Weekend Estimates by Dis-Klady-able He

Universal did what only Pixar, DreamWorks Animation, and Fox have done before… open an animated movie to $60 million. It is no small achievement. They did it by focusing on their target and using all those tools they have – especially with the NBC networks… though those tools, used in the wrong way or for the wrong property or both, guarantee nothing, as we have seen before – to make kids demand of those parents, “I want my minions!!!” As an adult, I found it all interesting, but I don’t really get it. But I was not the target.
If you wish to linger on the 3D Bump, this opening is about double the Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs launch, almost 4x Coraline, and if the estimate holds, a little more than Monsters vs Aliens. Only 3 of the 14 bigger animation openings were in 3D.
Regardless… a long way to go after opening weekend in the US. But the opening is an achievement for the Universal team.
The Sunday estimates on Twilight seem a bit high… not because of the World Cup, but because since last Monday’s holiday, Eclipse has been well off of New Moon every day. And If the Sunday estimate holds up, it will be a change of that trend. Look for this third film to fall back into line with New Moon next weekend. Nothing shocking there.
Predators did well. And word of mouth inside the niche seems pretty good. Even Rotten Tomatoes has it as “fresh.” So who knows? Could find its way to a shocking $100m… more likely around $80m domestic. As Fox prepares to go back to Alien as a stand-alone, this could well be a sequel-maker as well.
Toy Story 3‘s estimate pushes it past every animated film in domestic history, except for Shrek 2, which was, at the end of its run, the #2 domestic grosser in history, period. That target is about $100 million away… a long run. But a 26% drop in a weekend with a new $60 million-opening 3D animated film is another remarkable success for this film.
International for TS3 is a longer haul, as most of what are expected to be the biggest markets for this film are being held back because of the World Cup. But it still has over $200 million in that bank… and Nemo’s record of $529 million is far far away, nit not impossible.
$72,430 is a strong per-screen for The Kids Are All Right, though it’s always dangerous to project too much off of numbers like this, when the film has big commercial elements and a strong core of the interested in major metropolitan and gay communities. Keep watching that space.
The real “big stories” of the indie world right now are I Am Love and Winter’s Bone. Magnolia is around $1.5 million on Love, really based almost exclusively on interest in Tilda Swinton. Remarkable. And smart of SPC to relaunch Orlando into that. And Granik’s Bone is a buzz play for the art house interested. Jennifer Lawrence has gotten a lot of press. But it seems to be the art house film of the summer that people are being told by friends that they “have to see.”
Overall, small indie seems healthier than some think. City Island and The Secret in Their Eyes and clearly The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, though that feels like a franchise of some kind because of the book. We already have five $2 million documentaries after just four last year… all later in the year. The films’ grosses were bigger last year (including Michael Moore), but the diversity of interest of at least a few hundred thousand ticket buyers for five different docs is a good sign.
PS – There are a lot of unexpectedly small drops across the box office chart this weekend. Why? It’s even odder, given that last weekend’s 3-day had the benefit of a holiday Monday.
Well, for one thing, a Sunday July 4th slows down Sunday a bit. The other thing is, this is that summer lull when films have a little room to settle into niches. If you are willing to see an Sandler & Crew comedy, what else is there for you to see? Not a lot. Maybe Get Him To The Greek or The A-Team, but if you want goofy with a some smarmy, Grown Ups is where you are heading. Likewise, Knight & Day. Not a lot of other movies to satisfy that palate… though the film was, I still think, brutalized after it opened, lessening the ability to leg it out. And it certainly is working out for the indies, as noted above. If you aren’t a kid and aren’t interested in kid stuff, but you go to the movies weekly, you are probably heading to some arthouse titles that you may have skipped if there was something… anything… to see from the studios. (Inception is coming.)

BYOB Sunday

It’s almost time for the all-altered-state World Cup Final.
There is some beautiful irony that two of the most mellow nations on the planet got here. I can’t think of many countries I’d rather be celebrating in than these two.

Deals Getting Done

Miramax – Yawn.
After all the hype about this sale, I expect it to be one of the least significant events of the year. Apparently, Miramax will still roll out its last few films.
The story here will become interesting when the library is sold again.
MGM – Not so yawn.
Basically, the MGM creditors made their big move by deciding not to keep trying for a merger.
I expect the Lionsgate deal to get done in the next week for all the reasons I have previously mentioned… it’s too good a deal to not take and Lionsgate is probably in the best position to handle the big MGM-related product that they will now be funding. The opportunity is clear enough for Icahn to want it to happen. The only potential problem could come from Summit trying to outbid Lionsgate.
Essentially, look for Lionsgate (or whomever) to take on none of the MGM obligations, to commit about $700 million to The Hobbit, Bond, P&A for Bond, and a production fund of about $200 million for other films. Heck, they may even let Mary Parent hang around to shepherd the near-ready-to-go projects to “go.”
In any case, for the public, the only significance of this deal will be the greenlights on Hobbit and Bond.
Sadly for the MGM creditors, there won’t be a significant recovery on the library and that will remain by far the most significant asset of MGM, before and after this deal.
It will be fun to see Icahn get crazy when the boys at Lionsgate spend $100k to put their logo on top of that building in Century City though.

