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More Than Ever, Hollywood Studios Are Relying on the Foreign Box Office
A huge Tokyo billboard testified to the importance of the Japanese market for “The Da Vinci Code.” Tom Hanks went to Japan twice.
By LAURA M. HOLSON
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 6 — In 1998 the director Bryan Singer was asked to give a speech at the Tokyo International Film Festival to introduce his movie “Apt Pupil.” Mr. Singer, who often traveled to Japan, decided to surprise the crowd by speaking in Japanese.
After a brief greeting, Mr. Singer hoped to say, “I look forward to seeing you after the film.” But instead he bungled the translation, suggesting that he was looking forward to having sex. The crowd gasped. “It was,” he said in an interview on Thursday, “a disastrous mistake.”
So before he returned to Tokyo last week to promote “Superman Returns,” Mr. Singer said, he practiced his Japanese — a lot.
Much has changed since, besides Mr. Singer’s mastery of Japanese, as Hollywood increasingly looks to global markets to bolster the bottom line. Movie attendance has declined in the United States over the last decade, forcing studios to cultivate a wider audience. And combined with the increasing cost to make and market films, many here agree that having an overseas strategy is more important than ever.
Industry analysts predict an increase in worldwide movie attendance over the next five years, with Asia and Central and Eastern Europe the fastest-growing regions. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, global spending on film entertainment from 2006 to 2010, including movie tickets and DVD’s, is projected to grow at an annual rate of 5.3 percent.
But the rules that apply to movie marketing and distribution in the United States — a barrage of talk-show interviews and television advertising — do not necessarily translate in Hamburg, Tokyo or Moscow. In France, for instance, American studios are barred from advertising movies on television. Japanese audiences are notoriously fickle, and marketers appeal to women by stressing a movie’s romance. (At the “Superman” premiere in Tokyo, Mr. Singer said they gave away prizes.) And don’t even try to release a film anywhere in the world during a major sports event like the World Cup.
“People just won’t show up,” said Mark Zoradi, who runs worldwide marketing and distribution for the Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group, which produced “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.”
This summer, “The Da Vinci Code” was the standout overseas, surprising even the producers who relied on the international cast to generate interest in the film. “Pirates” turned out to be a hit, but even Disney knew it would be no match for the World Cup. As for “Superman Returns,” there are 13 territories yet to open, 3 of them top international markets. For now, it is unclear how much of a profit the movie, which cost $209 million to make, will take in.
•“The Da Vinci Code”
Domestic box office so far: $217 million
Foreign box office so far: $528 million
At the premiere of “The Da Vinci Code” at the Cannes Film Festival on May 17, the producer Brian Grazer watched in awe as Tom Hanks’s limousine was swarmed by a horde of eager fans.
“People were throwing their bodies on the back of his car; they were this close to getting run over,” Mr. Grazer recalled in a recent interview, holding his thumb and index finger an inch apart. “It felt like guerrilla warfare. Fans in foreign countries are excited when they see a third-rate actor. If they get someone like Tom Hanks, they go batty. It is like seeing Elvis.”
Casting an A-list movie star almost ensures a worldwide hit these days. But in the case of “The Da Vinci Code,” Mr. Hanks’s appeal was also a valued marketing tool because his nice-guy reputation was an antidote to the movie’s controversial subject matter.
Few movie stars, Mr. Grazer said, can get away with saying, “It’s only a movie,” as Mr. Hanks did when asked about the plot. (In the film, the Roman Catholic Church covers up the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had children.)
Mr. Grazer relied on Mr. Hanks and the film’s similarly good-natured director, Ron Howard, to appeal to scathing critics. “I thought we needed someone kind of forgiving around the world,” Mr. Grazer said, noting that he had canceled 27 interviews in Cannes to avoid the hostile media.
“The Da Vinci Code,” based on the best-selling book, was conceived as a global endeavor from the start. The book, though, “would attract only so many people,” Mr. Grazer said.
So, he and executives at Sony Pictures Entertainment hired well-known actors from France and Britain, where the movie was filmed. These included two British actors, Ian McKellen, who starred in the “X-Men” franchise, among many other projects, and Paul Bettany as well as the French actress Audrey Tautou. In choosing them, Mr. Grazer said, he read articles and reviews to make sure that the actors were “culturally relevant.”
Sony did not wait until Cannes to bring out Mr. Howard and Mr. Hanks. In February and March, Mr. Howard traveled to several countries to show 30 minutes of film to reporters, said Jeff Blake, chairman of Sony’s worldwide marketing and distribution. Mr. Hanks went to Japan twice to promote the movie. And the press junket was conducted on an 833-mile train ride from London to Cannes, a journey chronicled by 250 journalists.
