The $11 Billion Year

by Anne Thompson

  Jacobson was author Suzanne Collins’s handpicked choice to shepherd her Hunger Games trilogy to the big screen. Lionsgate, now merged with Summit and, because of its outstanding box-office performances, ranked by theater owners as “the seventh studio,” spent $45 million in marketing and opened The Hunger Games on March 23 in 4,137 theaters, the studio’s widest opening to date. It grossed $152.5 million its first weekend, at the time the third-biggest opening in history after The Dark Knight and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. (It’s now in sixth place.) It was the best opening ever for a nonsequel, and by the end of 2013 the film ranked as the fourteenth highest-grossing movie of all time.

  The Hunger Games is yet another case—like the Harry Potter films, The Twilight Saga, or The Lord of the Rings—where sticking to the material that excited readers in the first place is the right course. While Suzanne Collins may not be J. K. Rowling, Collins retained control by going with independent producer Jacobson, who lobbied the author hard in early 2009, soon after the first Hunger Games installment came out and well before it was a phenomenon. By the time the movie opened in 2012, the book had sold twenty-six million copies and been translated into twenty-six languages. The original three books have sold fifty million copies in the United States alone, and spent two hundred consecutive weeks on the bestseller list.

  Together, Collins and Jacobson chose Lionsgate as the film’s proper steward, all over the world. (Warner Bros./Spyglass and New Regency/Summit, also vying for the prize, might not have yielded such strong results.) Collins wrote the script, with Billy Ray (Shattered Glass) providing a polish. “It was about finding the bandwidth between two places,” says Jacobson. “If you failed, you were at risk of missing the point of the book, or worse, guilty of the sins committed in the book.”

  Crucially, the Hunger Games team hired skilled writer-director Gary Ross (Dave, Pleasantville), a genuine fan who had been introduced to the material by his kids and also chased the project, following Jacobson to London to give her his pitch and later presenting an elaborate video show-and-tell for Lionsgate. Jacobson leaned on indie producer Jon Kilik (Babel) to run production on this large VFX movie on a responsible scale. Jacobson’s previous film, One Day, had a $15 million budget, and the Wimpy Kid series was also made for a modest amount. “I know what I don’t know,” Jacobson says. “There’s no substitute for hands-on experience.”

  Shot in North Carolina with generous tax rebates, The Hunger Games wound up with a reasonable $80 million price tag. Lionsgate’s departing chief Joe Drake, who has substantial production and distribution experience; production exec Alli Shearmur; and marketing czar Tim Palen were on board every step of the way. Jacobson felt supported but not second-guessed, she says.

  Ross carried the movie to completion without losing track of the characters or going over the top with grandiose visuals, as many filmmakers would have been tempted to do. “He’s a smart, thoughtful, and inspired filmmaker,” Jacobson says. “Lionsgate gave him the room to succeed. So frequently things get lost in translation. With a great filmmaker with a great script you can get Chris Nolan to make The Dark Knight. There’s often so much fear and second-guessing that there’s not a chance for a real voice to emerge and engage the audience.”

  The filmmakers cast the roles well, choosing Liam Hemsworth (Paranoia) and Josh Hutcherson (The Kids Are All Right) for the young male leads and, for the supporting adults, selecting Deadwood’s Paula Malcomson, along with the eclectic cast of colorful characters from the film’s uber-glamorous Games site, the Capitol: Lenny Kravitz, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, and Stanley Tucci. Every young actress was eager to land the crucial lead role of tough but tender archer Katniss Everdeen.

  During her audition, Jennifer Lawrence clinched the deal with the scene in which Katniss says good-bye to sister Prim. “It was so definite and decisive,” says Jacobson. “Game over. Nobody could touch her. We were crying. She’s an unusually gifted actress. There was no way we were going to cast anyone else in that part. She brings authenticity, humanity, and accessibility. The movie relies on her to an extraordinary degree.”

  The most dramatic changes from book to film, however, have to do with the shift from a story told strictly from the point of view of our heroine to a movie where scenes that she does not know about unfold away from her. This makes The Hunger Games more of a social issue movie, and its humanity-fights-fascism message more heavy-handed than the book. But it works to turn dictator Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland) and his rule-changing Games henchman Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley) into movie bad guys.

