Get all your news in one place.

100's of premium titles.
One app.

Start reading

Get all your news in one place.

100's of premium titles. One news app.

Start reading

The Guardian - UK

Entertainment

Phil Hoad

Gods of Egypt's $140m budget looks Ozymandian as Grimsby goes south

Bringing a sword to a gunfight … Gods of Egypt. Photograph: AP

The blockbuster

An opening weekend of $14m (£10m) amounts to something of an embarrassment for Alex Proyas’s Gods of Egypt, already with egg on its suspiciously pale face after another controversy about cast ethnicity. But these sorts of flashy-looking-but-not-too-bright CGI romps – set in a kind of ahistorical fantasy version of ancient Egypt, where gods and mortals are on bantering terms – are set up to make their money in overseas markets. It’s had a disappointing start abroad, too, though, with $24.2m from 68 territories. Russia ($3.5m) and Brazil ($1.9m) – the kind of hotspots who can bulk out a good international run for second-tier fare – were mostly down on comparable films like Clash of the Titans (Russia: $11.8m; Brazil: $4.2m) and Pompeii (Russia: $5.6m; Brazil: $1.4m). The slightly condescending policy of relying on emerging markets to prop up hyper-digital yet somehow throwback actioners could be wearing thin.

For a $140m film, someone really dropped the ankh with the marketing: beyond the metamorphosing deities and CGI scarabs, the trailers gave little hint of what Gods of Egypt was about. With the only big-name star, Gerard Butler, playing the pantheon’s bad boy, Set, audiences could have done with knowing who and what they’d be rooting for. Lionsgate is now claiming it is only exposed for $10m of the budget, the rest having being reportedly been cobbled together from a combination of Australian tax credits, foreign pre-sales and an unnamed third-party investor. The number of interests probably accounts for why the film has done such a poor job of establishing a coherent presence. A shame, as scattered among mostly dismissive reviews is the odd dissenting voice for whom the kitsch-fest had awakened their inner D&D nerd. That $140m budget is a serious millstone, with the air of a gamble that got out of control. The kind of cut-price blockbuster rank occupied by the likes of Hansel & Gretel ($50m), Dracula Untold ($70m) and Hercules ($100m) is where this kind of enlivening schlock stands a chance.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s return

Ali G’s descent on the Oscars was welcome, but it was also an unfortunate reminder of Sacha Baron Cohen’s glory days. The comedian’s career graph is starting to assume an ominous downward curve, his projects getting getting more expensive but returns failing to keep pace. His retreat under the shelter of controlled fictional film-making in 2012’s The Dictator ($179m worldwide) saw a jump up on 2009’s Brüno ($138m), the final time he was able to needle the real world in character; but the film cost half as much again ($65m to $42m). Both results (and films) were a step backwards from 2006’s Borat, which managed $261m on an $18m outlay. The budget for his new film, Grimsby, hasn’t been made public; his most British-centric project since 2002’s Ali G Indahouse, you can bet it cost a lot more than that film’s $7m. But Grimsby has opened lower here ($2.7m) than the Ali G film ($4.6m) – and this in the country most culturally in tune with Baron Cohen’s king-scally creation. Needless to say, it is the comedian’s worst UK opening. There was a flurry of late publicity, including a Jimmy Kimmel appearance in the US, but you have to wonder how much difference it makes to a set-up that looks 10 years behind the times and an unlikely-secret agent premise too similar to last year’s Spy. We’ll find out when The Brothers Grimsby, as it’s been remonikered, opens in the US on Friday; it took an additional $1.3m, mostly in Scandinavia, this weekend, but placed down at 23^rd on the global chart. Baron Cohen, as the Oscars reminds us, needs to rub up against reality to spark his anarchic genius.

