RIght Wing Fantasies About Paul Ryan… by way of Hitler

Bury The Dead: 47 Ronin

Universal sent a crystal-clear signal this morning – all the while absolutely, positively insisting that 47 Ronin will open December 25, 2013 – that 47 Ronin is in deep trouble and will not open before 2014.

They were forced because it was time to launch marketing for a February 2013 release. And since that wasn’t happening – they filled the slot with a Seth Gordon comedy called Identity Thief – they had to announce something. So they claim a December 25, 2013 release date.

But there is virtually no chance in hell that they are releasing 47 Ronin for Christmas 2013. This is a movie they are trying to keep off the books for as long as jobs are being threatened and December happens to be the most expensive month in which to release a film. But look for a quiet move to January or February of 2014 herein the U.S. of A… if they release the film at all (probably under contractual obligation to do so eventually)… or for new management to make some other decision. The big question is what one can expect in terms of an international theatrical.

The last time I recall a movie being shoved around like this was another Universal title, the vaunted D-Tox/Eye See You. Shot in 1999, it was finally released worldwide in 2002, with the last stop being the U.S., in September of that year under the Eye See You title.

Mostly, I feel bad for the team at the studio. 47 Ronin is (yet) another bloated production that is being disappeared as quietly as possible, lest it sink the, uh, battleship. Historically, when studios start trying to push off their losers instead of bellying up to the bar and eating their gruel in a quick way in a strategically-chosen quarter, the problems don’t go away, they pile up.

Disney may have had two big financial problems with The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and John Carter… but they released the movies on schedule, braced for the hits, and kept moving forward (albeit with bodies thrown overboard for each film). In the case of 47 Ronin, the ability to rationalize the moves as an effort to somehow improve the product is over. Now it’s like one of those cartoon bombs where Wile E. Coyote runs with it as gunpowder falls out of the top and the lit flame chases the bomb… until it eventually goes off behind a rock and Wile E. comes out, stunned and covered in soot.

Sigh…

(edit… added sentence… 11:19a)

DP/30: The Odd Life of Timothy Green, co-writer/director Peter Hedges

One of my favorite director interviews. Hedges has been “true indie” and big studio and he has a lot of interesting things to say about a career in and outside of this industry.

DP/30: The Odd Life Of Timothy Green, actor Joel Edgerton

Trailer: Seven Psychopaths

Will this be the most beloved film to come out of Toronto this year? CBS Films picked up this Film Four movie for release in October.

DP/30: Jaws Blu-ray, screenwriter Carl Gottlieb

Pretty sure this is the windiest DP/30 in history… not the conversation, actual wind.

But Gottlieb is great and tells the story of coming to LA from San Francisco with The Committee and becoming part of Spielberg’s world… and we circle back to discuss The Jerk and other films as well.

Weekend Estimates by Born Klady

Well… Total Recall‘s estimated 68% drop tells us everything we need to know about The Slump and Aurora and The Olympics and Twitter BUzz… People Hate Shitty Movies.

Bourne is obviously not a home run right out of the box, but interestingly, the estimated $40.2m million start will be #10 or #11 of this summer… and Bourne Identity’s $27m launch in 2002 was the 12th best that summer. So there is some argument for equivalence. However, the awareness on the reboot is much higher than the awareness on the first of the franchise. I call it pretty even… the story will be clearer in time.

The Campaign can also be argued on both sides. You could do the “Will Ferrell opened this to almost the same number as Johnny Depp opened Dark Shadows.” Or you could argue that this is Ferrell’s weakest launch amongst his films that are not considered misses. You could compare Zach Z to John C Reilly unfavorably or you could just assume that the premise of this film is just not as attractive as the one offered for Step Brothers.

Surely, steadily, The Dark Knight Rises is proving to be no box office disappointment on any level. Yes, it’s about $50m behind TDK at this point. It’s also the third fastest film in history getting to $350m and will be the 4th fastest to $400 million when it breaks that mark, probably Thursday. (Avatar accelerated at around this point in its run.) It looks like it’s headed to somewhere around $450m domestic, which puts it behind only Avatar, Titanic, Avengers, TDK, and Phantom Menace in terms of first-one gross. The foreign total should now be over $400m as well. As I said from the start, this film might suffer Sith Syndrome, a climactic franchise film that isn’t the top grosser of the franchise. But even if it is $950m…. nothing bad in that.

