The Paper's reporter Cheng Xiaojun
This past weekend, the North American film market has been uneventful. In short, it is that the old film is full of stamina, and the new film is inherently weak. Compared with the box office of the movie that week, the two big news that broke out in the industry are more topical.
"The Crying Man" was only 52% positive on Rotten Tomatoes.
The new films "Crying Man" and "Police Station" fell short of expectations at the box office
The Marvel movie "Shangqi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" won $21.7 million in three days, leading the weekend box office for the third consecutive week. The film has grossed more than $170 million in North America and will surpass Black Widow's $180 million next week to make it the highest-grossing film in the North American market so far this year. The film currently grosses $320 million worldwide, and whether it can take another step forward depends on whether it can be released in Chinese mainland. A few days ago, the two Hollywood blockbusters "007: No Time to Die" and "Dune" have successively determined the October slot of the Chinese mainland, and the time left for "Shangqi" is really not much.
At the top of the box office list is "Runaway Player", which has been in theaters for more than a month, which has grossed 5 million at the weekend box office, has reached the $100 million mark in North America, and is approaching $300 million worldwide.
Two new films were released at the North American Film Market last weekend, one of which was a self-directed novel by 91-year-old Clint Eastwood, Cry Macho. The film only grossed $4.5 million in 3,967 theaters, which is not ideal, and once again confirms the trend that middle-aged and elderly American audiences are still relatively reluctant to take risks to gather and watch movies during the epidemic. At the same time as the theater release, the film, which is distributed by Warner, can also be seen on the HBO Max streaming platform (with an on-demand fee of $15), which naturally makes middle-aged and elderly audiences more comfortable sitting at home to greet their idol's latest work.
In addition, a closer analysis of Eastwood's past works, its core audience has always been dominated by middle-aged and elderly men in the southern states of the United States, and the South of the United States is the hardest hit area of the current epidemic in the United States, so before the release of the film, the industry generally expected its opening box office to be between $5 million and $10 million. However, the final $4.5 million weekend box office was still lower than expected, and compared with Mr. Toki's last work, the $17.5 million opening box office of "The Mule", which was released two years ago, it is indeed a lot different.
"The Crying Man" is based on the novel of the same name published in 1975, and it is said that the filmmaker bought the rights at that time and conceived to let Eastwood star. However, at that time, he felt that his age and experience were not suitable, so he recommended Robert Mitchum, who was 13 years older than himself, to play. It's just that the project didn't go well, and Robert Mitchum was already in 1997, but Eastwood has remembered it for decades until this time finally felt the time was ripe.
Set in the late 1970s, "The Crying Man" tells the story of a long-retired star cowboy who is hired to kidnap a thirteen-year-old boy, and on the way from Mexico to Texas, usa, the old and the young are from strange to familiar, forming an unusual fate. In addition to the box office, judging from the "Rotten Tomatoes" website, 52% of professional film critics and 65% of the audience praise, the word of mouth is not ideal.
"The Crying Man" is Eastwood's 42nd work as a director, exactly fifty years after the release of his directorial debut, "The Mist Chasing Souls". Roughly speaking, the American directors who are still active in the front line are probably only 85-year-old Woody Allen and 80-year-old Martin Scorsese, who have been filming longer than him. Looking around the world, the 91-year-old is still a director, and only Yoji Yamada in Japan and Godard in France can match. What is more worthy of the book is that Eastwood also personally starred in this time. 91-year-old is still starring, and there are very few in the global film circle.
Gerald Butler starred in the restrictive action film "Police Station"
Another blockbuster new film was the restrictive action film Copshop, starring Gerald Butler. The film was released in 3,005 theaters, not small, but only got 2.3 million US dollars to open the box office, ranking sixth in the weekend box office list, and it is a contrast to its 79% film critics on the film review website Rotten Tomatoes. The distributor, Open Road Flims, did not invest much in its publicity, perhaps the main reason.
If you look at the global film scene, the sci-fi blockbuster "Dune" has been released in nearly 8,000 theaters in more than 20 countries or regions last weekend, with a total of $36.8 million at the box office. The film premiered in France last Wednesday and received more than 180,000 viewers on the same day, which is a good result in the epidemic era. French critics gave the film a high score of 4 stars (out of 5 stars), and the audience gave it 4.4 stars.
