The $11 Billion Year

by Anne Thompson

  TWC’s Lawless doesn’t fly with the media at Cannes. When it opens stateside in August it does better with critics—who rate it 68 percent fresh on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes—and with audiences who are drawn to the attractive cast. Weinstein manages to get the film to a decent $37.4 million domestically, even though it is too talky for mainstream male action fans and too violent for art-house seniors.

  Because Pitt stars in Killing Them Softly, the Weinsteins hold back the stateside release until post-Thanksgiving November, one of the worst times to bow a movie, when it scores 75 percent fresh on the Tomatometer. But the movie flounders at the box office against competing films with adult appeal, including such powerful well-marketed entertainments as Argo and Lincoln, and it tops out at $15 million.

  Focus’s strategy of opening Moonrise Kingdom around the world after its Cannes launch works like a charm: the movie plays all summer (total gross: $68.3 million worldwide) and heads into Oscar contention. But Anderson does not participate in Oscar rituals: by the fall he’s in Europe prepping his new film The Grand Budapest Hotel—starring Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Ralph Fiennes, Jude Law, and Owen Wilson—rather than participating in the long slog of public appearances required of an Oscar campaigner. His laconic cowriter Coppola is left to hold down the fort.

  Anderson comes out ahead, though. He has now been entered into the ranks of Cannes auteurs. He’ll be back.

  CHAPTER 5

  JULY: COMIC-CON AND THE FANBOYS

  DC VS. MARVEL

  Back when nerds wore pocket protectors and geeks were beat up by bullies after school, reading comics was something many of us did under the covers with a flashlight.

  When I was a kid in New York City, every weekend I bought the latest comics: Marvel’s Thor, Spider-Man, and The Fantastic Four, and DC’s Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Supergirl. As I grew up, I moved on to Frodo and Gollum and the odysseys of Homer, Arthur C. Clarke, and Stanley Kubrick.

  But generations of Peter Pans never relinquished their youthful devotion to X-Men and Star Trek. And George Lucas made it easy for fans to feed their appetite for all things Star Wars after he launched the franchise in 1977. Thanks to his insistence that he hang onto multiple rights to the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, Lucas was able to build his sprawling Bay Area Lucasfilm empire over the next thirty-five years, complete with the industry’s top-ranked VFX, sound-editing facilities, and licensing and merchandising divisions. In 2012, after he passed the leadership to Kathleen Kennedy, he was able to sell that legacy to Disney for $4.05 billion.

  Lucas refined the art of playing to a large fan base, nurturing fan clubs with updates and newsletters on sequels and prequels, and offering them the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles TV series, Star Wars spin-off novels, video games, and collectible art and action figures. Lucasfilm was among the first of the movie companies to self-promote directly to fans and actively hawk its wares at San Diego’s Comic-Con International—the premiere comic-book convention and showcase for genre properties in the world.

  Back in the early eighties, my film critic husband, David Chute, who inhaled comics and graphic novels, introduced me to the small-scale convention called Comic-Con, originally founded in 1970 by a group of San Diego aficionados thrilled to welcome three hundred guests to their first gathering, then called the Golden State Comic Book Convention, at the U.S. Grant Hotel. Over the years, David introduced me to curmudgeonly dweeb Harvey Pekar, whose autobiographical American Splendor comics inspired the 2003 film of the same name starring Paul Giamatti, and to virtuoso underground comic writer and illustrator R. Crumb, who wore a seersucker jacket and fedora. And I met the man who took Batman to the dark side, The Dark Knight Returns writer Frank Miller, who, with artist Lynn Varley, also dramatized the Spartans’ Battle of Thermopylae in the gorgeous graphic novel 300 and went hard-boiled noir with Sin City. All became hit movies.

  Over successive Comic-Cons, attendance expanded to fill the San Diego Convention Center’s capacity of 130,000 and draw thousands more to numerous satellite sites in nearby parks and hotels. Comic-Con, held every July, became the city’s biggest convention ever. The Hollywood studio presence increased over the years as filmmakers and marketers figured out that many collectors and buyers of comics and art and action figures were also huge movie enthusiasts—a built-in, easily targeted core audience for genre fare. The circle closed when studios locked their tentpole strategy into mining already proven beloved characters from comics for big-budget franchises aimed at the fan faithful, who would help guarantee a return on investment. Ironically, the bashful comic book fanatics, who never asked a girl to dance at the high school hop, became the most desirable figures on the dance floor.

