Peter Bart: An Autopsy Of Dead-On-Arrival ‘Amsterdam’ Reveals Worries For Other Grownup Fall Releases
“Every movie needs a rabbi,” the great and grumpy Robert Altman once warned fellow filmmakers. “You need at least one important critic to champion your cause.”
Altman found Pauline Kael as his advocate for Nashville, but his warning seems relevant this week given the disastrous opening of Amsterdam, an $80 million-plus project that failed to find either a champion or an audience ($6.5 million opening weekend). Having worked with Altman from time to time, I personally witnessed his quarrels with studio management over budgets, schedules and inept marketing strategies.
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With a gifted cast and an accomplished director, Amsterdam is a darkly entertaining movie — its opening scene is a disturbingly meticulous autopsy. Its dead-on-arrival box office total, however, has prompted deep concerns for other films aimed at post-Marvel ticket buyers — even The Fabelmans from Steven Spielberg. Thus, an autopsy of the film itself and its release might be in order.
Its protagonist (Christian Bale) is a sort of ravaged doctor-from-hell whose glass eye pops out at inopportune times, much as the film’s narrative leaps across decades.
The movie’s’s other stars, Margot Robbie and Robert DeNiro, are buttressed by quirky performers like Chris Rock, Taylor Swift, Rami Malek and Mike Myers who pop up in key moments.
Amsterdam is not as easy to assimilate as David O. Russell’s earlier hits like American Hustle or even Three Kings. Its style and pace represent the polar opposite of streaming films now in vogue. It’s a convoluted who-done-it in which no one turns out to be who he or she (or they) represent themselves to be.
One character collects shrapnel from the bodies of wounded soldiers and displays the pieces as a distinct art form. She inevitably connects with Bale’s physician of last resort who tends to the hideously injured.
In terms of marketing and distribution, Amsterdam itself arguably is an injured patient. The project was financed by New Regency — that’s run by Arnon Milchan and his son Yariv, both combat veterans of the movie business, whose deal originally was with Twentieth Century Fox before its sale to Disney.
Hence distribution was dispatched to an entity called Twentieth Century, which decided on 3,000 theaters – not the sort of platform designed for “serious” cinema. Further, marketing was now managed by Disney, which, of course, had owned Fox. “Amsterdam, shall we say, is not exactly a Disney film,” commented one Disney executive.
The conventional wisdom on films like Amsterdam would mandate a festival opening plus successive screenings aimed at celebrities and influencers leading to a careful platform release.
No one seems ready to explain why none of this happened with Amsterdam. Nor has anyone stepped forward to pin Amsterdam’s limp performance to its marketing strategy, or lack thereof.
The silence is intriguing given Arnon Milchan’s contentious but superbly successful history in the business – films ranging from The Revenant to Pretty Woman to L.A. Confidential.
Robert Altman’s reaction to all this would have been high decibel. Altman’s 1975 classic, Nashville, had a busy plot that focused on a populist outsider who ran for president. He likely would have relished Amsterdam and its basic theme – a plot to take over the American government through a secret coup by Trump-like power players.
My suspicion is that Altman, who died in 2006, would be distressed by the state of cinema today — and how it is (or is not) effectively distributed and marketed — identifying Amsterdam as a symbol of its disarray.
“As a filmmaker, I conducted myself with the conviction that the money people are always wrong,” he once intoned. I suspect David O. Russell would endorse his point of view.
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