy. Few would insist that an e-book reads the same as a hardbound version published on a letterpress with rag paper. Is the digital version cheaper? Does it contain all the text? Is it endlessly clone-able? Sure. But reading a book on a Kindle is not the same experience as holding a book in your hand.

What looks better? A jpg of oil canvas, or the real thing? A digital file, or a platinum print? No matter how much you manipulate pixels to look like painting or still photography or motion picture film, the differences remain obvious. The whole goal of digital movie formats is still to look "just as good as" film.

Lost in the debate is the fate of our film heritage prior to the digital takeover. It turns out that film is an excellent archival medium—digital, not so great. Archivists are battling these issues out right now on the AMIA listserve, but I will point out that there are no industry-wide standards for digital preservation, no long-term case studies, no real idea what the costs will be.

And there is no market formula right now for the thousands of films from the pre-digital age. Who will pay to digitize them? And if they aren't digitized, how long will it be before the machinery required to see them becomes obsolete?

As one AMIA poster put it,

Caches of nitrate film are still being found—we were nitrate would only survive for 50 years, but there it is, 100 years old and older. Much of it can be saved digitally, but some deserves to survive as film as long as we are able to save it. Should Potemkin or Casablanca or The Red Shoes or Paisan or Caligari or [fill in a title] only survive in digital versions?

Burgundy falls in the battle of the sequels

In hindsight, all those commercial spots may have been (a tad) overkill. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues earned a solid, though not stellar, $40 million its first five days in theatres, this past Wednesday-Sunday. It grossed $26.8 million from the weekend alone, a figure that falls just shy of the first Anchorman’s $28.4 million bow. These numbers are more or less on par with what Paramount had predicted, though given the trumpeting fanfare building up to the movie’s release, many pundits are still calling it an underwhelming debut.

Their sense of disappointment may have something to do with the fact that Anchorman 2 failed to win the weekend. Instead, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug once again took home the treasure, or title of the weekend’s top earner. Like its predecessor, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Smaug fell 57% its second weekend in theatres. The fantasy flick took in $31.4 million to bump its overall cume to $127.5 million. Look for second-place Anchorman to gain a little more steam this coming weekend, however. As noted on Friday, the weekend before Christmas is a notoriously slow period, while business tends to pick up considerably over the holiday. Anchorman shouldn’t slip too much over its sophomore outing, and could even tally out with as much as $120 million by the time it closes.

Frozen and American Hustle jockeyed neck-and-neck for the third-place slot for much of the weekend. The latest numbers, however, have Frozen barely eking out the lead. Disney’s bid for a return to the glories of its princess-movie heyday earned $19.5 million to Hustle’s $19.1 million. The latter is a great haul for a specialty release, and trumps David O. Russell’s The Fighter, which grossed $12.1 million when it expanded over this same weekend in 2010. If Oscar predictions prove true, Hustle will also likely benefit from an upcoming awards-season boost. The film is on track to earn roughly $100 million in total.

Saving Mr. Banks rounds out the weekend’s top 5 with $9.3 million. While the true story of how beloved children’s story Mary Poppins came to the big screen has been underperforming (Stateside, that is; author P.L. Travers’ fellow Brits have been loving the film), Banks isn’t the domestic bomb that kids’ movie Walking with Dinosaurs proved to be. The CG feature grossed just $7.3 million. As with Anchorman, business will probably pick up over the holiday, though it’s unlikely Dinosaurs will drum up more than $50 million by the end of its run.

Finally, Bollywood offering Dhoom 3 set a new record with its $3.3 million North American debut. That’s the highest opening gross ever for a Bollywood release in the United States.

Happy holidays!

 

‘Anchorman 2’ to have a classy weekend

The man who managed to make the trinity of obnoxiousness – misogyny, dimwittedness and frustratingly perfect hair – hilariously lovable in 2004 is back for another crassly classy good time. Will Ferrell has reprised his role as ‘70’s newsman Ron Burgundy for Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, which opened wide in 3,450 locations on Wednesday.

Ferrell and director Adam McKay’s first Anchorman was by no means a box-office success, earning roughly $85 million domestically and failing to generate any international business to speak of. The film only found a dedicated audience once it was released on DVD, quickly becoming the kind of cult favorite many a high-schooler spent his, and her, lunch period quoting.

Hollywood, however, was a little slow to catch up. Anchorman may have found new life post-theatrical release, but given its tepid b.o. performance, studio execs at Paramount were initially hesitant to green-light a sequel. The fact that several of the film’s stars have become more popular over the last decade – most notably Steve Carell, who helmed his own cult hit, TV series “The Office – probably played a large role in overcoming the kind of bottom-line hesitancy that kept Anchorman 2 in limbo for years. Not that Paramount, once committed, minded waging an expensive marketing campaign on the movie’s behalf. Have all those Dodge Durango commercials piqued viewers’ interest? The weekend before Christmas is notoriously tough for new releases, but Anchorman 2 is still expected to earn between $40 and $50 million for the five-day spread.

