There's a battle going on at the cinema this week, but it's not the one onscreen in Clash of the Titans, the big-budget, 3-D, swords-and-sandals epic that opened yesterday. This battle is for the screen itself.
Hollywood is convinced that 3-D is the Holy Grail that will haul bums back into theatre seats, and it's churning out product as fast as it can. Twenty 3-D pictures are scheduled for release this year, including hugely anticipated sequels such as Toy Story 3, Shrek Forever After, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. They'll chase the record-breaking earnings that Avatar and Alice in Wonderland have already enjoyed - partly because the films are popular, and partly because theatres charge, on average, $4 more a ticket to see 3-D.
But in their passion for the third dimension, the studios overlooked one detail: There aren't nearly enough 3-D and Imax screens to accommodate the new pictures. Only about 200 theatres in North America can show Imax films. And though conventional multiplexes are racing to increase their 3-D capability - creating about 100 to 150 new screens a month, according to Entertainment Weekly - supply isn't keeping up with demand.
Already, James Cameron has huffed and puffed that Avatar (from 20th Century Fox) was blown out of 3-D and Imax cinemas too soon by Disney's Alice in Wonderland. He estimated to The Hollywood Reporter that "we left a couple hundred million dollars on the table as a result" of Disney's contract for Alice to play on all Imax screens. This weekend those two films, along with last weekend's box-office champ, Dreamworks's $43-million-earning How to Train Your Dragon, will have to move over to make room for Clash of the Titans. And this game of musical chairs will only worsen as the summer movies arrive.
Meanwhile, a trio of comedy titans - stars Tina Fey ( 30 Rock) and Steve Carell ( The Office) and director Shawn Levy - are pretty happy that their movie, Date Night, opening next weekend, needs only two dimensions to strut its stuff. Fey and Carell play a New Jersey couple whose good marriage has become a little set in its ways. Until the titular night in question, that is, when they find themselves tangled up with mobsters, crooked cops and politicians, low-lifes (Mila Kunis and James Franco) and a shirt-averse high-tech expert (Mark Wahlberg). Despite its squealing car chase and enormous promotion budget, Date Night relies on only one real special effect, and it's the cheapest one going: its writers' brains.
The Montreal-born, Yale-educated Levy, 42, has carved out a healthy career directing comic actors in light, family-friendly fare: Paul Giamatti in Big Fat Liar, Ashton Kutcher in Just Married, Steve Martin in Cheaper by the Dozen and The Pink Panther, and Ben Stiller in Night at the Museum and its sequel. He swears that despite their rabid followings - The New Yorker is doing a profile of Carell, and Fey has been showered with Emmy awards - his leads are the most self-effacing writer/performers to ever slay an audience.
"They're both brilliant at playing awkward, and they both do what we in the comedy world call smart funny: dialogue-driven, character comedy," Levy said in a phone interview this week from Los Angeles, where he's got two films in preproduction (including The Hardy Men, starring Tom Cruise and Ben Stiller as Hardy Boys who haven't grown up) and another eight in development. "They both have a healthy willingness to self-deprecate."
Levy swears that during Date Night's year-long development process (in which he, Carell and Fey passed around Josh Klausner's screenplay in an endless loop, with each adding and polishing lines, jokes and monologues) and then during the shoot itself, "Steve and Tina fell all over themselves to defer to the other. They were really respectful of each other, and willing to give the other person the laugh. Neither was the alpha dog; they were both betas."
He paused. "Well, to be honest, it's more that they're both alphas who don't realize they're alphas," he continued. "I've worked with about 15 major comics, and I won't name names, but a lot of them feel ambivalent about the amount of attention they want and get. But Steve and Tina both feel really lucky and grateful to have the careers they do."
Interestingly, both stars have found success by creating personas - Carell's Michael Scott and Fey's Liz Lemon - that are much more hapless and less attractive than the actors really are. I wondered if, in their twinned self-effacement and self-deprecation, they might cancel each other out on screen, creating a cinematic black hole. But instead, they carve out a space within the hi-jinks for a handful of quieter scenes that try to address honestly the complications of a long marriage.
"For us, this whole thing sprang from, 'Let's do a movie about a marriage that isn't in crisis and isn't new,' because no one explores that," Levy said. "I wanted to convey that marriage is hard, sometimes not fun, oftentimes not sexy. But it is a blessing. The commitment and intimacy that comes with building a life together is really, really valuable. Long before I'd fleshed out every scene, I knew that the last line would be the husband saying to the wife, 'I'd choose you every time.' That, to me, is the heart of the movie."
In fact, one of the sweeter and more serious scenes occurs smack in the middle of the car chase, when the action screeches to a halt for a few minutes while the couple have a conversation about marital hopes and disappointments - much of it written by Fey and Carell, based on their own marriages.
"I had huge pressure to gut that scene," Levy admitted. "Everyone asked me, 'Shawn, what the hell are you doing?' To which I said, 'Look, I made Night at the Frickin' Museum.' " (Wouldn't it be great if that were the title of the next instalment?) "I have earned the right to stop and take a breath and do an actual, honest scene.'" With no 3-D glasses required.
Johanna Schneller