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Filmmakers Embrace Reality, on the High Seas and Beyond

July 17, 2013 by Leave a Comment

LOS ANGELES — Capt. Richard Phillips was bobbing in a boat full of Somali pirates on the Indian Ocean four years ago when Hollywood recognized an Oscar moment.

Film producers who were glued to the news sensed the stuff of next-wave nonfiction — an action hero, in a real-life global drama.

Things turned out well, from a cinematic point of view: Navy SEALs flew to the rescue, three of the pirates were shot dead, and Captain Phillips was freed unharmed.

The resulting movie, “Captain Phillips,” directed by Paul Greengrass, will arrive in October with Tom Hanks in the title role. It is one of a dozen nonfiction narratives that are promising to shake up the coming awards season, and perhaps to reinvent a reality-based movie genre that only a few years ago seemed moribund.

While Hollywood still loves the summer escape movie, sophisticated real-life dramas are filling up the latter part of the year, attracting top-flight stars and directors and finding a niche with audiences continually wired into unfolding news events.

Almost everybody knows something about the tales behind the new films, giving them a recognition factor that serves as a built-in marketing motor.

“The story already exists, everybody around the table says, ‘Yeah!’ ” Mr. Hanks said in an interview, describing the current preference of studio executives as they sift through scripts and proposals.

Hollywood is quick to adopt a winning formula, and the critical and box office success of films like “The Social Network” and “Moneyball” has proved that reality-based narratives can make money and win awards — something beyond the ability of most blockbusters.

At the same time, executives and film historians say, media fragmentation has made studios more wary of jumping into purely fictional drama, because they can no longer rely on best-selling novels, original stage shows, or the even the reputation of master filmmakers to supply a mass audience.

“It’s quite possible that we’re in a golden age for this type of film, and we’re just not aware of it yet,” said Robert Birchard, editor of the American Film Institute catalog of feature films.

Since long before Gary Cooper played Lou Gehrig in “The Pride of the Yankees” (released in 1942), the nonfiction genre has tended to “come and go,” Mr. Birchard noted.

It seemed to be fading in early 2010, when a 3-D fantasy, “Avatar,” was all the rage, and — despite the real underpinnings of fictions like “An Education” and “The Hurt Locker” — only one nonfiction film, “The Blind Side,” figured among 10 best picture nominees at the Academy Awards. But “The Social Network,” which got eight Oscar nominations in 2011, set the film world abuzz with its close examination of Facebook and its founders — even as an old-style historical drama, “The King’s Speech,” took the top honors that year. Then, three inventive, reality-based dramas — “Argo,” “Lincoln” and “Zero Dark Thirty”— unexpectedly turned the last Oscar contest into a rousing political brawl.

This year, nonfiction is back with a vengeance, beginning Friday with the national release of “Fruitvale Station,” by the Weinstein Company, about the 2009 shooting of a young man by an Oakland transit officer.

Some of the more notable entries that follow will focus on events or people still prominent in the public consciousness: “The Fifth Estate,” about the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, from the director Bill Condon; Jobs,” about the Apple founder Steve Jobs, from Open Road; and “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom,” from the Weinstein Company.

Others examine subjects in both the recent and distant past, including “Rush,” about the Formula One racers Niki Lauda and James Hunt, from Ron Howard; “Twelve Years a Slave,” about the 19th-century abduction of Solomon Northup, by Steve McQueen; and “The Monuments Men,” about those who saved great art from destruction by Hitler, with George Clooney, who directed, in a starring role.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/business/media/filmmakers-embrace-reality-on-the-high-seas-and-beyond.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Common Sense: As Hollywood Leans on Blockbusters, the Flop Looms

May 17, 2013 by Leave a Comment

With a record number of big-budget action- and special effect-laden blockbusters opening between the beginning of this month and the end of August, competition for the spectacle-craving young male and surging international audience has never been more intense.

Steven Soderbergh, the much-admired filmmaker, delivered a blistering critique of the phenomenon at the San Francisco International Film Festival a few weeks ago, bemoaning studio executives’ lack of imagination and their fixation on big-budget franchise films. “Cinema as I define it, and as something that inspired me, is under assault by the studios,” he said. He likened the big studios to “Detroit before the bailout” and worried that the hegemony of the blockbuster is “a trajectory that I think is pretty difficult to reverse.”

But his warning may have come too late for this summer, when the studios seem to be headed over a blockbuster cliff. The numbers are pretty stark. According to Doug Creutz, the senior media and entertainment analyst for Cowen Company: “Of the expensive action and animated movies, we’ve never had a summer where more than nine did well, and often it’s fewer. This summer you’ve got 17 blockbusters coming out between May and July, 19 if you add August,” which he said is the most crowded release slate in recent memory. “Is this going to be by far the biggest summer box office in history? Maybe, if they’re all great movies, but it’s not likely.”

Studios have been shifting their resources toward what are variously called blockbuster, event, or tent pole movies for years — the big-budget movies intended to help studios make up for their less profitable films. By and large, the strategy seems to have paid off. “We haven’t seen many tent poles blow up,” Michael Nathanson, a media analyst and managing director at Nomura. “But this summer could be the breaking point. There may be some big write-offs on some of these films.”

