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No Money for Old Men. Trade Roughage 09/08/08

Christopher Campbell
By Christopher Campbell posted 1 year ago
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  • Bangkok Dangerous opened with only $7.8 million over the weekend, but on the upside it still topped the box office chart and it was still better than Nic Cage’s last non-National Treasure movie, Next. Far more embarrassing is Babylon A.D.’s 58% drop and College’s 55% drop in their second week, as well as Hamlet 2’s 52% drop in its second week in an already disappointing attempt at wide release.
  • Perhaps the Bard will have better luck with Paramount’s announced adaptation of the young-adult novel Spanking Shakespeare, which actually has even less to do with the playwright than Hamlet 2 does.
  • The obvious pitch: Braveheart in Egypt. Will Smith is playing Taharqa, a pharaoh who led battles against the eventually successful Assyrian invaders, in The Last Pharaoh. Randall Wallace is currently writing a new draft of the project, and hopefully Smith is hard at work on the “Walk Like an Egyptian”-sampling plot song.
  • Another soundtrack moment waiting to happen: “Hot for Teacher” playing as Jessica Alba becomes a second-grade math teacher in Marilyn Agrelo’s An Invisible Sign of My Own.
  • Just as the latest Coen brothers film is about to open, the previous is back in the news. Unfortunately, it’s because Tommy Lee Jones is suing Paramount for more than $10 million, which he claims he’s owed for No Country for Old Men.

Comic-Con 2008: Hamlet 2 Wants To Rock You Sexy Jesus

Kevin Kelly
By Kevin Kelly posted 1 year ago
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Hamlet 2 is one of the funnier films you probably haven’t heard of unless you track the movie sales at Sundance. Earlier this year it almost broke the Little Miss Sunshine record of 10.5 million when it sold for 10 million to Focus Features. The New York Times says “”It made sure to take shots at Christians, gays, Latinos, Jews, the American Civil Liberties Union and Elisabeth Shue, one of its lead actresses.” In fact, the trailer says “And reintroducing Elizabeth Shue as… Elizabeth Shue.”

Since we attended their party last night, and drank copiously from their open bar, which was stocked with drinks like “Holy Water” and “Rock Me Sexy Jesus,” we thought we’d better man up on the tough “sunday morning wakeup and head to the Con through the remaining fog of Saturday night.” They showed us the trailer for the movie, and several clips, which all served to make me wish I’d seen this movie in Park City. The aforementioned drink name serves as one of the key musical numbers, and you’ll end up having “Rock Me Sexy Jesus” stuck in your head.

Director and co-writer Andrew Fleming, and writer Pam Brady joined star Steve Coogan onstage to discuss the film, which is exactly what you’d expect from Brady, who writes and produces South Park. But Fleming has directed films like Dick, Threesome, The Craft, and Nancy Drew, so he’s all over the map. According to Fleming, the original title for the film was “Mr. Holland’s Anus,” but according to Pam Brady, “That title was already being used by a Belgian porn, so there were copyright issues.”

They didn’t really have much time for a Q&A, being slotted for just 30 minutes, right before the Harold & Kumar panel. Someone asked Steve Coogan, “did you watch a lot of Jesus movies?” Steve replied, “Yes, particularly enlightening was Max Von Sydow in The Greatest Story Ever Told,” which might have actually inspired Coogan’s hair in the film. “The hair was very key,” according to Coogan.

Fleming also explained that, yes, they do make a lot of fun of Elisabeth Shue throughout the film, although most of that was her idea. For instance, when Coogan’s theater teacher character brings her to class, no one knows who she is. That was Shue’s idea. I’m actually wondering if that’s based on some of her real-life experiences. Do people still know who Elisabeth Shue is?

They showed several clips from the film, including an extended “sing along” scene of the main dance number, which you can watch in the video above. As they closed things out, Fleming thanked everyone at Comic-Con for coming to the panel, “Jesus is the original superhero, so… yeah!”

Hamlet 2 comes out in limited release on August 22nd, and goes wide on August 29th.

Summer Time is Here

Christopher Campbell
By Christopher Campbell posted 1 year ago
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Never mind the fact that my school just let out for spring break. It’s a beautiful 77 degrees in New York City today, the outdoor bars are open and I’m wearing shorts for the first time this year. Plus, the Entertainment Weekly Summer Movie Preview just arrived in my mailbox, giving me the signal that it is officially the blockbuster season. Sure, May 2nd isn’t for two more weeks, when technically Iron Man begins the summer movie stretch (can’t we just pretend The Forbidden Kingdom is the first summer action flick?), but nothing says, “break out the beach ball,” like the bible of blockbuster buzz.

Yet there’s something strange about this year’s issue. There’s a little less marketing-agency-fueled promotion and a little more reality checking. Maybe it’s because these days, thanks to the web, most moviegoers have already heard about the big releases. That would explain why EW devotes most of its two-page spread on The Incredible Hulk to describing its troubles:

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Sundance 2008 Deals: Suddenly Features

Karina Longworth
By Karina Longworth posted 1 year ago
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Wow. About three and a half hours ago, I posted this story about how there hadn’t been any deals in two days. Then I went to a screening. By the time I came back, three features had landed multi-million dollar deals. The hugest of these is the $10 million Focus paid for the Steve Coogan comedy Hamlet 2. That’s Little Miss Sunshine money. That’s insane. Also off the maket: Mark Pellington’s Henry Poole is Here, which went to Overture for $3.5 mil, and Choke, which sold to Searchlight for $5 million. All of the above have been added to our comprehensive Sundance deal chart.

A note about the chart itself: yesterday I removed the $$$ column, as up until that point there had been minimal information released about how much distributors had actually paid. But all of today’s deals have had dollar values clearly attached–– I guess nobody spends $10 million on ANYTHING without making sure that someone knows about it–so from here on, I’ll append dollar values if applicable in the Rights column.