On today’s episode of the “Daily Variety” podcast, Box Office Corner, Variety’s Brent Lang breaks down the big opening weekend of Amazon MGM Studios and Ryan Gosling’s fantasy vehicle “Project Hail Mary.” And Variety’s Naman Ramachandran reports on the atmosphere at Hong Kong Filmart, where AI and China dominated the conversation among Asia’s top producers, distributors and talent.
“The Bezos family is very happy because this is a movie that Amazon MGM really needed to deliver, and they needed to deliver it in a big way, and I think it exceeded their expectations,” Lang said. “With $80.6 million, it’s the best opening of the year. I think it’s one of the best openings of all time for an original non-franchise film, and it came at a time when that company was really struggling to have a coherent strategy in theaters, and now they’re doubling down. They bought MGM for $8 billion a few years ago, and with that they got a catalog of films and projects in development, including ‘Project Hail Mary.’ Amazon MGM has had many different ventures when it comes to movies, but it hasn’t quite decided what kind of company it wants to be when it grows. This points to a more populist direction for popcorn. ”
Lang points out that the film was originally mooted for MGM by the studio’s former film heads, Michael De Luca and Pam Abdi, who are now the heads of Warner Bros. Pictures. The pair have been on a roll lately with new releases and box office success, culminating with One Battle After Another winning the Best Picture Oscar earlier this month.
“They put ‘Project Hail Mary’ in the pipeline when they were hired to basically make MGM more attractive to buyers, and they did that pretty well,” Lang says.
Mr. Ramachandran, Variety’s chief Asia correspondent, spoke from Hong Kong as he wrapped up a whirlwind four-day Hong Kong Film Art. This massive event attracted around 8,000 attendees representing film and television companies with a strong presence from across Asia and Europe. Rapid advances in AI technology were a major theme of the conversation. Ramachandran explains that there is an enthusiasm for adopting new content creation tools, in contrast to the reluctance in the U.S. creative community.
“People are already making feature films using AI. We wrote about a Korean project called ‘Raphael,’ which is set in Europe and is 80 minutes long. It will be released theatrically in Korea in May,” Ramachandran points out. “AI is also the most popular for microdramas, as they can easily create two- to three-minute segments. And many microdrama companies use AI as a testing tool. So they create 10 two-minute episodes of a microdrama, and if the audience likes it, they shoot the remaining episodes with humans.”
(Photo: Ryan Gosling in “Project Hail Mary”)
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