Friday Estimates By Despicable Klady

A slightly better than Shrek Forever After start for Despicable Me. Huzzah. Not only is this the biggest animation opening ever for Universal… it will likely be the highest domestic grossing animated film ever at Universal by the end of this weekend.
Twilight: Eclipse is quickly falling back into like with Twilight: New Moon. The 6-day opening left the new film about $15m domestic ahead of the New Moon at the end of Monday. Since then, Eclipse has been behind Moon’s numbers each day, including a $6.6m fall-off, second Friday vs second Friday. Eclipse’s domestic total could slip behind New Moon, relative date for relative date, by Tuesday or Wednesday this week.
Still, about 2/3rds of New Moon’s domestic gross was earned by the end of its second weekend and much the same is likely to be true of Eclipse. Should land between $280m – $310m domestic. But the real question remains international, where the big markets start opening this weekend.
Predators is the #2 opening in the franchise history, behind only the first Alien vs Predator, which did offer double trouble. Doubtful that Fox expected more.
Mighty Mighty Toy Story 3 is probably the most underreported story of the summer… perhaps because it is a positive box office story… booooo positive box office stories! It passed Shrek The Third to become the #4 best animated grosser in domestic history yesterday… #3 The Lion King will fall today… Alice in Wonderland will be passed as the #1 domestic film of 2010 on Sunday… and all-time domestic animation’s #2, Finding Nemo, will be vanquished no later than Monday. There will still be $100 million or so to go to catch Shrek 2, which may be beyond the grasp of the film… but you never know.
This is one of those happy occasions when “good” meets “4 quadrant” and the result is spectacular.
Adam Sandler cracks $100 million domestic for the 11th time in 12 years today. And The Last Airbender could get to the 9-figure mark by the end of the weekend, causing Roger Ebert to become The First Twitterbender.
Cyrus expanded from 77 screens to 200 and looks to have its first million dollar weekend. This is the tipping point for most films in this kind of release pattern. It could cruise to $4m or $5m from here or they could try to make a big leap. Time (and Steve Gilula) will tell.

Box Office Hell – 10/9/10

Responding To Ted Hope's Schindler List For Indie Film, Pt 1 of 2

Ted Hope is an important producer and has become even more important to the community as he has become a strong and constant voice in the conversation about the future of the industry.
A few days ago, he published “38 More Ways The Film Industry Is Failing Today”
Did I mention… I often disagree with Ted’s perspective on things?
He’s a very smart guy, but I think he gets tangled up in his good intentions with some ideas and is a bit pie in the sky on others. On some things – maybe more than this piece will suggest – we are in agreement.
Anyway… I have responded to his ideas, by number. This is the first 19 items…
Here is a pop-up of Ted’s entry, in case you want to have his list open next to mine.
1. It is a sad notion that movies are not enough to get people to pay to go see movies

Spoiler-Free Review – Inception

The most surprising thing about Inception is how complicated it is not.

The dream world has rules. And they are spelled out in the first act of the film about as clearly as you could ever request of a film. It’s well handled, though this may be the new Basil Exposition film of the decade. There is a load of dialogue trying to make sure that you know exactly where you are and what is going on… except for the few moments when the film really wants to surprise you. The bulk of the lifting here falls to Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page.

At its heart, Inception is a 60s heist movie. Your hero needing to do one last job to get out from under The Life. A gathering of expert co-conspirators, who seem like misfits but are geniuses in their specific realms. The laying out of The Plan, leaving just enough out to keep the audience wondering. There are even a load of bank vaults, though the vaults are inside of dreams.

And that is what makes this movie more than The Italian Job with bigger names and better scenery… dreams.

Dreams.

Much more intriguing espionage in the mind than a blonde at a bar manipulating the mark. And for me, the most interesting conversation about the mind comes from Tom Hardy’s Eames, who is the only character who really touches on subtext in the entire film… which sometimes seems odd for a movie about dream manipulators. Eames is given the job of speaking to the philosophy of leaving something behind instead of stealing something.

