LOS ANGELES — Nearly a month ago, the University
of Wisconsin’s Badger Herald gave a rave to Ron
Howard’s “Frost/Nixon,” calling it a “masterpiece that excels in all three
areas of film’s holy trinity of acting, directing and writing.”
Maybe so. But if folks in Madison, Wis., were looking for a movie last
weekend, they would have had more luck with the 2:45 matinee of “Bolt.”
“Frost/Nixon,” described far and wide as a favorite in the Oscar race, has
yet to open in midsize cities with audiences as sophisticated as those in
Madison, New Orleans or Tulsa, Okla.
Instead, Universal Pictures put the film in just three theaters on Dec. 5.
A week later “Frost/Nixon” slipped into three dozen more spots. It finally
opened last weekend in 205 locations in the nation’s top 50 markets. But that
was still fewer than half the number that played Mr. Howard’s Oscar-winning
movie “A Beautiful Mind,” in what was viewed as a cautious debut when it was
released in 2001.
This year’s movie awards season has played out like Oscar night at Minsky’s.
At least a dozen of the supposedly hottest contenders — among them “The
Wrestler,” from Fox Searchlight; “Milk,” from Focus Features; and “Revolutionary
Road,” from Paramount Vantage and DreamWorks — are being teased out to the
public in peekaboo release patterns.
That approach became especially common this year, as studios held many of
their more serious movies until after the election. They then found themselves
crowding into a marketplace that made a slow rollout look like the safest
pattern even for some films, like “Frost/Nixon,” with big studios behind them.
That sort of release is meant to build anticipation, by trading on good reviews
and accumulating nominations from bellwether awards like the Golden Globes. It
also allows a studio to hold back its big advertising buys until the audience is
really ready to connect. But it can frustrate potential viewers who have been
bombarded with information about movies they still cannot see.
“I’m surprised we don’t have ‘Revolutionary Road’; we usually do pretty well
here,” said Sam Stephenson, a film buff and an instructor at Duke
University’s Center for Documentary Studies in Durham, N.C.
Though it features Kate
Winslet and Leonardo
DiCaprio, two of Hollywood’s biggest stars, “Revolutionary Road” was in just
three theaters last weekend. Similarly, Mickey
Rourke’s portrayal of a beaten-up battler in “The Wrestler,” the talk of the
Toronto
International Film Festival in September, had yet to play in more than about
15 locations as of last weekend.
Four years ago Warner
Brothers unveiled “Million
Dollar Baby,” which eventually won the best picture Oscar along with a
directing award for Clint
Eastwood, in an excruciatingly slow release that began with eight theaters
in mid-December and did not reach most of the country until six weeks later.
The studio this year has dribbled out Mr. Eastwood’s “Gran
Torino” — starting with just six theaters on Dec. 12, and fewer than a
hundred by Christmas — even while widespread publicity has piqued the curiosity
of an audience that will be largely unable to see the film until it moves to
still more theaters on Jan. 9.
“You should see my e-mails,” Dan Fellman, Warner’s theatrical distribution
president, said recently of the inevitable response by would-be viewers, many of
whom find it hard to accept that New Yorkers and Angelenos should spend weeks
with a big-star movie before it gets to their hometown malls.
With “Frost/Nixon,” perhaps the most heavily promoted of the season’s
trickling releases, Universal’s plan is to reach more screens when and if the
movie picks up awards at the Golden Globes on Jan. 11, or Oscar nominations on
Jan. 22.
The film has moved slowly because its appeal is more dependent on reviews and
awards than the drawing power of its stars, Frank
Langella and Michael
Sheen. “This was a passion project,” said Adam Fogelson, Universal’s
president for marketing and distribution.
That a certain number of people may be wondering where the movie is does not
worry Mr. Fogelson. “If people are interested enough to ask those questions now,
I suspect they’ll be interested when we bring it to the wider market,” he said
in a telephone interview on Friday.
Still, some films are disappearing even before a slightly confused audience
can find them.
For instance, Charlie
Kaufman’s “Synecdoche,
New York,” released in nine theaters in October by Sony Pictures Classics,
expanded briefly to 119 locations, and then the number dwindled.
John Muller, a Yale Law School student who comes from Santa Monica, Calif.,
was hearing a lot about the film, starring Philip
Seymour Hoffman, weeks ago and went looking for it in the New Haven area, to
no avail.
“I guess I’m spoiled, because I’m from Los Angeles,” Mr. Muller said Friday.
“I expect films to come out when they say they’re coming out.”