The Big Picture

by Ben Fritz

  Perlmutter and Feige’s plan was for Marvel to reintroduce Spider-Man in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, paving the way for a fresh new take on the web-slinger in his next solo movie, in 2017. Global audiences had eagerly devoured the stories that bounce from one Marvel Studios film to the next, and the Marvel executives were confident that Spider-Man would enjoy the same benefit once he was part of the same cinematic universe as Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor.

  Spider-Man, in other words, would be saved by the very characters that Sony had refused to spend an extra $15 million to buy back in 1998.

  Many Sony executives saw the undeniable wisdom of Perlmutter’s pitch. “It’s still your baby,” the production president De Luca reassured Pascal. “Feige is just maybe the right babysitter for this moment.” The problem was the economics. Sony certainly wasn’t going to give away its valuable rights, and Disney wasn’t going to write a check for the potential billions of dollars Spider-Man movies would make into the indefinite future. So the two companies discussed plans to invest in each other’s movies as part of an arrangement to share the characters. Perlmutter, unsurprisingly, thought any such deal should heavily favor Marvel. He proposed that his company take a 50 percent stake in the next Spider-Man film, while Sony would get a 5 percent stake in the third Captain America movie.

  After taking time to reflect, following her lunch with Feige, Pascal ran hot and cold on the idea. At times she saw it as a potential coup and at others as an unthinkable insult. “Unless I partner with marvel And have spiderman join their world I’m running out of options,” she complained to Jeff Robinov, a former Warner Bros. movie chief whose new company had a deal with Sony.

  “U got to figure out spidey,” he urged her. “Can’t go back to marvel.”

  Lynton thought a deal with Marvel was a no-brainer. “Michael had no ego about who creatively oversees Spider-Man,” said De Luca. “He felt this is a giant asset for the studio, so let’s get the best movie made. I think Amy felt personally guilty the fans didn’t love the last Andrew Garfield movie and felt she owed Peter Parker a better outing. She wanted to deliver that outing.”

  For a while, Pascal’s hopes to do that lay with The Sinister Six.

  In July, Sony had announced a change to its prior plans to release The Amazing Spider-Man 3 in 2016, with the fourth in the series following in 2018. Now the studio would release Amazing Spider-Man 3 in 2018, it said in a press release, and deliver The Sinister Six in 2016. In reality, though, Sony had already given up on the Amazing Spider-Man series. The announcement about The Sinister Six was intended to distract fans from that fact. Pascal was done with “the Marc Webb experience,” particularly since after paying him $6 million to direct The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which she admitted was “crazy,” she was obligated to pay him $10 million if she brought him back for a third installment.

  She now was prepared to bet on Drew Goddard, a rising star who wrote and directed the cult horror hit The Cabin in the Woods and was writing and directing The Sinister Six. Envisioned as The Dirty Dozen for Spider-Man villains, Pascal dreamed of casting major stars like Matt Damon, Daniel Craig, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Initially, Andrew Garfield was going to have a role in it, but that plan fell apart in the wake of The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

  In fact, by November 2014, when the talks with Marvel appeared dead due to conflicts over financial terms, Sony began planning to use The Sinister Six to reboot the web-slinger for a second time. Goddard was turning the movie into a more lighthearted adventure, which used a story line from the comics involving the Savage Land, where Spidey and a team of villains would do battle in a world filled with dinosaurs. Spider-Man, who would be recast and aged down to sixteen, was going to ride a tyrannosaurus rex.

  But just as Goddard delivered his draft, the hackers hit Sony. Work ceased while fans gleefully dissected the revelation from leaked e-mails that Sony and Marvel had been in talks to partner on Spider-Man. The pressure was higher than it had ever been, and Sony couldn’t afford to spend months or years on the risky goal of fixing Spider-Man on its own. The safe choice was to reapproach Marvel.

  Feige and Pascal met again, this time for dinner at her house, and things went quite differently. It was a creative meeting of minds, and they excitedly shared ideas for a new Spider-Man movie with a decidedly John Hughes tone.

