Top 12 Film Industry Stories of 2007 #12:
The Golden Compass Anything But Magnetic
By David Mumpower
December 27, 2007
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Despite this staggering series of box office performances, there were still those who believed that Tolkien's work was the fantasy equivalent of Star Wars. Its ticket sales dominance in no way guaranteed future epics would achieve such dizzying heights of box office appeal. Another trial began with the release of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. If a title considered to have less mainstream appeal than The Lord of the Rings could attain similar worldwide popularity, maybe the fantasy genre would prove itself to be an untapped yet lucrative market for film studios. $740 million in worldwide revenue later, that theory appeared to have held up. This series of events had a domino effect on New Line Cinema.
New Line had some success in the past, particularly with the sequels to Mike Myers' Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery and the Jackie Chan/Chris Tucker buddy movies in the Rush Hour franchise. Nothing they had experienced even scratched the surface of what Jackson's masterworks would achieve, though. The problem with this, if such a serendipitous reversal of fortune could have any problems, is that the studio had given Jackson a lucrative contract for his efforts. Included in this deal was a back-end plan of revenue sharing wherein Jackson was rewarded with a percentage of the financial income of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The studio's generosity went far enough that Jackson has been by his own admission made a man worth a quarter billion dollars just from these three titles.
The problem stemmed from the fact that Jackson believed they were a couple hundred million short in paying him what was truly owed. The end result was that the natural successor to the New Line schedule, a Hobbit prequel, was forestalled due to friction between studio execs and the genius responsible for creating the films worth $2.92 billion worth of revenue. New Line studio boss Robert Shaye, a producer on the Lord of the Rings trilogy no less, went so far as to say the following: "I do not want to make a movie with somebody who is suing me. It will never happen during my watch." A line was drawn in the sand.
Seeking to move forward in a manner that would show New Line was fine without their New Zealand frenemy, the studio lined up its next big budget trilogy. The choice was Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, starting with the author's best known work, The Golden Compass. Hugely popular in his native England, this novel was selected as one of the ten most important novels of the past 70 years by the same panel of judges that had previously awarded it the Carnegie Medal. The popular British newspaper, The Observer, went so far as to name it one of the best 100 novels of all time. Being on the same list as A Pilgrim's Progress, Wuthering Heights and David Copperfield is a heady accomplishment for any scribe.
The problem is that not all respected novels are adapted into popular movies. In the case of The Golden Compass, this would be an understatement. Production was a struggle from the start. The novel's central premise involves a central organization modeled after The Catholic Church who has lost their way, becoming a misguided overlord of the people. American Pie director Chris Weitz, an odd choice to helm a fantasy epic anyway, was at a crossroads in how to adapt the novel. He eventually settled upon a vanilla interpretation that would be less incendiary to organized religion, a decision that did not sit well with avowed atheist Pullman. Even worse, the two actors brought on board to anchor the project, Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, had recently worked together on a doomed production known as The Invasion. So disastrous was that shoot that almost the entirety of its footage was discarded when the team behind V for Vendetta was hired to clean up the mess. The film was reviled by critics and earned only $15 million against a reported negative cost of roughly $100 million. The Kidman/Craig tandem was off to a lousy start as the next Butch and Sundance, to say the least.
As production of The Golden Compass unfolded, a teaser was aired for the first time in theaters and on the Internet. It focused upon the same aspects of storytelling that had made Disney's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe a smashing success. There were the exotic locations, lavish set designs, and an adorable kid highlighted. But North American movie-going audiences are a mercurial bunch. For whatever reason, response was tepid. Later trailers and clips from the movie merited similarly icy reception. For whatever reason, all of the same aspects that had made prior fantasy epics successful were met with disdain in 2007. The signs of this were already on display with the late summer release of Stardust, a Neil Gaiman adaptation that was well received by critics and greatly appreciated by the few people who saw it in theaters. Despite the fact that it was a quality production, Stardust earned only $38.3 million against a $65 million budget.
The writing was on the wall that consumers were dissatisfied by recent fantasy epic options. That theory was validated when The Golden Compass earned a miserable $25.8 million on opening weekend, well beneath the $40 million estimate its own studio had for the title. A production with a budget of $180 million and a negative cost of as much as $250 million had failed to match even the least ambitious of expectations. As I type this, it has current domestic box office of only $53.1 million after 19 days in release. It has already fallen out of the top ten. While we would normally examine whether the prospects of overseas box office might save such a title, New Line Cinema does not have even that possibility available to them. They sold off worldwide rights in order to find investors to help them offset production costs.
A movie featuring armor-clad bears looking to open whoop-ass upon snowbound opponents has completely failed to appeal to children. Re-read the prior sentence again to appreciate fully the unlikely nature of such a scenario. Children raised to love the company of toy bears are unable to identify with CGI representations that are cute and fuzzy one minute then warriors of the apocalypse the next. Never has a marketing campaign experienced a larger indictment. A surefire premise had failed to catch on with the mainstream public.
The end result of this occurred just prior to the holidays. Less than two weeks after the release of The Golden Compass, New Line Cinema had come to terms with Peter Jackson on a settlement, agreeing to pay him previously owed back-end money from The Lord of the Rings as a compromise. In exchange, Jackson will oversee but not direct a pair of prequels to his trilogy. The Hobbit will be split into two movies, and New Line Cinema once again has a pair of tentpole fantasy epics moving forward. Two films they will not be making in the foreseeable future, however, are The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. Those two remaining titles in the His Dark Materials trilogy are no longer viewed as profitable titles for the studio. So dramatic is the failure of The Golden Compass that sequels are currently out of the question. Also, they have forced New Line co-founder Robert Shaye to swallow his pride long enough to kiss and make up with Jackson. People who wanted movie adaptations of The Hobbit oddly have The Golden Compass to thank for their upcoming productions.