  The film efficiently establishes Everdeen’s world in District 12, in the postapocalyptic North America now known as Panem. Her home is hardscrabble poor, like a depressed Appalachian coal-mining town. She’s the main support of her widowed mom (Malcomson) and younger sister (Willow Shields). She and friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth) are chums who feed their families by hunting and trapping in the woods together using bows and arrows. At the annual tribute day, when the country’s children are subject to a televised lottery in which one boy and one girl aged twelve to eighteen are selected from a dozen districts to compete in a nationally transmitted battle in which only one will survive, Katniss steps in to replace her sister. She is joined in the seventy-fourth annual Hunger Games by baker’s son Peeta (Hutcherson), who was once kind to her when she was starving.

  The train trip to the intoxicating Emerald City—er, Capitol—introduces their drunk “mentor” (Harrelson), a Games winner who counsels them on how to survive and win. We are invested in what Katniss is going through as we enter the decadent overscale metropolis, with its Truman Show audience and Olympic Games spectacle. “We wanted it to be more ominous,” says Jacobson, “not magical and wonderful but intimidating and frightening, freak-show-ish.”

  “Happy Hunger Games, and may the odds be ever in your favor,” intones President Snow. “In two weeks twenty-two of you will be dead.” Katniss does what she does in the sci-fi survival adventure—killing in self-defense, playing up her budding romance with Peeta to ubiquitous TV cameras—not for civic pride or political motives but to win the Games so that she can go home to her sister. That is what is at stake. The Games transform her; over the course of the series, Katniss matures into a more evolved leader of other people.

  Jacobson and Ross leaned on an experienced team, many of them indies, from Kilik and Oscar-winning music supervisor T-Bone Burnett to French editor Juliette Welfling (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, A Prophet), who tag-teamed with Stephen Mirrione, a frequent collaborator with Steven Soderbergh. Ross shot the film knowing how it would be edited, with jump cuts off handheld cameras and bobbing close-ups, to intensify Katniss’s POV. “We were inspired by Juliette’s work,” says Jacobson. It was also cheaper to run and gun in the woods and save expensive dolly and crane shots for the cityscapes.

  There was never any question that the movie would be anything but PG-13. Ross depicts the film’s extreme violence without showing too much or getting gratuitous with it. In the end, Jacobson is proud that she did not mess up the book: “I love it and didn’t want to let people or Suzanne down. I worried a lot about that.”

  Lionsgate, which developed and released The Hunger Games, was in many ways following the model set by another rising independent studio, Summit Entertainment, which developed and released the young adult Twilight Saga based on the Stephenie Meyer novels—and which merged with Lionsgate just as the series was about to end with Breaking Dawn—Part II.

  Experienced foreign sales chief Patrick Wachsberger is a genial Frenchman who expanded Summit into a full-blown studio with his partner, former Warner and Paramount exec Rob Friedman, a wily, clear-eyed administrator with a shock of white hair who understands marketing, distribution, and production. The two combine sophisticated know-how with die-hard conservatism and occasional risk-taking. They sold Summit at its peak and made a deal to take over Lionsgate’s worldwide motion picture operations.

  Having impeccably pus
hed the Twilight franchise through its paces—carrying Summit to profits it could never have achieved without it—the new Lionsgate team swiftly pushed forward with development and production on the next two Hunger Games books. With Ross opting out of a rushed follow-up, the company brought in Francis Lawrence (Water for Elephants) to direct three sequels; the first one, Catching Fire, opened November 22, 2013, to be followed by the two Mockingjay installments in 2014 and 2015. Jacobson, in order to protect her position with Friedman, who had thrown director Catherine Hardwicke off the second Twilight movie, went to her friend, Hollywood power broker Skip Paul, who has known Friedman for years. He took the initiative to help them get to know each other so that Friedman would know the movies were in good hands. (She also had author Collins in her corner.)

  The Hunger Games couldn’t be more vital to Lionsgate’s future. But the studio doesn’t rest on its laurels, proceeding apace with two franchise candidates presented at Comic-Con in July 2013: Orson Scott Card’s sci-fi classic Ender’s Game, starring Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley as two adults training a team of young warriors who must save the world from alien attack, and Divergent, based on Veronica Roth’s young adult bestseller set in a dystopian Chicago, starring Kate Winslet, Brit hunk Theo James, and Shailene Woodley (The Descendants).

