There’s a melancholy vibe at the core of “Arrival” - the kind that, like a certain kind of indie song, attracts hard-core devotees but not necessarily a broad following.Īdams’ presence will help “Arrival” with female audiences, who tend not to flock to sci-fi movies. Those movies, it should be said, did have a triumphant quality.
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By way of a more extravagant comparison, “Gravity"-another space-themed movie with an emo element and female lead - opened to $55 million and soared to $274 million. Indeed, the studio has been hoping that “Arrival” can follow in the path of successful adult-oriented entertainment such as “Argo,” “The Revenant” and “Bridge of Spies,” in which warm reviews and awards attention kept fourth-quarter films going strong in theaters for much longer than the typical studio release.īy way of comparison, “Argo” opened to $19 million and climbed all the way to $136 million. So far tracking for “Arrival” has put the film’s take this weekend at around $17 million, a decent opening that could provide a good bedrock for future word-of-mouth-driven weekends. Colligan notes that $80 million at the domestic box office would be a “huge number” for “Arrival.” Last year, no small to mid-budgeted genre film got near that figure, though this year films such as “Don’t Breathe” and “10 Cloverfield Lane” have topped or approached it. “This is,” Villeneuve acknowledged, “a bit of an experimental movie for the studio.”Īnd the recent track record for smaller genre movies breaking out has been mixed. It must compete not against limited-release, Oscar-bait character pieces but the likes of Marvel’s “Doctor Strange,” expected to draw plenty of business in its second weekend. “Arrival” is different, funded with an estimated budget of $50 million.
It was a hit, but a Sundance hit, grossing $5 million. Now these films, when they happen at all, tend to be on a small scale - movies such as “Moon,” Duncan Jones’ chamber-piece puzzler from 2009. The category, with its slow burn and small pleasures, its philosophical reveries and character discoveries, was a staple of Hollywood that loved subtle human feeling in its foreign beings.įrom “2001: A Space Odyssey” in 1968 to “Close Encounters” the following decade, “E.T.” in the 1980s to “Gattaca” and “Contact” in the 1990s, these were movies filled with ideas, in no hurry to get anywhere except maybe to meaningful introspection. The film was sold a bit too heavily as a car-chase actioner, and not the meditation on violence it actually was, leading to dismal CinemaScores and even a lawsuit from one disillusioned customer.Ĭerebral science-fiction movies used to be de rigueur. Of course, emphasize too effectively and that can become a problem-a challenge faced by the artsploitation movie “Drive” a few years ago. " really is in a fight against time, and there are mounting pressures all over the world. “We felt strongly we had enough clean packaging that can communicate there is a commercial core,” Colligan said, explaining both the campaign and the decision to go wide.
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Its digital campaign has underscored the mystery at the core of the film, and posters show oblique shots of the alien crafts under the message “Why Are They Here?” But the trailers and TV ads get to the global panic and confrontations much quicker, on the assumption that the young male audience that can help open a genre movie needs to be fed such fare. Paramount’s campaign has sought to walk a line between the splash that traditionally sells wide releases and the low-key moments that more accurately represent the movie’s contents. That a ruminative work is even coming from a studio in this era of franchise machines is an anomaly.īut will intimacy sell to an audience accustomed to epic bot battles and hungry jungle games? We think that’s the kind of freshness audiences want to see.” “It lives in a genre but is doing something very different with it. “This is a super-unique experience,” said Megan Colligan, Paramount’s worldwide president of distribution and marketing. The Paramount release is quiet, subtle and patient - an artisanal offering in a time of studio fast food. When “Arrival” touches down at 2,200 theaters this weekend, it will do so not only as one of the most well-regarded science-fiction movies in some time but as one of the greatest marketing puzzles in recent memory.
But it isn’t easy to market a masterpiece - especially a sci-fi masterpiece with spaceships that don’t engage in dogfights, aliens who don’t fire lasers and protagonists who don’t throw punches. “It’s a masterpiece you won’t stop talking about,” the ad promises.ĭenis Villeneuve’s latest work, starring Amy Adams as a linguist chosen to communicate with alien visitors, may well be that. The TV spot blares the early buzz for “Arrival.” The new science-fiction film, it says, has created word-of-mouth, wowed audiences and earned a 100% Fresh rating on the movie review website Rotten Tomatoes.
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