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Indiewood Circuit

Posted: January 2, 2010

Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos)

Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Writer: Pedro Almodóvar
Producers: Esther García

Stars:

Penélope Cruz
Lluís Homar
Blanca Portillo

Tri-genre: noir romance suspense
Story Situation: dangerous love
Satisfaction Rating: above average
Maturity Rating: 13+

Plotline: Mateo (Lluis Homar) lives, lusts and writes in the dark.  He was the victim of a violent car accident fourteen years previously.  Not only did he lose his vision, but also the love of his life, Lena (Penelope Cruz).  He was a movie director and Lena was his leading lady on-set and steamy lover off-set.  But it was a secret passion because Lena was stuck in an intimate relationship with jealous aging tycoon Ernesto (Jose Luis Gomez).  The situation grows increasingly tense as Lena pulls away from the ever-suspicious Ernesto and into the arms of her true love Mateo … until the accident.

Now, under the pseudonym Harry Caine, Mateo lives a quiet life as a novelist with his past suppressed. But after an unintended drug mishap involving Diego (Tamar Novas), the son of his business partner Judit (Blanca Portillo), Mateo sits vigilantly at his bedside and entertains him by recounting the whole sad tale, revealing his suspcion that the tycoon’s son Ray (Ruben Ochandiano) may have been responsible for the fatal accident and that he may not yet be done with his underhanded deeds.  Then Judit reveals the truth that Diego is Mateo’s own son from their short fling. Suspicion now turns to her.

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Sandra Bullock — Courage at the Top

At a career stage when most lead actresses fade from the limelight, Sandra Bullock emerged this year with her two personal best box office openers: The Proposal and The Blind Side.  Moreover, with her all-time top opener The Blind Side, she did it on her own … as the sole marquee anchor … in a marketplace crowded with new event pictures … by delivering a charismatic Oscar-worthy performance … like nothing she has done before … in a genre different from her usual chick-flick comedies, phone-it-in romances  and thrillers buoyed by a popular male co-star.  Bullock ought to garner great respect within industry circles for creating this compassionate in-your-face mother character as well as for her bold choice in selecting this project.

Certainly, Bullock knew that if The Blind Side did not work with audiences, studio chiefs might well have regarded it as a decline in her stardom.  Instead Bullock signals that her best is yet to come.

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Top Actresses

Watts, Connelly, McAdams Top the Best Buy List; Streep, Aniston, Hathaway Balance Price with Prominence

Forbes.com’s Celebrity Valuations recently released its compilation of the Top-10 women stars whose last three pictures in over-500 screen releases earned the largest revenues (including box office, DVD and television licensing less budget costs) in proportion with their compensation packages.  For example, Naomi Watts’ metric of 44 means $44 were returned for every $1 paid for her services as a performer.  Of course, since actual numbers for actor compensation and picture revenues are difficult to verify, the Forbes valuations are based on estimates.

In the chart below, the Forbes valuations are compared with their Marquee Star appraisals.   Marquee Stars ranks performers in accordance with box office prominence as expressed in millions of present-value dollars.  Top Openers provide the average opening weekend gross, and Top Closers the average final gross.

Not surprisingly, the bottom half of the Forbes Top-10 tend to appear in the top half of the Marquee Stars appraisals owing to larger salaries paid to actresses in higher profile films.  Meryl Streep, Jennifer Aniston and Anne Hathaway offer the best balance between cost-return and box office prominence.

Aaron Eckhart Happens; Marketers Not So Much

"You’re making lemons out of lemonade." - Martin Sheen in “Love Happens”

Box Office Analysis by Paul Maslak
Posted:  September 21, 2009

A funny thing happened this weekend on the way to Love Happens. When we walked through the theater doors, we could have sworn we bought tickets to the latest romantic comedy starring two of Hollywood’s hottest - Aaron Eckhart and Jennifer Aniston.  I mean, the lobby poster steamed romance.  The preview trailer sang romance … and comedy.  The theater guides actually printed the words “romantic comedy.”  And my wonderfully enthusiastic woman swooped me up so fast in the direction of the movie house that I nearly floated skyward like a kite.

But when we found our seats - POOF! … presto change-o - magically, not much comedy and perhaps less romance.