  Warner Bros., which acquired DC Comics in 1969 and therefore movie and television rights to the jewels in the DC crown, Superman and Batman, discovered in the early eighties that many fans of the comics were attending Comic-Con—and would come to see their movies. Soon the promotion of movies inspired by comic books expanded to genre films and eventually just about anything aimed at the studios’ sweet spot, the young male demo.

  Most fans must wait in ridiculously long lines to get into the studio presentations inside the Convention Center’s cavernous Hall H, which holds 6,000 people. They line up just outside and, for the must-attend panels, sleep under tents in sleeping bags overnight, sometimes on concrete. One fan waited seven hours and still didn’t get in, as the line was cut eleven people ahead of him. So once they get into Hall H, people camp there all day. Getting sustenance and keeping appliances charged are a serious issue. (The Wrap editor Sharon Waxman and I have almost come to blows over the limited electrical outlets.) Press people work hard to get access to VIP passes—for each separate panel—so they can skip the queues.

  At Comic-Con 2012 (Thursday, July 12, through Sunday, July 15), fan anticipation for the fifth and last installment in the Twilight series is so high that a lengthy queue of Twihards starts camping out the Sunday before the opening. Tragically, on Tuesday, one woman eagerly awaiting the Thursday entry to the Breaking Dawn—Part II panel in Hall H leaves the line and, in her rush to regain her place, runs against traffic and falls into an oncoming car; she later dies from head injuries.

  Inside the convention, at the last Comic-Con Twilight press conference and panel, you’d never know that Kristen Stewart has eyes for a man other than on-and-off-screen swain Rob Pattinson, who plays her vampire lover, Edward Cullen, given the way the couple plays their roles as real-life lovebirds to the hilt. They, author Stephenie Meyer, and the rest of the Twilight cast bid farewell to the series of five movies that has given them enough “fuck you” money to last the rest of their careers.

  The team expresses their sadness at having to say good-bye to the series and to their onscreen family, with whom they have worked for the past four years. After the last week of shooting, “I was sad not to be able to hang out with these people,” says Meyer. “This is the last question, the last press conference,” adds a smiling Pattinson, whose fans in the hall are still screaming. Director Bill Condon sends a video message from London, where he is scoring the film. Taking up where the fourth film left off, he opts to preview the first seven minutes of its follow-up, which starts with Bella Swan opening hard yellow vampire eyes—and learning how to embrace her inner action hero.

  There’s plenty more than movies going on at Comic-Con, where Game of Thrones and other TV series have crashed Hall H. The real attraction is the blocks-long exhibition floor spanning letters A through G, with Hall H at the end of the building and more halls and meeting rooms up above on the second floor. The exhibition covers more than 525,000 square feet of contiguous space on the ground floor (about ten NFL playing fields), where fans cruise with their giant Warner Bros. tote bags looking for cool stuff to buy, from T-shirts and bobble-head dolls to signed graphic novels. As marketing hype threatens to overwhelm the Con, its beating heart still resides with the artists and collectors. I get a kick out of
the lovingly crafted costumes—from steam punks and Wonder Woman to Little Bo Peep, Walking Dead zombies, and the Joker in nurse garb—that allow fans to embody their own image of who they want to be.

  The studios use the convention as a massive viral marketing opportunity. The colorful blitz includes signings, roving billboards, elaborate stunts, public appearances, and interactive treasure hunts, complete with clues, prizes, and rewards. The studios no longer rely on TV and print ads and in-theater trailers to reach moviegoers; they have sophisticated online marketing departments planting viral memes, games, and video and tracking social media and awareness.

  In a world where the once mighty Newsweek has been superseded by TheDailyBeast.com, moviegoers no longer need to wait for stories planted by publicity departments in print editions of the New York Times and Rolling Stone. They’re seeing blog posts on Vulture, Slashfilm, Collider, MSN.com, the Huffington Post, MTV.com, and EW.com; following their favorite media outlets and influencers on Twitter and Facebook; and seeing trailers, interviews, and reviews via Flixster, Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, Metacritic, and Criticwire.