The other element of rare subtext in the movie is the music that sometimes plays mid-dream – you’ll know why when you see the film – for which Nolan used Edith Piaf… which is really weird. I took it as a reference to Cotillard’s character, but it’s one of those elements that seems too bent to keep because of her so famously playing Piaf. Likewise, Hans Zimmer and Nolan should have probably reconsidered some of the score after hearing how Robbie Robertson put together modern classical for Shutter Island.

In any case, being inside of dreams offers Christopher Nolan: The Director, the chance to go wild with the visual palate of the film. And he does. Yes, it’s very Matrix. But Nolan gives it his own style. When, late in the film, a door opens and, for a second, I though we were visiting The Architect, I was not the only one to let a gasp/laugh out in the theater in which I saw the film. But it wasn’t him. And the moment felt more like a Tarkovsky riff than a Matrix homage.

Epic landscapes, an endlessly shifting world, sometimes Escher, sometimes DeMille. I was surprised to be reminded that Nolan is not a great director of action. His skills are with bigger visual ideas than cars crashing or chasing. Nolan is an IMAXian. Even an image like the clown mask being held on the street by a grubby looking thief that has not yet been identified as The Joker… it’s familiar, yet not… and make giant on the screen, has remarkable power.

As you watch the film and even thinking back to The Dark Knight, it is apparent that the director who Nolan worships is not Kubrick or Tarkofsky or The Wachowskis, but Michael Mann. The clothes, the gun blasts, the cool air around the good/bad men, and the general view of women as fantastic furniture, even though Nolan: The Writer likes to have women being tough as men at times as well. But Nolan is more ambitious visually than Mann ever has been. Mann is a writer first… Nolan a director.

While we are nearby, let me harp on the one real failure of the film. Marion Cotillard is, as she was in Public Enemies, gorgeous wallpaper. It seems that on La vie en Rose, she found the one man who didn’t see her as an object, and he helped her win a well-deserved Oscar playing an often ugly woman. But she still isn’t a full actor in English. And even more than Michelle Williams in Shutter Island – a movie that you will hear a lot about in comparison to this one… fairly – she fills the space she is meant to fill, gives it her best, looks great, and that’s about that. She is – and this is no spoiler- a memory in this film. So there is a degree of ethereal that fits perfectly. But because the screenplay never really builds her character out, even as her story is eventually laid out, there is never the emotional weight coming from her and her relationship with Leo’s Cobb that blows the movie up to the next level. Her character is part of the structure. And when the movie clearly wants the audience to feel deeply, some will, but I suspect that many, like myself, will wish to feel more… much more.

I believe that the lack of emotion in the film – as has been a hallmark of all of Nolan’s films – is why some people are confusing it for something in the realm of Kubrick. It’s nothing like Kubrick. Remember, Kubrick’s dream film is Eyes Wide Shut… and he never does anything more than hint that you are in Doctor Bill’s dream. There is no real connection to The Shining, which if it were at all connected, would be an entire movie about the Marion Cotillard character in the real world. (If you haven’t seen Inception, don’t hurt your head trying to figure that out.)

But I digress…

One more negative point before getting back to the pleasures of the film…

The Nolans need a good and trusted script editor, because they just can’t stop themselves from overweighting their third acts. In the case of Inception, in a term you will understand best after having seen the film, they go one layer deeper than they need to and as a result, big holes start showing up in the narrative for no really good reason. Writers who are as skilled and intelligent as The Nolans always have an answer, between themselves, to “What the hell was that all about?” questions. And I am sure they have those answers well thought out in this case. But while another viewing may clarify a detail or two, I don’t expect it will suddenly seem necessary to make the last 30 minutes so much more complicated than the rest of the film. I know it makes for a great circus moment… but they had enough to have a great moment/moments without going quite as far down the rabbit hole of complication.

It’s the old Hitchcock thing about allowing the audience to participate, projecting, rightly or wrongly, about what’s coming next. The Nolan’s are masters of this… until they seem compelled to add a bunch of new vegetables to the stew without enough time to fully cook them. It’s not that they aren’t the highest quality veggies. It’s that a full, beautifully cooked meal is laid out in front on you, and you are eating at a pace, knowing you want the great desert and after-dinner drink and cigar that will top off the meal, and all of a sudden, you are presented with more sides that you feel compelled to eat, but you know are going to stuff you past the point of discomfort.

In any case…

Inception works quite well as a heist movie. By the end of the second act, it was a bit shocking that the film felt so complex, yet was so traditionally structured, aside from the dream idea. It would be unreasonable to say it is just a heist film. There are a lot of beautiful things flying around, often in slow motion. But the core is the core… and that core works better than anything attached to it.

