Good article on the global play behind this film
Hollywood Banks on Foreign Moviegoers as U.S. Ticket Sales Stall
Brent Lang
Senior Film and Media Editor
@BrentALang
COURTESY OF COLUMBIA PICTURES
DECEMBER 14, 2016 | 09:00AM PT
Vin Diesel’s passport is getting a workout these days.
This story first appeared in the December 14, 2016 issue of Variety.
The action star was in Brazil last month to hawk “XXX: Return of Xander Cage” at the country’s edition of Comic-Con. Diesel, recognized the world over for his role in the “Fast and Furious” franchise, popped up at a surprise screening of the “Xander Cage” sequel, and drew crowds as he drove back to his hotel. At one point, he stopped the car to play soccer with locals.
“Fans were screaming,” recalls Nic Crawley, head of international marketing and distribution for Paramount. “It was like the Beatles had come to town.”
The next two months will bring Diesel and company to such far-flung locales as Mumbai, where the film, which features Indian superstar Deepika Padukone in a lead role, will have its world premiere. It’s part of an effort to drive turnout for a movie that seems to have been greenlit primarily for its overseas appeal. The picture is loaded with the kind of action set pieces that cross every language barrier, and it has a multi-ethnic cast that includes Kris Wu, Tony Jaa, and Ruby Rose, major stars in China, Thailand, and Australia, respectively.
“It’s a glorious international movie because of the diverse cast,” Crawley says.
How things have changed. Twenty years ago, foreign markets were something of an afterthought. They could be counted on to pad the grosses of a few select films, particularly those with a Tom Cruise or a Will Smith above the title. Today, overseas territories routinely account for more than 60% of a major release’s total gross.
On paper, the domestic box office achieved record revenue in 2015 and could set a new high-water mark this year. When inflation is taken into account, however, sales have been essentially flat and attendance has failed to come close to matching the record of 1.57 billion set in 2002.
Duncan Clark, president of distribution for Universal Pictures International, says that the American market is still the gold standard when it comes to exhibition technology and in ratio of screens. He adds however, that “the population base, by definition, means that this international world is going to deliver bigger numbers than you’ve witnessed for any of the titles that go out on a broad basis.”
With the domestic business maturing, studios have looked overseas, particularly to Asia and Latin America, to find markets with burgeoning middle classes and a thirst for pop culture. China, for instance, saw ticket sales increase more than 20% through the first half of the year (actually a sizable decline from the 48% growth it experienced in 2015), and movie theater construction is continuing at a feverish pace. Opportunities abroad are leading several studios to change the types of films that they’re making, or to expand the number of films they release that are aimed at foreign audiences in their own language.
That has led to some shakeups and shifts at major studios. Under newly minted studio chief Tom Rothman, Sony Pictures is building up its local-language division and putting more of an emphasis on star-driven, special-effects-oriented productions such as “Passengers” and “Jumanji” that are designed to appeal to overseas crowds. In the past, Sony tended to be the home of Adam Sandler comedies and adult dramas that had a limited appeal outside of the U.S. In a signal of this shift, Rothman tapped Sanford Panitch to serve as president of Columbia Pictures. The two men worked together at Fox, where Panitch developed the studio’s local-language productions.
“You have to have a global revenue perspective,” says Panitch. “No studio should greenlight a big movie based solely on how it will perform in the U.S.”
At Sony, Panitch has also reinvigorated the company’s slate of films produced by and for foreign audiences. In less than two years, the studio has built up its local divisions in 10 countries, including new arms in Turkey, China, and Russia.
“You have to empower your local team,” notes Panitch. “To sit in an office in West L.A. and think we know what will work for a Hindi-speaking audience in Mumbai is the height of imperial arrogance.”
Sony’s not alone in making changes to its foreign-distribution strategy. Universal, for instance, recently placed Universal Pictures Intl. Productions under the banner of Focus Features, its specialty-film arm. The combined divisions have been tasked with instituting a more global approach to the movies they make. That has led the companies to move opportunistically, picking up foreign rights to the likes of “American Honey,” a buzzy Cannes hit; Spanish distribution for Oscar hopeful “La La Land”; and worldwide rights to a drama about the fashion industry from Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Thomas Anderson.
Even as studios seek to offer films that are more regionally specific, there’s a growing sense that social media and the internet are breaking down barriers and allowing pictures to reach audiences in far-flung parts of the globe. Studios are also dealing with the same issues overseas that they are on these shores — namely, an ever-expanding array of entertainment options.
“People have more choices than ever before, and therein lies the challenge,” says Tomas Jegeus, president of Fox Intl. Productions. “People are consuming so much audiovisual content, from YouTube videos to Vines, that there’s only so much time left to commit to getting in the car and going to the theater.”
The audience is also graying, Jegeus notes, although he attributes that more to a demographic shift than a sign of changing tastes.
“There’s an aging-up of the population when you look around the world,” he says. “The average family size is shrinking, even in Catholic countries, so with fewer kids being born, it’s a natural progression that the audience is getting older.”
Foreign audiences are getting pickier when it comes to what they’re willing to see. This summer, many sequels sputtered at the domestic marketplace, with follow-ups from “Star Trek Beyond” to “X-Men: Apocalypse” failing to match the grosses of previous entries in their series. Slapping a roman numeral on a film used to be enough to guarantee healthy returns overseas, but the same slackening appears to be taking place in foreign markets.
“At the end of the day, it’s about the films themselves,” says Veronika Kwan Vandenberg, president of international distribution and growth initiatives at Warner Bros. “There’s a bit of franchise fatigue, so there has to be more reimagining of stories, with sequels that present unique and different elements.”
She points to “The Conjuring 2,” one of the rare sequels this year for which foreign box office grew from installment to installment, as an example of a follow-up that got it right. The second film kept the original picture’s team of paranormal investigators, but transported them across the Pond to England to check into a totally different haunted house.
For many, the gold standard remains Disney. The studio controls major brands such as Lucasfilm, Marvel, and Pixar, which have deep and passionate fan bases around the world. That puts them squarely in the zeitgeist at a time when superhero films and animated features dominate the list of the most popular global releases. It also means the studio doesn’t need to be a major player in the local-language game.
“Having films that work locally takes many, many different forms, and our approach has been to tell broad stories that are universally compelling and relevant,” says Dave Hollis, Disney’s global distribution head.
As for Paramount, the studio is looking beyond “Xander Cage” to brush the dust off characters and franchises it believes will resonate as strongly in India and China as they do in the Heartland. That has often meant travelling far from home for some projects: The studio recently hosted a trailer launch in Tokyo tied to “Ghost in the Shell,” an adaptation of a popular Japanese manga, and it’s filling out the casts of upcoming blockbuster hopefuls like “Transformers: The Last Knight” and “Baywatch” with actors like Anthony Hopkins and Priyanka Chopra, who appeal to overseas consumers. In the case of “Baywatch,” Chopra, Dwayne Johnson, and Zac Efron have been convinced to break out their swim suits in large part because the original television show was so widely broadcast.
“In its day, it was the most-watched TV series in the entire world,” says Crawley. “Wherever you lived outside of California, everybody dreamed of running up and down those beaches.”
And having an international star like Chopra around to do some of that running won’t hurt.
You know, I’m a little disappointed that we don’t have threads for xXx (2002) and xXx: State of the Union (2005). I’ll write reviews up for those here next week perhaps. I rewatched them a few months ago in anticipation of this.