  Thus Comic-Con is an irresistible generator of instant buzz. Fans and major media all perch in Hall H eager to communicate with the outside world via laptop and smartphone. If a director breaks news on a release date or shows new footage, reaction hits the Internet in seconds. Studio chiefs attend their show-and-tells, such as the one for Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, which, the director first hints to Comic-Con media, will be a trilogy. (Tellingly the footage is not shown at 48 fps.) Execs also attend the presentations of their competitors. All the while, ears are pricked to see how footage and materials play with fans.

  Just before the huge exhibition floor opens its doors to thousands of fans, many of them in costume, I tag along with a gaggle of press covering an AMC Walking Dead event: the unveiling of next season’s survival car, a souped-up Hyundai Elantra GT complete with rhino guards and whirring spikes. “It’s a one-of-a-kind engineering marvel!” gushes the PR rep. “The ultimate zombie-proof survival vehicle!” Comic-book creator Robert Kirkman (celebrating his hundreth issue) had described the black car, which was then realized and built to his specifications by Gary Castillo of Design Craft Fabrication, who claimed, “The car is 100 percent zombie-proof!”

  It’s a delight wandering around Disney’s museum-style Art of Frankenweenie exhibit, which features Tim Burton’s drawings and miniature sets for the black-and-white stop-motion expansion of his 1984 Frankenweenie short. But later, at Disney’s Hall H show-and-tell, the response to the movie is muted. Sure enough, when Frankenweenie opens in October, it’s a box-office disappointment, topping out at $35.3 million domestic. (Another more contemporary, colorful, and comedic stop-motion horror feature, Laika’s ParaNorman, plays better both in Hall H and in theaters.)

  After the Con closes down each evening, talent, executives, and media swing by a series of hotel parties, many of them poolside at the Hard Rock Hotel. At the Lionsgate-Summit Twilight fete, Summit chiefs Rob Friedman and Patrick Wachsberger, now running Lionsgate’s motion picture division, admit they are applying the same approach to The Hunger Games franchise as they did to the Twilight Saga: don’t waste any time getting the sequels up and running.

  The indies have also discovered the benefits of Comic-Con. If self-promoter Kevin Smith can market B-fare such as Zack and Miri Make a Porno directly to his fans (without help from critics) via raunchy stand-up routines, as he did in 2008—one young fan got down on one knee and proposed to his intended during one of Smith’s Q&As—why not take Django Unchained to Comic-Con? The Weinstein Company follows up its highbrow Cannes media intro with a Quentin Tarantino panel for the fans in San Diego at which they show footage of the film. They also hold backstage press roundtables with stars Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Kerry Washington, and Walton Goggins. (Smart move: the film won’t be finished and screened for press until right before it opens December 25.)

  No longer a convention just for fanboys, fangirls now flock to Comic-Con, thanks in part to Summit bringing the first Twilight movie to the Con in 2008 and luring thousands of women who might otherwise not have gone. That year many regulars were aghast when piercing screams filled a darkened Hall H the first time unruly-haired Brit Rob Pattinson opened his plummy mouth on the panel dais, projected on giant video screens. If Summit needed proof that it had a winner, that was it. Twilight scored a total $392.6 million worldwide. “It’s the world’s largest focus group,” journalist Scott Mantz tells filmmaker Morgan Spurlock in his 2011 documentary Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope. “Studios realize this is the place to get grass-roots awareness,” adds actor Seth Green.

  But make no mistake: playing well at Comic-Con is no guarantee of success, as the studios have learned the hard way. Comic-Con hits from Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World to Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens have crashed and burned. The fan demo is just a slice of the wide mainstream audience that big-budget studio movies need to pull in. Zack Snyder’s innovative $60 million sword-and-sandal actioner adapted from Frank Miller’s 300 played well in Hall H and went on to be a $456 million global hit in 2006. His 2009 follow-up Watchmen, adapted from a complex, interlocking Alan Moore graphic novel that had been deemed unfilmable for years, played equally well—but cost too much ($138 million) to make a profit in release ($185.3 million worldwide).

