| Apr 15 2008 |
So everyone's on the same page about theatrical distribution for Asian films being dead in America, right? If you're not convinced:
CJ7 (Sony Pictures Classic): $194, 534 total US box office (in 30 theaters; it averaged $2619 on opening weekend)
FLASHPOINT (Third Rail Releasing): $5,151 total US box office (in ten theaters; it averaged $327 per theater on opening weekend)
FUNKY FOREST: THE FIRST CONTACT (Viz) grossed even lower than FLASHPOINT by all accounts.
It's becoming increasingly rare for an Asian movie to gross over $100,000 at the box office in America, so what do you do? Stop importing them entirely? No one gets clobbered at the box office harder than Viz which has seen one movie after another sink unnoticed at American theaters (TASTE OF TEA, KAMIKAZE GIRLS, LINDA LINDA LINDA, HONEY AND CLOVER, TRAIN MAN), and so they're finally trying something new. They're releasing the two DEATH NOTE movies for two days only, on High Def digital projection at 300 theaters on May 20 and 21 at 7:30pm.
They've teamed up with a company called NCM Fathom that broadcasts high def opera performances from the Met to multiplexes around the country and as much as I hate seeing DEATH NOTE not get a release, I think they're onto something here. Turning Asian movie releases into events may be what's required. We can get big, rowdy audiences to see EXILED at the New York Asian Film Festival, but it opens in theaters to the sound of crickets. We had sold-out, lines-around-the-block screenings of both DEATH NOTE movies at last year's New York Asian Film Festival but I don't think the audience is there to sustain a week-long run in, say, Chicago or Boston, or even New York. So why not try to apply the festival model (it's a one-night-only event, rather than just another movie) to releasing Asian films?
NCM has made their Met broadcasts enormously popular, and despite the fact that DEATH NOTE 1 and 2 are so old in fan time that they're growing mold, I think that if Viz can mobilize fans, meet-up groups, cos-players and the like to attend these two screenings through the enormous marketing platform they have via their manga, anime and magazine releases, then they may be able to sell a lot of tickets.
It's time to accept reality: Asian movies can no longer compete against Hollywood at the American multiplex, so maybe it's time distributors stopped acting like they were movies and they became special gatherings where local fans could interact and hang out? Distributors will be nervous about losing imaginary profits, and about slicing the pie up so thin (NCM takes a large cut of the box office I would imagine, as does the local multiplex) but when they look at all the P&A costs they can save I think it becomes a lot more attractive.
Think if someone had done this with MEMORIES OF MATSUKO? It's released on four prints in New York, LA and San Francisco to get reviewed, then it airs at 200 theaters across the country for a two-night-only screening. If there's a demand, it can be re-broadcast and there are still a couple of prints to go to the rare calendar house bookings. Now all that money that would have been spent on prints can be spent on advertising the film. It's going to take a distributor with deep pockets and real guts to make this work on more than a one-off basis, but someone's bound to try it soon. I wonder who'll be first?
(Full info on the DEATH NOTE High Def broadcasts)
(Note: we are not talking about Bollywood releases in America. Those still make millions.)
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I do see adverts in our cinemas here in Toronto for MET performances I could assume that this is the same group and I would hope they would consider this for Canadian cinemas as well. At least the major genre markets in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.
Do you think that international DVD sales might have anything to do with the lack of box office returns? If an American studio purchases a film and puts it out in theatres well after a DVD release has already been picked up by cine-philes with region free players then what is the point?
I've urged my readers to support theatrical screenings (the three city liimited release of Funky Forest, for example), but it looks like the future of theatrical releases of Asian films is in jeopardy. Unless of course the releasing companies are willing to take a hit at the theaters, hoping that reviews and buzz will pay off a bit later when the DVD is released.
Maybe Viz's new policy, which I'd just learned about a day or so ago, will help. But will Asian film fans turn out in greater numbers because the film is only showing for a couple of screenigs? Got my doubts. I mean, a mini-event is not the same as a film festival. Still, I'm glad that they're trying a different approach, and not just bailing on theatrical releases.
Finally, though you know I love you Grady, how often have Asian movies really been able to compete with Hollywood at the U.S. box office? "Crouching Tiger," "Hero," and maybe "Shaolin Soccer" and "Kung Fu Justle' have done decently, but that's about all I can think of in recent years. Right now, us Asian film fans can be grateful fro the occassional theatrical release, the ready availablity of DVDs, and of course great festivals, like the New York Asian Film Festival, Japan Cuts, the New York Korean Film Festival, etc.
