Thompson On Hollywood

Weekend Boxoffice: Beowulf Slays Competition

Sure enough, as expected, Beowulf more than scored this weekend; 40 % of its $28 million came from 3-D screens, both IMAX and regular. Bee Season's gross passed the $93-million mark, while American Gangster passed $100 million, the first fall film to do so. The literary art film Love in the Time of Cholera, which needed good reviews, didn't get them and grossed a weak $1.9 million in 852 theaters, or tenth place. On the other hand, Margot at the Wedding opened well on two New York screens and No Country for Old Men expanded successfully. Read the full Variety story.

Beowulf Leads Raid on Weekend B.O.

Beowulf is heading toward a strong opening weekend. Here's Variety's take.

Fandango Five – Ticket Sales (as of 11/14/07 5:00 p.m. PT):

Movie Fandango User Rating % Fandango Sales

Beowulf “Go” 30%

Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium “Go” 7%

American Gangster “Go” 7%

Bee Movie “Go” 5%

No Country for Old Men “Go” 5%

Beowulf: Hybrid Animation VFX

Beowulf is good cheesy fun. Bob Zemeckis and Sony Imageworks and the hundreds of folks who labored to make this movie have delivered a must-see event, especially in IMAX 3-D. But it's not nearly as good as it could have been, nor did it need to be so labor intensive. I would happily watch the blue-screen/live-action/300 version of this movie, which would have cost half as much. Or I would eagerly see the entirely animated version. Why not shoot live-action and animate the non-human creatures? This performance capture/imagemotion process remains clunky and stiff.

Here's the deal: the best stuff in Beowulf is the most stylized, the most liberated from the motion-capture process--Angelina Jolie's spike-heeled demon, the monster Grendel, the golden dragon and Beowulf himself. Beowulf is an idealized Adonis-version of Ray Winstone, and the most magnificently rendered human character ever put on-screen. But the other humans, from Robin Wright Penn to Anthony Hopkins, with their plastic eyes and murky teeth, are still strange and weird. They are stiff, robotic, less human than if they had been animated. The human eye is rigged to pick out anything wrong. The closer to reality you get, the easier it is to miss it.

As for the whole Academy debate about animation vs. visual effects, Zemeckis remains hung up on being taken seriously as a live-action director who works with actors and props etc. Well, as long as this movie is 100% rendered, the Academy considers it animation, even if the process used to make the movie is the same one that created Gollum or King Kong. Those characters are considered VFX. But the VFX committee will never budge on this.

The Beowulf myth is a deep and powerful one; it goes back to the old tales that J.R.R. Tolkein was inspired by when he wrote The Lord of the Rings. I highly recommend the Seamus Heaney translation, which doesn't take long to read. But Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman have gussied up the story, complicating it with sex and honor and guilt and all sorts of modern emotions that the original myth had nothing to do with. Finally, I prefer the old-fashioned action-adventure Beowulf & Grendel, starring 300's Gerard Butler.

Here's the Variety review.

I Am Beowulf!

Here are some early reactions to Beowulf, which is supposedly under a review embargo until November 12. Humph! I'll hold off a bit, but what I will say is this: in one scene when Angelina Jolie rises up out of her cave pool to seduce the mighty Beowulf, who has just killed her only son, Grendel, she walks on water, revealing that she is not only painted in gold, a la Goldfinger, but sports a tail and stacked high heels. Please. Barbie Doll stilettos in 5th century Denmark? There must have been debates about that one. I ran into Imagemovers partner Jack Rapke in the lobby of the Four Seasons Saturday.

"What were you thinking?" I asked.

He replied, "She's a demon! She's timeless." Two of the men I asked about this, intelligent film critics both, said it didn't bother them. I guess Jolie worked her magic.

Nicole Sperling lays out the VFX future in EW.

Jeff Wells writes a letter to Roger Avary.

Stephen Schaefer's early rave is mysteriously missing online:

Seeing is believing with Robert Zemeckis’ mighty, monumental “Beowulf,” which opens Nov. 16. This extravagant adaptation of the epic poem about a cursed kingdom invents a 6th century A.D. Denmark that is so richly detailed, romantic and engrossing it’s like seeing the Prince Valiant comic strip brought to blazing, 3-D life, a childhood fantasy realized in such a complete way you’re stupefied with delight. Using the motion capture technique that “Lord of the Flies” managed to create the lisping monster Gollum and that Zemeckis employed on the saccharine “Polar Express,” “Beowulf” is nothing less than an immersion into a world that is somehow familiar – they live in a harsh climate like Boston, they drink mead, get drunk and pass out, they have a wife and a mistress – and totally strange with its demons that morph into flying dragons, sea monsters that can be slain by blond Beowulf, a hero for all times. The fight scenes are startling, not the least because like “Eastern Empires” Beowulf is nude as he takes on Grendel in mano a mano to-the-death combat. The homoeroticism, a friend said, outdoes Gerald Butler’s “300” by “500.” Ray Winstone may look nothing like this sleek god-like warrior but he sounds perfect. The cast includes a brilliantly underplayed aging king by Anthony Hopkins, a Bette Davis-style villain in John Malkovich and Angelina Jolie’s siren, a shape-changing seriously seductive sylph who gets a laugh in her six-inch heels. Big Oscar Question: Is this in the running for Best Picture or Best Animated Feature?