In contrast, the film's premiere in North America will not wait until October 22, and it is said that the producer Warner Bros. is mainly concerned about piracy, after all, the film can be released online and offline in the United States on the same day.
When it comes to today's online and offline synchronization model, one of the problems that most headaches theaters and film companies feel is piracy. After all, compared with the so-called preemptive versions that have been pirated or leaked out of the industry in the past, the pirates we have seen in the epidemic era are actually exactly the same in quality as the genuine version, and they come with various subtitles, and the speed and breadth of dissemination are far more than that year. "Dune" was released outside of North America first, at least to ensure that the piracy that flowed out of HBO Max was rampant, and its overseas screenings had already begun in full swing, and the overseas box office that should be earned was almost earned. However, the film is also scheduled to be released in North America on the same day as the Chinese mainland, and it is unknown whether the box office will be affected by piracy.
"Dune" has been the first to be released in France and other places
The online and offline struggle has become the basis of Hollywood's changes
The above debate about whether online and offline parallel or going back to the past window period is also reflected in the two most high-profile news in Hollywood in the past week.
First, last Monday, The head of Paramount Pictures, Jim Gianopulos, was abruptly announced to be dismissed and replaced by 58-year-old Brian Robbins.
The 69-year-old, who has worked in Hollywood for nearly half a century and was the head of Twentieth Century Fox, succeeded Brad Grey, who four years ago succeeded Brad Grey, who lost Paramount a $450 million loss due to a decision to shoot films such as Transformers 5, and became president and CEO of Paramount, and then successfully pulled the century-old Hollywood veteran film company out of the mire.
Gianopoulos belongs to the older class of Hollywood movie tycoons who like to spend thousands of dollars on big-budget films, but this style of work is clearly no longer in line with the overall development strategy of The Viacom CBS Group, to which Paramount belongs, four years later. So Viacom fired the squid directly with two years left in the contract, and Brian Robbins, who took over, was good at medium- and low-cost production of online works.
Unlike Jim Janopoulos, who majored in law, Brian Robbins is a standard Hollywood star ii, his father is also an actor, and he has appeared in well-known American dramas such as "General Hospital" when he was young; later, he has produced dramas such as "Superman Prequel" and worked as a director, making a big bad film "Norbit" that won multiple golden plum awards.
Nine years ago, he saw the prospects of online media and founded a network called AweesmenessTV on YouTube, specializing in the young audience market, and was later acquired by Viacom Group for $50 million.
After Janopoulos took the helm of Paramount Banner in 2017, he paid a lot of money to hire Brian Robbins as chairman of the newly formed Paramount Players. The company aims to unite paramount artists to create content exclusively for the young people's market, and has participated in the production of "Adventure-loving Dora: The Vanishing Golden City" and "Fire Daddy" for four years.
In 2018, Brian Robbins served as chairman of Paramount's famous Nickelodeon channel. This year Paramount launched its own streaming platform, Paramont+, with Brian Robbins as chief content officer, and its position in the entire Viacom CBS Group continues to rise. After taking office, he advocated the direct introduction of a large number of resources from nickelodeon's children's channels into Paramont+, introducing many home users to this streaming media.
It is reported that the contradiction between Janopoulos and the group boss Shari Redstone has existed for some time. The latter hopes to vigorously develop Paramount+, so that Paramount, who lost the starting line in the streaming media war, can catch up as soon as possible, but the former still insists on the old principle that movies must be seen on the screen from his many years of experience in the industry, and does not want to sacrifice the theatrical box office in order to pursue the number of streaming users, and thus mess up the relationship with actors and directors. At the end of 2018, Jim Janopoulos had proposed that Paramount's goal was to be a content provider, providing quality content for platforms such as Netflix. But within three years, Paramount's positioning had clearly changed dramatically, and Gianopoulos's route had become a thing of the past.
