No Fable: A Big Bet on a Summer Original
Sony’s ‘Once Upon a Time,’ Tarantino’s first major studio release, is a refreshing break in a season of sequels
Nice Start despite glowing reviews, A-list movie stars and a singular filmmaker who inspired an across-the-board studio bidding war, Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” still represented a massive creative risk for financier and distributor Sony Pictures.
Now it seems a risk well taken, as the studio marks a career-best opening weekend for Tarantino, with $41 million at the domestic box office.
To drop a two-hour, 40-minute, R-rated original movie that defies easy categorization in the middle of the summer blockbuster season was a swing for the fences, numerous top executives and industry analysts tell Variety.
“The truth is, there aren’t a lot of filmmakers out there who are creating their own original stuff anymore,” says Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group chairman Tom Rothman.
Indeed, the hotly anticipated project starring Leonardo Dicaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie contains neither a billowing superhero cape nor a singing lion in a single frame. It’s a period piece, for starters, a love letter to idyllic ’60s cinema that in true Tarantino fashion has its share of feverish violence — and a film in which the central characters’ lives intersect with the Manson Family in surprising ways. Dicaprio plays a fading television star and Pitt his loyal stuntman and gofer. The only resemblance the film does share with franchise fare is its budget.
The true production cost of “Once Upon a Time” is still a matter of great debate, though several individuals close to the project insist it was $110 million, which decreased to $90 million after Sony won a generous California tax rebate in an annual state lottery. As Variety previously reported, Pitt and Dicaprio were each paid $10 million upfront — a major haircut from their usual quotes.