The $11 Billion Year

by Anne Thompson

  The other top earner was Beasts of the Southern Wild, which Searchlight was able to nurture on a smaller scale (but for a longer time) with a $2 million minimum marketing guarantee and far fewer ads. But it achieved a similar gross. That’s because it could rely on word-of-mouth to sell a movie that played like gangbusters, and instead of a large upfront payment, made a back-end deal to share the box-office gross with the filmmakers.

  Safety Not Guaranteed won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for Derek Connolly and grossed $4 million in theaters, a modest hit for FilmDistrict, a distributor then allied with Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions that tends to focus on wide-release genre fare.

  At Sundance awards night, the Sundance NEXT section audience award goes to standup comedian Mike Birbiglia’s comedy Sleepwalk with Me, which, before its August 24 opening, is heavily promoted by producer Ira Glass to smart audiences of his well-branded This American Life radio show. It becomes a breakout hit, playing to packed houses (where it grosses $2.3 million) and scoring on VOD as well.

  By the end of Sundance 2012, everyone knows which films have the right stuff to go all the way to the Oscars: features The Sessions and Beasts of the Southern Wild, and docs Searching for Sugar Man, Detropia, and The Invisible War.

  At the Sundance closing-night awards ceremony, Searching for Sugar Man wins both the World Cinema Documentary Audience Award and a special jury prize. Sony Pictures Classics later puts Rodriguez on the fest circuit with his retuned guitar, and he even winds up on 60 Minutes as the film heads toward a $3.7 million gross and Oscar frontrunner status.

  The Invisible War wins the U.S. Documentary Audience Award; digital distributor Cinedigm picks up the film after the festival and in summer 2012 releases it in a limited number of theaters, allowing it to qualify for the Oscars. It grosses $72,000. Releases follow on iTunes and cable VOD in October. On its road to an Oscar nod, The Invisible War also receives a coveted International Documentary Association nomination for Best Feature. ITVS shows the film as part of its Independent Lens series over Memorial Day 2013.

  The Sessions wins two Sundance prizes, the Dramatic Audience Award and a special jury prize for its extraordinary ensemble acting. The battle for Searchlight is to coax audiences to go out to see a drama about a paraplegic’s sex life. So they play The Sessions at fall festivals to build awareness. When it opens October 19, critics praise it for being moving and uplifting without an ounce of sentiment or string-pulling, because it is less about settling for less than it is about striving for more. Searchlight keeps the film in limited release for months, waiting to make a strong pitch for award attention. For all their labors and substantial marketing costs, they squeeze out $6 million in North America for a total of $9.1 million worldwide—half of which is shared with theaters. That’s less than they paid for the film.

  Beasts of the Southern Wild takes home Sundance’s highest honor, the Grand Jury Prize, along with a cinematography award for Ben Richardson. Zeitlin tells the awards night crowd, “We had more freedom to make this film than any filmmakers in America—ever.” He exhorts producers to take note of this and let other filmmakers run just as wild.

  After Sundance, Searchlight takes the movie and the creative team on a global promo tour to build an identity in advance of playing New Directors/New Films in New York and Un Certain Regard at Cannes, where it wins the FIPRESCI Prize and Golden Camera. Accompanied by rave reviews, the film lands in theaters June 27, 2012, and totals $12.8 million at the box office, plus another $8 million abroad. Unusually, for all his public appearances and exposure to Hollywood, Zeitlin is never tempted by any of the many offers coming his way. He sticks to his original plan of returning home to find and develop another story that would come out of a particular Louisiana community and culture.

  While no single organization can remove all the impediments facing filmmakers who want to find audiences for their films, Redford’s Sundance Institute and annual film festival continue to be vital in shaping cinema’s future.

  CHAPTER 2

  MARCH: CHASING THE FRANCHISE

  JOHN CARTER VS. THE HUNGER GAMES

  If Robert Redford didn’t like what he saw back in the seventies and eighties, he could never have imagined the Hollywood of today, chasing frantically after easy-to-sell titles based on already established brands, whether remakes, sequels, or anything else already proven popular with audiences. It’s up to the independents now to support modestly budgeted dramas or anything original—unless it’s a comedy or an animated feature.

