DP/30 Sundance – A Prophet (Un Prophet)

Director Jacques Audiard & actor Tahar Rahim (and translator)

mp3 of the interview

Sundance's First Actual Sale & Coverage Catch-Up

Lionsgate bought Buried for $3.2m. Sounds like their hope to relive Open Water… low-budget, all performance and concept.. not really commercial, but a clever enough campaign will trick people and based on reviews, they may actually enjoy what they get suckered into seeing. Seems like a movie that has found the right home.
Larry Gross on…
Jack Goes Boating, Hesher, Winter’s Bone, Four Lions
Full Disclosure
Enter The Void
A Prophet (Un Prophet)
John Wildman on…
Douchebag & The Company Men

Avatar = Titanic x The Dark Knight

Up until now, box office analysts have had three kinds of mega-movies to figure out. There are the speed demons, there are – and there are only a couple of examples – the Christmas plodders (which only seem like plodders because we haven’t seen any $100m openings in December yet), and there are the films that are either majority-domestic or majority-foreign.
The highest form of the third group is Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. $885m worldwide, $688 of it from overseas… a remarkable 78% of the gross. We will see more of this. 2012 and The Da Vinci Code were also in the 70s internationally.
Avatar is hovering right under 70%, a few percent more domestic than Titanic. Avatar will likely end up in the low 70s, a reflection of the expansion of markets internationally since Titanic… and all the more impressive since pumped-up 3D revenues represent less than half the international tickets sold.
But what is fascinating about Avatar is that it is doing both what The Dark Knight did domestically (and The Potters and Pirates 2 and Spidey 3, etc did worldwide) AND what Titanic did. It didn’t open as huge or speed to $300 million as fast… and it won’t hold as long as high as Titanic.
But as a hybrid of the mega-wide-release, the international phenom, and supermuscular legs, it is a new breed. (And the 3D money doesn’t hurt either.)
We are six weekends – 38 days – into this ride. Titanic‘s ride was 38 weeks.
And in spite of being the #2 all-time domestic grosser and #1 international grosser already, we’re looking at another Avatar drop of under 20% domestically. It’s insane. If the film keeps holding at 20% a week, we’re looking at another $200 million at the domestic box office BEFORE Alice In Wonderland takes over a large chunk of the 3D screens. (And don’t be surprised if Avatar makes a significant 3D-only return in April.)
That would be more than $750m domestic. $800m is not unlikely.
Internationally, it is already the #1 film of all time… and that is with a much smaller percentage of 3D tickets being sold overseas. And it had a $107 million weekend overseas this weekend. So are we looking at another $250 million… $300 million… $400 million? More?
By the way, the reason the Chinese thing is remotely significant is that China – about 90% 2D screens – has been one of the top six international markets for the film so far and Avatar is the highest grossing film ever in China.
The first $2 billion movie is now inevitable. But will Avatar raise the bar as high as Titanic did a dozen years ago? $2.5 billion is not unthinkable, given this run.
That would be a $650 million improvement on the Titanic gross.
For a little perspective, only 42 films in movie history have earned $650 million worldwide… period.
Of course, even at $2.5 billion, there will be whiners out there trying to diminish the achievement by slurring on about ticket pricing and inflation adjustment. Infantile. Or in the case of competing studios, business jealousy.
As far as the inflation bores go, as far as i can tell, the only $2 billion worldwide grossers, even adjuster are Titanic ($2.8b) and Star Wars ($2.2b).
And those ticket counters? 203 million tickets allegedly sold for Gone With The Wind (based on estimated pulled out of educated, but thin air). So let’s take the inaccurate $7.35 ticket price average of today. 203 million tickets sold would be $1.492 billion. Add $3.50 to 80% of tickets sold (all overly generous) for another $568m. So… $2.06 billion, broadly, would be equal to Gone With The Wind. Fair enough? When it happens, will you please shut the f**k up about the 3D bump?
Seriously, folks. A movie that more than DOUBLES the worldwide take of all but one film in movie history. You have to have big ol’ blinders on or be the world’s greatest contortionist to bend that into “just another big grosser.”
People make excuses for all kinds of movies, all the time. Avatar needs no excuses.

