MYTH: BUSTED
Challenging the notion that black films don’t do well overseas.
Black films don’t do well overseas? “Get Out,” “Hidden Figures” and others suggest otherwise.
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On his way to winning a best picture Oscar for “Moonlight,” a film made for a minuscule $1.5 million, writer-director Barry Jenkins took time between awards-season red carpet appearances for a six-city European promotion tour. It was time well spent.
“Moonlight,” about a poor black boy living in the projects of Miami and struggling with his sexuality, wasn’t supposed to be the kind of movie that wins the best picture Oscar. Its modest coming-of-age narrative, unconventional story structure and outsider characters with no mega stars made it, as filmmaker Mark Duplass said recently with admiration, “a bit of a miracle” that it even reached U.S. theaters. Certainly, it’s not the kind of movie that was expected to make money overseas. After all, says a longstanding Hollywood myth, black films don’t travel.
Yet “Moonlight” has made more than $28 million at the international box office.
“This black film is definitely selling overseas,” Jenkins said to The Times on the red carpet for the Screen Actors Guild Awards, just after he’d returned from Europe.
It’s one more way “Moonlight” has bucked conventional wisdom.
“Every time there’s a success, it gets swept under the rug,” says Jeff Clanagan, president of Lionsgate’s Codeblack Films, which primarily produces films with African American casts. “It’s almost like there’s an asterisk on it. They chalk it off as an anomaly.”
For 1988’s “Coming to America,” the anomaly was the comedic genius of Eddie Murphy, who “transcended race” when the film grossed $160.6 million internationally for a $288.8 million worldwide take. (Samuel L. Jackson, Morgan Freeman, Jamie Foxx, Will Smith, Kevin Hart, Denzel Washington and Don Cheedle are other box office champs for whom the “transcended race” label has been applied.)
For 1995’s “Bad Boys” and its 2003 sequel — which together pulled in a combined $210.3 million internationally and $414.7 million worldwide — it was that the film was an action flick, never mind leads Smith, Martin Lawrence and Gabrielle Union.
For 2015’s “Straight Outta Compton,” a $40.4 million payoff internationally (and $201.6 million worldwide), it was the popular music of rap group N.W.A.
Even as three-time Oscar nominee “Hidden Figures,” with its predominantly black cast, has triumphed at the box office, the myth persists.
When asked about the myth, Octavia Spencer, Oscar-nominated for her “Hidden Figures” role, responded simply: “I have two words for you: Will Smith.”
“He was told the same thing (at the beginning of his career) — that he wasn’t going to be taken to promote his film,” she said at the annual pre-Oscars Sistahs Soiree honoring women of color in the industry. “Had he not paid for himself to fly all over the world that very first time, he would not be an international box office star. So they have to start investing and taking black actresses and actors across the world just like they do with unknown white actors . ... If you don’t know ‘em, why would you
go support the film?”
The latest picture to face the international test headon is “Get Out,” from writerdirector Jordan Peele. While the social thriller starring Daniel Kaluuya has been the talk of Hollywood since its Feb. 24 premiere — making Peele the first black director with a $100 million debut — the film is just beginning to be released internationally, an effort by the studio to first test the film among its intended American audience, then strategically roll it out in other countries.
‘Good movies perform’
“If a movie is good, it should transcend borders, cultural difference and ideologies,” says Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst with comScore who analyzes box office returns. “If you have a great movie, I think it can play anywhere.”
He struggles, he says, “with categorizing any film using the makeup of its cast or point of view of its storytelling” and calls Hollywood banter about the inherent lack of profitability for a movie that features a diverse cast “myopic.”
Jonathan Deckter, president and chief operating officer of Voltage Pictures, with a specialty in international and domestic sales, agrees, saying the myth is “ignorant.”
“That’s an overgeneralization to say that black films don’t travel,” Deckter says. “Good movies perform. Movies that have something special, unique, something that drives an audience to get off of their sofa and into a cinema perform.”
Director and producer Reginald Hudlin says, “The confusion starts with the definition of ‘black film,’ as if it was a genre. There are musicals, action movies, comedies, horror films, but ‘black’ is not a storytelling genre. And the fact that these movies (with black casts) that can be wildly different are all put in the same category as if they’re all the same, ignoring actual genres, which can have a huge effect on its ability to travel, already leads to people misunderstanding its worldwide box office potential.
“The definition,” adds Hudlin, who is working on the upcoming “Marshall,” starring Chadwick Boseman as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, “is designed to reach a conclusion, which is that black films don’t sell.”
How does it work?
For an American independent film to make it into international theaters, a producer works with international sales agents to license the rights to overseas distributors. The licensing process often begins with the sales agent attempting to pre-sell the film, persuading local distributors in international markets to purchase rights before the movie is complete. While some films get purchased during the pre-sale process, international buyers can also choose to wait until they see a finished film at film festivals, or film markets. A film’s commercial potential, which takes into account the U.S. release date, script, director, genre, cast, critical acclaim and culture of a film, dictates the enthusiasm of international distributors.
At last year’s American Film Market, “Moonlight,” says Voltage Pictures’ Deckter, was “one of the most sought-after movies,” months before it landed any awards-season nominations. The reason for such high interest in the film, independently made through Brad Pitt’s Plan B and A24, wasn’t obvious.
“As a general rule, independent film distributors try to find reasons to find movies that work, acquire them and then make them work,” Deckter says. “They’re probably not taking the same amount of at-bats on black movies as they take on other movies. Distributors haven’t seen an entry point to certain black movies so they haven’t taken it on.”
Perhaps with the success of “Moonlight,” some of those entry points are more clear. To Clanagan of Lionsgate’s Codeblack Films however, the fault for the pervasive myth lies at the feet of international distributors themselves.
“It comes from the foreign distributors and studios,” he says. “They have perpetuated and created a myth that black movies don’t work over there.”
When Deckter was president of IM Global, he sold “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” and Marlon Wayans’ “A Haunted House” to international distributors. “A Haunted House,” a comedy starring Wayans and Essence Atkins, brought in $20 million internationally — on a $2.5 million budget. “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” pulled in $60 million internationally, “twice as much as we thought,” he says.
There are general ideas about what types of films do better in certain countries, though there are exceptions to every rule. Dramas, for example, don’t play as well in Germany as they do in Britain. Comedies, unless they have huge stars, don’t play as well in France, Italy, Germany and Spain. It’s also difficult to translate comedy in hopes of connecting with an international audience, unless it’s slapstick in nature.
And for those films that happen to have black casts, there is, in fact, a consistent market interested in seeing such stories; Britain, Australia, United Arab Emirates and South Africa are always popular locations.
Even so, Deckter says, “There is no marketplace for any product until you prove that there is one.”
“Black films don’t sell if the studios and marketing people aren’t putting forth the right type of muscle to platform and position those films overseas,” says Gil Robertson, president of the African American Film Critics Assn.
Hudlin admits that after more than 20 years of pitching movies with multiethnic and black casts to studios, he no longer has to preface it by saying “films with black casts aren’t just for black audiences.” But there still is a hesitancy to greenlight such films.
“The next frontier is finally blowing up this myth,” he says. “A lot of movies don’t travel, unless they do.”