While the next instalments of wizard spells, web-spinning action, anaconda squeezes and the lovable antics of Benji are coming soon to a multiplex near you, Troy is the summer season's first successful tent pole -- and I don't mean the thing holding up the seaside shelter where godlike warrior Achilles (Brad Pitt) cools his heel.
The industry term for a movie (usually but not always a franchise flick) that a major studio expects will be a blockbuster (but often isn't), "tent pole" is a particularly evocative buzzword to toss around these days, especially for those brushing up on ancient texts or history in preparation for a pitch meeting with a major studio.
As of Thursday, the $170-million epic Troy, which opened May 14, had earned a worldwide cumulative gross of approximately $263-million (that includes $92.7-million at the North American box office), according to Warner Bros. Pictures president of domestic distribution Dan Fellman. "[ Troy]is right where we expected it to be," he said on the phone from Burbank, Calif., adding, "I must say Canada has performed extremely well. Canada normally represents 8 per cent of the U.S. box office, and it's running closer to 14."
Yet we are mere foot soldiers. Like several major Hollywood movies in recent years, the real hero in Troy's upbeat (though not exactly record-smashing) box-office story is the overseas market, increasingly the bottom-line saviour of big-budget films with disappointing domestic theatrical admissions. (Last year, overall U.S. box office was down 4 per cent, while international was up 5.)
"Epic action adventure stories have tremendous universal appeal," said Veronika Kwan-Rubinek, Warner Bros. president of international distribution. "And I feel that Troy, as well as being about war, has romance and the drama of relationships that also helps it resound internationally."
In less than two weeks, Troy brought in $22-million at the box office in Germany, more than the entire run of The Last Samurai in that country. So far Troy has been the No. 1 film its opening weekend in all territories, including Turkey (where ancient Troy once stood) and Greece (where, more than two millennia ago, Homer composed The Iliad, one of the sources for Troy screenwriter David Benioff).
"It used to be we'd open a movie internationally six months after its U.S. release," Fellman explains. "But the Internet is such that it's a global world in terms of information about movies. That and piracy issues means we are doing more same-date releases, which has proven successful for us. Our business, from Warners' point of view, is taking a global strategy. That's how we decide on what products we make. The international market is a growing and very vibrant place, so when we make movies, we view it as a global opportunity."
With Hollywood's shift to a world market informing the stories being told, audiences here and abroad can expect to see more tent poles. Literally. The tent, after all, is the accommodation of choice for the "sword-and-sandal" hero on the move. General Maximus (Russell Crowe) had a luxurious tent in Gladiator (2000).
The critical and box-office success of Ridley Scott's film is widely credited as paving the way for the return of the genre, which has had its ups and downs and variations in the history of cinema; sword-and-sandal probably saw its last heyday 40-some-odd years ago with Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960) and, on a lighter note, all those early 1960s Italian peplum (short tunic) flicks starring Steve Reeves and other lesser-known musclemen playing various characters from biblical or classical antiquity.
Since Gladiator, there has been considerable industry buzz and Internet fan-site chatter about a handful of projects in the sword-and-sandal sweepstakes. Films started to emerge this year, a serious if varied lot, beginning with Mel Gibson's highly controversial box-office winner The Passion of the Christ, followed by Brad-buoyed Troy (combining story elements from Homer, Virgil and Aeschylus, and thus irking classics teachers everywhere) and Alexander, written and directed by Oliver Stone (whose historical adviser, the Oxford professor and author Robin Lane Fox, leads a cavalry charge in a non-speaking extra role). Shot in London studios and on location in Morocco and Thailand, Stone's biopic of Alexander the Great (356-323 BC), the Macedonian king, conqueror and builder of a vast empire that stretched from Greece east into Asia, stars Irish scallywag Colin Farrell in the title role (bowl-cut blond hair and all), Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer, Jared Leto and Anthony Hopkins.
Scheduled for theatrical release later this year, Stone's Alexander may be first out the gate but there are other "great" projects in the works. Moulin Rouge director Baz Luhrmann was reportedly scouting locations in his native Australia last year with producer Dino De Laurentiis; there were entertainment news stories last year about the casting of Leonardo DiCaprio as Alexander. For now, at least, Luhrmann's project appears to be in a holding pattern.
According to the company website of producer Ilya Salkind, Young Alexander, the first of a planned trilogy, began shooting in Greece and Egypt this February and is being directed by Canadian direct-to-video guy Jalal Merhi. During the Cannes festival, the website content was updated with production stills, poster art and a short trailer. And I stumbled upon a partially funded project about the Persian king Cyrus the Great (5th century BC); I wouldn't be surprised if its screenplay is loosely based on a narrative by the Greek writer Herodotus.
"When it comes to the appeal of these films, in particular Troy, one of the things that may be playing a role, on an unconscious level, is that fact of America fighting wars in that general part of the world," said Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. "I think the way most Americans still think of Iraq is in relation to the ancient world. I remember being really upset with someone in my own family who was more concerned about the destruction of ancient monuments than about Iraqi people dying."
Rosenbaum, whose many books include Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See (2000) and The Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (2004), admits he enjoyed Troy more than he thought he would, but nevertheless suspects the escapism of the movie feeds into people's mythologizing about real wars. "To me it's a viable concept that in order to make war look glorious and heroic, you have to go farther back into the past. In order to make war look more unambiguously heroic, you can't go back to Vietnam, you have to go back to Troy. There's something ideological about that choice. It seems to me kind of corrupting."
For his part, San Francisco Chronicle book critic David Kipen, formerly an editor at Daily Variety, said: "You have to travel far back into the literary past in order for your movie to travel as widely and lucratively as possible." In his illuminating essay, Offshoring the Audience (actually a book review of Andrew Horton's Screenwriting for a Global Market) in the June issue of The Atlantic, Kipen argues that Hollywood's global tunnel vision means, sadly, that it no longer makes movies expressly for the home team. The recent sword-and-sandal movies weren't mentioned in his piece, so I called him up.
" The Passion of the Christ one could describe as a film whose underlying literary property has world appeal and a simple icon that everyone recognizes," Kipen continued. "It's interesting for me to see how Troy is sold -- why was that title chosen? Well, it fits on a T-shirt and in an instant message. And as for Alexander, I don't know much about Macedonian history but I think Alexander the Great might be something like the Alamo -- something everyone has heard of but doesn't know much about."
That may be true in some places, but not in the city of Thessaloniki, a short drive from Pella, where Alexander the Great was born, and Vergina, where the tomb of his father, Phillip II, was discovered in 1977. I visited the city a couple of months ago to attend an excellent documentary film festival and met its artistic director Dimitri Eipides, also a veteran programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival.
"I think Alexander will cause a lot of controversy here," he said on the phone, a few days after returning to Greece from Cannes. "I am connected to Vangelis [ Blade Runner, Chariots of Fire] the composer who is doing the music for the Oliver Stone film, and we were discussing this topic. Alexander is a hero, a monument in the Greek consciousness. One waits with some reservation to see how his story will be treated."
As Achilles and Hector duke it out in the multiplexes, does Greece have a little something to offer in return? The country's domestic industry, though well supported by the state and viewers, only rarely produces a film with international legs. A Touch of Spice tells the story of a Greek immigrant family living in Turkey, and features a gorgeous soundtrack.
Warmly received at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York last month, the film, which has been described as the Mediterranean Like Water for Chocolate, knocked Pirates of the Caribbean from the top of the Athens box office last fall -- and with nary a sword or sandal in sight.