Hope Springs, Sony wants you to know, was cheap. They were in for under $20m, picking up the film from Mandate and the remnants of MGM. Good for them. If you think Sony is happy with a $15.3m launch for a Meryl Streep rom-com in August, you believe that WB is happy with $27.4m for Will Ferrell and Zach G. But it will not be a financial loser… so that’s very nice.

And if you were just guessing, what would you think was the #3 film of this summer worldwide. If it didn’t start with an Ice Age, you’d be wrong. Dark Knight just passed the film, which like its predecessor, has generated a massive international number ($620m)… more internationally than any other animated film has done in total this year. Amazing.

BYOB: Paul Ryan Gosling

Friday Estimates by Klady

It’s a forgettable box office weekend. The Bourne Legacy is heading to an okay launch in the low 40s (perhaps high 30s). That’s great for a Jeremy Renner movie and not terribly exciting for the franchise. At a reported cost of $125m for production alone, profitability is likely, but no lock. Bourne, the rare franchise which has never done as much internationally as domestically, is either going to have to stay quite strong for the rest of the month at home or turn around the streak and more than match domestic overseas.

The Campaign is on the low end of Ferrell’s big openings. Again, no disaster. I suspect that the budget is not $100m, as WB must have taken the US-only nature of the material into account, right?

Hope Springs is the only really unhappy tale. Ont he other hand, people feared worse. The film, which is apparently less of a light comedy than it’s being sold as, hasn’t found a buzzy hook, like Streep singing Abba, Streep being Julia Child, or Streep being an uber-bitch. On some level, this opening is a tribute to just how strong she is. But no one in SonyLand will be happy with this.

A “meh” second weekend of August.

But another great example of why the studio indulgence of Nikki Finke wanting to be first with box office is more dangerous than one idiot blogger having poor information being run as news.

The Bourne Legacy is a big movie for a company in transition. Ron Meyer is “leaving early” and whoever fills his office is going to be looking long and hard at the team that’s been in charge since Shmuger & Linde. So, the “FIRST BOX OFFICE” landed on Deadline at 12:48p PDT. That’s 3:48p East Coast and likely covered the box office until about 3p eastern. So a couple shows in the east, first of the day in the midwest and in mountain time… plus Midnights.

I think publishing those numbers is stupid… and if Nikki did that, she would probably not get the information handed to her. But extrapolating the 3-day weekend out of 1st and 2nd shows on Friday w/o the west coast is really, really dumb. You can tell “thumbs up” or “thumbs down, but anything more subtle than that is still conjecture at that time.

But under pressure, Universal started spinning… or some other studio, hoping to embarrass Universal when real numbers landed started spinning.

Finke wrote: “I haven’t heard Hollywood this encouraged about the domestic box office since The Avengers. Let’s face it: every studio this summer is making the vast majority of money off the international grosses. So to have North America back in business was helping mop up mogul flopsweat.”

First line of bullshit. Even with overstated numbers, there was nothing terribly exciting about this weekend’s numbers. Nikki was being played. Even at its highest projection, Bourne would be the 10th best opening of the summer of 24 major studio wide releases. Campaign was projected at around the same opening level as The Dictator and Madea. Hope Springs was looking at an opening on the level of That’s My Boy.

Worse, the ongoing mythology of the failing domestic box office is offensive. There is NO… I mean that literally… not a whit of evidence that Aurora had any effect on the this weekend or the two weekends before at the box office. Last Friday, there were some concerns, but the drops that were worrisome all turned around before the end of the weekend. And this moronic thing about comparing this year’s 30th weekend to last year’s 30th weekend… oy. You want to know “The Aurora Effect” last weekend? The Watch and Step Up: Lionsgate opened. The year before, Cowboys & Aliens, The Smurfs, AND Crazy Stupid Love all opened. That’s $91m in openers vs $25m in openers.

Weekend 31? Rise of the Planet of the Apes vs Total Recall.

Yeah… must be Aurora.

The domestic box office summer is #2 all-time right now, running $50m behind last summer as of today. The domestic year is up 4.5% over last year, and is #2 all time to date, behind 2010 by $16m.

But still… one idiot publishing prematurely and making wild, inaccurate commentary.