Actually, so is The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Few pundits have been able to discuss Smaug without mentioning its inability to generate the same kind of boffo revenue as its predecessor, last year’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (even though Smaug has earned superior reviews). Yet Peter Jackson’s second Lord of the Rings prequel is still drawing sizable crowds. It wouldn’t be a Christmas miracle if Smaug managed to out-gross Anchorman 2 this weekend.

CG-animated kids’ film Walking with Dinosaurs will likely land at the bottom of the weekend’s list of top earners. Frozen continues to pose fierce competition, and will probably keep Dinosaurs from grossing more than $10 or $12 million.

Specialty enthusiasts who do not live in either New York or LA (a tough position for a specialty enthusiast) will be treated to Christmas-come-early today. Both American Hustle and Saving Mr. Banks are expanding, to 2,500 and 2,200 locations, respectively. David O. Russell’s Oscar favorite had the fourth-best per-theatre average when it opened in limited release last weekend. Given the loud buzz surrounding the flick, it should earn upwards of $15 million.

Last but by no means the least interesting, Spike Jonze’s Her, about a man who falls in love with a computer operating system (not as crazy as it sounds, considering the computer’s voice belongs to Scarlett Johansson), also bows in six locations today. The film is on track to expand wide on January 10^th.   

I don't get it: Supernatural adventure with Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in the works

If you take all of Hollywood's current money-making impulses and twist them around, I'm pretty sure you'd end up with the project featuring Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn currently in the works. The Paramount project, Huck, comes from a spec script by Andy Burg and will be produced by the Rise of the Planet of the Apes team Peter Chernin and Dylan Clark. My first thought was, "What a terrible idea," so here I'll explain why.

Why Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are the wrong kind of iconic, pre-sold properties. I get that Hollywood is all about showing viewers familiar characters. There's an updated Sherlock Holmes and every single fairy tale known to man is getting re-done, often with stellar results. On the flip side, remember Gulliver's Travels? That update of a classic bombed. This project plans on taking Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and then aging them up to adulthood. There's another trend they're capitalizing on--the adult boy. But I can't and don't want to see the charming antics of mischievous kids transferred to adults. It's not as funny when adults are acting like children.

The addition of "supernatural" elements is just following trends. Have you heard about a series called Harry Potter? Twilight? They all involve magic and horrific creatures. So why not add supernatural elements to Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer? No, no, no. I hate the idea of taking Mark Twain's beloved characters, aging them up, then making them fight ghosts or monsters. In the original books, the characters are runaways, fight thieves and murderers, and dig up trunks full of gold. What about this premise isn't fantastical enough? These were all things kids thought maybe could happen to them, but never did. Moving into the supernatural just adds another dimension that isn't necessary. Did I mention the production team's inspiration is Snow White and the Huntsman, an upcoming iteration of the fairy tale that turns the poison apple story into an epic battle picture?

I'm actually fine with Snow White and the Huntsman providing an update on a classic, centuries-old fairy tale. But I'm less inclined to see Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, who are specific products of their era, the 1840s, changed. The changes Huck proposes would completely alter the nature of these characters. They aren't just adults, they're adults fighting ghosts or vampires or weird curses. Twain's work was as much a commentary on its era as it was an adventure, and that would be lost. If this project ever enters production, I think Hollywood will learn a lesson that not all iconic characters can be distorted in order to fit the day's trends, and still end up a blockbuster hit. On that note, don't even get me started on what Michael Bay plans to do to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

 

Paramount announces two more fourquels and one sequel

By Sarah Sluis

It's no secret that Hollywood has been pursuing more sequels in recent years. Despite all the complaining from those that want more original content, sequels continue to do well. Audiences already have an idea of what they're getting, and with rising ticket prices many people would prefer to bet on a sure thing.

What's surprising is that so many sequels are now reaching the "fourquel" stage. This year, two such movies reached that stage: Shrek Forever After and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. It's not necessarily because studios expected huge grosses domestically, but rather predictable ones: both achieved their greatest success in their second incarnation, with sliding grosses since. Now Paramount has announced three more sequels, including two fourquels: Paranormal Activity 4 and Transformers 4.

Horror movies have more of a precedent for spawning multiple sequels. Scream had its fourquel just this year, and Saw yielded an astonishing seven movies. Final Destination just reached its fifth movie this year. Back in the 1980s, series such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and Halloween yielded numerous sequels.

