Defamer: Focus Features

Steve Coogan or Rainn Wilson: Who Had the Worse Weekend?

STV — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 10:00:00 PDT

It's probably asking a lot for a Monday, but pretend for just a second that you're Focus Features, Universal's mini-major offshoot and the folks who last January made the single biggest buy in the history of the Sundance Film Festival: Hamlet 2, which sneaked into Park City at the last minute and left 10 days later with lukewarm (at best) reviews and a check for $11 million. So imagine your signature was on that check, and imagine how much weight you'll lose this week as your appetite plunges with Hamlet 2's box-office prospects: $435,000 on 103 screens, averaging $4,223 per for one of the most profound festival flops of the decade — not to mention the film that bumps Steve Coogan back to ensemble/supporting-class in American movies.

To be fair, the film goes wider later this week, and Focus always has the UK release this fall and whatever slight cult audience accrues for video. So it could be worse — now imagine you're Rainn Wilson.

As we anticipated last Friday, TV viewers' Wilson goodwill isn't exactly multiplex-ready. The Rocker's marketing misfires, non-existent word-of-mouth and release-date follies yielded a $2.8 million, 12th-place opening. We're not in the short-sighted camp that thinks Fox is having the Summer From Hell — not with The Happening and What Happens in Vegas finding very respectable profits overseas — but there really is no positive way to spin this one, at least not for his toplining future. Until further notice, Wilson is Dwight Schrute and the clever bit-parter who has a way with pregnancy-test pitches and other Oscar-winning patois — maybe not in that order, but at least in that zone. Maybe a few scenes in Inglorious Bastards? Our Mondays are too fragile as it is to go through this again.

Weeken Box Office Results [Box Office Mojo]

Demetri Martin To Go Gay For Ang

Seth — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:10:00 PDT

Our anticipation is great for Oscar-winning, Gays-friendly director Ang Lee's next movie, Taking Woodstock; based on the memoir by Elliot Tiber, it's the unlikely tale of a closeted guy working at his parents Catskills motel inadvertently responsible for mounting the music festival that defined a generation. (OMGZ! I CAN HAZ GAI HIPPYZ?!!!) How to make an already awesome and weird project even more awesome and weird? Variety now reports that comedian Demetri Martin is who Lee wants for the lead. With shooting set to begin in late August, and a greenlight from DreamWorks for his script Will, look for 2009 to be the year that the comic makes the seemingly inevitable leap from cultish stand-up and Daily Show correspondent to full-fledged movie star. It's also going to be the year that actor-comedians go gay on film, but hopefully Martin's portrayal will be a little more nuanced, and less spray-tanned and Versaced, than Jim Carrey's.

Demetri Martin heads to 'Woodstock' [Variety.com]

Steven Soderbergh and Benicio Del Toro Cancel Cannes Reservations as Che Biopics Miss Deadline

STV — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:00:00 PDT

In other Cannes program news from Todd McCarthy's Variety survey this morning, Steven Soderbergh and Benicio Del Toro's Che Guevara biopic two-fer The Argentine and Guerilla will apparently join Sex and the City among the year's notable omissions. It's a bit of a surprise considering Soderbergh's lightning-fast methodology and Focus Features' high expectations for early awards momentum (the Universal subsidiary is holding the Coens' Burn After Reading until September as well); also, as we hear from McCarthy after the jump, at least one of the films is ready to go:

It seems that the director, who has wanted either both or neither of the films to play the fest, won't be able to finish the four-hour-plus opus by deadline. Evidently, Soderbergh has essentially finished the second film but, despite non-stop work in recent weeks, hasn't quite gotten the first half of the Benicio Del Toro starrer where he wants it.

Hunting for silver linings in our cloudy dismay, we find consolation only in the fact that Del Toro can continue production of The Wolf Man uninterrupted, thus leaving on the cumbersome make-up his character requires straight through the end of shooting next month. We'll always have Indiana Jones 4, we suppose. Sigh.

Few U.S. pics set for Cannes festival [Variety]

The Return Of Late-Night?

Seth — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 12:06:48 PST

· They aren't done administering the defibrillator to the dead-eyed corpse of late-night TV just yet: Some are buzzing that "several hosts" plan on returning to the air by January 7, making life a little less egg-pelty for Ellen DeGeneres and Carson Daly. [Variety]
· After next week, however, every scripted TV series shooting in LA will have officially gone dark, explaining the eerie, silent calm throughout the city, and the longer, sadder lines at the Coffee Bean. [Variety]
· A new ceremony from The Academy of TV Arts & Sciences "will highlight and demonstrate the good things that TV does." The first lifetime achievement award goes to Fox Alternative Programming guru Mike Darnell, for his "tireless efforts in furthering the cause of people being hooked up to a lie detector and forced to answer whether or not they are still attracted to their spouse on national TV." [Variety]

· Focus Features is in a great mood, everyone! [THR]
· Always at the cutting edge of internet marketing content, Showtime has set up a hybrid video player/chat room for serial killer drama Dexter, allowing fans to learn cutting-edge knifing techniques visually as they swap mass-murder tips. [THR]