But it does like to cultivate a reputation for maintaining strong, long-term relationships with directors: Clint Eastwood, Stanley Kubrick, Christopher Nolan, Ben Affleck. The studio is, of course, under no obligation to continue bankrolling careers that look to some sceptics like meandering philosophy postdoctorates, with the odd pop-culture-fetish interlude such as Speed Racer thrown in. But the piecemeal strategy – buttressed by Warner's odd decision to schedule their other openings on the other side of Christmas – killed off the possibility of Cloud Atlas being any kind of global event far-removed from the simultaneous worldwide release (the first of its kind) rolled out by Warner for the Wachowskis' The Matrix Revolutions a decade ago. He also says that the original push focused too much on filmgoers over 30, and adjustments were made to target the youth demographic on the later international releases. Cloud Atlas's treatment feels like a failure of nerve – irrecoverably so, once the film clocked up a middling C+ CinemaScore with US audiences, opened in the middle of Hurricane Sandy, and was then blown on to the rocks by Typhoon Skyfall.Īrndt stresses that the marketing was a joint affair between the producers and the studio, and that wide release couldn't have happened without a partner of Warner's clout. A six-minute trailer dropped last July, but this heavy-handed approach only highlighted that Warner were struggling for ideas.
Or how about mining the shapeshifting feats performed by the cast, who take on multiple roles across the six stories, for their visual potential?īut the main poster is a mess. They could have homed in on more specific themes – "The weak are meat, and the strong do eat" is one resonant catchphrase – that might have dredged up more protein from the zeitgeist. "Everything is connected" was the flat tagline, a default globalisation slogan more suited to a mobile-phone campaign than a quixotic, pioneering blockbuster. The material wasn't easy, granted, but the studio failed to encapsulate it appealingly. Warner, who retained the rights in core territories such as the US, UK, Japan, France, Spain and Australia, were in the best position to set the tone, but have dropped the ball. One key problem, amid the babble, is whether the enigmatic Cloud Atlas ever had a chance to build a clear identity with audiences. "But what happens if you have 20 territories with 20 investors with 20 opinions – in the end you cannot force your distributors to follow one strategy." "Our plan in the beginning was to have a much more coordinated release," says producer Stefan Arndt. The latter push was overseen by Focus Features, whose CEO James Schamus had once sewn a quilt of similar deals for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.īut the fragmented nature of this arrangement caused problems, beginning with a haphazard release schedule trailing over six months that means Cloud Atlas, arriving in the UK this week, has the air of yesterday's news. "The demands it put upon the audience and everybody, the business risk, were off the scale." That was Warner's judgment, too after projecting the box office take, modelling their estimate on Darren Aronofsky's similarly flighty and multi-stranded The Fountain, it refused to commit all the way.Ĭloud Atlas was eventually financed, appropriately, with a patchwork of international capital: part-Warner, part- German Federal Film Fund, part-Asian investors, part-preselling distribution rights to territories around the globe. "The script was not user-friendly," actor Tom Hanks later told the New Yorker.
And the Wachowskis, co-scripting with Run Lola Run director Tom Tykwer, arguably made it even more complicated: instead of simply nesting the stories in a controlled order as Mitchell did, their screenplay chopped and changed antically between. David Mitchell's novel – six interlinking stories spanning the planet and time frames from 1850 to 2321 – is as adaptation-resistant as they come. It was never, it must be said, an easy sell.
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