The dominance of the blockbuster may have many directors, writers and producers wringing their hands, but it has been warmly welcomed by moviegoing audiences and Wall Street. Of the 15 movies that have grossed more than $1 billion, all were big-budget and all but three (“Avatar,” “Titanic” and “Alice in Wonderland”) were franchise films. And only “Avatar” could be considered original material. Disney’s “Iron Man 3,” the quintessential franchise blockbuster, opened two weeks ago and on Thursday joined the billion-dollar ranks.

(Curiously, once the figures are adjusted for inflation, none of the Top 10 grossing films of all time were part of a franchise, though all were big-budget event films at the time. The top grossing movie, adjusted for inflation, is “Gone with the Wind.”)

Mr. Soderbergh readily conceded that blockbuster films, despite often scathing reviews from critics, seem to have “the full support of the audience.” While waiting at Kennedy Airport, he said, he saw “a guy on the other side of the aisle in front of me and he pulls out his iPad to start watching stuff.” Mr. Soderbergh went on: “I’m curious to see what he’s going to watch — he’s a white guy in his mid-30s. And I begin to realize what he’s done is he’s loaded in half a dozen action sort of extravaganzas and he’s watching each of the action sequences. He’s skipping over all the dialogue and the narrative. This guy’s flight is going to be five and a half hours of just mayhem porn.”

The blockbuster phenomenon is also pleasing Wall Street and investors because it means that the big studios are making fewer movies, yet commanding a larger share of total box-office revenue. “It’s been a smart strategy,” Mr. Nathanson said. “They’re making fewer films and controlling costs and they’ve stabilized the industry. This is appealing to Wall Street. It’s a coherent strategy that can be articulated to investors. The studios may not be growing much, but they’re not the declining problem children they were after the DVD bubble popped.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/18/business/as-hollywood-leans-on-blockbusters-the-flop-looms.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Hollywood’s Box Office Heroes Proving Mortal in China

April 22, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Last year, helped by a high-level deal that expanded the number of foreign films for release there, American blockbusters like “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” led the Chinese box office for 23 straight weeks, and received a disproportionately large share of their ticket sales from China.

More big releases were on the way, and the floodgates in the world’s second-largest film market appeared ready to swing open.

But something unexpected happened on the way to the bank: demand tapered off sharply.

In the first quarter this year, ticket sales for American movies in China — including films as prominent as “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” and “Skyfall” — fell 65 percent, to about $200 million, while sales for Chinese-language films rose 128 percent, to well over $500 million, according to the online publication Chinafilmbiz.com.

The weekend brought one sign of a rebound for Hollywood: “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” from Paramount Pictures, took in a respectable $33 million at the Chinese box office, matching roughly 75 percent of its ticket sales when it opened in the North American market on March 28.

But if the preferences of Chinese moviegoers continue to shift to domestic releases, China will maintain control of its own film market just as Hollywood was ready to seize it.

When “Iron Man 3,” an action heavyweight from Disney’s Marvel Entertainment, opens in coming days, it will slug it out with a small, domestically made romance called “So Young,” about a Chinese woman who reconnects with her college sweethearts. It is hard to be certain which film will be the underdog.

In fact, a succession of domestic Chinese films, including the comedies “Lost in Thailand” (a close cousin to “The Hangover Part II”) and “Finding Mr. Right” (China’s answer to “Sleepless in Seattle”), have unexpectedly clobbered expensive American fare like “Oz the Great and Powerful,” “The Hobbit” and “Jack the Giant Slayer” on Chinese screens.

The abrupt shift toward local favorites may have something to do with market manipulation. As American films gained traction in China last year, alarmed officials imposed an unusual two-month blackout that kept most foreign movies off screens during the summer season.

They also forced “The Dark Knight Rises” and “The Amazing Spider-Man” into direct competition with each other, and promised to pay theater owners an annual bonus if their receipts from domestic films matched revenue from foreign films for the year.

Still, executives and China watchers here suspect something potentially more threatening to Hollywood: a rapid evolution in the tastes of Chinese audiences, which are quickly turning away from the spectacles American companies have assumed they crave.

“I know what they don’t seem to want,” said Rob Cain, who runs Chinafilmbiz.com and is a consultant to producers and others doing business in China. “They don’t want the same old thing, over and over again, the action blockbusters with lots of explosions.”

The apparent shift is helping Chinese films like “Lost in Thailand,” which was an eye-opener last year when it posted more than $200 million in ticket sales in China. It surpassed “Avatar” to become the country’s best seller in terms of total admissions (though not revenue, as “Avatar” had heavy 3-D sales at premium prices). It led a string of Chinese-language hits that outstripped Hollywood films like “Stolen,” “Jack Reacher,” and even “A Good Day to Die Hard,” which briefly claimed the top spot in China.

Richard L. Gelfond, chief executive of the Imax Corporation, whose screens in China play both American-made and Chinese-made films, said he was confident that viewed over a long period of time, “China is opening up to Hollywood.”

But lately, Mr. Gelfond acknowledged, the shift toward domestic films has been “dramatic.” In early 2012, he said, American studios did well in China partly because the available Chinese films lacked audience appeal. Later, he noted, Chinese officials delayed the release of “Skyfall” and “The Hobbit” until those films had played elsewhere, which allowed video pirates time to put a dent in the potential audience.

Mr. Gelfond said he expected American films to rebound in China over the next few months, as more of them are released on or near their opening dates elsewhere in the world.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/22/business/media/hollywoods-box-office-heroes-proving-mortal-in-china.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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