More unusual is that expensive action movies like Transformers can do well enough in their subsequent outings to warrant a fourth movie. Transformers 3 only did 88% of the business of Transformers 2--domestically. Internationally, the franchise earns more and more with each outing: $390 million to $434 million to an astonishing $770 million. Turns out the same holds true for the Shrek and Pirates of the Caribbean series. Even as domestic grosses flounder, the international box office surges. The proliferation of sequels may be less about Hollywood failing to find original product and more about the siren call of the international box office.

Doug Liman's 'Moon': 'Ocean's Eleven' in outer space?

By Sarah Sluis

Doug Liman's latest project, Moon, may be set out of this world, but its plot reminds me of those jetsetting heist/spy movies. After all, it would just be plain old boring if Jason Bourne or James Bond or the Ocean's Eleven crew did all their fighting stateside. The script for Moon centers on a group of ex-space agency employees, led by a woman (Another switch-up from routine, but maybe it's easier to go the Sigourney Weaver route in space). Their "mission" involves stealing space equipment and eventually capturing a NASA employee in their quest to go to the Moon, where they can mine the celestial body's energy source.

Liman's most famous for directing the first Bourne movie, which had the action sequences, intrigue, and travelogue feel of the Bond movies with a little less swagger. He also directed the stylish Mr. & Mrs. Smith, but misfired in his first foray into the sci-fi genre, Jumper. That film, which centers on a young man with the ability to teleport across time and place, garnered a mixed review from our critic Frank Lovece, who praised aspects of Liman's work. With these kinds of credentials, Liman seems exceptionally qualified to direct. He also has a historical drama in the works, Attica, but perhaps he's shelved it after the tepid box-office reception to Fair Game, another based-on-a-true-story script.

Moon (which will likely be renamed to avoid confusion with the 2009 movie with the same title) managed to keep the same star, Jake Gyllenhaal, even as it cycled from DreamWorks to Paramount. But no more. Up for the male roles are Andrew Garfield, Emile Hirsch, and Chris Pine. The list of possible leading ladies is more extensive. THR reports that Rosario Dawson, Megan Fox, Rachel McAdams, Eva Mendes, Zoe Saldana and Olivia Wilde are being considered for the part.

If Liman can assemble a cast with the proper chemistry, Paramount will greenlight the project for a shoot later this summer. I love space movies, but the genre has been in need of some punching up. Moon seems to be it. With NASA funding being cut and cut, the future of space travel is commercial. What better way to comment on that than by creating a film about anti-heroes pilfering space equipment so they can steal the Moon's energy source? Sign me up.

Miley Cyrus eyes a 'Twilight'-like role in 'Wake'

By Sarah Sluis

Miley Cyrus has already gone from being a tween superstar to a household name among all ages. Now she's doing something harder: aging up and into more mature roles. Cyrus may star in Wake, the first in a series of young adult novels about a girl who gets caught up in other people's dreams. It sounds like her character

has a similar talent to Leonardo DiCaprio in this summer's Inception, but her gift is more supernatural and less sci-fi. Because the book has horror and suspense elements, the tone will be edgier without being sexier. She's gotten a lot of heat lately for provocative performances at recent concerts, but the seventeen-year-old's first non-Hannah Montana feature was comparatively tame. She played the lead in The Last Song, a Nicholas Sparks adaptation that was written especially for her and thus certified to be Cyrus family-friendly.

Wake is the first in a series that now encompasses three books, the latter two entitled Fade and Gone. The girl, Janie, has the ability to go inside other people's dreams if they are physically near her. She also discovers that she can direct their dreams, turning the fears expressed in nightmares into something more manageable. She can give people closure. She drops in on the dream of a burnout named Cabel, and discovers that there's a lot more there than meets the eye--he becomes her boyfriend and later her sidekick as she tries to figure out who dreamed one horrible dream she cannot forget. The movie will be distributed by Paramount and MTV Films (which passed on Twilight) is developing the project. Christopher Landon (Disturbia) will write the script, and whether or not Cyrus gets on board will depend on the quality of the script.

So kudos to Miley. The project's supernatural overtones put it in the trendy Twilight territory without being directly vampire-related.Also, although the heroine has a boyfriend, it's not a romance, so Cyrus isn't going the rom-com route--thank goodness. She's still stuck in a hard game, and there's plenty of popular young actresses popular in the tabloids but unable to make the switch to adult roles. Lindsay Lohan crashed and burned her way out of Disney movies, and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen have more success now with fashion than they do on movie sets. Cyrus has never appealed to me--she has a kind of awkward demeanor that's inconsistent with being a movie star without being charming in its own way. While she has hordes of young fans, it's possible that her grown-up fans may want to cast her off instead of growing up with her. Just one more note to Miley about her image: stop slouching!