DiCaprio is solid from beginning to end. But he is a little stuck in the Jim Phelps role. He has a side arc of his own, with Cotillard, but it’s really a side arc.

For me, it’s Hardy’s Eames who made the strongest impression in the film. He doesn’t always get a lot of time to stretch out, but every second of screen time is well used.

Ellen Page is in a role that could have been filled by a hundred different types, meaning that based on the character we see and her dialogue, the role surely could have been played by Morgan Freeman or Mark Ruffalo or Jay Baruchel or Queen Latifah. Page makes it her own and it’s a pleasure to watch. She doesn’t fit neatly into anything she has done before and she navigates a lot of expositional dialogue without ever giving in to it. She just stays focused, finds a motivation for the line, and pushes forward.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt gets to GQ it up and also never fights to steal scenes… he just owns his space on screen with cool and when ingenuity is called for, you believe his character is completely ready to deliver.

Ken Watanabe continues to be a strong screen presence in everything he does. But he ends up – like Michael Caine and Cillian Murphy here – being a somewhat passive piece of this movie.

I love seeing the supporting team in Nolan movies. Dileep Rao is always good. Great to see Pete Postlethwaite and even more, to see Tom Berenger. I’m betting there will be many conversations about Lukas Haas’ role in the film after the movie is over… and half the people won’t even realize he was in the movie. (He is. And it’s an important role.)

The thing about a really good heist movie is that there is always a strong clock. And in the case of Inception, Nolan has created one of the great clock devices of all time… dreams. When dreams start to deteriorate, it’s a thing of beauty. When you come to understand the time issues, terrific.

There is more to discuss, but better to wait until people have seen the film. I’m not 100% sure how I wrote 1500 words without spoilers, but here we are.

Go.

Look At The Size Of The Name On That Girl!!!

BYOB Humpday 77

The Inception review will land on Thursday.
Here’s some space to run in…

DP/30 – The Kids Are All Right writer/director Lisa Cholodenko

mp3 of the interview

Rebranding The Miramax Sale

It’s one of those great moments… a reason why Hollywood can be happy that two aggressive self-promoters, trying to wrest control of the old territory of The Trades from each other, are taking advice from opposite teams on the same story. It creates some beautiful transparency.
On one side is Sharon Waxman, who is on the “Disney is selling Miramax to known thief Ron Bergstein” tack. Her EXCLUSIVE from Monday is headlined, “Bergstein Nears Miramax Purchase from Disney” and offers, “Tutor and two other unidentified equity partners.”
Cut to today and Nikki Finke’s EXCLUSIVE, “Former Disney CFO Richard Nanula Now Leading Ron Tutor’s Miramax Negotiations; “Bullet Train” Deal Could Close In A Week; Disney May Get Its $700M Asking Price”
And a previously unidentified equity partner comes out of the closet… Colony Capital.
But the lede tells you exactly why this story was fed to Nikki: “Forget the bizarre involvement of David Bergstein, and Morgan Creek’s James Robinson, and even Rob lowe.”
Later she adds, “he was being advised by two of Hollywood’s most controversial and disliked figures: not just David Bergstein but also his good friend, Morgan Creek’s James Robinson. I understand that both men are being pushed aside now.”
And there you can find the real nugget in all this… Disney doesn’t want to be saddled with Bergstein as The Buyer. He has real union problems from which Disney wants to stay far, far away. And the idea they are selling a $700 million library to a guy who owes a lot of people a lot of money – and even a lot of smaller sums of five-figures or less – is embarrassing.
Now, they get to sell to Richard Nanula and Colony Capital and yeah, Ron Tutor. Forget about those other guys… sideshow… not our problem.
It will be fascinating to see if Sharon and her source fires back with more BERGSTEIN screams.
Meanwhile, the effort to rebrand what has long been called “Bergstein trying to buy Miramax” as “former insider Richard Nanula trying to buy Miramax for a consortium of serious players who feel just as happy shoving Bergstein out” tells you that the deal is likely all but closed… except for winning the hearts and minds.