The bigger problem came last night, when the other shoe dropped. How could Universal explain the number that Crazy Nikki had printed early on Friday being overstated by 10%? That’s what inspired today’s lie…

“strong matinees and early evening shows gave way last night to emptier late shows, unfortunately. “Daytime business was fabulous. But everything after 10 PM wasn’t,” a studio exec tells me. “Even exhibition is saying that fewer people are going to late night shows.” Theories abound, like Aurora or the Olympics. The result is that some of Friday’s earlier revved-up forecasts slowed. This may still be a rare ‘up’ total weekend of $150M.”

Uh, Bullshit.

What Nikki fails to mention at that point is that both The Campaign and Hope Springs were UP from her premature predictions on Friday afternoon. So people who like comedies are less afraid of Aurora or more likely to watch the Olympics? Maybe this is a new industry trend we should be obsessing on!

Or maybe, the earliest numbers were misleading – though I had a reader tweet in that the Bourne numbers looked high to him based on Thursday midnight shows – and now, Nikki Whisperers were covering their asses by using excuses that Nikki doesn’t know enough to analyze seriously. Maybe Universal didn’t want to look like their movie was suddenly underperforming – though it wasn’t – after Nikki stupidly claimed it was overperforming – which it wasn’t. Maybe the WB whisper was different. Maybe the Sony whisper was also different.

In the end, besides one idiot writing up an incoherent mess which will be transmitted to an unknowing public via Matt Drudge, we have Bourne being built up and then defended, theatrical being presented as unstable, Aurora still being brought up though it is clearly a non-issue, and a bizarre skew on how domestic theatrical is doing overall this year and this summer.

All of those things, repeated by enough people who don’t know better, are dangerous to the industry and to the box office.

Or maybe it’s just a fart in the wind.

We’ll see if the wire services and other box office ignoramuses pick up on these clearly false notions.

Have a nice Saturday.

DP/30: Goats, dir Christopher Neil, actors David Duchovny, Graham Phillips

Delivelution: Why Netflix Is Easily The Best Suitor For STARZ

This isn’t all that complicated. Just ask the simple question… which is not “whose portfolio can this fit into?”

Ask, “For whom would STARZ/Encore offer value?”

Well… what does STARZ/Encore offer a buyer?

You’d be paying for a business in some form of stasis… not a problem business, but not a riser. The company is a pure content provider, but not a content creator of any significance.

So who is in great need of an instant filmed-entertainment cable network?

Not Comcast/NCBUniversal. Comcast serves more than 20% of the television households in the United States. If the company wants to launch another standalone filmed-entertainment cable network (in addition to Universal HD, Chiller, A&E, and USA), they are in as good a position to do it as anyone. And while any issues that competitors have with Comcast may not be an immediate issue in a STARZ buy, there is nothing assuring STARZ ongoing security beyond current carriage contracts.

Rich Greenfield, BTIG’s uber-self-promoter who has turned out to be wrong almost every time he makes a pronouncement, seems to be thinking about another era of media when he calls Comcast “the ideal buyer.” His 3-plank argument is wrong on all three fronts. 1. Movie licensing in 2012 is a series of agreements. Each one is about measuring the value of each category (on-air, VOD, streaming) at the time of each deal. Universal keeping its content “for itself” only makes sense if it can make more money by keeping the content in-house and not selling it. Another imperfection is that Comcast owning STARZ with the intent of putting Universal movie product on the network would almost inevitably require – as it did for Netflix – making a choice, aka dumping either Disney or Sony or both. Would bringing a third studio into the mix on the STARZ network increase subscriptions enough to pay for itself? Every indication is no.

2. The idea that STARZ would have more success in programming as part of Universal Television is, simply, moronic. The history of television and networks/content=-creators owned by the same company is that deals are made for all the wrong reason and content is never improved. Even if that negative is not always true – though it is a high percentage of the time – mistakes are made all the time. Jerry Bruckheimer, tied at the hip to Disney, ended up taking his TV division to WB and they sold CSI, Amazing Race, and other big hits to CBS. Owning the plantation doesn’t make the corn grow higher.

3. Universal isn’t in f-ing competition with Netflix. No content creator or distributor needs to defend themselves from or attack Netflix. Netflix still can’t afford to license STARZ content for streaming as is. Meanwhile, WB, which has been harder than any studio on Netflix and more independent-minded about the future of self-control, just did a deal with Netflix… which is likely to end as soon as WB cracks self-distribution.

Other major content creators, like Fox and WB, have been mentioned as candidates, under the theory that the prices being paid by pay-TV for movies continues to drop, so they should stop selling to that market. But right now, as I wrote before, we are in a wide-open market will all kinds of ways of generating revenue. Buying a series of channels ties a studio down (unless you’re crazy Viacom), it doesn’t open things up.

