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October 01, 2008

Patrick Says, "Oscar Go Away!"

I guess we could start with the hypocrisy that 4 of Patrick Goldstein's last 8 blog entries are about the Oscars, whether directly or in reference to The Reader.

But let's skip that... and let's not worry about cranky Patrick's terrible disappointment with not being the only person to get attention for covering The Oscars anymore, like it was in "the good ol' days" when the hype was less deafening but the bull was flying just as intensely, albeit in fewer venues, all printed on paper.

Let' s just deal with the blatant misinformation.

To wit...

"In the past year or so, a host of specialty film divisions and indie producers--notably Picturehouse, Warner Independent Pictures, Paramount Vantage, ThinkFilm and Sidney Kimmel Entertainment--have either gone out of business or suffered huge losses largely because they wildly overspent on Oscar campaigns or made films that couldn't compete in the overheated Oscar marketplace."

False.

Picturehouse released 23 movies in its brief life. Not a single one was out chasing a Best Picture Oscar. Only 3 made any real effort to chase other nominations or Oscars (Pan’s Labyrinth, La Vie en Rose, and A Prairie Home Companion). Pan’s got six Oscar nominations, won three, and generated about $29 million of its $38 million total domestic dollars after the nominations. La Vie en Rose won an Oscar for Marion Cotillard and though it did not make much more at the US box office because of that, the library value of the film (including DVD sales) surely more than made of for the cost of the very targeted campaign. And Altman’s last film, APHC, probably didn’t need any awards push, so yes, they probably lost $4 million or $5 million in that effort. If you want to push the issue, Fur might have been considered an Oscar hopeful going in… and bombed. But no, the demise of Picturehouse had pretty much nothing to do with Oscar desperation. In fact, the Dependent was one of the more successful in that focus.

Warner Independent Pictures (WIP) release 29 films in its almost 5 years of life. There were a total of three films that were ever seriously pushed for Best Picture – Good Night, And Good Luck, The Painted Veil, and In The Valley of Elah. The first got a BP nod amongst six total nominations. The poor release plans around the other two films were what doomed them as box office draws (and perhaps distaste for Iraq War movies), not their Oscar ambitions.

If you want to point fingers for WIP’s failing (and the bottom line was really as much about WB deciding that there was not enough money in the specialty business as anything else)), look to The Jacket ($6m), A Scanner Darkly ($5.5m), The Science of Sleep ($4.7m), Funny Games ($1.3m), Infamous ($1.2m), A Home at the End of the World ($1m), Criminal ($929,233), Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (a film promoted aggressively by Patrick Goldstein - $888,975), and Around the Bend ($193,637). Criminal. Around The Bend, and Infamous alone lost more than WIP ever spent chasing Oscar.

Paramount Vantage did throw a lot of money at Oscar, but it was the exceptionally high production costs of their movies, combined with the costs of awards marketing, that led to the massive losses. A total of one – generously, two – PV movies got to profit. And only 6 of the 15 films released by the division were in any kind of Oscar push.

ThinkFilm released 90 films in 7 years, the vast majority being documentaries. The ambitions of the company did, indeed, in combination with the softening market for theatrical docs, did them in. But blaming Oscar is not remotely realistic. Half Nelson, one of the few films they did push hard, was released in August, not in the middle of the battle. Last season’s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead never got to more than 320 screens. No Oscar consultant on the planet would push a movie that didn’t have the money for a proper release to chase to spend an Oscar marketing budget. (For the record, ThinkFilm still owes MCN the entire cost of their small ad buy from last season.)

And Sidney Kimmel Entertainment… well, I don’t really want to kick a guy and his team when they are down. But SKE had a long history of box office misses before they backed into a failed Oscar bid with Lars & The Real Girl last year. And like Devil, it never got past 321 screens and that was in weekend four, at under $2.5 million, which pretty much guaranteed that their $6 million domestic total, based on that, was pretty good considering. Besides scattershot, release-date flopping by The Kite Runner, Charlie Bartlett, and Alpha Dog, this is the company of Married Life, Death at a Funeral, and Trust The Man. Does Patrick want to blame the $20 million-plus greenlight of Synecdoche, New York on Oscar? I doubt it.

Not a single distributor has gone out of business “largely because” of the absurd cost of chasing Oscar.

That doesn’t mean that the amount spent makes little sense in the DVD era of the movie business, unless you have a very small movie that wins something big or if you win Best Picture.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t too many people talking about Oscars too often with too many hysterics.

That doesn't mean that The Envelope isn't still in business, with a tightened budget, because there is still the hope against hope that it will generate enough extra money to keep a few more people employed at the LAT.

(And perhaps the biggest scam of the week… that Harvey Weinstein pushing The Reader into December is because of Oscar lust.)

As for why studios don’t tend to look to the spring for their dramas, I can only offer Under the Same Moon ($12.6m), Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day ($12.3m), Stop-Loss ($10.9m), Smart People ($9.5m), The Visitor ($9.4m), Young@Heart ($4m), Then She Found Me ($3.7m), Married Life ($1.5m).

There hasn’t been a serious drama release in the summer since World Trade Center in 2006 either. But again, this is no Oscar issue. Seabiscuit did $120 million in mid-summer in 2003 and got a Best Picture nomination. Since then, Collateral (with Cruise) barely got to $100 million domestic and The Notebook did $80 million in 2004. In 2005, Cinderella Man only did $61 million. In 2006, WTC did $70 million. And that was that. It’s too expensive to fight with the 4-quadrant films and teen comedies and there is not enough upside.

It’s the economy, stupid.

It's not that Oscar gold is so hypnotizing, it's that dramas are very, very difficult to find an audience for in this era and awards excitement is one of the few viable marketing tools left... and most quality filmmakers REALLY want to make dramas. And they can't all get Brad Grey and Alan Horn to greenlight $150 million for a period epic that happens to be from a great filmmaker.

If you are going to try to create a boogeyman, try to back up what you are saying instead of just tossing it off like because it occurred to you as a notion and you know Oscar pushes are expensive, so it must be true,

Posted by dpoland at October 1, 2008 04:23 PM

Comments

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