In 2020, Ronald Meyer, who has long been in charge of the core power of Universal Pictures, resigned due to a sex scandal, and Alan Horn, the long-term chairman of Disney, was forced to take a back seat, plus jim Janopoulos, the old-school movie tycoon who runs the Hollywood studio, there is very little left. In fact, there may be many causal relationships between Tom Rothman, the current chairman of Sony Pictures, who is also the only of the five largest Hollywood companies other than Netflix that does not have a streaming platform.
With the rise of Brian Robbins, Paramount also announced that the annual investment in the production of film and television content will increase significantly from the original billion US dollars to 5 billion US dollars in the future, but it will mainly focus on online platform content, and the production of big screen movies is expected to decline significantly. At this time, some media outlets pulled out the golden sentence that Brian Robbins said in an interview eight years ago: "The film industry is finished!" The movie model went bankrupt, but for me, it was a great opportunity. ”
Director Christopher Nolan (right) will work with Universal Pictures for his next work
On Tuesday, another industry news piece shook Hollywood. Big director Christopher Nolan announced that his next work will be at Universal Pictures. It is no secret in the industry that Nolan wants to make a biopic about Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb". However, after the tension with Warner, who will spend the film on, all kinds of speculation have been disturbed.
For nearly two decades, Nolan and Warner have had a loyal partnership. His "Batman Series", "Inception", "Dunkirk", "Creed" and many other masterpieces, all produced by Warner, also earned the latter box office, eyeballs and honors. However, just as the so-called world is full of feasts, the two sides have turned against each other, in order to fight online and offline.
At the end of last year, when the epidemic was at its worst, Warner saw that the fate of the cinema industry was imminent, so it decided to temporarily and completely abandon the traditional window period and launch all the works expected to be released in 2021. Unexpectedly, in addition to angering the theater, the most fierce opposition was his own ace director Nolan.
Insisting that the big screen experience is the ultimate meaning of the movie, he angrily labeled Warner's streaming platform HBO Max as "the worst streaming service provider in the industry", and then wrote an open letter to the media, bluntly saying: "Warner once had such a powerful ability to make a director's film work appear anywhere, not only in the cinema, but also in the audience's home, but at this moment, they are destroying this martial art." They don't even know what they're losing. Their decision-making of online and offline synchronous walking is actually impossible to draw at all. ”
Of course, if you go further back, the reason for the gap between the two sides that were originally closely cooperating may lie in the "Creed". At the beginning, the film was affected by the epidemic, and the schedule was pushed back and forth. Warner naturally hoped to release the matter online and minimize the loss. But Nolan, who has great control over the distribution of his own works, did not budge and insisted that the film be on the big screen. In the end, Warner still met the director's requirements, but "Creed" could not compete with the impact of the epidemic after all, and the global box office was not ideal, and Warner lost at least $50 million for this.
For a variety of reasons, Nolan finally decided to leave Warner. In the past period of time, he has widely published hero posts, and his studio in Hollywood has taken turns to welcome the first leaders of Hollywood manufacturers. Under the premise of abiding by the confidentiality agreement, they read the script of the new film and listened to all the conditions of cooperation proposed by Nolan. These include at least $100 million in filming costs and a $100 million publicity budget, including the exclusive slot he has enjoyed in Warner for the first three weeks and the last three weeks (that is, as long as Nolan's new film is released, Warner will not arrange the release of similar films in the first three weeks and the next three weeks), and also includes the requirement that the new film must enjoy a long window of 90 to 120 days before it can land on the online platform.
In the end, Universal's head of filmmaking, Donna Langely, laughed to the end. As Nolan's fellow Briton, she overcame sony, MGM, Paramount and Apple streaming peers to win the distribution rights to Nolan's new film. It is reported that the film is scheduled to start filming in the spring of 2022, and it will not be released until the end of 2023 at the earliest. At a time when the epidemic continues to change day by day, it is too difficult to predict what will happen in two years, what kind of direction will the dispute between streaming media and the big screen, and whether the Nolan God who has experienced the decline of "Creed" can still fight, and only after two years can we see the difference.
The unsatisfactory box office of "Creed" is the reason for the contradiction between Nolan and Warner
Editor-in-Charge: Chen Shihuai
Proofreader: Yijia Xu