  Every studio is banking on its stable of franchise properties going forward. Here’s what they’ve got:

  Disney, which has become a fiend for mega-mergers, now owns all Star Wars characters, every Pixar creation, the Muppets, Winnie the Pooh, and many Marvel characters (like Iron Man and the Avengers), with the exception of Spider-Man and Ghost Rider (see Sony), and the X-Men and the Fantastic Four (see Fox). Disney is in a strong position, as it also has powerful creative players in place, such as Lucasfilm’s Kathleen Kennedy and Marvel’s Kevin Feige, to supervise the ongoing execution of the films.

  Warner Bros. owns DC Comics and its stable of characters (think cash-cow Batman, and Superman) and all Looney Tunes characters. But Warner has had mixed results with DC, which has never found its equivalent to Marvel chief Feige, and animation is not its strong suit (see Space Jam). The gift that kept on giving, Harry Potter, is no more. Christopher Nolan is done with Batman, and so is Christian Bale. After motion picture chief Jeff Robinov entrusted Zack Snyder, Nolan, and David S. Goyer with the not entirely successful reboot Man of Steel ($391 million worldwide), starring Henry Cavill, Robinov left his job, having clashed with new boss Kevin Tsujihara. At Comic-Con 2013, Warner announced that Goyer and Snyder were developing a Superman-Batman movie, and cast Ben Affleck as their older and wiser Dark Knight. The fans, all too predictably, wailed in protest.

  MGM rules the character shires of The Hobbit, James Bond, and RoboCop, but shares the spoils with its partners Eon and Sony (Bond and RoboCop) and New Line/Warner (The Hobbit). While Skyfall is the biggest Bond film ever, it remains to be seen how avid the global appetite is for not one, but three returns to Middle-earth.

  Paramount lost its Marvel deal and struggled with Hasbro’s postponed G.I. Joe: Retaliation, and there’s a question about how many more Transformers pixels audiences can absorb. J. J. Abrams masterminded still-vital Mission: Impossible and Star Trek iterations, but for the time being has moved on to Disney’s Star Wars. With DreamWorks Animation gone, Paramount really needs these franchises to deliver. Disney’s Lucasfilm and DreamWorks’ Steven Spielberg could revisit Paramount’s Indiana Jones franchise, but it seems dormant for now.

  Twentieth Century Fox rules over the Planet of the Apes (which came back strong with Rise of the Planet of the Apes and will be followed soon by Dawn of the Planet of the Apes); the less profitable Alien/Prometheus franchise; Marvel’s X-Men and Fantastic Four; and James Cameron’s Avatar. With longtime cochairman Tom Rothman gone, Fox brought original director Bryan Singer back to the X-Men series for Days of Future Past, which combines his older ensemble with their younger counterparts. Though many think Singer desecrated Superman Returns, the truth is that Warner was angrier at his out-of-control spending (budget: more than $250 million) than the respectable grosses ($391 million worldwide). We’ll see if he’s on his best behavior at Fox. Cameron has always worked closely with now solo studio chairman Jim Gianopulos, and three pricey VFX-bending 3-D Avatar sequels are in progress.

  Sony has the popular Spider-Man, which they expensively remounted with director Marc Webb as The Amazing Spider-Man to respectable returns. His sequel is in the pipeline, with Jamie Foxx playing the villain Electro. The studio also has the less popular Ghost Rider. Men in Black 3 was a costly sequel, and Ghostbusters has long proved too expensive to profitably relaunch. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo franchise could pay off in the long run if the studio can keep prices down on subsequent iterations without perfectionist David Fincher.

  Universal has rights to all Universal Monsters (this includes Wolf Man, Frankenstein, and the Mummy), plus the revved-up Fast & Furious series and Jason Bourne. Tony Gilroy delivered a solid Jeremy Renner–starring Bourne film, but the studio needs to lure back Matt Damon. They’re going with Renner for the next one—to be helmed by Fast & Furious czar Justin Lin. They had a good run with The Mummy (with another sequel ramping up), but The Wolfman was a bust.

