April
12
Weinsteins Face Grindhouse Setback
Rather than dive into the well-plowed turf of Grindhouse's dismal b.o. prospects, the NYT's Michael Cieply uses the double-feature's misfire as a hook for a story that carefully sifts through the Weinstein Co's financial situation, yet gives Bob and Harvey the benefit of the doubt. This piece is a classic example of how a major mainstream newspaper can at the same time gain access, report the hell out of a story, yet remain fair and objective enough to keep the subjects from wanting to kill the messenger. The final piece does not read, as many stories about the Weinsteins do, as though they succeeded in spinning the writer. You can be sure they tried. The NYT is taken seriously by all their Wall Street investors.
While I have been dismayed by many of the Weinsteins' moves in the past few years, I'm encouraged by a sense that they are returning to their roots as champions of films they actually care about, even as they've been distracted by trying to build a strong business to support them. (I have suspected them of being too big for their britches, a tad grandiose in their reach.) But nothing is going to work if they don't succeed at producing and distributing those films. Yes, their investment in the homevideo company Genius was a good move, but do they want to make movies that only succeed on DVD? I don't think so. They still want to win an Oscar or a Palme d'Or or two.
Now that Grindhouse will go out as two movies in all foreign markets, not just English-language territories, and likely in the U.S. as well (something the NYT story does not address), Robert Rodriguez's half, Planet Terror, will have a shot at playing to the horror crowd. And I have many cinephile friends, many of them women, who were put off by the gross-out flick and will now flock en masse to Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof. Let's see what happens.
A slice of the NYT piece is on the jump:
Marquee filmmakers like Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, with “Grindhouse,” and Anthony Minghella, with “Breaking and Entering,” have tanked. Michael Moore has yet to unveil “Fahrenheit 9/11.5” and “Sicko,” a pair of films that were supposed to yield tens of millions of dollars in profit by now.Meanwhile, “Factory Girl” and “Shut Up and Sing” had plenty of media sizzle as last year’s awards season got going, but they missed the Oscars and sold barely $3 million in tickets between them.
“It could be better, obviously,” said Bob Weinstein, speaking by telephone from New York. “Our drive and ambition are to be better than perhaps we’ve been.”
Yet Mr. Weinstein was also markedly buoyant, insisting that the ministudio had not so much failed in its aims as succeeded in ways not widely understood. If “Grindhouse” had people asking “ ‘Wow, what’s going on with the Weinstein Company?’ ” he said, “I’ll use the opportunity to say, ‘Wow, the kids are all right.’ ”
More to the point, Mr. Weinstein described a strategic shift that, only shortly after its birth, began transforming the Weinstein Company. Instead of acting as a minor league film producer and distributor, exposed to market risk and filmmaker whims, the brothers are trying to create a somewhat less minor media conglomerate, one that may be equipped to survive the vicissitudes of show business.
The underlying logic has been somewhat obscured by a blizzard of announcements connecting the fledgling company to deals with partners as far-flung as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Cablevision, Blockbuster, the aSmallWorld Web site, the Ovation cable channel and the Halston couture house, in which the Weinstein Company acquired a stake in March.
At least one of the Weinstein Company’s private investors — which include Goldman Sachs, the French television broadcaster TF1 and the advertising company WPP Group — expressed wariness at that flurry.
“My only concern is that they may be taking on too many challenges outside their core business,” said that investor, Mark Cuban, whose other interests include the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and the HDNet high-definition television network, in an e-mail exchange this week. He added: “That said, I have confidence in them.”
Asked if he was comfortable at this point with WPP’s investment in Weinstein, Martin Sorrell, the company’s chief executive, said: “Very much so. It’s the early days.”
Mr. Weinstein said that his company’s most significant step had been its acquisition last summer of a 70 percent stake in Genius Products, a Santa Monica, Calif., video distributor.
Genius, said Mr. Weinstein, distributes the company’s movies at half the 10 percent fee he would pay a major studio for the service. (In fact, the Weinstein Company paid no cash for the distributor, but received the stake in return for rights to its products, according to a person involved with the transaction.)
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I don't think The Weinstein Company will survive, unless they focus on smaller movies.
In their last five years at Disney, the Weinsteins only made so little profit for Disney.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2127757/?nav=tap3
No one can bulid another big studio independently; even Steven Spielberg couldn't do that.
I think it is time for the Weinsteins to do what they did best: making/releasing smaller movies.
Posted by: marychan | April 12, 2007 at 01:47 PM
The Weinsteins are smart; they'll get past these hiccups and survive. They might not recreate what they had at Miramax, but I think if they focus on movies they care about, they'll be okay. I'll be interested to see how it plays out if they break up Grindhouse into separate releases. That probably makes more sense as far as marketing to general audiences.
Posted by: Josh Boelter | April 12, 2007 at 06:39 PM
David Poland has made some interesting point about it.
http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2007/04/friday_estimate_31.html
[The truth is, it is very similar to what happened to DreamWorks. TWC entered the marketplace at the worst possible time to build their dream and they have been caught with their financial pants around their ankles. And the NYT suckage and the arrival of Michael Moore with a $50 million grosser and even adding a west coast gossip to their east coast bee-otch, Mr. Friedman, ain't going to change the inevitable shift of the next 6 months.]
Posted by: marychan | April 14, 2007 at 01:08 PM