If at first you don’t succeed, minimize and keep at it. That’s the strategy Paramount Vantage Pictures appears to be taking with A Mighty Heart, the Daniel Pearl story adaptation that they hope will be Oscar material for them. Unfortunately, audiences aren’t biting the way Paramount had hoped, leading the studio to reduce the film’s screen count, hoping a persistent but smaller approach will work better for the movie.
In its opening weekend, A Mighty Heart barely scraped into the top ten, taking in only $5.4 million dollars. By the following weekend that had dropped to $1.6 million. So the studio is puling back from nearly 1,400 screens down to just 651 starting this weekend, according to Variety. The idea is to keep the movie in urban arthouses and theaters that cater more to this kind of movie, and hope those people still come out and see it.
To some this might look like a bit of a “withdrawl strategy” for the Angelina Jolie vehicle, but the studio hasn’t given up on it yet. They are still planning an aggressive awards campaign for the film, focused around Jolie’s leading performance. They are also intending an awards season DVD release. That’s what they are going to need in order to get the film seen before awards are doled out. We all know movies that aren’t seen don’t win awards.
Critics think this may be a case of too little, too late however. With low box office numbers and now a minimized presence, the public consciousness is going to think of the film as a failure. If it had started small and either stayed that way or built (a strategy other releases like Sicko or Waitress are taking), it might be perceived as less of a failure.
"Too little, too late," seems to be the catchphrase for Paramount Vantage’s handling of A Mighty Heart. We were offered interviews several times in an effort to help promote the movie, but were constantly pushed to the point that we quietly just stopped promoting the film. Assuming we weren’t the only website treated this way (and considering how little we saw online for the movie that’s an easy assumption to make), Paramount could be suffering the consequences of handling their PR as poorly as they have the release as a whole. Since they have so much hope pinned on the awards season, here’s hoping they figure out how to get this movie to the masses before then.
