December 7, 2024

‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ Aims for World Audience

“Star Trek” may be one of the biggest franchises in Hollywood history, but it has one surprising flaw: Captain Kirk doesn’t travel well. Foreign moviegoers for one reason or another have never fully embraced the swaggering Starfleet captain and his oddball crew. That is a major problem for Paramount Pictures now that international ticket sales account for up to 80 percent of a movie’s total gross.

A 2009 effort to revive the Star Trek movie series was a smash hit in North America, taking in about $280 million, after adjusting for inflation. But box-office analysts were deeply disappointed by the film’s foreign box office total of $139 million.

So Paramount has revved up its engines to warp speed for “Into Darkness,” which is already playing in some countries and will arrive in the United States on May 17. The Viacom-owned studio has increased its international marketing budget for the film by 35 percent over that for the 2009 film, asked stars to do an unusual amount of globetrotting and staggered the release dates to shield “Into Darkness” from competition.

Paramount’s bid to draw in more foreign ticket buyers even extended to casting decisions and the script, which turns on a more terrestrial story. “Into Darkness” finds the Enterprise crew called back home, where a terror force has infiltrated the Starfleet organization.

“The team has really been in the weeds, so to speak, going country by country and looking at every possible opportunity,” Brad Grey, Paramount’s chairman, said of the studio’s marketers in particular. “On a profit level, focusing on your shareholders, this is now how detailed you have to be on pictures of this scope and scale.”

Mr. Grey added, “Between J. J. outdoing himself and our efforts to build up our global distribution system, I’m very, very confident that the franchise is finally going to live up to its potential.” In 2009, “Star Trek” may have been a disappointment outside North America, but it also represented enormous progress. The preceding film in the franchise, “Star Trek: Nemesis” in 2002, took in a grand total of $31 million overseas.

But Paramount and its financing and producing partner, Skydance Productions, are counting on “Into Darkness” to do much better — perhaps delivering a 100 percent increase over the 2009 movie’s overseas gross. The studio has little room for error. Hollywood’s major studios will release as many as eight movies each over the summer, but Paramount will issue only two: “Into Darkness” and the risky “World War Z,” an intense zombie thriller starring Brad Pitt.

Pure science fiction has long been a difficult sell overseas, where audiences generally prefer space movies that have more fantasy elements, like “Star Wars.” The Star Trek movies, at least until Mr. Abrams came along to direct the 2009 version, also lacked eye-popping visual effects, leaning more on makeup tricks and drama on the bridge of the Enterprise.

Six “Star Trek” television shows, all notable for their kitsch, have been dubbed and distributed overseas, creating a solid (albeit older) fan base. But the TV show also hurts Paramount’s big-screen efforts, adding to a perception that the franchise is an impenetrable universe of characters and story lines.

The 2009 film, which featured a young cast but no proven stars, was in some ways torpedoed by Paramount’s own distribution decisions. Four other big releases — “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” “Angels Demons,” “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian” and “Terminator Salvation” — all opened in the same period, giving “Star Trek” little time to find its way.

This time, Paramount has decided on a staggered rollout, releasing “Into Darkness” in Australia, Germany, Britain and Mexico before the United States and Canada, and holding the movie back elsewhere. It will not arrive in Japan until August, for instance. Unlike the 2009 chapter, “Into Darkness” is planned for distribution in China. All told, Paramount will stage red carpet premieres in seven countries.

Cast members and producers have been crisscrossing the globe for months as part of advance marketing efforts. Chris Pine, who plays Capt. James Kirk, was dispatched to Tokyo in December to unveil a nine-minute trailer. More recently, Bryan Burk, an “Into Darkness” producer, went on an 11-city foreign tour — South America, Asia, Europe — to show 35 minutes of the movie, almost a third of it, to journalists and exhibitors.

Paramount went out of its way to cast foreign actors, in particular adding the British star Benedict Cumberbatch as the villain. And writers tried to produce a self-contained plot that would be exciting to loyal Star Trek fans but not put off people who know nothing about the franchise, which now includes 12 movies. (Research showed that foreign ticket buyers viewed the 2009 film as “too Trekkie and too sci-fi,” in the words of one Paramount executive.)