Weekend Box Office by Klady – Avaseis

What was most striking about the weekend numbers, aside from Avatar’s ongoing worldwide rampage, was what seems to be an actual Globes bump. Yeah… gross. But estimated holds of 29% for Holmes, 25% for Complicated, 20% for Blind Side, 23% for George In the Air, and even small-count holds from Young Victoria, Single Man, Broken Embraces and Crazy Heart seem to be getting a sweep of people going down the list and checking out what they haven’t yet seen before Oscar nominations.
Holmes, which was down 40% last weekend in 3 days, even with the holiday, is down just 29% this week, even while losing screens. I don’t see any other explanation other than Downey winning an unexpected (and ridiculous) Globe last Sunday. And while Meryl Streep has won stuff for Julie & Julia, the only Streep performance in the marketplace is It’s Complicated. Bullock & Clooney are less surprising.
Legion did okay… it hurt Book of Eli a little, though Eli’s hold is pretty good. The Tooth Fairy has to be a bit disappointing for a hot-streaking Fox, though if the kids who did see it liked it, word of mouth could do them quite well. We’ll see.
Extraordinary Measures, like all openers, is a failure of marketing more than anything else. Yes, the footage in the ads and trailer looked horrible visually. (There is some debate over whether the movie itself looks as bad… I haven’t seen it, so I can’t tell you.) But it was everything feeling low-end, from outdoor to ads. I am a fan of Debbie Miller, who is there from Fox and WB, but you have to have a team of the highest level to take a movie like this beyond what it is… a heavy-casted TV movie. Universal dumped Lorenzo’s Oil, a movie I love, never going as wide as 500 screens, probably finding the same problem with targeting a market that wants to see parents fighting for sick kids.
Avatar. Well. Time for a new entry…

SAG Awards

No surprises at all.
Winners after the jump… for the sake of avoiding spoilers for late West Coast viewers…

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Friday Estimates by Klady – Avatar vs The Wing Men

Legion is, typically, a Sony Screen Gems piece that got dragged around for a bit… and the marketing dept. opened the thing to the mid-20s anyway.
Not so much luck for CBS Films’ Extraordinary Measures, which is going to struggle to see a cume of $20 million domestically. (It may actually improve overseas, with the value of Fraser & Ford increasing.) Terrible campaign and a movie whose clips all suggest that it was made on sets from ER on the weekends.
For me, the biggest surprise is the poor opening of The Tooth Fairy. Yes, the Friday number will have a nice multiple for the weekend with as much as $12 million. But after a $23m start for The Game Plan and $18.6m for Are We There Yet?, this number kinda sucks. From my perspective – and it may be limited – Fox didn’t sell the entire story arc, just certain gags… and none of them were that great. The Rock in a tutu was just not enough.
Oh… and that little Avatar thing. Another weekend record – for Weekend 6 – though it’s about to start falling behind Titanic in this stat, probably next weekend. It’s been running ahead of Dark Knight domestically for about a week as the fastest grosser ever, right now about $45 million ahead for 36 days. $1.75 billion worldwide will be passed this weekend… which means it will have doubled the gross of any movie not in the Top 20 all-time, including Spider-Man and Trannys 2. It also puts the film less than $100m away from Titanic. In fact, it may pass Titanic’s international record this weekend… and that record was a full $500 million more than any other movie before, putting it well past adjusted gross and 3D bump range, especially since international grosses for the older movies were tiny by percentage of total gross in comparison to the post-70s era.

DP/30 – Avatar actors Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang

Zoe Saldana
mp3 of the interview

Stephen Lang Sneak Peek


Stephen Lang
mp3 of the interview

Box Office Hell – A6

Bad Idea & Bad Exclusive

1. Roman Polanski directing God of Carnage – Rarely has a great director seemed more wrong for great material. This is a dark social satire of people exposing themselves bit by bit… a comic variation on the disastrous Polanski take on Death And The Maiden. Really, Mike Nichols should direct it. Nora Ephron would be a fascinating choice. But Polanski? No.
2. Vulture Exclusive: Fox

Sundance – John Wildman Reports…

Sundance, I need you. We need you.
However, I am also well aware that I and others that feel like I do to one degree or another can become so enraptured with this experience and so wrapped up in these films that we can attribute greatness to them and heap the praise in larger and larger piles of gush (and gush can be hell to clean up) to the point where the hype has far outdistanced the reality of the film