Recently, a rash of movie bloggers and film critics struggled to express our love of the daring and different Cloud Atlas to the movie-going public. We tried to explain the spectacle, the scope and the ambition, but with the film offering so much that was unconventional—from three directors (Tom Tykwer, Andy and Lana Wachowski) to a cast playing multiple roles, and six separate yet philosophically linked narratives—we found this hard to sell to more casual movie fans. And from the looks of the film's dismal box office numbers, so did Warner Bros' marketing department.
Of course, a movie's box office doesn't make the movie itself bad or good, and often its box office does not impact its legacy. Consider Vertigo. At time of its release, it barely broke even at the box office, and garnered mixed reviews from critics. For Alfred Hitchcock, it was seen as a failure, and yet this year it was dubbed the Greatest Film of all time by Sight & Sound's critic's poll.
In the new biopic Hitchcock, director Sacha Gervasi unveils the struggles Hitch and his wife and most trusted collaborator Alma Reville faced in bringing Psycho to life. Today it's arguably Hitchcock's best-known film, but in 1959 it seemed too ghastly and too strange to get support from the studio system for which Hitchcock had made millions. Now in Hitchcock's latest international trailer, you get a feel for what troubles the Hitchcock's encountered to make the master of suspense's riskiest film to date:
Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren star as Hitch and Reville, while Scarlett Johansson and Cloud Atlas' James D'Arcy play Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins. Jessica Biel, Toni Collette, Danny Huston, and Michael Stuhlbarg also appear.
Hitchcock opens in limited release on November 23rd.
