Kotaku. Luke Plunkett is a Contributing Editor based in Canberra, Australia. He has written a book on cosplay, designed a game about airplanes, and also runs cosplay. STX Entertainment: A New Hope for Hollywood? Adam Fogelson, the chairman of Hollywood’s newest studio, listened to a pitch for a film called “Unmanned” with an encouraging smile. Hollywood pitches are jolly, elaborately courteous affairs. Adam Fogelson, the chairman of Hollywood’s newest studio, listened to a pitch for a film called “Unmanned” with an encouraging smile. Hollywood pitches are. Directed by Carl Rinsch. With Keanu Reeves, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ko Shibasaki, Tadanobu Asano. A band of samurai set out to avenge the death and dishonor of their master. Pirates of the Caribbean 5: Dead Men Tell No Tales Movies Cast & Crew. 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So on this sunny afternoon the filmmakers—two producers, the director, and the star, Keanu Reeves, whose black suit and black T- shirt and black beard gave him the look of a stylish sexton—had cheerfully trekked over the hill to STX Entertainment’s offices in Burbank, and STX’s executives had cheerfully welcomed them with a bottomless supply of bottled water. Chris Morgan, one of the producers, explained that “Unmanned,” an action film about a global war set in 2. The film’s hook was that every soldier has an “ape”—a robot sidekick that accompanies him into battle and mimics his habits. To find Royce, Bellam would have to forge an unlikely bond with Royce’s ape. As in almost every Hollywood film about a dystopian future, humanity would outfox and outfeel the machines. Fogelson’s face was a mask of amenability. At forty- eight, he is neither young nor old, neither tall nor short, neither trendy nor mainstream. Pleasantly handsome and immensely competitive, he strives to remain imperturbable and, as he likes to say, “laser focussed.” Yet he’s a hugger, grateful for any true sincerity or passion in a town dedicated to fabricating both. Though he’d never volunteer this in a meeting, his strongest motivation is his fear of dying without leaving some monument behind. In a sense, he embodies the movie business he hopes to dominate: calculating, impulsive, hard- nosed, and hopeful. Morgan rolled a five- minute “sizzle reel,” essentially a trailer for an unmade film. Made by the prospective director, Tim Webber, who was the visual- effects supervisor on “Gravity” and “Avatar,” it comprised bits from twenty- three films, as well as from commercials for video games. Reeves’s voice- over—“War is pain . When the lights came on after the sizzle reel, he said, “I was thinking, Please, God, don’t let me have to fake enthusiasm—and that was the best version of that kind of thing I have ever seen! I love the wish fulfillment, the idea that, even after technology takes over, a human brain and a human soul still matter.”“This is about brothers,” Webber said. Choosing which movies to make is the crux of his job, the hundred- million- dollar decision. When he was eight, his father, the head of marketing at Columbia Pictures, told him, “You need a clear good guy and a clear bad guy, and the audience needs to know what it’s rooting for.” “Unmanned” satisfied that injunction. But one of Fogelson’s own rules is “Only make a film you already know how to sell.” Having come up as a marketer at Universal Pictures, which he ran from 2. Fogelson believes that seventy- five per cent of a movie’s success is due to its marketing and its marketability. One of his biggest bombs at Universal—a hundred- and- sixty- million- dollar bloodbath—was “4. Ronin,” which starred Reeves, regrettably, as a samurai warrior. Nonetheless, Fogelson believed he could sell Reeves here by positioning him as the kind of reluctant hero that he had played in “The Matrix.”“What do you think you can make it for?” Fogelson asked. The line producer answered, “We haven’t done an absolute budget. And for the battle portions we still have to find a pre. Oren Aviv, who narrowed his eyes. The script called for “the largest naval armada gathered since the Second World War,” among other showstoppers, which would run well above sixty million dollars.“Unmanned” was going to have to change to fit STX’s model—the origin story that explained to investors how the company would reinvent the Hollywood formula. The six major studios, besieged by entertainment options that don’t require people to get off the couch, have bet that the future lies in films that are too huge to ignore. Although they make low- budget films for targeted audiences (teen girls, say, or horror fans), they focus most of their energies on movies that cost more than three hundred million dollars to make and market. Such films are predicated not on the chancy appeal of individual actors but on “I. P.”