  The studios’ thirst for sequels is nothing new. From the start it was rooted in extreme risk aversion. In a now famous story, when Coca-Cola acquired Columbia Pictures, it researched the safest possible movie to produce and release. Answer: the sequel. Hollywood already knew that. Studio hits have spawned sequels from the early days of the Ma and Pa Kettle comedies, Depression-era Gold Digger musicals, and Andy Hardy movies to multiple iterations of “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” But back in the Golden Age of Hollywood, which ended in the late fifties, sequels were a small part of the annual output from the studio factories. They churned out a wide range of movies—from slapstick and romantic comedies to melodramas, actioners, westerns, war films, musicals, biopics, and serious dramas—aimed at audience niches from adult men and women to families.

  The major studios released their pictures in small numbers of theaters, city by city, responding to local demand. Those were the days when word-of-mouth carried the day. Even as recently as 1982, Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi smash E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial played on screens for more than a year, and as late as 1997, James Cameron’s blockbuster Titanic enjoyed a rare ten-month domestic run. Perhaps the only disappointment to the mega-billion dollar hit for partners Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount was that there could be no sequel.

  But with the rise of the wide-release movie in the eighties, when movies opened in the top-twenty markets in the country all at once, the studios began to reverse themselves. It all started with indie Tom Laughlin’s successful thousand-theater release of The Trial of Billy Jack in 1974, which Universal imitated the next year with Steven Spielberg’s summer scare-fest Jaws. Instead of high-class A-movies slowly building support city by city via highly publicized talent promo tours, or road shows—with low-brow B-movies playing shorter runs around the country—distributors saw that they could sell commercial fare by targeting different wide audience swatches with blanket buys of TV spots.

  Many have blamed Jaws, the quickest movie to pass the $100 million mark at the box office, for introducing a widely emulated new business model. “Jaws whetted corporate appetites for big profits quickly, which is to say studios wanted every film to be Jaws,” Peter Biskind wrote in 1998’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. Added John Podhoretz in 2010 in the Weekly Standard: “Hollywood had been happy to hit for average. After ‘Jaws,’ it began swinging for grand slams.”

  Over the decades the movie studios—which had become smaller parts of corporations run by business executives with an eye on Wall Street who were skittish about narrow profit margins—steadily moved away from risky, execution-dependent quality films for adults. That’s because these films demanded painstakingly slow campaigns in order to build title awareness and “want to see” excitement, as opposed to presold titles. “Why should we rely on molasses-speed word-of-mouth creation for an unknown product that could die in one weekend?” asked more and more executives, under pressure from bosses who had to answer to the bottom line.

  That old-fashioned review-driven limited “platform” release—starting out in a few cities and slowly broadening out as buzz builds on a title—survives today mainly as the operative model for quality adult fare, publicized and branded via reviews by critics at fall film festivals, and aiming at the extra promotional boost provided by award season attention.

  For the studios, “give the people what they already want” was the new mantra.

  Through the nineties and into the twenty-first century, Hollywood marketers decided that
they were better off selling a beloved James Bond or Harry Callahan or Indiana Jones than a seven-figure-per-movie star like Tom Cruise in something no one ever heard of. Better still, they could make films based on established plays (Mamma Mia!, Les Misérables), movies (The Wizard of Oz, Planet of the Apes), comics (Superman, Batman, Thor, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Captain America, The Avengers), video games (Resident Evil, Mortal Kombat), toys and games (Transformers, Battleship), TV series (Mission: Impossible, Star Trek) and bestselling books and classics (The Three Musketeers, Twilight, Robin Hood, Alice in Wonderland, The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter series).

  It comes down to this: an executive who lives in fear of losing his job won’t take unnecessary risks. Only the most confident studio head with solid performers behind and ahead can gamble on failure. Which is why they need the security that multiple vital franchises provide.

  Even the venerable James Bond series, which in 2012 celebrated its fiftieth birthday and twenty-third and possibly best-ever installment, Sam Mendes’s Skyfall, originally sprang to life on the screen in 1962 with Dr. No, based on the popular Bond novels by British writer Ian Fleming. Bond is the model—a film franchise oft-imitated, from parody Our Man Flint to xXx to the Bourne series—developed and sustained first by producer Cubby Broccoli and then by his daughter Barbara Broccoli and stepson Michael Wilson. The family protected, nurtured, and modernized their sexy but deadly secret agent through six incarnations, from the most popular, Sean Connery, through the least, Timothy Dalton, to current 007 Daniel Craig. Skyfall, released November 9, 2012, became the highest-grossing film in the series, with $1.1 billion in the till worldwide.