  “The truth is, a huge hit can cover a number of mistakes,” says ex–Universal cochairman Adam Fogelson. “And most, but not all, huge hits come from big bets. What’s more, even mid-level performance from a tentpole film has some real value—driving international TV deals, theme park opportunities, sequels, etc. Unfortunately, mid-level performance from a tentpole is no longer a remotely reliable outcome. No matter how much you spend to make and market a film, if people don’t like what they see, they won’t come. And that new reality is having repercussions throughout the industry.”

  CHAPTER 3

  SPRING: CINEMACON, SXSW, AND THE MOVE TO DIGITAL

  2012 is the year that the word “film” officially becomes an anachronism.

  The forces that combine to put celluloid on the endangered list come together in April at CinemaCon, the annual convention mounted at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas by the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO), which represents some 30,000 movie screens in the United States and cinemas in fifty countries worldwide. About five thousand people—NATO exhibitors, major studio chiefs and key marketing staff, independent producers and distributors, concessionaires, agents, and trade press—congregate for four days and nights to review the past and get a glimpse of the future. Longtime partners, the majors and exhibitors have historically struggled in their symbiotic relationship, but cannot thrive without cooperating. That partnership has never been more fractured than it is now, as their mutual interests are no longer the same.

  The CinemaCon annual rituals are simple: the major studios display their wares via show reels and fly a few stars into Las Vegas by company jet. The stars understand that the theater owners are their bread and butter: the work that they do to sell movies locally to moviegoers helps to build actors’ careers. Thus, at CinemaCon 2013, Adam Sandler comes out onstage—trumpeted by Roman soldiers in tunics and breastplates and sandals—to promote Sony’s Grownups 2. “It’s a fucking four-quadrant movie,” Sandler exhorts the theater owners in the Colosseum at Caesars Palace. “Let’s get it done, motherfuckers!”

  Joining Sandler in Las Vegas are Brad Pitt, Harrison Ford, Ben Stiller, Melissa McCarthy, Sandra Bullock, Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Kevin Hart, and Vin Diesel, among others, which is one reason why more media outlets than ever want to track the goings on.

  Truth is, the four-quadrant movie—that plays young, old, male, and female—is pretty hard to come by.

  And the star system that defined Hollywood for most of its history is not what it once was either. Aging stars like Ford, Mel Gibson, and Arnold Schwarzenegger no longer command $25 million paydays; they’re reduced to costarring with Sylvester Stallone in The Expendables 3. Will Smith, Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, and Tom Cruise still mean something if they star in a familiar franchise like
Men in Black, The Da Vinci Code, Die Hard, or Mission: Impossible, but outside those parameters, they no longer guarantee a huge opening. As James Bond, Jack Ryan, and Batman prove, audiences fall for characters more than the stars who play them, who are endlessly replaceable.

  Like everyone else, theater owners and studios are dealing with the shift to digital, which has radically changed everything about how movies are produced and released. The Internet gives and takes away, competing for eyeballs with so much noisy content—video games, social media, streaming, downloads, video on demand—that studios and theaters need to be smart about reaching consumers and luring them to the multiplex.

  THE CHANGE BEGINS

  For the first time since the move to sound in 1929, Hollywood has been going through a seismic technological change. For a hundred years, 35-millimeter film was the gold standard. Movies were shot in various celluloid formats, processed with photochemicals, and projected in movie theaters by throwing powerful beams of light through film onto a giant white screen. Until the past few years, studios spent millions annually creating film negatives, striking 35-millimeter prints, and shipping them by the reel in heavy cans to theaters, where they were loaded onto reel-to-reel projectors.

  Most moviegoers are unaware of the industry’s slow move to digital. In the 1990s, analog magnetic sound recording and mixing—added to celluloid on magnetic strips—gradually gave way to digital sound recording and mixing, added to film on optical strips or synced to accompanying compact discs. This was followed by the replacement of editing on flatbed Moviolas or Steenbecks, literally cutting and splicing pieces of film together, with Avid digital editing systems. Eventually negative cutting gave way to the creation of a digital intermediate, where instead of complex chemical-dipping color-timing techniques, the digital “painting” of the image, used on such films as the Coen brothers’ gold-tinted O Brother, Where Art Thou?, became routine.