How the boutique company behind ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ is pioneering a new model
A DECADE ago, a movie producer named John Penotti was feeling low. He had just nearly lost his shirt on a series of independent productions, which he made during flush times only to find the 2008 financial crisis had claimed many of the distributors who would buy them. Casting about for a new model, he decided to investigate the Asia market.
There was only one problem: He knew nothing about Asia.
Ten years later, the Patterson, New Jersey, native has a thriving company, Ivanhoe Pictures, specializing in the Asian market. Unlike many of the studios that in recent years travelled across the Pacific seeking global projects, the boutiquesized Ivanhoe has undertaken a local and curatorial approach and in the process created a business model for a continent that has long vexed American entertainment executives.
This weekend will bring a major dividend of those efforts. Penotti’s Ivanhoe is a principal behind a different sort of Asianthemed production, one that is aimed at American audiences: the US- and Singapore-set ‘Crazy Rich Asians’, an emerging romantic- comedy phenomenon that opens in American theatres Wednesday.
“My experience in Asia before I started this was limited to being a Wong Kar-wai fan,” Penotti said during an interview at his Santa Monica offices on a recent afternoon, alluding to the Hong Kong auteur.
“It took two years of immersion, of travelling there for months at a time, before I even began to feel comfortable. My wife began asking if I had another family there.”
It’s a fictional family that will prove Ivanhoe’s comingout party. Even before its release, ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ is an increasingly mythical Hollywood creature, an original book-based success in a summer season usually immune to them.
Kevin Kwan’s 2013 novel, in part about a young New York academic who falls for a colleague who happens to come from a family of Singapore tycoons, has been turned into a movie by ‘Step Up’ director Jon Chu and Warner Bros.
The movie is shaping to be a smash by August standards, with pre-release surveys suggesting as much as US$ 25 million in grosses its first weekend - nearly the entire size of the film’s US$ 30 million production budget.
More important, it is the first major studio picture to feature an entirely Asian American principal cast since ‘ The Joy Luck Club’ a quarter- century ago, helping it sail into the history books.
‘Crazy Rich Asians’ stars Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Awkwafina and others.
But for all the glitzy headlines, the film is the result of some gritty shoe-leather work by Penotti, who, together with ‘ The Hunger Games’ producers Color Force, bought the book at an early stage.
Ivanhoe helped hire Chu, courted a bidding war between Warner Bros. and Netflix and served as financier with the studio. Little of it would have been possible if not for the groundwork laid years earlier,
My experience in Asia before I started this was limited to being a Wong Kar-wai fan. It took two years of immersion, of travelling there for months at a time, before I even began to feel comfortable. John Penotti, movie producer
allowing Ivanhoe to establish itself as a solid transpacific company in a position to discover and finance ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ in the first place.
Not for nothing have American companies sought to crack local Asian markets. The continent has been a growing source of moviegoing; it now contains half of the world’s top six countries by box office. But the challenges have been numerous.
After reaching out to and ultimately teaming with the Singapore-based American mining mogul Robert Friedland, he began to understand some of the problems.
“The studios seem to be doing it wrong, trying to either impose their way on local cultures or make these big tent poles that not enough people wanted,” Penotti said from his office, a loft-like space with high ceilings and exposed brick and an array of posters on the wall.
“They were trying to re- create an American model verbatim on another continent.”
The solution, he felt, was a blend - taking what worked in America but reformatting for Asia. The solution, in other words, was remakes of Englishlanguage hits.
So the company produced a Chinese take on the 2009 Anne Hathaway romantic comedy ‘Bride Wars’ in 2015; the 2007 Frank Oz family dramedy ‘Death at a Funeral’ became an Indian movie several years later; and India will soon see a new retelling of the Jeff Bridges Western thriller ‘ Hell or High Water’.
Because these projects – along with original local-language productions in countries including South Korea, Indonesia and Malaysia – are done with the local market in mind, they have a defined audience and a budget that gets them to profitability sooner.
They also are the result of a more human approach. “The idea is to get on the ground and have them know you, which we can do as a small and nimble company but not everyone else can,” said Kilian Kerwin, Ivanhoe’s global executive vice president.— Washington Post