What Went Wrong: Knight and Day
By Shalimar Sahota
April 14, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
It’s a little difficult working out the hellish history of development on Knight and Day. It all started with first time writer Patrick O’Neill, who had originally written a serious thriller titled All New Enemies, which was sold on-spec back in 2004. When the script reached Revolution Studious, it was turned into a romantic action comedy titled Wichita, with Adam Sandler attached. Revolution Studios folded in 2007, and the script was transferred to its parent company Sony Pictures. After Sandler dropped out, the script was later refined, and the titled changed to Trouble Man, now with Chris Tucker and Eva Mendes in the lead roles. Sony dropped the film, and the script ended up at 20th Century Fox.
Now known as Untitled Wichita Project, it was during this period that screenwriter Scott Frank rewrote the script. His rewrite caught the attention of Cameron Diaz, who then supposedly brought in writer Dana Fox (whom she had worked with on What Happens in Vegas) to boost the romance. In early 2009 James Mangold was attached to direct, and apparently Diaz sent the script to Tom Cruise. It was in May 2009 when Cruise finally signed on. 20th Century Fox chairman Tom Rothman gave the film the unusually cool title, Knight and Day. However, the script was still going through various rewrites. Somewhere along the way, Laeta Kalogridis, Ted and Nicholas Griffin, Don Payne, Timothy Dowling and Simon Kinberg worked on the script. It then came back to Scott Frank, who polished up what was rewritten. This still didn’t stop director James Mangold from rewriting parts of the script during production! Overall, the film had at least ten different writers involved, but O’Neill is the only one credited.
The film follows June Havens (Cameron Diaz), an auto-mechanic (!) flying to Boston for her sister's wedding. At the airport she runs into Roy Miller (Tom Cruise), and they both just happen to be boarding the same plane. Unbeknownst to her, Roy is a rogue agent who has supposedly suffered a mental breakdown. Suddenly the few passengers on board attack Roy (even the pilots), only for him to kill them. After landing the plane in a cornfield, Roy drugs June, and she wakes up at home the next day. Soon federal agents show up, led by an Agent Fitzgerald (Peter Sarsgaard), wanting to ask June a few questions.
On the run up to release, Fox put together new trailers and varying TV spots (one promoting more action, another more comedy). Worried that they weren’t working, Fox went one better and previewed the film itself at 494 theaters on Saturday June 19th, just a few days before it opened. They may have been trying to build more buzz, but the desperation here suggested that even they were worried that they might have a flop. “The best tool we had was the movie itself,” said Fox’s distribution president Bruce Snyder. “It’s an original, adult movie, which we expect will run for quite a while.”
Knight and Day had a production budget of $117 million. Released on Wednesday, June 23, 2010, Fox had pushed the release date forward by two days. “It gives us a little bit of a jump on the weekend and the opportunity to get word-of-mouth going,” said Snyder. “We want to let people know how wonderful this picture is.” The film took $3.8 million on its opening Wednesday. Word-of-mouth wasn’t going anywhere, for although it entered the US top ten at #3, it was with a middling opening weekend take of $20.1 million. For a blockbuster that initially looked like a sure fire $100 million earner in the US, this was not a good sign, especially with Cruise in the lead role. This was his lowest opening weekend since Jerry Maguire (which opened to $17 million back in 1996!). Knight and Day ended its run with a take of $76.4 million.
Cruise and Diaz can’t be faulted when it came to their round the world trips promoting the film, helping it earn $185.5 million overseas. The film earned a total worldwide gross of $261.9 million. Not bad, but given the lackluster US box office takings, one could argue that money was certainly left on the table here.
The weekend after it opened in the US, fingers were being pointed as to whom to blame. Some felt that the blame lay squarely at Cruise. Ever since his couch-jumping incident, his popularity had dwindled, though I personally don’t see what’s wrong with a little couch cruelty. In Knight and Day he appeared to be parodying his Ethan Hunt role from Mission: Impossible. Yet, given the so-called crazy antics in his private life, having him star in a film where almost everyone thinks he’s insane seemed to be part of the selling point. If so, sending himself up is something Cruise does with bravado, and comedically he is great in this.
