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Hollywood "Globalized" When director Adam McKay pitc

游客2024-05-03  11
问题                         Hollywood "Globalized"
    When director Adam McKay pitched a sequel (续集)to his 2004 hit movie Anchorman, he thought it would be a no-brainer for Hollywood.
    The $ 20 million comedy grossed more than $ 90 million at the box office. But only $ 5 million of that came from ticket sales abroad. Paramount Pictures refused the sequel this spring, fearing the comedy’s uniquely American brand of humor wouldn’t play abroad.
    "At the end of the day, the economics of the business have changed— there is so much more pressure to play globally, and we couldn’t fight that," says Mr. McKay.
International Box Office
    The rising power of international audiences is a sea change for Hollywood. Decades ago, a movie’s foreign box office barely registered with studio executives. Now, foreign ticket sales represent nearly 68% of the roughly $ 32 billion global film market, up from roughly 58% a decade ago, according to Screen Digest Cinema Intelligence Service.
    The result is that one of the most American of products is now being retooled to suit foreign tastes. Studios have begun to cast foreign actors in American-themed blockbusters (大片)like G. I. Joe. Scripts are being rewritten to lure global audiences. And studios are cutting back on standard Hollywood fare like romantic comedies because foreign movie-goers often don’t find American jokes all that funny. Several Hollywood studios have gone as far as financing, producing and marketing original movies for markets like South Korea and Brazil.
    "We need to make movies that have the ability to break out internationally," says Rob Moore, vice chairman of Paramount Pictures. "That’s the only way to make the economic puzzle of film production work today."
    The rise of the international box office has as much to do with a shifting global economy as with the evolution of the movie business. For years, Hollywood’s bottom line was propped up by double-digit growth in DVD sales. Dwindling (缩减)in-theater audiences in North America also have contributed to the shift.
    Another factor: Regions from Asia to Eastern Europe went on a credit-fueled building boom, erecting shopping malls—often with multiplexes attached.
Local Films
    IMAX Corp. has opened 66 big-screen theaters abroad in the last three years, including 25 in Asia to increase the company’s brand awareness in Asia.
    Satisfying foreign audiences has been tricky for Hollywood. Years ago, audiences in South Korea would faithfully go to the multiplex to watch movies that were written, produced, and cast out of Hollywood. Now, increasingly sophisticated local films are giving Hollywood a run for its money.
    In South Korea, ticket sales to local movies accounted for about 10% or 20% of box-office revenue in the 1990s. Hollywood movies grabbed the lion’s share. Now, local fare makes up nearly 50% of South Korean ticket sales, according to Screen Digest.
    In 2008, veteran film executive Sanford Panitch was shocked when a Twentieth Century Fox film he worked on called "Jumper" was nearly eclipsed (衰落)in South Korea by a local crime thriller called The Chaser.
    Just a few months later, Mr. Panitch was plucked to head up the studio’s new Fox International Productions division. Fox, noticing that local films were eating up more of the foreign box office, had become worried about its ability to reach up-and-coming markets with its Hollywood fare. Fox set up the new division so it could start developing, producing, and distributing local-language movies for those countries.
    Mr. Panitch says he sometimes uses Fox’s vast array of film production resources like relationships with special-effects companies to dress up foreign films. But he says it’s more important to draw on local producers and their expertise to make films that appeal to that particular audience. "It’s not about bringing Hollywood tactics to the foreign markets," says Mr. Panitch. "It’s about participating in a local culture enough to create a product that those audiences will actually want to watch."
De- Americanize
    Donna Langley, co-chair of General Electric Co. ’s Universal Pictures unit, was recently working on the script for an upcoming big-budget movie based on the Hasbro board game Battleship. The plotline is classic Hollywood: Evil aliens land on earth and live underwater. One of the first people at Universal to read the script was David Kosse, the studio’s London-based president. One worry surfaced immediately: The aliens only threatened the US—a premise deemed "too American."
    Universal asked the writers to redo the script. In the new version, the aliens threaten the entire world. "The movie takes place off the coast of Hawaii, but the question we asked was, ’How do we make this a global proposition’?" said Ms. Langley. Universal now tries to have senior executives vet scripts early to look for ways to make them more international.
    Last summer, Paramount was worried that its 2009 summer release, G.I. Joe, which cost $175 million, might flop overseas. "People questioned whether it would travel outside the US because the original formulation is a strong US military theme,"says Mr. Moore, the Paramount executive. The solution: Stuff the cast with international stars. In the end, G.I. Joe grossed slightly more abroad than at home, taking in $ 152 million of its world-wide $ 302 million in ticket sales overseas.
    But Hollywood has concluded that some movies just can’t make it abroad. "A lot of comedies and a lot of comedians don’t travel,"says Mr. Moore. Paramount and others have begun to give them the ax. Fox Searchlight was recently developing "Baggage Claim," which chronicles a young flight attendant’s search for Mr. Right and stars an ensemble of African-American actors. But that film ended up in "turnaround," the Hollywood term for when a studio abandons the rights to a project and allows others to acquire it. It was heavily targeted to an African-American audience, a factor that often means the film won’t play well abroad.
    Since Anchorman 2 was killed, Mr. McKay, the director, has been trying to broaden the foreign appeal of his next project, The Other Guys, a $ 100 million comedy. Sony Pictures will bring it out in August.
    A key plot point of the film involves Mr. Wahlberg and Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter. Sony’s executives initially worried that Mr. Jeter—and the joke that involves him—would seem too American. They found a solution: The studio asked Mr. McKay to spend his summer re-shooting those scenes with international sports stars, and it went after soccer stars David Beckham of England and Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal.
    Sony wanted to release a separate version of the film abroad starring Messrs. Beckham or Ronaldo— rather than Mr. Jeter. Neither soccer player was available in the end. But the studio plans to use the strategy in the future. "I gotta tell you, I loved the idea and still think it’s really smart," says Mr. McKay.
    "It’s a whole new way of looking at movies," he adds. "Rather than trying to veer your audience toward the film, just tweak your film to the audience. Next, I’d like to start tweaking movies by region, one version for the Midwest, another for the East Coast, and the South." [br] Why did Paramount Pictures refuse to invest in the sequel to Anchorman?
选项 A、The director wanted to change the comedy into a tragedy.
B、The stars demanded a much higher pay than what they could afford.
C、They didn’t think foreign viewers would enjoy the American humor in the movie.
D、The play failed to be a commercial success and thus disappointed Paramount.
答案 C
解析 同义转述题。文章开头介绍说，导演Adam McKay为Anchorman这部电影的续集搜寻投资者，他以为这是一件相当容易的事，但没想到派拉蒙影业公司居然拒绝投资，原因是他们担心这部喜剧独特的美式幽默在海外没有市场。C)是对原文的同义转述。
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