And why is it exactly that Bollywood releases here make so much more money ?
However, if a distrib does have a 35mm print, they should release it as a roadshow, like how they release domestic films in Japan. Plan out ahead of time, I.D. key venues and build an event that way. It's kind of like platform releasing, but just focusing on 1 or 2 cities at a time.
In the 16 years I have covered Asian film, great strides have been made. But will a 'Flash Point' compare with an 'Iron Man' of course not. Asian film is still niche and has to be viewed as such.
But as a niche market - it has grown from "chop suki" movies and cheap Japanese B monster movies to arthouse film - some gaining world wide recognition - certainly some Asian film makers crossing over helping raise visability for Asian talent before and behind the camera.
Miramax (in its heyday), Weinstein Co, Warner Bros and other major distributors all have interest in Asian film but when product is not mainstream enough, what can you do?
Besides, Asia is only one part of the world, we have middle-eastern film, South African film and Russian cinema all making in-roads now-a-days.
It's a fickle movie market out there........
A) The Dimension Syndrome
Simply put, the Weinsteins poisoned the well. Their flood of moronically renamed, atrociously repackaged, terribly dubbed, and randomly recut films crapped out by Dimension Films created a permanent association between "unwatchable trash" and "Asian cinema" for far too many mainstream viewers. By the time that they realized* that they'd not only shot themselves in the foot, but had amputated both their legs, and tried to do right via Dragon Dynasty, it was way too late. To this day, people express surprise when I tell them that most of the Dragon Dynasty releases (or any other non-botched US release of an Asian film) are an acceptable option most of the time for all but the most finicky viewers. They're expecting THE LEGEND all over again, which should come as no surprise.
B) "MARKETING MARKETING MARKETING"
This is the biggie. American companies, the vast majority of them anyway, produce the most embarrassingly shoddy promotional materials IN THE WORLD - for foreign films in particular. We succeed in peddling our crap only through brute force repetition, and that tactic irritates nearly as many people as it brainwashes. They get away with it on American films because it's an easier sell. But foreign titles are tricker. You need to be more persuasive, but instead we get some of the least appealing "artwork" imaginable, horrendously unprofessional looking stuff that wouldn't pass muster in an high school art class, and often has nothing to do with the actual movie at all - almost as if it was made by people who'd never actually seen the movie (which I strongly suspect is the case a lot of the time). If I didn't know what the movies behind some of those embarrassing DVD covers actually were, I wouldn't touch them with a ten foot pole either. I don't understand this one at all. Nobody, NOBODY, could look at, for disastrous example, the Miramax DVD art for INFERNAL AFFAIRS, and think "Gee, that looks like a good movie." It looks like total GARBAGE, and they wonder why nobody's buying. You don't even need to do a particularly good job with it - look at CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON and HERO - certainly not ingenious marketing, but at least there was a touch of class about it - and lo and behold, both were quite successful. Compare those examples with the marketing of KUNG FU HUSTLE, where the US poster was apparently designed by and for special needs children. Domestic product can frequently survive our awful marketing. Foreign films and other more specialized offerings just can't. These days, we seem to have simply given up on marketing them altogether - I did see a commercial for FLASH POINT, but it was typically poor and didn't even convince me to go see a film I was interested in. I can only imagine the indifference of Joe Sixpack. As for CJ7 - Sony shuffled its released date around a bit and then just dumped it, and I don't blame them. They made their money elsewhere in the world, and word of mouth was weak on the title in the US. Made no sense to spend anything marketing it here - especially since they'd just screw it up anyway. This isn't just an Asian cinema problem, but Asian cinema is hit disproportionally hard because it requires more careful marketing than your average US piece of s*** with Shia LeBoueuf or whoever that useless kid from TRANSFORMERS and the new INDIANA JONES* is.
*Christ, that's the perfect example of how poor our marketing has gotten. They can't even cut an interesting trailer for INDIANA JONES. But it doesn't matter as much because it's INDIANA JONES, and that is marketing enough to allow it to limp to profitability.
The economic situation out there is awful right now, and I've heard from three different companies - all of which are somehow involved on a certain level with releasing Asian film in the US - that things are getting worse. I wouldn't be surprised if by the time we reached September of this year there were some huge layoff, acquisition, merger and bankruptcy announcements.
In an environment like this it's hard to justify a distributor taking a risk on a movie that's unlikely to reach $100,000 theatrically. Which means most Asian films.
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