  In a matter of weeks the two companies reached a deal: a new, high-school-age Spider-Man would debut in May 2016, in Captain America: Civil War, to be released by Disney. Next, he would appear in his own film in 2017, which would be creatively supervised by Marvel but released by Sony. It was titled Spider-Man: Homecoming, a none-too-subtle allusion to his return to the Marvel universe. Rather than haggle over co-financing arrangements, Marvel and Sony agreed they would each fully finance and keep the profits from their respective releases. Marvel, however, would pay less than the standard $35 million to Sony for Homecoming if the movie grossed more than $750 million.

  Just a few days before she was fired, in January 2015, Pascal flew with Lynton to Palm Beach, where they hammered out the terms with Perlmutter and Feige at the Marvel chief’s condominium. A few days later, their handshakes turned into a nine-page document that the two sides signed. In a surprising twist, Marvel agreed to let Pascal, in her new post-mogul life, serve as a producer on the next Spider-Man film. She would be the first person besides Feige with a producer credit on a Marvel Studios film since 2008 and the first outsider ever to actually be on set every day and oversee one of its films. It was a sign that despite their companies’ conflicts over the years, Feige and Pascal saw each other as kindred spirits—studio executives who believed the job was still about the hands-on details of making movies they loved.

  It also meant that by giving up Peter Parker, Amy Pascal would finally get the chance to do what she had long desired: redeem him.

  6

  Star Wars

  The Decline of the A-List

  Michael Lynton has long been known as one of the most easygoing, even-tempered men in Hollywood. But when he returned from his annual vacation to Martha’s Vineyard in August 2014, he was pissed off. The object of his anger: movie stars.

  “Michael seems to have gotten annoyed with the movie star drama business in a big way since he’s been away,” Doug Belgrad reported to his boss, Amy Pascal.

  Why, Sony Pictures’ CEO wanted to know, was his studio considering making both a Brad Pitt World War II movie and casting Leonardo DiCaprio in a biopic of Steve Jobs? Why were they considering casting Will Smith in a drama about NFL concussions—a subject Lynton felt strongly about but believed should be dramatized at a very low cost—when the star wanted $15 million for what was supposed to be a passion project?

  “Why,” he demanded, “do we have so many of these movies that take so much time and energy, are risky, and can never make us very much money?”

  The movies Lynton was talking about, mid-budget vehicles for major stars, were not that long ago among the easiest to make, most consistent, and most profitable movies in Hollywood.

  Sony’s CEO was not griping about them because he was in a bad end-of-vacation mood. His attitude reflected a painful reality that was upending decades of accumulated wisdom in Hollywood and the status of the closest thing America has to royalty: our movie stars.

  A-listers like Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts once commanded $20 million salaries or 20 percent of the first dollar gross—box-office and certain other revenues—and were able to get nearly any project made that they fancied because their names on the marquee and faces on a poster practically guaranteed box-office success, as well as huge DVD sales. They were the beating hearts of the movie business, and everything else revolved around them. Their productions were called “star vehicles” because everything—the script, the setting, the direction, the supporting actors—was in service of the celebrity who was the reason the film existed and would likely make money.

  Audiences deciding what to see at the multiplex or buy at Wal-Mart often made their de
cisions based on the face on the poster or the box cover because they knew what they were going to get. No matter the role, Tom Cruise was likely to be sexy and masculine. Jim Carrey would be wacky and hilarious. Sandra Bullock would be goofy but goodhearted, and relatable.

  In the first decade of this century, even as “event” movies and superheroes were starting to make their box-office power known, about ten of the twenty highest-grossing films annually were star vehicles. Among the most successful were star vehicles like Tom Hanks’s Cast Away (number two in 2000), Jim Carrey’s Bruce Almighty (number five in 2003), Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith (number ten in 2005), Will Smith’s Hancock (number four in 2008), and Sandra Bullock’s The Blind Side (number nine in 2009).

  But by the 2010s, as few as three movies of the top twenty each year was, generously defined, a “star vehicle.” DiCaprio in The Revenant, Bullock and Melissa McCarthy in The Heat, and Kevin Hart and Dwayne Johnson in Central Intelligence were becoming the exception, rather than the rule.