“Classically people think that it’s a space film, but this one is a very earthbound story,” Mr. Pine recently said at a convention for theater owners.

Judging by advance excerpts Paramount has shown, the studio has added some superhero touches; Mr. Pine, for instance, dons a space suit and zooms through an asteroid field in a sequence that resembles an “Iron Man” moment.

The “Iron Man” movies, as Paramount knows, having distributed the first two, are enormously popular overseas.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/03/business/media/star-trek-into-darkness-aims-for-world-audience.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

‘Django’ Expected Back in Chinese Theaters

One person who was briefed on plans for the film said late Friday that it would undergo additional cuts to qualify it for the Chinese film market, following some slight earlier changes to its presentation of bloodshed. The person was not authorized to speak publicly about the plans because of confidentiality strictures.

It remains unclear precisely when or how widely the film will eventually be seen in China.

On Thursday the movie was abruptly pulled from Chinese theaters on its first day of release, with little explanation. Moviegoers were told only that there was a technical problem with the film.

The decision to pull the movie at the last minute was surprising, considering the careful review process that international films undergo before they are cleared for release by Chinese censors.

The exact nature of the problem is not clear, though speculation in China and Hollywood has focused heavily on the film’s portrayal of nudity. Its longest scene with nudity is one in which a naked Django, played by Jamie Foxx, is tied up and about to be castrated. There is also a shorter scene in which a female character played by Kerry Washington is dragged naked from an underground chamber.

Mr. Tarantino’s films are known for their graphic violence, and news outlets and film blogs have widely reported that he had made revisions that included altering the color of the fake blood.

American studios have been eager to tap into China’s vast film market, now the second-largest in the world behind the United States. But they have become accustomed to, and occasionally frustrated by, the demands for revisions by Chinese censors as a condition for a film’s release.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/world/asia/django-expected-back-in-chinese-theaters.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Global Ticket Sales for Movies Rise 6%

LOS ANGELES — Movie ticket sales around the world rose 6 percent last year, to $34.7 billion from $32.6 billion in 2011, as China became the world’s second-biggest market for theatrical films after the United States, according to statistics released by the Motion Picture Association of America on Thursday.

The Chinese box office reached $2.7 billion in 2012, up 36 percent from the year-earlier total, to surpass Japan’s $2.4 billion, the association said.

Ticket sales in the United States and Canada, which are tallied together, rose 6 percent in 2012, to $10.8 billion, from $10.2 billion a year earlier, while sales in other countries posted a similar gain, increasing to $23.9 billion from $22.4 billion.

In the United States, the report noted, the increase was driven by a rise in the number of tickets sold, to about 1.36 billion from 1.28 billion a year earlier, while the average ticket price remained almost flat, at $7.96, compared to $7.93 a year earlier.

While the number of 3-D screens around the world rose about 27 percent in 2012, to 45,545 from 35,792 in 2011, the domestic box-office take from 3-D films was $1.8 billion, the same as in 2011, the association said.

In one of the report’s more intriguing statistics, 74 percent of the population of Illinois saw a movie in 2012 — the highest share in any of the 12 most populous states. That outstripped the percentage of moviegoers in Ohio, where only 59 percent reported seeing a film. The report did not identify a reason for the disparity.

California had the highest number of moviegoers, 26.8 million, more than twice the number in New York, which had 12.6 million.

Continuing a trend that has been visible since 2007, the number of movies released in 2012 by members of the association — which include the major film studios — fell by 9 percent, to 128, from 141 a year earlier. The year’s total was down 37 percent from 2006, when the studios released 204 films.

The decline has been steepest among the studios’ specialty film subsidiaries, whose schedules are typically heavy with the sort of adult-oriented dramas that compete for awards. The specialty units released 34 films last year, down about 59 percent from a recent peak of 82 films in 2007.

Releases by companies that do not belong to the movie association rose 17 percent last year, to 549 from 468. The rising number of independent films includes many movies that play only on a small number of theatrical screens, depending for their revenue on video-on-demand and other home entertainment distribution.

The total number of films released theatrically in 2012 was 677, compared with 609 in 2011 and 455 in 2003, the association said.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/22/business/media/global-ticket-sales-for-movies-rise.html?partner=rss&emc=rss