Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business (11 page)

SO, COMRADE, WHAT WILL WE SEE?

I am glad that I have found Legendary to be my comrade. We sincerely value this partnership and believe that this collaboration will not only produce countless fantastic films for our global audience, but simultaneously will allow the world to see China from a whole new perspective.

—Thomas Tull’s partner in their
Variety
announcement.

All these coproductions are subject to strict government regulations. They must be shot in China, and more significantly, they must pass the government censors. This will be no small feat, apparently. People who’ve seen
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
(an English-language film) tell me that foot binding never occurred in provincial China in the nineteenth century, as depicted in Wendi
Deng and her partner’s coproduction of the classic novel. Or so say the Chinese censors. They didn’t like the dirty laundry hanging in Shanghai in 2006’s
Mission: Impossible III
either, so it was cut. They are even tough on their favorite kind of tentpole. The Chinese are tough on laundry!

Recently, while on the jury of a film festival in Beijing, director Jean-Jacques Annaud apologized to the Chinese government for his insensitivities toward Chinese culture in his film
Seven Years in Tibet
—about the Dalai Lama during the time of China’s takeover of Tibet—in order to shoot his next film there; the
Los Angeles Times
reported that in
2012,
a disaster movie about an attack on the White House, dialogue was inserted for the Chinese version that extolled Chinese scientists as visionaries. It also reported that gratuitous compliments about the Chinese people or government are being inserted into scripts to please financial partners. Pretty soon, with Russia and China as our primary trade partners, we will have no bad guys in our action movies. Only North Koreans.

What coproduction will also deeply affect are the types of movies we’re less likely to see from the studios, as Chinese box office dominance expands: Dramas. Period pieces. Romances. Anything remotely political. Comedies. All of our financially advantageous (especially to the Chinese) coproductions require extensive rewrites and polishes to please the delicate sensitivities of the Chinese partners. Even the science-fiction hit
Looper
had to be moved from France to China, sixty years in the future, when it will be the greatest superpower in the world!
There’s
a subtle change. Not.

The impact of this new deal obviously cements the studios’ reliance on special-effect-driven tentpoles. Without the new exports, the Chinese market was already moving from number five to number one. They want fantasy, and only we can make giant, spectacular fantasy. It is the thing technology has left us with which to refill our empty coffers. The biggest movie in history led the way.

Think of what
Avatar
provided the world. The $2 billion dollar
fantasy was the ultimate ride; it was the thrill of seeing a perfectly used technology that was invented, literally, for one movie. It was something that could be done only in America at that point, by only one filmmaker. The creation of that technology converged perfectly with the outfitting of IMAX and 3D conversions in all the emerging markets. Suddenly, teens, kids and families from Indonesia to Peoria, from Kaliningrad to Beijing, from Kyoto to Brooklyn, were all hooked up to the rest of the village. It made everyone feel like they were in tune with everyone else at the cutting edge of technology. You had to see it, and you had the technology to know that, and we had the outreach to tell you that—wherever you were under the Earth’s moon.

As for ideas—the government of China doesn’t want the West intermediating ideas. The Web is hard enough for them to control, and now they have their own indie filmmakers. Their audience doesn’t want subtitles, or our interpretation of Tiananmen Square. This is not our job.

How do we keep making movies for them and yet also keep making movies for us? With this potential industry-saving mandate, can we still make something other than tentpoles and sequels? Is the business systemically addicted? Are we addicted? What about those of us who aren’t?

THE ORIGIN OF SEQUELITIS

Is It a Disease Without a Cure?

The
Ice Age
Paradox:
Diminishing Appetite for Sequels Here Is in Direct Proportion to the Increasing Appetite for Them Abroad.