  Movie stars didn’t become irrelevant, but they became very inconsistent in attracting an audience. People used to go to almost any movie with Tom Cruise in it. Between 1992 and 2006, Cruise starred in twelve films that each grossed more than $100 million domestically. He was on an unparalleled streak, with virtually no flops. But in the decade since then, five of Cruise’s nine movies—Knight and Day, Rock of Ages, Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow, and The Mummy—were box-office disappointments. This was an increasingly common occurrence for A-listers. Will Ferrell and Ben Stiller couldn’t convince anyone to see Zoolander 2. Brad Pitt didn’t attract audiences to Allied. Virtually nobody wanted to see Sandra Bullock in Our Brand Is Crisis.

  It’s not that they were being replaced by a new generation of stars. Certainly Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt and Kevin Hart and Melissa McCarthy have risen in popularity in recent years, but outside of major franchises like The Hunger Games and Jurassic World, their box-office records are inconsistent as well.

  What happened? Audiences’ loyalties shifted. Not to other stars, but to franchises. Today, no person has the box-office track record that Cruise once did, and it’s hard to imagine that anyone will again. But Marvel Studios does. Harry Potter does. Fast & Furious does.

  Moviegoers looking for the consistent, predictable satisfaction they used to get from their favorite stars now turn to cinematic universes. Any movie with “Jurassic” in the title is sure to feature family-friendly adventures on an island full of dinosaurs, no matter who plays the human roles.

  Star vehicles are less predictable because stars themselves get older, they make idiosyncratic choices, and thanks to the tabloid media, our knowledge of their personal failings often colors how we view them onscreen (one reason for Cruise’s box-office woes has been that many women turned on him following his failed marriage to Katie Holmes).

  In a franchise-dominated business, stars matter only in the right roles. Tom Hanks in Sully? Yes. Matt Damon in The Martian? Absolutely. Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games? Nobody else could do it. But put them in A Hologram for the King or Monuments Men or Passengers, and fans are just as happy to skip it.

  It’s no wonder that their salaries have fallen too. While A-listers still occasionally get $20 million for the right role, nearly all have seen their paychecks drop significantly. Now $15 million, $10 million, or $5 million are more likely when it’s a mid-budget movie the star really wants to make, or a franchise in which the role could go to any number of actors. Gross points, meanwhile, have almost completely evaporated. In most cases, stars have to wait until a movie breaks even, after which they share in the profits along with the studio.

  Sony’s Da Vinci Code series, based on the best-selling books by Dan Brown about intrigue and corruption in the Catholic church, shows how these changes have unfolded. These movies star Tom Hanks and are directed and produced by the highly compensated A-list team of Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. The original, from 2006, grossed $753 million and made Sony a $179 million profit. To bring the trio back for 2009’s sequel, Angels & Demons, Sony agreed to pay Hanks $20 million, Howard $10 million, and Grazer $2.5 million. But that was just a minimum. The trio also split 25 percent of the first dollar gross. If that worked out to be more than their salaries, then they would make even more. That was what it cost to get A-list talent to work on a movie, particularly a sequel to a successful film, in those days. Stars had the leverage and studios had no choice. But the deal turned out to be a disaster for Sony. Angels & Demons grossed a disappointing $479 million at the box office, and the studio lost $24 million. The talent, meanwhile, made more than $75 million once their quarter of the first dollar gross was totaled.

  Under their contract for Angels & Demons, Hanks, Howard, and Grazer were entitled to be paid at least as much on any follow-up. But by 2014, when Sony started work on an adaptation of a third novel by Brown, Inferno, that level of compensation was just not possible. Angels & Demons had lost money, after all, and the economics of the industry had changed, with plummeting DVD sales and the waning box-office power of stars like Hanks.

  After four months of negotiations, Sony reached a deal with the trio’s representatives at CAA. They would all take pay cuts: Hanks got $15.4 million up front, Howard $7.7 million, and Grazer just under $2 million. More significant, instead of sharing one-quarter of every dollar that came in, Sony gave them 50 percent of the profits after the production and marketing costs were covered. Hanks would get 26 percent of the profits, Howard 14 percent, and Grazer 10 percent. Only if the movie was a massive success and Sony earned a huge profit could they make as much as they did on the previous film.