—intellectual property, in the form of characters and stories that the audience already knows from books or comics or video games. These blockbusters are intended to appeal to everyone, everywhere—but they leave many people cold. STX’s founder and C. E. O., Bob Simonds, told me, “There’s a huge vacuum there. And that vacuum is the place you can tell human stories—what I think of as movies.” What had vanished were the kind of character- driven, John Hughes- level films that suck you in on a rainy Saturday morning. So STX was betting on the enduring appeal of movie stars. But they had to be playing the kinds of role that had made them stars. Russell Crowe in “Robin Hood”? Russell Crowe in “The Water Diviner”? And the movies had to be sensibly priced, by current standards: between twenty and eighty million dollars. STX’s internal data showed that such star- showcase films, within that budget range, were profitable thirty per cent more often than the average Hollywood film. So the studio planned to make a lot of them. By 2. 01. 7, STX expects to release between twelve and fifteen movies a year, as many as some of the major studios. Bob Simonds is a shrewd, preppy fireball who dated Jennifer Beals at Yale, graduated summa cum laude, then made his name as the producer of such Adam Sandler comedies as “Happy Gilmore” and “The Waterboy.” He was offered two studio chairmanships but never a job running the parent company. Simonds told me—as Fogelson sat nearby, frowning responsibly but not demurring—that “Adam led that studio to the three most profitable years in its history, and he’s still suffering from watching the success built on his back.” In 2. Universal accounted for a whopping twenty- two per cent of the industry’s domestic box- office, largely from films that Fogelson green- lit. He was going to pick the right films, spend less to make them, spend just as much to market them, and win back audiences who’d forsworn the moviegoing habit. He was going to save the industry. And he didn’t expect much thanks. He stood and began to pace, talking the story through. He became Bellam, tagging along behind Royce’s ape in Hong Kong, limping, heroic, then became Royce’s ape, looking back coldly: “C’mon, keep up!” Fogelson and Aviv smiled at each other. Reeves was into the project, not just the paycheck.“And from a worldwide marketing perspective,” Chris Morgan concluded, “the two sides that are fighting are sort of Axis and Allies, but it’s not specified who the Axis are, so any country with a movie theatre can be on the side of the Allies.”Fogelson said, “I love—I hate—but I love the idea of the U. S. So the meeting ended in hugs and high hopes. Tour, was to be a studio chief. It’s a sweet deal. You get paid eight million to upward of fifteen million dollars a year to decide what the entire world will clamor to see in two years. You are not a household name, but you determine who the household names will be. When Fogelson joined STX, he took a salary a quarter the size of his compensation at Universal—but he also received equity that, in success, will be worth many times that. And he got the chance to reinvent at least a system, and possibly himself. As he began the job, his daughter Willa reminded him, “The good part about being fired is you got to chase after a different dream. Just like a movie.”The downside to being a studio chief is that everyone hates and fears you, because you say no so much more often than yes—and because your yeses come with so many provisos. Also, you rarely get to hold the crystal ball long. Conglomerates prefer firing a studio’s leader for picking the wrong films to reassessing the whole business. Fogelson has an opportune temperament for the job, because he firmly believes that the world will love what he loves, once he gets its attention. Stacey Snider, the co- chairman of Twentieth Century Fox, told me that, when she worked with him at Universal, “if the tracking said we open a movie at ten to twenty”—million dollars—“I’m thinking ten, and Adam is thinking twenty. I used to say to him, . The producer and record mogul Russell Simmons said, “Adam’s not interested in movies where they all talk too much, that Sundance shit of jerking off on the screen.” Fogelson’s favorite films include “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Kramer vs. Kramer,” but also “National Lampoon’s Animal House” and “National Lampoon’s Vacation.”At most studios, prospective films are vetted by a green- light committee. Marketing and distribution weigh in on whether they can sell and disseminate the film, and then, after totting up expected costs and examining “comps”—the receipts of comparable films—the executives build a spreadsheet showing a range of outcomes. Then the chairman decides whether the film seems likely to help the studio hit the target margin (fifteen per cent, say) that its parent company set for the year. Fogelson looks at comps, too, but then he applies a three- part test. First, can the film be great? And, Can we make much more in success than we lose in failure? STX is now filming “The Foreigner,” which stars Jackie Chan as a former assassin who comes out of retirement to hunt the I. R. A. Fogelson was confident that he could sell it, and that it was a “free play”—that it would earn enough in China alone to recoup its costs. The low- risk strategy would be to bring in a pliable unknown to direct. It’s not a painting—it’s tens and tens of millions of dollars. Also, none of our movies are being made with the idea that they have to turn out great. Because eighty per cent of movies don’t.” When I mentioned a number of superb films that failed at the box office, and asked whether better marketing could have saved them, Fogelson said he wouldn’t have made them in the first place.
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