  Audiences today have an appetite for immersing themselves in exotic worlds like Middle-earth, Tatooine, and Pandora. Characters, not movie stars, are pulling them into theaters. That said, many of the most successful Hollywood franchises started as originals, including George Lucas’s Star Wars, the Die Hard series, the Wachowskis’ cyberpunk series The Matrix, and Dick Donner’s Lethal Weapon to James Cameron’s 2009 3-D film Avatar, which beat only his 1997 Titanic as the biggest global blockbuster of all time—thanks to 3-D premium ticket sales. That’s what Hollywood often forgets in its never-ending search for the sure, sure thing.

  Both Titanic and Avatar were seen as terrifying gambles. But each time, Twentieth Century Fox execs hung tough as Cameron’s production budgets mounted, because he had a track record as a writer, director, and technological explorer able to deliver characters moviegoers could care about and eye-popping effects they had never seen before. That’s the secret sauce.

  For every Harry Potter, which eventually came to an end in 2011 after eight films and set an all-time franchise record with $7.7 billion in worldwide receipts, there are many others— Eragon, The Last Airbender, R.I.P.D., Max Payne—that go nowhere.

  In March 2012, two make-or-break franchises for their studios, Disney’s John Carter and Lionsgate’s The Hunger Games, reached theaters. Both were based on preestablished bestsellers, but the Hunger Games trilogy was launched in 2008 by novelist Suzanne Collins and still flying off the shelves, whereas John Carter was based on A Princess of Mars, the first in a series of eleven pulp novels written by Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, and launched in 1912. Remarkably, Burroughs’s Mars novels are still in print and have inspired generations of writers and filmmakers since: their DNA is in both Star Wars and Avatar.

  But it’s one thing to believe that a book can launch a movie franchise and another to deliver it. Compare and contrast the respective fates of these two would-be blockbusters. Disney produced John Carter under inexperienced new studio chairman Rich Ross, who placed his trust in Pixar star director Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, Wall-E), who had never before directed a live-action movie. Neither of them knew what they were doing, and their lack of expertise combined to yield a disastrous $200 million write-off for Disney, the largest in Hollywood history.

  On the other hand, fans of Collins’s dystopian trilogy The Hunger Games were delighted with Lionsgate’s faithful movie adaptation of the first installment in the still-bestselling young adult series, whose appeal spread over the years from high school girls and boys to their parents, both women and men. Reviewers raved about how well Winter’s Bone star Jennifer Lawrence fit the similar role of tomboyish sixteen-year-old adult child Katniss Everdeen, who is athletic, resourceful, honest, and strong-minded. The movie, adapted and directed by Gary Ross (Seabiscuit), managed to walk a careful line, neither diluting nor sugarcoating the book, nor making the violence sensational or glamorized. Released March 23, The Hunger Games easily broke Alice in Wonderland’s $116 million March opening box-office record with $152.5 million and soared to $684 million worldwide.

  And so one franchise was born, while the other met a different fate.

  JOHN CARTER

  John Carter had been in development for decades. Director John McTiernan (Die Hard, The Hunt for Red October) tried to mount it first at Disney in 1990. Then Paramount producer James Jacks (The Mummy) gave it a whirl with a series of directors: Guillermo del Toro, digital techno-whizzes Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids) and Kerry Conran (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), and, finally, Jon Favreau, who had shown off his directing chops in Elf and the space adventure Zathura.

  But the project languished as Paramount went through a management shift; TV import Gail Berman came in to run the studio in 2005, and shortly before she left in 2007, she dumped the ambitious project, which carried a high cost and degree of difficulty. When Paramount did not renew their option on the rights with the Burroughs estate, Favreau moved on to direct Marvel blockbuster Iron Man.