People apprised of the marketing budget said Sony spent about $70 million to market the movie abroad. It paid off. “The Da Vinci Code” brought in double the amount at the box office abroad than in the United States.
•“Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest”
Domestic box office so far: $380 million
Foreign box office so far: $392 million
When Mr. Zoradi met last year with his boss, Richard Cook, who is Walt Disney Studios’ chairman, to discuss the studio’s 2006 release schedule, they had a problem. Disney was distributing two expensive movies in the summer, the animated “Cars” and a sequel to “Pirates of the Caribbean.” But unlike earlier summers, it faced tough competition from the unlikeliest rivals — 20 sweaty men chasing a ball around a grassy field.
The World Cup soccer championships were scheduled to begin in Germany on June 9, just as the summer movie season moved into high gear. Both Mr. Zoradi and Mr. Cook knew that even the savviest marketing campaign was unlikely to coax fans from their television sets. So, Disney decided to release “Pirates of the Caribbean” over several weeks instead of on the same day worldwide.
Disney opened “Pirates” in the United States on July 7, two days ahead of the World Cup final match between France and Italy. That was not a problem. Among Americans, soccer is not as popular as it is overseas, and the American team had been eliminated early. Industry analysts pointed out, too, that the morning matches did not cut into evening movie attendance.
Europe proved more challenging. The international campaign for “Pirates” began on July 6, with releases in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. “We took a bet that England and Australia wouldn’t be in the World Cup finals,” Mr. Zoradi said.
It was a good guess. But there were other factors working in the movie’s favor. Not only was it a sequel, but the cast, including Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom, was largely British.
“Pirates” opened No. 1 in all those markets, bringing in $25.3 million in Britain, $8.4 million in Australia and $1.2 million in New Zealand that first weekend. The studio then waited until July 12 — three days after the World Cup ended — to continue releasing “Pirates,” first in Scandinavia, then in the Netherlands, most of Asia, Latin America, Japan, Germany and, finally in August, France and Spain. The rollout ends in Italy on Sept. 13 because many movie theaters there are not air-conditioned and families are on vacation in August.
So what does Disney plan for its last installment of “Pirates?” With no major sports events planned, Disney is expecting a global release the last weekend in May 2007.
•“Superman Returns”
Domestic box office so far: $190 million
Foreign box office so far: $146 million
How do you make a superhero fly? That was the challenge for Warner Brothers this year when it reintroduced “Superman” after a 20-year absence. Superman, unlike characters in the “X-Men” or “Pirates” franchises, is distinctly American, and that made it a challenge to market abroad. “The problem with Superman was that he was Midwestern, not a cultural fit,” said Sue Kroll, president of international marketing at Warner Brothers.
After the release of “Batman Begins” in 2005, Ms. Kroll said Warner held discussion groups to understand, among other things, why the critically acclaimed film did not perform as well as expected overseas. (It brought in $372 million worldwide, only $167 million of that from the international box office.) Ms. Kroll said the studio learned that Batman’s character was too dark.
Warner also studied how Superman was perceived abroad. In Germany, audiences wanted his personality to have more dimension, Ms. Kroll said. In Japan, the groups responded to Superman’s physical strength but sought a more complicated character. “Everything we learned was not surprising,” she said. “He was one-dimensional. There was a huge cheese factor. He felt old and outdated.”
Ms. Kroll and her team were charged with updating the superhero’s image. But each country had its own rules to market films. France, for instance, barred American movie studios from advertising on television. So, Warner’s French marketing team came up with an outdoor campaign based on The Daily Planet, where Clark Kent and Lois Lane worked. The ads, one with the headline “Superman Est de Retour!” (Superman is back!), were plastered on the back of buses beginning in May, as well as in bus shelters and in transit stations.
Con Gornell, Warner’s executive vice president for European marketing, said French staff members proposed the idea last November. The studio began its French campaign in May at the Monaco Grand Prix, where a team of drivers wore Superman-style jumpsuits.
Then, too, the studio began giving away three million copies of a French edition of The Daily Planet on the streets of Paris and 10 other cities. Like many studios these days, Warner heavily promoted Superman on the Internet. On a Daily Planet Web site, French speakers could post photos of Superman, track Superman on a map, watch a video blog from the director or play a game. Mr. Gornell said executives in other countries modeled aspects of their campaigns after the French effort.
How successful was it? Since July 12, “Superman Returns” has brought in a respectable $10.5 million in France. But in the weeks ahead, Superman is facing a foe mightier than Lex Luthor: Johnny Depp in “Pirates.” That movie earned $18 million in France over the weekend, its debut.