Mid-term reports

Still cocksure at the top of the global chart, Deadpool, boasting $609.7m, is the 2016’s first monster hit. Like Star Wars: The Force Awakens but smaller and gobbier, it’s founded on a strong US response – close to 50%, uncommonly high for a 21st-century blockbuster. Led by the UK ($43.9m), the expected western territories are high on the Deadpool board, but Russia (third highest), Mexico (fifth) and Brazil (sixth) show that ironic superhero style – similarly to last year’s Kingsman – now travels. Stephen Chow’s Chinese all-time champ The Mermaid doubled its theatre count in the US this weekend, to no great effect. We’re going to have to wait another day for the Sino-blockbuster to land big abroad, but The Mermaid is looking likely to cross $500m this week on the back of its phenomenal domestic performance. Also in China, Kung Fu Panda 3 showed the benefits of local tailoring by this week becoming the country’s highest grossing animation, its 975m-yuan ($149m) take passing last year’s Monkey King: Hero is Back’s 965m yuan. Still only playing in seven countries, we’ll see if Oriental Dreamworks’ efforts are at the expense of success everywhere else; the global-entertainment conundrum everyone’s trying to crack.

He’s got the statuette. And passing $400m last week, Leonardo DiCaprio’s The Revenant now stands a picturesque fourth in his franchise-eschewing filmography, with Django Unchained’s $425.4m clearly in its sights – though it’ll need one hell of an Oscars bounce to slip past Inception’s $825m. Almost as tenacious in pursuit of success but a million times more annoying is Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip, dug into the global chart since Christmas and now still at 12^th; $224.7m for this fourth instalment is a low for the series, but it’s made the most of the fact all other kids’ entertainment ran shy of Star Wars this year. At $48m for 14^th place globally, Zoolander 2 is close to strutting past the original’s $60.7m take, but on double the budget ($50m) it’ll need to stay on its feet considerably longer. Not quite the disaster the US opening suggested, it’s not a resounding resurrection like Anchorman 2’s ($173.6m) either.

Beyond Hollywood

Vin Diesel lookalike Franck Gastambide scored a No 2 in France and No 12 worldwide directing and starring in Pattaya, in which he plays a wideboy who enters his dwarf buddy into the world kickboxing championships in order to get a cheap holiday to Thailand. Probably doesn’t qualify as progressive casting, that. South Korea’s top movie this week, Spirits’ Homecoming, scored $5.4m for 17^th place on Rentrak’s chart. Directed by Cho-jung Rae, it’s about Koreans captured by Japanese soldiers and forced to work as “comfort women”; holding off Deadpool and Zootopia, as well as local blockbuster A Violent Prosecutor, a nice vindication for a project that had trouble finding a distributor. In at 21 with a $4.5m Chinese snifter was Japanese anime Saint Seiya: Legend of Sanctuary: already debuting in its home country in June last year, this adaptation of the Masami Kurumada manga puts Greek mythology through the intercontinental culture-mangler in that glorious Japanese way.

The future

It was a long-shot that 2013’s president-in-peril potboiler Olympus Has Fallen (an uttered-during-the-film title if ever there was one) would spawn a sequel. But apparently the slender margin of $161m gross on a $70m spend is enough these days, and so here is London Has Fallen. Gerard Butler, his second bite of the box-office cherry in a fortnight, returns as US secret service bodyguard Mike Banning, with an upgraded $105m budget and a suspiciously Middle Eastern-sounding delegation, presumably the villains, on the cast list. It kicks off in the US, among an initial batch of 25 countries. Zootopia, or Zootropolis, or whatever it’s called has a big week: simultaneous US and Chinese releases, plus Russia and lots of the surrounding countries. Currently on $81.4m and holding the line in France and Korea, the Disney animation will be looking to step it up into blockbuster numbers now. And on the back of two 2015 hits in the shape of ensemble comedy Dil Dhadakne Do and sumptuous period drama Bajirao Mastani, Priyanka Chopra takes on Jai GangaaJal in India this week, playing a police superintendent taking a big stick to corruption in Bihar. Directed by Prakash Jha, rare in mainstream Bollywood for his sociopolitical leanings, Jai GangaaJal surely is aiming to bolster Chopra’s leading-woman credentials. Then she’s off to Hollywood to star in the Baywatch remake.