  The general rule of thumb is that a movie needs to gross double its production cost to come out ahead. Given that Warner Bros. spent at least $50 million in global marketing costs and that returns from theater owners were about half of worldwide ticket sales, Watchmen was a write-off for the studio—even with earnings from TV licensing and DVD sales (down 20 percent from their 2004 peak). In 2012, for the first time, online revenue grew enough to offset the seven-year drop in DVD sales and rentals.

  An earlier disappointment for Warner had been Bryan Singer’s out-of-control 2006 reboot Superman Returns, which cost close to $250 million and yielded just $391 million worldwide. It also caused an uproar among fans who complained that it was too much of an homage to the original 1978 Dick Donner Superman and didn’t have enough action. They were dismayed that Superman (Brandon Routh) and Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) had spawned a kid and were facing too-familiar villain Lex Luthor (Singer regular Kevin Spacey). The problem with the square-jawed orphan from Krypton is that he’s an invulnerable big blue Boy Scout, with no weaknesses except kryptonite—and his feelings for Lois. But Superman doesn’t have to be squeaky clean, many fans argued: the origins of the character are darker and more complex.

  In late 2009, one Warner exec told me that, after many false starts, the studio was again seeking to find the right direction for the superhero: “We’re working on a strategy for DC. Superman is the trickiest one to figure out.”

  With its franchise stalled out, Warner inevitably turned to the indie filmmaker who had saved its bacon with Batman Begins and was coming to the end of that $2.5 billion trilogy with 2012 release The Dark Knight Rises: Christopher Nolan. At Comic-Con 2012, the studio introduces a teaser for Nolan and writer David S. Goyer’s latest Superman iteration, Man of Steel, which visual stylist Zack Snyder is directing with young Brit Henry Cavill (The Tudors) in the starring role, Russell Crowe as his father, Amy Adams as Lois Lane, and Michael Shannon as archvillain General Zod.

  When a fan asks Snyder if he’ll be using John Williams’s iconic Superman score, he explains why not: “We had to act as if no film has been made. When we approached it, we had to say, ‘This is Superman for the first time.’ ” Veteran composer Hans Zimmer got the gig.

  Unlike DC, whose properties have remained under the control of Warner, Marvel decided to take control of its destiny. After partnering with various studios on X-Men (Fox), Spider-Man (Sony), and Iron Man (Paramount), Marvel took itself independent—for a time—by taking over management, production, and ownership of its films. The results have been extraordinary. Because it was invested in controlling over the long term its characters
as well as the universes they inhabit, Marvel developed a five-year plan and put Kevin Feige in charge. An ardent comic-book fan who lives and breathes and fights to protect Marvel characters, he knew the Marvel world inside and out and understood both moviemaking and fandom.

  New Jersey native Feige, forty, studied film at the University of Southern California and interned for producer Lauren Shuler Donner, whose husband, Dick, had directed the Lethal Weapon series and the first two Christopher Reeve Superman films. When she produced X-Men at Fox, Feige became her assistant and an X-Men associate producer because of his vast knowledge of all things Marvel. Since joining Marvel in 2002, he has supervised all their in-house films; he became president in 2007.

  After proving his prowess with various Marvel studio pictures, Feige was heading toward an ambitious goal. He laid the groundwork first in singular hero movies by introducing Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), and Thor (Chris Hemsworth), as well as several other supporting characters such as Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner). Once established, Marvel could proceed and assemble them, along with the Hulk, into one supercharged Marvel hero ensemble movie: The Avengers.

  But who had the skill and chops to artfully blend all these worlds into one, and not have the whole thing devolve into a shouting match? Feige turned to writer-director Joss Whedon, son of two generations of Manhattan TV writers: father, Tom, and grandfather John Whedon. (His mother, Lee Stearns Whedon, my best-ever English teacher at St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s School, taught me Shakespeare.) An unapologetic comics maven, Joss Whedon went to Hollywood, where he moved from TV success with Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the writers room of the Oscar-nominated Toy Story to cult status with the short-lived TV series Firefly, later incarnated as the underwhelming film Serenity.