Here we get to the crux of the matter, where marketing meets international, where our taste diverges from “theirs.” This is where the number crunching tells you what the studios are going to
make, what they are going to continue to make (apart from their Oscar bait), why they’ve made what they’ve made, and why there is rarely something you want to see at the mall this weekend but everywhere else they’re flocking to theaters in huge numbers. This is where the rubber meets the road to China. The question I am asked most frequently is, why do the studios keep making sequels? Here we go:

Jim Gianopulos slaps what I can only describe as a profoundly depressing chart in front of me. It is the grosses for
Ice Age,
domestic and international. It is clear they exhilarate him, as well they should.

“So here you go, look at
Ice Age,
” he says cheerfully.

A quick scan reveals bad news, if your angle is to reduce the number of unnecessary sequels from the movie diet. “This is fascinating,” I say, scanning the numbers for confirmation of the end of the movie world as we knew it.

Jim reviews the numbers: “The first
Ice Age
does $175 million domestically, $206 million internationally. The second one does $192 million domestically, $456 million internationally. The third one does $200 million domestically and $700 million internationally.”
³

“That’s crazy! That’s crazy!”

He tries to talk. “Yeah. And what that shows you is—”

“You’re going to make
Ice Age
s forever is what it shows you.”

“That’s for sure,” Jim agrees. “But it also shows you the potential of the international market, when you have something that appeals broadly across many audience sectors. Something that is pure entertainment and enjoyment, that has the warmth and emotion that appeals to families, that has the wit and fun that appeals even to teens.”

It is about now that I want to stick my finger down my throat. But then Jim gets serious.

“But more than
anything,
when someone sees a poster, when someone sees an ad and it says
Ice Age
and he sees those characters, they know instantly what it is.”

There it is. Preawareness. The enemy of originality.

“The problem is, even if international is now two-thirds of the box office, getting close to seventy percent—the population that we talked about is five percent to ninety-five percent—you can’t spend twenty times the marketing internationally that you spend domestically. It’s just too outrageously expensive. So when you look by any measure—by total rating points (this is how we measure TV buys), by the amount of the overall spend, by
anything
—you can’t spend the same to get any particular person per capita abroad to be aware of your movie, to involve them in your movie and to get them to come to your movie as you would per capita in the United States. But when you have a sequel to a film that’s recognizable, that they know, that they’ve enjoyed in the past, that’s when you really tap into the potential. That’s when the population potential and the audience potential really kicks in.”

“Disease” is a term for any condition that impairs the normal functioning of an organism or a body.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you sequilitis. We are infected, and the infection seems to be killing some and making others very healthy. And wealthy. It will be with us forever. The question is, can the original movie survive despite it?

1.
Star TV’s British affiliate, BSkyB, is 39 percent owned by Fox, a constant source of frustration to Murdoch, who has been recently thwarted in his bid to take it over in its entirety by the tabloid hacking scandal that threatens both his media holdings in Britain and the status of his heir, James.

2.
State Administration of Radio, Film and Television.

3.
The fourth one opened at $46 million domestic, with a global total of $385 million as of July 16, 2012.

DANCING WITH THE MARKETING STARS

Creative filmmakers and producers—those who care about original movies—are increasingly dependent on marketing wizards for the survival of movies not based on previously existing material. These films without “preawareness” are the endangered species of the movie business. Christopher Nolan’s
Inception,
released by Warner Bros., based on an original script by Nolan, is one such film that many in the industry doubted would open at the time, as it had no famous title or comic-book hero to hang its hat on. But it opened like gangbusters due to a brilliant marketing campaign. This is why people like Warner Bros. president of worldwide marketing Sue Kroll are the new Hollywood stars.

Sue is a complex presence, full of mixed metaphors. She looks like a cameo in a locket but acts like a turbocharged Ferrari. Her demeanor is conservative, but she makes up the hippest campaigns for teen boys. “RELEASE THE KRAKEN!!!” read the ad line for the 2010 hit
Clash of the Titans
that was so widely and loudly repeated by young boys from coast to coast when the movie was released that it became an international meme. Sue made it up. She is equally intuitive and intellectual.

