The first out-of-town, pre-Broadway run for the stage musical version of Mel Brooks‘ Young Frankenstein begins at Seattle’s Paramount theatre on Saturday, 8.4, and closes Saturday, 9.1. The tickets are steep ($175 for orchestra/mezzanine) but they’ll be nowhere near as outrageous as the prices New Yorkers will pay when it starts previews at the Hilton Theatre on 42nd Street on 10.11. (The official opening is on 11.8.) I’m told that premium seats will go for $450 on weekend nights and $375 on weekday nights. I could not in all good conscience part with that much money to see a Mel Brooks musical. I’m happy just watching the DVD of the 1974 film.
The ad slogan for The Bourne Ultimatum (Universal, 8.3) is “this summer Jason Bourne comes home.” But if the Universal marketing guys were to dream up a slogan that honestly characterizes the financial realities behind the making of the third Bourne flick, it might read “the more money an action franchise earns, the more money the next installment will cost. Just ask Jason Bourne.”
That’s a fairly dull slogan so let’s stop cute-ing around and get down to brass tacks. I was told last night that The Bourne Ultimatum, which is locking its final release print over the holiday, has cost more than the first two Bourne films combined, or $175 million. (The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy both cost $75 million each to shoot, per IMDB and Wikipedia.) The Universal position is that Ultimatum cost $130 million. Big gap there.
I really and truly don’t give a toss how much The Bourne Ultimatum cost. All big-studio movies seem to end up costing a fat pile, and it’s hard to sustain an interest in such things when everything is $100 million this and $200 million that. I just want the film to be good, and a slightly prejudiced friend of Ultimatum tells me it’s “flat-out great, and that’s what should matter most of all.
“One of the things that distinguishes the Bourne films is that authentic, you-are- there, on-the-ground subjective shooting style — that near-verite trademark feel,” he says. “The production visited Morocco, Paris, London, Spain, Berlin and New York, but the Bourne series is not one of those metastasizing, ever-inflating behemoths like some other franchises. [Director Paul] Greengrass has become an even more accomplished director since the last go-’round and his virtuosity is one of the things that is a hallmark for Ultimatum.”
Okay, but I don’t want to experience the same heebie-jeebie, super-shaky handheld photography and spazzy machine-gun cutting that was used in two or three of The Bourne Supremacy‘s action sequences. Some moviegoers went with it, and some (including myself) found it infuriating. I was saying to myself, “Stop whipping the camera around and cutting everything so fast…it’s too much work to follow what’s going on!”
Where were we? Oh, yeah, the higher costs. I’m told that the engorged Ultimatum tab is due to an alleged 35 days of extra shooting above and beyond the original principal photography schedule. (The Bourne Ultimatum began shooting on 10.2.06.) “They weren’t happy with what they had so they kept going back in stages and adding or re-shooting this and that,” is how it was conveyed to me by an off-the-lot source.
This sounds like a pretty good thing from an audience perspective. The more exacting and perfectionist Greengrass and producer Frank Marshall were, the better the final film is likely to be…right?
I tried to get my Universal insider to confirm or question the “extra 35 days of shooting” story, and he replied that “none of that can accurately be told. It’s not a matter of ’35 extra days’ or the schedule starting on this day and going until that one. There were hiatus breaks built into the schedule as well, so it can’t be said that it started here and shot till then. The hiatuses were built in to accommodate the unorthodox schedule.”
All he would say beyond this is that “‘additional’ stuff was shot in all locations. The same was true of Supremacy and Identity.”
Universal’s Bourne Ultimatum website says Identity and Supremacy have earned over $500 million in global box office. Wikipedia says Supremacy did $288,500,217 worldwide and Identity did $213,925,107 million. Supremacy, in other words, made almost four times as much as it cost to shoot (i.e., $75 million), and Identity earned almost three times as much as it cost to shoot (i.e., ditto).
Boil it all down and the higher budget figures (be it the official $130 million or the alleged $175 million) suggest that Ultimatum can’t be the breadwinner that the first two films were.
The Ultimatum friend argues that using a budget-gross ratio formula “loses steam when you consider the nature of franchise revenues and how this series has built considerably from first to second film and how those ancillary revenue streams — everything from DVD to TV, etc — are different for the third in a successful series.”
I told him that I absolutely love that shot in the Ultimatum trailer of Damon jumping from one building to another in Tangier with the camera jumping right along with him. “A very cool CG shot,” I said. But it’s not that, I was told. “The cameraman actually followed the jump and caught that as a practical,” the Universal guys says.
With a crane, I presume he meant. The shot is so smooth and flotating it’s hard to believe it’s not a digital creation. I’ve watched it five or six times this morning. The guy just wrote back and said “not a crane — the cameraman made the jump himself off the roof!” To which I replied, “Oh, come on…!!”
Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason is predicting a $152 million, six-day total for Transformers, but I”ve been told of a lower projection (composed by a competing studio) of $149,851,000. Dreamamount will undoubtedly claim $150 million and change if the actual final figure is anywhere close to that.
The best Transformers earning day so far has been the $29 million and change it took in last Wednesday. It did $22,201,000 yesterday, which was $2 million higher than Thursday’s total but $7 million below Wednesday’s.
Ratatouille‘s weekend projection is $30,878,000 — a good hold. Live Free or Die Hard will take in roughly $17,500,000 for the weekend. License to Wed wll end up with $10,5000,000 for the weekend…a cume of $17.8 or $17.9 million for six days (having opened Tuesday).