UPDATE: And here's AICN's Moriarty. And Beowulf co-writer Neil Gaiman's blog posts a funny typographical error from transworld news:

Angelina Jolie has admitted she was got a little shy when she saw her nude scenes in her latest film “Beowulf.” The actress says although the nude scenes were stimulated, she was still a little embarrassed. “I was a little shy,” she says. “I was really surprised that I felt that exposed. There were certain moments where I actually felt shy – and called home, just to explain that the fun movie that I had done that was digital animation was, in fact, a little different than we expected.”

Oscar Watch: Animation Tempest Over Beowulf

[Posted by Peter Debruge]
It's never too early to start debating Oscar, and over at the Gold Derby, Tom O'Neil is stirring up trouble by quoting Jeffrey Wells' thoughts on the animation category (which happens to be my beat over here in the Variety features department). Tom reports:

Jeff saw a reel of footage yesterday and it "may not, according to the Academy's 'Rule Seven,' be an animated film," he warns. "It's a real eyeball-popper and clearly something else in the realm of animation — each and every frame is, in fact, animated by the standard of digital animation — but the Academy seems to be saying that any film that starts with live action footage and then uses digital animation to enhance or augment that footage (like Richard Linklater's 'Waking Life' and 'A Scanner Darkly') is not eligible."

This is a non-issue. Beowulf isn't "animated over" traditional footage, the way Oscar-eligible "Waking Life" and "Scanner Darkly" were. It's a performance capture-based film, just as "Polar Express," "Monster House" and (Savion Glover's dancing scenes from) "Happy Feet" were. That doesn't mean that the animation community is crazy about motion-capture movies (the "Ratatouille" end credits featured the following quality assurance guarantee: "100% genuine animation. No motion capture or any other performance shortcuts were used in the production of this film"), but then, they resisted computers at first, too. Nor should it suggest that traditional keyframe techniques aren't featured heavily in motion-capture films (the word "shortcuts" is misleading, since more time and expense is ultimately expended in trying to translate live-action performances through CG than would be true in either the hand-animated or live-action versions of the same film).

Comic-Con: Beowulf Footage Unveiled

It kills me that I missed Beowulf yesterday--I got in late Thursday night. I'll be posting coverage all weekend from our Variety team:

[Posted by Peter Debruge]
It’s been a long time since high school, so maybe I’m not remembering “Beowulf” correctly, but the footage touted in four separate screenings at Comic-Con this year implies that (a) Grendel is actually the love child of “corrupt” King Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) and a “ruthlessly seductive” demon and (b) when sent to kill Grendel’s mother, Beowulf (Ray Winstone, He-Manned up for your viewing pleasure) gets it on with her instead.

It doesn’t hurt that she’s played by a very naked Angelina Jolie — or the computer-animated, gold-laminated equivalent of the actress, looking more Lara Croft than ever. Banish the primitive, hairy beasts of the Anglo-Saxon epic from your mind. As reimagined by screenwriters Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, Grendel’s mother is a “Species”-like shape-shifter, a sex goddess with a serpent’s tail (see the trailer for yourself).

The footage unveiled at Comic-Con is an enigma, delivering photorealistic characters using director Robert Zemeckis’ “Polar Express”-style performance capture technique. The audience at Thursday’s Paramount panel seemed less than impressed, comparing the look to video games and the “Final Fantasy” movie, although a longer 20-minute clip screened in 3-D went over far better with the fans.

During the Q&A following the demo I attended, one impressed journalist volunteered, “The new ‘Star Trek’ would look great in 3-D,” to which Real D chairman-CEO Michael Lewis enigmatically replied, “Stay tuned.” Could J.J. Abrams’ upcoming “Star Trek” prequel be one of the dozen or so yet-to-be-announced 3-D projects Real D has in the works? “Let’s put it this way,” Lewis said, “it would be foolish for any major release not to be considering the possibility.”

Here's LAT's Beowulf takeout. Other responses to Beowulf are on AICN; here's one overheated AICN fanboy response:

The trailer for Robert Zemeckis' CGI-a-riffic BEOWULF is now online.

Some of it is "Oh...my...GOD!!!!" breathtaking.

Some of it looks like cut scene fodder still in need of TLC.

ALL of the characters look better than the glassy eyed zombies who populated
POLAR EXPRESS - whose technology was built upon to realize this project.
And, this looks a helluva lot better than that goofy Christopher Lambert
movie we got a few years back. (Duh!)

And, when all is said and done, they've CGId an Angelina who (here, at
least) appears every bit as bulge inducing as the real thing. No small
accomplishment there.

Click on Angelinabot's svelte, glistening, beckoning hotness to see for
yourself!!!

UPDATE: Sony Pictures Imageworks is developing three perf capture pics: producer Avi Arad's Maximum Ride, the James Patterson series; Neanderthals, a caveman comedy from Jon Favreau of Iron Man fame; and a mystical epic adventure from perf capture innovator Jerome Chen.