What we got instead was the story of a widower confronting his grief over the loss of his wife, egged on by the prospect of a new love.  More accurately, then, you might classify Love Happens as a romance drama.  A perfectly fine movie, mind you, with a tour de force performance from Aaron Eckhart, emotionally-charged bits from Martin Sheen and John Carroll Lynch, and plenty of charm from Jennifer Aniston in an otherwise nonplussed supporting role.

Still, something of a buzz kill for an audience all revved up for a different experience.  The film title is an outright canard.  So is the ad campaign.  And pre-release, the critics were silent; apparently kept away from advance screenings because Universal’s studio marketers did not want them to tell the public.  Good grief, you’d think this old-fashioned personal drama was the fine print on an adjustable rate mortgage.

Reading between the lines of that fine print, we can surmise what went on…  Filmmakers Brandon Camp and longtime partner Mike Thompson (Dragonfly) had a small arty project.  They called it Brand New Day - an absolutely spot-on terrific title for this film!  Relativity Media got behind it.  Eckhart and Aniston, both of whom periodically take on less mainstream material, signed on … which in turn brought in Universal Studios to co-finance.  Given the cost of studio overhead, we guestimate Universal could not afford to turn on its office lights for projects budgeted much under $15 million.  So with talent and studio commitments, Brand New Day’s budget moved upward.  All the tenpercenter agencies now could make more money and could pat each other on the back for their deal-making prowess.  Perhaps deep down the filmmakers knew better.  But who would rock the boat with all these now house-proud agents about being handed more money since they had Eckhart and Aniston AND their first shot at directing and producing a major feature film?

Of course, tossing extra money at a film project seldom increases the inherent demographic appeal of its concept by very much.  Brand New Day began as a small slightly arty “worth-doing” drama and, upon completion, remained so.  Now the whiz kids in Universal’s marketing department were charged with the do-or-die mission of recouping the studio’s 50% negative costs plus their own department’s heavy marketing costs and overhead.  They would need an opening weekend gross somewhere north of $7.5 million.

Using our own Marquee Stars package calculator in Table 1 above, correctly classifying the picture as specialty & genre product, we calculate the package strength for these combined marquee elements at an anticipated opening weekend gross of $6.22 million.  Our package calculator is actually intended as a measure of relative strength between different package combinations but, nevertheless, can often anticipate good ballpark performance numbers in a pinch.  When further adjusted downward for genre, subject, and prevailing market conditions, the picture’s package strength might even dip as low as $3.47 million - ouch - in all cases well below the studio break even requirement for $7.5 million.

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Til Schweiger

Still Germany's Best Kept Secret

Beyond his flashy action cameos in international films such as Inglorious Basterds, King Arthur and Lara Croft 2, Til Schweiger remains the biggest box office star in the strategically important German-speaking market.  However at home, the handsome actor is known less for his action roles than for his Matthew McConaughey-style comedy romances, most recently 1 ½ Ritter (Knight and a Half), Keinohrhsasen (Rabbit without Ears) and Barfuss (Barefoot). Schweiger has starred in four of the top-10 grossing German films of all time including Raumschiff Surprise (Starship Surprise) which set the record for the highest opening weekend gross.

Schweiger was cast fresh out of Cologne Theatre School as a regular on the popular German soap Lindenstraße (Linden Street) which, in turn, also landed him his first starring film role in the hit comedy Manta, Manta (Racing in the Streets). Subsequently, his film performances have earned him Best Actor Awards at the Max Ophüls Festival, the Moscow Film Festival and the Polish Film Festival, as well as the Ernst Lubitsch Award for producing, writing, directing and starring in Keinohrhsasen.

Til Schweiger lives most of the year in Germany. He has four children with American wife, model Dana Carlsen.

Jackie Chan Gets Dramatic

In Shinjuku Incident, an uncharacteristic non-comedic passion project from Jackie Chan, produced by his longtime management partners and distributed comfortably out of sight of international family audiences, Chan explores a more mature and darker dramatic range as a socially-conscious anti-hero who cheats, steals, kills mercilessly, and even sleeps with a prostitute.

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Chinese star Ziyi Zhang channels Julia Roberts

Often regarded as the Chinese Julia Roberts, international sex symbol Ziyi Zhang (Golden Globe nominee: Memoirs of a Geisha, Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Rush Hour 2, Golden Horse nominee: Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon) boldly ventures into an actual Julia Roberts-style story with Sophie’s Revenge in a genre not so very well-established on the Chinese circuit.  Also featured as her romantic rival is charismatic newcomer Bingbing Fan.  Both women speak English.

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