The companies for whom STARZ offers a great opportunity are the companies that cannot buy that opportunity – or built it easily – on their own. On the top of that list is Netflix.

Netflix is a company in major transition that needs stability and versatility. Owning a cable channel brand would give them just that. Obviously, the deals to stream or just to air on STARZ are separate. Buying STARZ doesn’t automatically get Netflix Disney or Sony back. But it would instantly put Netflix in the game on a different level.

In spite of the lazy writing about Netflix challenging HBO, a STARZ purchase would put Netflix in a position to compete with HBO for real… and then also have a streaming business that can remain healthy, if not burgeoning, for many years. With content sellers out there looking to sell streaming rights and airing rights, but unsure of the real value in either, Netflix/STARZ could get both, packaged together, at a discount. And until Time-Warner decides to make HBO Go or some other connected site the Home Of Warner Bros Content (or another major bellies up to the bar), Netflix would be breaking new – and inevitable – ground yet again.

Amazon is another interesting possibility. But unlike Netflix, the company has a day job. It doesn’t need to pay a premium to get into this game. And indications are that content providing is a service for the retailer, not the lead business.

But I want to reiterate… buying STARZ is only a first step, not an end in itself. Deals would be all over the place. And to really build STARZ, Netflix would have to be innovative. But that opportunity is wide open. A truly great doc channel… an indie channel… etc. STARZ is actually already in that space with Starz in Black and Edge and Encore’s various channels, including a Western channel. Good ideas. Now let’s see the execution. Let’s see some promotion… some excitement.

STARZ is one of those deals to come that takes place in the new age, where people are wise to the idea of being sold shells that have little in them. STARZ is a good business that could be better. But if the narrow thing that they offer a buyer is not what you need… if it’s just another piece of the portfolio, you would be a corporate fool to go there. The game is changing fast. Th buy-in is changing. EPIX is still limping along, even with a major and two major mini-majors.

Caveat emptor.

Unless you’re Netflix. For you, it would be a game-changing move, even if it costs a little too much.

DP/30: Craigslist Joe, documentarian Joseph Garner

BYOB Humpday

Barry Eisler’s “Journalistic Compromise Metrics”

Barry Eisler gets into the issue of how journalists choose to compromise themselves and it is an excellent piece and an incredibly important conversation.

I am quoting Eisler’s list of 10 steps for the sake of simplifying… but please do read the whole piece.

Eisler writes…

1. Probably the first compromise will take the form of a rationalization. You’ll be pressured to do something you know isn’t quite right. But you’ll be scared not to do it — if you don’t, you’ll alienate someone powerful, your career will suffer a setback, your ambitious goals will suddenly seem farther away. At this point, your lesser self, driven by fear, greed, status-seeking, and other selfish emotions, will offer up a rationalization, and your greater self will grasp at it eagerly.

2. As the compromises accumulate, you’ll need a larger, more all-purpose rationalization to explain them away.

3. As your career progresses, you can usefully ask yourself if you can name a compromise of which you’re not proud. If you can’t… bad sign.

4. And: have you ever publicly copped to that compromise? If not… bad sign (see: “You’re only as sick as your secrets”).

5. Can you identify compromises you think have been made by any of your compatriots? If not… bad sign. It means you’re not even capable of projection.

6. Do you find yourself identifying more with the public figures you’re supposed to hold to account than with the readers and viewers you’re supposed to serve?

7. Can you identify a personal or career cost to any of your decisions? If not… bad sign. Who will you be offending, and what retribution are you likely to suffer? Who has the power to reward and punish you, and what are you willing to do to risk losing those rewards and incurring that punishment?

8. Here’s one you wouldn’t think a journalist should even need to ask (but you’d be wrong): are there any public figures you refuse to honestly, objectively, publicly criticize? If yes… it’s worse than bad. You’re already suborned. You’re not even a journalist.

9. Can you identify any scenarios, any potential compromises, that you would not make under any circumstances, that you would resign over before ever embracing? If not… bad sign.

10. Can you put yourself in the shoes of the organization/establishment/oligarchy and imagine how you would go about suborning yourself to get past your defenses?

Unclusive Trailer: Judd Apatow’s “This is 40”

Only one real flaw… NEVER tell the audience that “this is about all of us.” Let them figure that out on their own. Seriously.