Chapter 541 DreamWorks falls apart
After Halle Berry joined, the other main roles were confirmed one by one. They are basically all powerful Hollywood actors with no problem with their acting skills.
With Tom Cruise as a superstar, there is no need for anyone else to handle the box office.
Besides, this is little Gilbert's project, and his name is the signature.
Because there will be a lot of action scenes in the film, although Tom Cruise is very good at action scenes, he still received training after signing the actor contract.
The other actors with action scenes also received training together, and even the actors without action scenes took the initiative to participate in the training, so that the director Gilbert Jr. felt that they were also working hard.
In addition to special effects production, the zombies in the film also require real people to make up to play them. The film was shot in Australia, which also provided many professional extras, so there was no need to specifically select them from Los Angeles.
For little Gilbert, the core issue is actually how much space to use to tell the story. This is a question.
You know, "The Last of Us" was originally a game, and the game has enough space to accommodate battles and plots.
But movies are different. Once a movie exceeds three hours, the audience will be restless in the cinema. Therefore, when initially creating the script, the screenwriters at Melon Studio suggested dividing the story into two parts.
But Gilbert Jr. doesn't think so. He believes that the story created by the film must be complete and follow the three-act structure of traditional film creation, that is, the beginning, the middle, and the end.
Putting aside the highly controversial "The Last of Us Part 2", the first part of "The Last of Us" has already told a complete story, and it is not suitable to be told in separate pieces.
So little Gilbert finally decided that even if it was longer, he would tell the story of "The Last of Us" in one movie.
This posed great difficulties for the screenwriters. Fortunately, everyone worked hard to find a way, and the final script met the requirements of little Gilbert.
The script structure is very compact. If the film is shot according to the script, the film will be very dense in information.
Of course, in order to prevent the audience from being bored and unable to watch it, there will naturally be a lot of action scenes, as well as various classic scenes from zombie movies.
Moreover, most of the zombie films in the past were made with small and medium budgets, and they inevitably looked a bit shoddy. But "The Last of Us" is different. This is a movie with an investment of US$120 million, and additional investment may be needed in the future.
Such a lot of money is not just spent on the actors' remuneration. It also costs money on scene construction, special effects and model production. The accumulated effect is the selling point of the film.
Of course, "The Last of Us", which has a lot of scary scenes, inevitably has disadvantages in terms of classification, and it will inevitably become an R-rated film in the end.
But it’s not like R-rated movies can’t sell well. “The Matrix” is also an R-rated movie. Hasn’t it also become a classic of science fiction movies and a model of commercial movies?
As long as the classification is not too outrageous, R-rated movies can also sell well in the theater market.
After the main actors were finalized, it was already July. The audition for Ellie took place in the middle of the month, and something big happened in July.
Little Gilbert had told Scarlett before that there was a high chance that "Escape from Clone Island" would be a hit.
Sure enough, even though little Gilbert attended the premiere for Scarlett's sake, the quality of the film was still as little Gilbert said.
Michael Bay, who kept repeating himself in the past, suffered a big setback. The film only received 12.54 million US dollars in its first week of release, which was not even as good as the first week of "Kingdom of Heaven".
The film's box office for the next weekend was only over US$4 million. If this continues, the North American box office of "Escape from Clone Island" will not exceed US$50 million.
This incident was a huge blow to Scarlett, because this was her first film as a heroine when she switched from the field of literary films to commercial films, and it was a film with an investment of over 100 million US dollars.
As a result, the film's failure shattered Scarlett's dream of becoming a top-tier Hollywood actress. But fortunately, she still has little Gilbert to rely on, and the role of Agent Romanoff will help her realize her dream.
Michael Bay also has hope. Although "Escape from Clone Island" failed, he has signed a director contract with Sky Studios and is confirmed to be the director of "Transformers".
The male lead of the film, Ewan McGregor, was in a bit of a misfortune. His major commercial production as the male lead was screwed up, but he still has the movie "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" this year.
At present, "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" has achieved a box office of 322.305 million U.S. dollars in North America and more than 700 million U.S. dollars globally. The results are quite good.
But having said that, when watching the "Star Wars" series, you basically don't pay attention to who the actors are.
Even Harrison Ford relies more on other characters to get out of the circle, such as Indiana Jones in the "Raiders of the Lost Ark" series.
The most unlucky person among the flops of "Escape from Clone Island" was actually DreamWorks as the producer and distributor.
DreamWorks has been somewhat unsustainable in the past few years. Last year, DreamWorks Animation Studio separated from DreamWorks.
Jeffrey Katzenberg and Spielberg parted ways, taking DreamWorks Action Studios into Paramount's distribution system.
DreamWorks Animation Studio released "Madagascar" at the end of June this year, which took in a box office of US$50.31 million in the first week. The North American box office has now exceeded 100 million.
With the loss of DreamWorks Animation Studios, the only profitable division, and the fact that Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" released this year was not too successful, "Escape from Clone Island" became the straw that broke the camel's back.
Just in mid-July, DreamWorks announced bankruptcy and reorganization, closing its heavily loss-making television production and recording departments. Most importantly, give up distribution rights.
This is very important. Distribution rights are an important reason why Hollywood giants are besieging DreamWorks.
David Geffen, one of the Big Three of DreamWorks, took a breakup fee of hundreds of millions of dollars and announced his farewell to Hollywood to concentrate on his philanthropy.
The DreamWorks live-action film department fell into the hands of Spielberg.
Looking back at the past, I still remember the grand occasion when DreamWorks was founded. The three giants are ambitious and want to challenge the traditional giants of Hollywood.
People who are dissatisfied with the dominance of Hollywood giants have high hopes for DreamWorks, hoping that DreamWorks can become a vanguard against the giants.
DreamWorks did achieve certain results in the beginning, but later under the siege of the giants, DreamWorks faced failures and crises again and again.
The three giants of DreamWorks often clash because of their ideas. If DreamWorks develops smoothly, this kind of ideological conflict will not break out.
However, DreamWorks' development was not going smoothly, so the differences in concepts became fatal, which was also the reason for the divestment of DreamWorks Animation Studio.
Spielberg is currently looking for a suitable distributor, which shows that he is back to his old ways.
Spielberg, who has given up the idea of competing with Hollywood giants, is still one of the most popular film directors in Hollywood.
But can Spielberg go back to the past? No one knows.
Frankly speaking, although the relationship between Gilbert Jr. and Spielberg is nominally teacher and student, he was also involved in the collapse of DreamWorks.
There is no way, friendship is friendship, but when it comes to issues involving interests and positions, no compromise is allowed.
(End of chapter)