Evan Almighty will have a three-day tally of $8,719,000 by Sunday night. Figure a cume of $80 or $90 million. It lost 490 theatres this past week, which is unusual for a big studio film in its third week of play. 1408 will take it $7,091,000 for weekend. Knocked Up — $5,226,000. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer — $4,140,000. Ocean’s 13 — $3,668,000.
Sicko added 280 theatres but is down 24% from last weekend. It will probably earn between $25 and 30 million by the end of the run.
Two things wrong with Stuart Gordon‘s House of Re-Animator idea, which is about Herbert West bringing Dick Cheney and George Bush back to life with one of his green-liquid injections inside the White House. One, he’s a little late. The movie should be coming out, at the latest, sometime early next year, and Gordon doesn’t even have the financing together. And two, a Bush White House Reanimator movie won’t be worth much in terms of home video revenues because it’ll be totally dated as of January 20, 2009. It should have actually come out last year, or in ’05. Otherwise, it sounds hilarious.
“Walking out of a movie means something,” writes Chicago Tribune critic Michael Phillips. “It means a filmmaker has crossed a personal line in the sand. We ‘ankle,” as the show business publication Variety likes to put it, for different reasons. A walkout’s significance depends largely on the pace of the exit (fleeing in revulsion versus schlumping out, bored beyond recognition) in relation to the crimes up on screen.” I’ll never forgot being bawled out by three or four journos at the Westwood Bruin for walking out on Eight-Legged Freaks. As if I’d done something wrong. Who, today, would stand up for Eight Legged Freaks? Hell, who remembers Eight Legged Freaks?
Transformers will “certainly” make more than $150 million by Sunday night, I’ve been told. This is too depressing to write about at any length. If I could have clapped my hands and turned Transformers into a box-office bust, I would have clapped my hands and said “yeah.” I have this image of a 1500-foot tall statue of Micheal Bay striding Hollywood Blvd. like the Colossus of Rhodes, and then the statue suddenly coming alive with people screaming and cars crashing down below. And then Bay hearing the commotion and looking down and grinning, and then putting his hands on his hips and throwing his head back and going, “Hoo-haw-haw-haw-haw-haw!” — just like the big genie in Alexander Korda‘s The Thief of Baghdad.
A trailer for Ang Lee‘s Lust Caution (Focus Features, 9.28), a World War II espionage thriller featuring tasteful hot nude scenes featuring Chinese film star Tang Wei. The Focus copywriter says that Tony Leung (In the Mood for Love) plays Mr. Yee, “a powerful political figure in 1940s Shanghai.” with whom Tang Wei “gets swept up in a dangerous game of emotional intrigue.”
What the copywriter meant to say is that she does a Mata Hari on the guy, having an affair with him as part of a plan to either get information or set him up for a hit….or both. And that things get a little complicated by the fact that she falls in love with him. Ang Lee is a great cinematic painter and we all know it’s the singer not the song, but my God this could be the plot of a Sydney Sheldon novel.
No telling how good Ben Affleck‘s Gone Baby Gone (Miramax, 10.19) may be, but the trailer is very well cut — a solid indication of a pro-level thing. You can sort of tell that Casey Affleck gives a sharp, convincing performance as a Boston-area private dick. Morgan Freeman appears to be doing his excellent usual usual; ditto Michele Monaghan. It feels like this could be Mystic River and then some. You can’t trust feelings and intimations, of course. The proof will be in the pudding, which I presume will be served at the Toronto Film Festival.
A guy in the pipeline of producer J.J. Abrams, currently vacationing in Maine, informs that Cloverfield, the sea-monster movie, will open on 1.18.08.
Abrams is “very active on this one, as he plans to be on all Bad Robot projects,” he says. “The only things he’s been involved with which he hasn’t really had any creative role were What About Brian and Six Degrees — both shows that existed before Bad Robot really opened for business (meaning, when he put the team together).
“Cloverfield is an idea Abrams had over a year ago, which he then sold to Paramount. The point-of-view thing (Handicam) is the whole movie. Scenes from the trailer are in the film. Abrams got a really talented guy (Drew Goddard) to write (they’d worked together on Alias and, presently, Lost), and Matt Reeves to direct (they co-created Felicity and he’s pretty damn genius-level).
“Bad Robot and Paramount will be announcing the real title shortly.”
Paul Giamatti frame capture from the Shoot ‘Em Up trailer. (Thanks to Jason K. Heiser for providing the art.)
This Shoot ‘Em Up trailer has re-sold me. I was into this film eons ago, but the ardor faded when no trailer turned up for months and months and then when I heard about the extra shooting. Now I’m into it all over again because of Paul Giamatti‘s crazy-villain performance, which looks wonderful. It also seems to slightly de-emphasize the absurdist John Woo gun-ballet aspects.
I tried digging into the bootleg trailer for J.J. Abrams’ new hair-raiser called Cloverfield, attached to Transformers in theatres but captured by video cameras and posted online. It’s ostensiby “about a creature from the sea that attacks Manhattan” and sends, in the final shot, what looks like the head of the Statue of LIberty rolling and thumping down a street.
The trailer was forcibly removed from YouTube sometime this afternoon (Paramount legal takes credit for tha action in a posted statement in red letters). I wrote a guy who’s in the loop for a little inside-baseball reporting, but so far it’s been nada enchilada. Here’s another link.
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