Tony Sella, co-president of marketing at Fox, tried to sum up why the film didn’t connect with US audiences. “Blame me,” he said. “Don’t blame Tom Cruise...I take full responsibility.” He was the one who okayed the stupidly daring teaser poster where Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz are nowhere to be seen, instead represented by white silhouettes. Sella explained how the poster was supposed to be a homage to Saul Bass. “It was a way for us to signal that this was a different, adult kind of movie,” he said. “The whole campaign was designed to evoke a film like North by Northwest. It wasn’t in any way us trying to hide anyone, simply to make the film look unique.” Fox made sure not to make this mistake with the international posters.
Sella also commented on what was being sold in the TV spots, that people might have thought, “‘Oh, I've seen that movie before. It’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith or it’s True Lies,’” said Sella. “That was exactly what we’d tried not to do, to make the movie feel like something you’d seen before.” Some people may have even thought of Killers, a very similar Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl comedy released just three weeks prior. The film told the story of a married couple, with the wife unaware that her husband is actually a spy. Suffering horrendous reviews, it made $47 million at the US box office. While Knight and Day fared better critically, reviews were still mixed, and appropriately so, since there was only half a good film here.
After a safe house shootout in Brooklyn, June is drugged and around a minute later, she’s on a tropical island. From this point on the film has lost it. Since explanations aren’t the strong point here, drugging June (with a made-up substance Roy refers to as Brotine-Zero) and causing her to blackout is used and abused as a lazy plot device to move from one set piece to the next. At first it’s forgivable, as Roy does it to get June back to her home safely, but it’s shocking to see this executed more than once (June is knocked out a total of three times). It’s almost as if the realization of making a summer blockbuster means that this shouldn’t matter, so the film decides to frivolously take advantage of this. It comes across as a bad attempt to super glue whatever good bits were left over by other writers, and it shows, with the pace slowed down in a latter half that’s suddenly devoid of humor.
For an action comedy blockbuster, Knight and Day appeared to be tailored more towards women. It’s told from the perspective of June, who is essentially the main character, and is in almost every scene (Diaz has more screen time than Cruise). We’re also supposed to believe that she’s an auto mechanic, but it seems wasteful giving her a skill that serves no purpose in the film (maybe it did in a former draft). Most of the time we know as much as she does, as the film plays out almost every woman’s dream fantasy, with June going on an adventure and different locations with a spy who happens to look a lot like Tom Cruise.
When the film was being advertised on TV in the UK, I recall most of the positive review quotes coming from women’s magazines! This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but then you have Mangold admitting that the film is, “essentially a love story.” Diaz said in an interview with Empire magazine, “We wanted the romance to be front and centre, because this is really a love story about these two people. In a way, what they’re going through is a metaphor for falling in love.” So there you have it. It’s not even an action comedy; it’s a love story. Promoting the film this way, and having it told from June’s perspective, might have brought in the women, but it could have done just as much harm by turning off the men.
I viewed Knight and Day a week after it opened. While it was nice to see an original idea released amid numerous franchise films, it didn’t help that the film was so mediocre. As already noted with the TV spots, audiences probably didn’t know what they were getting. It doesn’t help when the film itself starts as a frantic action comedy, but soon isn’t so sure what it wants to be. The characters jump to different locations and the focus shifts entirely during a third act where June is trying to find the man of her dreams. Plot details are spoken haphazardly in the hope that audiences are still clued in.
Working from a script that no longer resembles what was originally put on the page, with numerous writers and rewrites, is part of the problem (ten writers, and this was the best they could come up with?). But because Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz are involved, Fox threw over $100 million at it and hoped for the best. International grosses pulled the film out of the rubble, but this could have (and should have) been so much more.