Free Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business by Lynda Obst Page B

few dozen screens. Now it is enjoying such enormous growth that we think it’s fitting to have the opening of one of our biggest franchises here. Russia is just one of several new markets opening up that are driving most of the demand for our movies.”
    China is another. It is now the second-largest market in the world, and it is predicted to surpass the United States to be number one by the year 2020. It had 11,000 theaters in 2012, and is expected to have 16,000 by 2015. Take this number in. Most of these new theaters are 3D and IMAX theaters, built to play our blockbusters. This has both transformed and cemented trends in the movie business. But the important thing to note is that these emerging markets are now driving the profit engine of the industry where DVD revenue once did. So have your popcorn with some chopsticks, and let’s figure out what we’re likely to see—and not see.
    SAD NEWS ABOUT COMEDY
    Comedy is often said to be a dead dog abroad. It’s basically not a funny situation. The easy reason for the conundrum is that emerging markets (let alone markets with their own comedy tastes—say, France) and Americans do not have the same sense of humor. Humor is local. People like their hilarious indigenous customs, built around their own private jokes. But I have a ridiculous and stubborn Pollyanna streak and am constantly butting my head against these kinds of obstacles, looking for counterexamples, ways around them, loopholes. And arguably, they’ve arrived.
    The successive successes internationally in the past few years of The Hangover parts I and II ($190,161,409 and $327,000,000 respectively) and Bridesmaids ($119,276,798) have broadened the market for broad high-concept comedies, even those starring broads. It has recently become possible to travel a breakout domestic success if it’s a high-concept comedy, so: (1) Easy to get the idea. (2) Not too heavy on the big words or walk-and-talks. (3) Big bawdy “set pieces,” preferably with Mike Tyson and a tiger and/or pooping in a sink. Comedy that doesn’t travel is, as Jim Gianopulos says, “based on wit.” Or “verbal.” Nicht so gut for clever so-called writers. Jim added, “Someone slipping on a banana peel is funny in every culture.”
    WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU LAUGHING ABOUT?
    In America we laugh at movies based on our customs. They could be college movies, prom movies, high school ritual movies or family vacation movies. But national archetype jokes don’t travel. When independent foreign sales agent Kathy Morgan of KMI tried to sell our huge domestic hit The Wedding Crashers —about two buddies who live off of the joy and food of strangers’weddings—to Japan, the Japanese buyers were incredulous. “Why crash wedding?!”
    On the other hand, in India, weddings are big business, big culture, big events. Wedding Crashers is being remade in India, where the idea apparently is funny, because Indians are as obsessed with weddings as we are. Though the specifics of our wedding cultures and senses of humor are wildly different, our obsession with weddings is the same. It is enough to remake this in the vast Indian market somewhere, with its distinct sense of humor. There are pockets of similarities and differences to be exploited and avoided everywhere. For example: Sometimes a movie’s sensibility doesn’t travel twenty-one miles, as in this famous story I heard from Jim Gianopulos and Kathy Morgan and a few others.
    “There was a movie in France a couple of years ago called Welcome to the Sticks . It was a fish-out-of-water story about a guy from Paris who goes to this city in the south of France where he doesn’t understand the local accent. It was hilarious to the French. The movie did a hundred million dollars there!”
    This is an impossibly high number in France—which obviously made everyone think it could travel. So they exported it. First stop: the UK.
    Gianopulos said, “It made ten dollars in the UK, right across the Channel.