The Rest Of The NetFlix/Relativity Story

So color me (somewhat) wrong.
There are elements of the NetFlix/Relativity deal that I feel are still pretty much what I thought they were yesterday. But the thing that stuck out like a sore thumb to me

Harry Potter $s

Michael Fleming – still the only person at Deadline bylining major studio stories… Nikki’s been doing only press releases, minis, cable, and theme parks for almost a month now – ran a page from a financial distribution report from Harry Potter & The Order of The Phoenix, dated to September 30, 2009.
He asked around and got pretty normal responses.
One thing that struck me is that he makes it all sound like accounting trickery – “Phony Baloney Net Profit Accounting” – when it is really simple.
WB paid themselves a 22.5% distribution fee on the film.
WB paid itself interest on the “loan” to make the movie… some of which likely paid the much bigger line of credit for the studio at a much lower interest rate.
WB paid itself a 10% override on marketing.
That’s $211.8 million, $57.6 million, and $13.1 million.
That’s $300 million into the studio coffers on incoming revenues of $612 million. A pretty good haul.
The only thing missing is a massive charge for using the studio… because they shoot in England…. where part of the payment for the studio space probably kicks back to WB somehow.
The only thing, of those three, that is really “unfair” by normal standards is the distribution fee, which at market rates for a movie like this would be max 9%… and the studio paid itself 2.5x that amount. A “fair” distribution fee would be about $85 million. The studio took $211m.
But that’s not an accounting trick… that’s getting away with doing business. There is nothing particularly clever or underhanded… it’s just extreme. And, as Michael Fleming points out, as the sole investor in the film, how they split out the revenues is really up to them.
The one piece of this puzzle that puzzles me is the lack of any gross participants. That means that JK Rowling’s deal is done in some other way. That could explain the one other massive line of $316 million for “production and/or advance,” including $7.8 million under that heading between September 2008 and September 2009. Is she getting an “advance” as a budget line? The 9/08-9/09 year’s “advance” is almost exactly 20% of the total defined gross for that period, so that kinda makes sense. But just guessing, really.
Anyway, always interesting to digest this stuff… even if I lean towards using it as background instead of publishing private documents that are not of any direct news value.

BYOB For The 6th Of July!

The Continuing Adventures Of Billionaire Kavanuagh

Oy.
Ryan Kavanaugh is at it again.
This time, he is taking his Relativity product to NetFlix instead of pay-TV.
Hmmmm….how exactly does this pay? How much is NetFlix playing in order to try to change their future from being a passive gateway to being a programmer? Can they really be paying $1 million a title… which is still – even with pay-TV deals getting smaller – significantly less than major studios are paid by the major pay-tv companies?
No one who Kavanaugh called to hype the deal (Deadline – TheWrap) seems to have an answer (or asked the question).
Essentially, this deal is based in failure. It is the failure of the studio world to keep the prices for their movies up as high as they were with pay-tv for years. And it is about failure for Kavanaugh, as he will only control and put on NetFlix movies for which he/Relativity hasn’t found studio distribution. I don’t foresee any studio doing a distribution deal with any movie – other than a straight service deal – that doesn’t have pay-tv rights attached.
it seems to me that the bar at non-major-studio pay-TV is now so low that NetFlix can reach to compete and Kavanaugh can rationalize this new idea. But this is also why the notion that this move will intimidate pay-tv companies is silly. The biggest of them are now more in the original content business than the movie business. That’s where the spending and the profits live. They still fill a lot of hours across multiple channels with movies, and indeed, use exclusive movies to sell their brands. But NetFlix isn’t anywhere near competing with HBO and Showtime in filling its “channel.”
NetFlix’s only window into studio pay-tv until now – which they use to drive much of their streaming success – is the Starz deal. Basically, Starz’ deals in recent years have included streaming, which they have partnered on with NetFlix. But… Disney is already pushing hard to get out… and they will surely be followed by Sony in two or three years when their deal is up for renegotiation. Without Starz delivering recent studio product (anything less than 4 years old or older) there will no major studios streaming newiish product through NetFlix at all. And remember, Starz paid virtually nothing for streaming rights, as there was no market for creating revenue with streaming even a year or two ago when the last deal (Sony) was done. Even if they can keep a studio under their banner, the price is on the rise.
But accentuating the positive, it seems like Kavanaugh is building IFC or Magnolia with more expensive films that he is paying for in full. Small distribution, VOD, streaming, DVD. The first question is whether more people will “tune in” and stream a Mark Wahlberg film on NetFlix than are tuning in to Magnolia previews on HDNet. The second question is whether there is a single person on the planet who will join NetFlix to watch Relativity Media titles as they roll out?
Hollywood’s favorite question about Kavanaugh is how many hundreds of millions more he can lose before he is no longer in business. This NetFlix deal, while smelling like future spirit, is really just a new way to lose money. The hope is that it is, indeed, a bridge to the future and Kavanaugh will make his money back and then some in The Future.
On some level, you have to love this guy’s bravado and NetFlix’s awareness of and unwillingness to just accept the fact that they are 3 – 5 years from being Blockbuster. On another level, you have to wonder how to get into this guy’s pocket because he throws around his massive funds like a drunken sailor on leave. Cha-ching!
What will this madman think of next?
And how long can he last?