  Watching like a hawk the entire time was writer-director Andrew Stanton, forty, who had grown up on the Martian novels and had waited decades to grab the movie rights. Disney’s then-chairman Dick Cook agreed to scoop them up in 2006 and green-lit a $250 million feature to be adapted and directed by Stanton. Disney eventually brought in writer Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author, and Mark Andrews, Pixar’s story supervisor for The Incredibles, who would later take Pixar’s animated Brave to the Oscar finish line. But Stanton was in charge.

  “When you’re ten or eleven years old, and you’ve discovered girls, but they haven’t discovered you yet,” Stanton told the Los Angeles Times, “and you’re reading about this ordinary guy that’s suddenly extraordinary on another planet, he’s got the coolest best friend, the coolest pet, and he’s winning the heart of the most beautiful girl in the universe, that’s like a checklist of everything you’ve ever wanted.” Along the way, rather than confuse moviegoers with the girl-friendly title A Princess of Mars, and in order to boost its male appeal, the studio changed the title to John Carter of Mars. In this planetary romance, our hero is a Confederate soldier who is magically teleported from a Civil War battlefield to the surface of the desert planet Barsoom (Mars), where his superhuman strength turns him into a mighty warrior; he must vanquish many formidable foes so that he can win the heart of the magnificent Princess Dejah Thoris.

  As it turned out, Disney, like Paramount, was also undergoing a change in stewardship. Three years after he acquired the property, marketing and distribution exec turned studio chief Cook, a thirty-year Disney veteran, made way for the new boss, Rich Ross, who was promoted from the Disney Channel by Walt Disney Company CEO Robert Iger.

  As Disney movie studio chief, Ross never felt right to Hollywood. He had made his reputation in television molding teen stars like Miley Cyrus and Zac Efron into household names. Now Iger had tasked him with updating the Disney movie brand with the right mix of family-oriented fare. “The film business is changing before our very eyes,” Ross wrote in an e-mail to his staff, “and we must all rise to the occasion to meet our consumers’ changing needs.” Six months later, in April 2010, the new Disney chairman put on a show-and-tell at Team Disney, the studio headquarters on the Burbank lot, to introduce himself to a group of about two dozen entertainment business beat reporters, including me;
he wanted to alert Wall Street to a strong studio lineup in advance of an upcoming Disney earnings call.

  Ramrod stiff and geekily awkward, Ross apologized for having been inaccessible, admitting that he had a lot to learn. He paced in front of a Disney screening room as he delivered a well-rehearsed sales pitch for a series of trailers, several clips, and a timeline of the studio’s upcoming slate, and he let loose a lot of corporate-speak about brands and market quadrants and giving consumers what they want, which clearly was the new company line as the studio sought to narrow the gap between theatrical and DVD and VOD release windows and cross-pollinate a consistent marketing message across multiple platforms.

  Ross showed us footage from Pixar’s upcoming 2010 summer release Toy Story 3, which was adding Barbie and Ken to the familiar gang, and announced two more Pixar movies to come: Disney was scheduling Pixar’s thirteenth film, Brave, for June 15, 2012, and a Monsters, Inc. sequel for November 15, 2012. Also, as the studio had just acquired Marvel, The Avengers would be coming on May 4, 2012.

  In addition, the studio had just closed a deal to distribute the output from Steven Spielberg and Stacey Snider’s DreamWorks, which, with financing from Indian company Reliance, had extricated itself from Paramount and was rapidly ramping up its slate to be released through Disney’s Touchstone label. (Family actioner Real Steel starring Hugh Jackman was already under way.) Altogether, Ross was expecting to release fourteen to sixteen pictures a year, he told the group.

  Jerry Bruckheimer (Bad Boys, Top Gun) was another key Disney tentpole supplier, whose costly vid-game-based visual-effects (VFX) action-adventure Prince of Persia and Fantasia-inspired live-action The Sorcerer’s Apprentice starring Nicholas Cage would be coming that summer (and turn into major disappointments for Bruckheimer and the studio). Ross announced that his first green light was Bruckheimer’s fourth installment in the lucrative Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, which was starting to film in London and Hawaii with Johnny Depp and an international cast including Penelope Cruz. (That $250 million movie, released in 2011, yielded $1 billion worldwide, most of it overseas, for a series total of $3.7 billion to date. Needless to say, a fifth is in the works.)