Insurge Pictures brings sub-$100,000 movies to Paramount

By Sarah Sluis

Was Paranormal Activity's huge success last year a fluke or a new business model? Using a viral campaign, slow expansion and a geographical emphasis on college towns, the $10,000 horror movie became last year's $100 million surprise hit. Now Paramount's created Insurge Pictures to create more movies using the same techniques that made Paranormal successful.

Whatever the outcome, Paramount doesn't have much to lose. With a planned $1 million budget for ten films made for $100,000 each, the investment is a drop in the bucket. Insurge plans to release the finished products theatrically or use them as templates to create higher-budget, more polished features (the original plan for Paranormal Activity). There isn't a planned focus on acquisitions--my guess is that not many good finished films can be sold for that amount.

This model will attract young, hungry filmmakers willing to work for almost nothing for the potential of hitting it big and launching a career. With a planned audience of 13-24's, Insurge will be creating films made by people within--or not much older--than that age bracket.

Filmmaking has become increasingly low-cost and democratic in recent years. Channels like YouTube show clips made by thirteen-year-olds and watched by thirteen-year-olds. Insurge seems like an attempt to scale up this viewing behavior by releasing these movies theatrically.

Nevertheless, the venture might fail as easily as it might succeed. Was Paranormal a one in a thousand movie, or a one in ten movie? One thing I am sure of: more low-budget movies will find ways to be distributed and make money, whether it's on the internet, at the local theatre, or through a major studio like Paramount.

Note: While IndieWire broke the story on March 11, supposedly pending an official announcement, we're still waiting for it a week later. The website and Facebook page mentioned in the article couldn't be readily found, and the Twitter account had protected tweets, leading me to believe they've been pulled until the studio is ready for a full-on launch.

The journey of a scare: 'Paranormal Activity'

By Sarah Sluis

There are a couple of interviews of Oren Peli, who went from being a software programmer to the director of Paranormal Activity, circulating the blogosphere. The movie has taken a non-traditional path to the theatres, from production, to distribution, to exhibition, and Peli helps fill in the blanks.

According to his interview with Cinematical, DreamWorks bought the project after Slamdance 2008 with the intent of having him remake it on a bigger budget--because you can't release a film that was made in seven days for $14,000--or could you?

The studio scheduled screenings for potential screenwriters, but the overwhelmingly positive reception led them to decide to release the movie nearly as is. Pacing and editing were changed to make it more fast-paced--though some reviews have still faulted the film for being too slow. The ending, which apparently "makes" the film, was also changed based on the input of none other than Steven Spielberg (DreamWorks and Paramount had ownership of the project before their split).

Peli sounds like a very organized, analytical person. He planned the production for a year, sprucing up his house to prepare for the shoot, and looked at hundreds of people before finding his two actors (how many low-budget films would look at that many people for their casting calls?). He spent ten months editing, and thanks to his technical background, he did the visual effects and audio mixing himself. His hours of work was probably worth several times more than the film's budget.

Oren Peli already has his next project lined up, Area 51, which will use the same home-video camera techniques to document a group of teenagers who decide to poke around the famed UFO grounds.

Now that the studio knows it has a hit on its hands, Paramount has announced plans to expand the release to 2,000 theatres two Fridays from now, putting it head to head with Saw VI. While there are certainly many horror fans who will have already seen Paranormal Activity (at least $8 million worth), its positive word-of-mouth could encourage more casual viewers to put the movie on their must-see list. Last weekend, the movie ended up being more successful than early tracking figures indicated. It actually earned $7.9 million, not $7 million, bringing its per-screen total to almost $50,000 per screen, a truly astonishing number (there must be some big theatres showing this movie--and a lot of sellouts)

So why has the movie been such a big success? The "found footage" style has been used in films from The Blair Witch Project to Cloverfield, but there is something to be said for the fact that the camera is often fixed in the same spot in front of thehaunted couple's bed, giving the movie a more "security camera"-type look. Also, not many horror movies have the benefit of having Steven Spielberg come in and fix your ending, nor the dedicated marketing team at Paramount, which appears to have risen to the challenge of marketing a non-traditional film. I, for one, wouldn't have expected college towns to be the jumping-off point for a horror film, though the midnight-only screenings fit perfectly into a college student's late-night schedule. Now that Paramount has thrown down the gauntlet by pitting their film against Saw VI--a move that, at the very least, will generate publicity--we'll be waiting to see who will emerge the winner in the battle of Saw VI vs. Paranormal Activity.