The for Alex Garland’s upcoming ♋film Civil War released earlier this week, and it marks a major budgetary﷽ step-up, both for Garland, and for the film’s distributor, A24.
Earlier this year, A24 released its most expensive movie yet. With Beau is Afraid, the indie production company and distributor took a bold bet on Ari Aster, the auteur responsible for two of its biggest hits, Hereditary and Midsommar. The Joaquin Phoenix psychodrama cost $35 million to make which would be pocket change f🐲or🌞 a big studio like Disney or Warner Bros. But for A24, it was a huge swing.
It didn't pay off, at least not at the box office. Beau is Afraid only made $11.5 million, despite benefiting from the increased ticket prices of the select IMAX screens it played on in the United States. If you've seen the movie, that isn't surprising. It's a deeply uncommercial fever dream of a film that, at times, feels actively hostile to the audience. Seven months after seeing it, I still don't know how I feel about it. All I know is that the three hours I spent watching it prompted me to up my anxiety meds.
Beau is Afraid represented a shift for A24 which had, until then, largely placed a lot of small bets instead of piling all its chips on one movie. The company put its weight behind inexpensive features like Spring Breakers, Moonlight, The Florida Project, and The Whale, and pushed them to breakout success. A24 has released mid-budget movies, too — its biggest hit Everything Everywhere All At Once reportedly cost between $14.3 and $🌌25 million to make ⛎— but the bulk of its films are smaller and less risky.
That was the playbook it followed with Ex Machina in 2015, the feature directorial debut from Alex Garland, who went on to work with A24 on Men and, now, Civil War. I can't find official confirmation of Civil War's budget, though I've seen . At any rate, it looks expensive. The trailer has shots with big crowds, stretches of highway covered in abandoned cars, bombs going off, helicopters and jets flying, and tanks and humvees rolling through the streets. Whether accomplished practically or with the aid of CGI, those aren’t cheap shots to get. Whatever the official total ends up being, it will be one of the most expensive movies A24 has ever produced — likely the single most.
I like Ex Machina and Annihilation, enjoyed Garland's collaborations with Danny Boyle on 28 Days Later and Sunshine, and Dredd is a personal favorite. Garland has way more hits than strikes, as far as I'm concerned.
A24 recently signaled that it’s interested in , pursuing the rights to the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Halloween franchise, and planning to produce more commercial movies and franchises. The Civil War trailer has been met with skepticism because a) Garland's last movie, Men, was bad, and bad in a specific way that calls into question how much nuance Garl💯and will be able to brin🌱g to a political topic like this, and b) the movie is coming out during a U.S. election year and looks like whatever the polar opposite of escapist fare is. So, it's hard to know whether Civil War, with its explosions and guns, is part of A24's quest for more commercial movies, or, given its likely price tag, part of the reason it needs to pursue more commercial movies in the first place.
If A24 going commercial means auteur directorꦜs getting bigger budgets to make idea-driven action movi𝐆es, that sounds great. But, if Civil War doesn't connect at the box office, it could just as easily be the distributor's Heaven's Gate moment. Michael Cimino's three-and-a-half hour Western is one of the most notorious bombs in Hollywood history, running Partisan Productions and United Artists $44 million in 1980 money, and only recouping $3.5 million of it at the box office. It (along with William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York, and a few others) signaled the end of the New Hollywood era, when filmmakers had greater creative freedom and edgier films with unique visions, like Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, and The Exorcist could be commercial hits.
During the IP-era, A24 has been a ray of hope for film fans. Its movies aren't all great, but they have been, by and large, driven by the creative interests of the filmmakers, not the needs of shareholders. If Civil War fails, I worry that could all come to an end.
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