By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Kenneth Branagh: Charity case?
Kenneth Branagh‘s adaptation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, writes Variety’s Adam Dawtrey, was not greenlit with the expectation that Mr. Branagh’s work could make a profit. “You might think a $27 million movie of [it], updated to the First World War, wouldn’t stand much chance of making a profit… The producers… want to make absolutely certain it doesn’t… The Mozart movie, conceived and directed by Kenneth Branagh with a libretto by Stephen Fry, is being bankrolled by a grant from the Peter Moores Foundation. As a charity, it’s not allowed to make profits.” But Producers-like, did they examine Branagh’s filmmography and find a history of failure? Dawtrey jokes that possibility away in his opening graf.
Deeper in, he explains, “The film has been set up to ensure that any upside flows to the distributors, rather than to the foundation… Sales agent Celluloid Dreams is offering buyers an unusual deal—the better the film performs, the bigger their share of the backend. Once the distrib recoups its minimum guarantee and [other] costs, overages are initially split 50/50 with the production company, rising to 90/10 in favor of the distrib. “In my 20 years of experience as a producer, it’s the first time I’ve seen a film financed that way,” says the pic’s French producer Pierre-Olivier Bardet. In this way, the foundation hopes to recoup some of the production cost without actually slipping into the black.” $25 million of the budget comes comes from the Littlewoods retail and gambling concern, and “the charitable intent of Sir Peter Moores, the 73-year-old Liverpool-based patron of the arts… is to bring opera to the masses. Over the years, his foundation has funded roughly 50 recordings of operas in English.”