  Inferno cost $90 million to make, less than half the budget of Angels & Demons. Sony was aiming for it to gross just $300 million, in which case it would make a profit of about $50 million. Lynton was still skeptical as to whether it was a good deal, though. “This is getting pricey for what it is,” he told Pascal.

  He was right. Tom Hanks and the Da Vinci Code brand proved even less appealing than Sony’s most conservative estimate. It grossed only $219 million, meaning the studio lost a little money and there was nothing extra for Hanks, Howard, and Grazer.

  The crumbling of the modern star system hit Amy Pascal particularly hard. Though she wasn’t much like the moguls of Hollywood’s golden age—she didn’t have their mean streak or megalomaniacal tendencies—she resembled them in one key way: her focus on building a stable of stars.

  In the early days of Hollywood, such an approach was much easier because studios signed talent to long-term contracts that forbade them from working anywhere else without the permission of the mogul, who essentially owned them. Since the old star system ended in the 1950s, however, actors and filmmakers have been free agents. Now studios actually had to earn the loyalty of the talent. When they did, they could convince an A-list writer or director to form a production company that had a “first look” deal at a studio. This arrangement didn’t guarantee exclusivity, but it meant that in exchange for providing an office on the lot and covering overhead costs, studios could get a first right of refusal on any film that the company developed. If the talent wanted to produce their own projects, giving them more money and creative control, their home studio still got first dibs on their work.

  That’s why Clint Eastwood has made so many movies for Warner Bros., Leonardo DiCaprio for Paramount, and James Cameron for Fox.

  Amy Pascal used this tool effectively throughout the 2000s. She convinced stars like Drew Barrymore and Jennifer Lopez and directors like Nora Ephron and James L. Brooks to call Sony home. Always a lover of creative talent and skilled at drawing actors and directors into her orbit, she built her business strategy around making Sony their favorite place to call home. Competitors tried to do the same, but nobody was as consistently effective as Amy Pascal.

  The Los Angeles Times in 2009 pronounced Sony “the most talent-friendly studio in town.”

  “Whether it’s a filmmaker or a movie star, I
don’t want them to come here and just do one picture,” Pascal said. “My goal is to have the kind of relationship where they want to keep coming back.”

  Publicly, Sony executives would state that they were as interested in franchises as anyone else was. But it clearly wasn’t true. “People labeled us a relationship studio,” Pascal reflected in 2014. “We were, and it was our strategy.”

  Of Sony’s top fifty movies from 2000 through 2016, more than two-thirds were “star vehicles,” in which the talent involved was as big as or bigger than the move title or the franchise. More than one-third, amazingly, came from just two people, the most important stars on Sony’s lot and arguably the studio’s most significant movie assets after Spider-Man: Will Smith and Adam Sandler. Movies they starred in or produced grossed $3.7 billion from 2000 through 2015, 20 percent of Sony Pictures’ domestic total. From 2007 through 2012, an internal analysis found that this duo’s movies generated $450 million in profits—23 percent of everything the motion picture department earned.

  No other studio this century was as reliant on just two movie stars for its success. And no other relationship between talent and studio was as consistent and as consistently lucrative for both sides as that of Adam Sandler and Will Smith with Sony Pictures. Their rise and fall illustrate what has happened to movie stars in Hollywood.

  In West Philadelphia Born and Raised . . .

  A rapper from Philadelphia, known for rhymes that were more lighthearted than hardcore, Will Smith first rose to fame as the second part of the hip-hop duo DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. In 1989, he won the first ever Grammy for rap at the age of twenty. Two years later, he became the most prominent black star on TV since Bill Cosby, with his hit sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. It ran for six seasons and seared Smith’s charismatic persona and resistance-melting smile into the minds of a generation, along with a couldn’t-forget-it-if-you-wanted-to theme song, written and performed by the star.