I saw her for the first time in September 2009, dancing out of an elevator at the Four Seasons Hotel during the Toronto Film
Festival with Matt Damon and her trusty ally and second-in-command, Blair Rich, in tow. I’d been dying to meet her. This is the famous Sue? I thought. It turns out Sue is more likely to be poring over research than boogalooing down hotel corridors; I’d just found her at a very uncharacteristic moment. They must have dared her to do it. Wouldn’t you, if Matt asked you to?

At the top of the Warner Bros. decision-making team, she had been an inside star for fifteen years. She worked her way up through international marketing, creating Warner’s worldwide
Harry Potter
campaigns, among others. Warner Bros. was not doing well with its U.S. releases in the mid-2000s (though its international marketing was thriving), and chairman Jeff Robinov got the idea to bring Sue back home from London to L.A. to run the whole shebang. It was a bold move, since the customary thing to do when marketing is in trouble is to play musical chairs and entice someone from another studio. Warner Bros. has been among the top in market share ever since. So I had my eye on Sue even before I was lucky enough to work with her.

Sue and her Warner Bros. team were opening Matt Damon’s
The Informant
at the Toronto Film Festival, as well as the Ricky Gervais/Jen Garner movie,
The Invention of Lying,
that I was producing with my son, Oly. The two movies were sharing a press junket Sue was running, wherein the world’s entertainment press gathered to watch our movies to review them and write features. Sue’s team would try to affect the coverage by feting, wining and dining, and gifting reporters with their paltry movie swag and holding a press conference for each. The game played at press junkets is for the entertainment press to lap up all the perks, free meals and snippets of “intimate” milliseconds with the stars that they possibly can, while remaining as snarky and independent as possible and still manage to be invited back next year. These days there’s a lot of satellite TV, and less mano a mano than before. And the swag is pretty much movie merchandising—a key chain, a board game,
printed bath towels, all movie-theme dependent. The New Abnormal has taken the swagger out of swag, and the press is pretty much left with buffets and promotional tchotchkes.

Both
The Informant
and
The Invention of Lying
were destined to be “art” movies for Sue’s studio. By this I mean the box office estimate was under $50 million domestic, no matter what happened. (That would have been a bonanza for
Lying
.) But from the look-to-conquer in Sue’s eyes, you would have thought we were all Batmen. Well, she did have Matt. And that’s pretty hot.

Sue spearheads each of Warner Bros. Pictures’ campaigns personally, working closely with President Jeff Robinov and his production team in every aspect of a movie’s release. Robinov, who started as an agent, has a keen eye for picking pictures. Making sure they get seen is Sue’s department.

Marketing is the one hard cost in moviemaking now; the studios cannot change how much a television ad, a billboard, etc., costs. If the studio is smart and tough, they can lower a movie’s budget and rein in production costs with a responsible filmmaker. But getting the word out—through all the noise of the other movies getting their word out—costs a fortune. Free advertising and publicity have become crucial. Getting the stars—if there are any—to do their bit on TV is a job in itself. But if the reliance on titles of famous books and fairy tales, superheroes, games et al. ad nauseam comes from their preexistence in the culture, then marketing creatives working on original properties must compensate for their product’s lack of awareness with a campaign that captures the public’s imagination.

Robinov also brought Sue Kroll onto his green-light team, making her a part of their early decision-making about what to produce. When the head of production and the head of marketing are on the green-light committee together, as is the case at Warner Bros. and now other studios too, there is more communication throughout the process. The whole team knows what it is selling from the moment it buys the script or idea and starts developing
it. No marketing team can successfully open every movie, and Warner Bros. has had its failures: It couldn’t get an audience to go to female-fantasy-actioner
Sucker Punch,
or get sufficient numbers to launch
Green Lantern
into franchise territory, despite Herculean efforts. But it has opened “original” movies—those without preawareness—as well as anyone ever has; for example, the Warner Bros. marketing team’s phenomenonally successful campaigns for
The Hangover
and
Inception
. By October 2011,
The Hangover I
and
II
had crossed the $1 billion mark, the highest-grossing live-action (nonanimated) comedy franchise in history.