Gravity effect

Alfonso Cuaron and Angelina Jolie at the Oscars

As Mexico basks in the glow of its first best director Oscar for Alfonso Cuaron and his blockbuster film Gravity, a new generation of homegrown filmmakers wonders if the magic of the golden statuette will rub off on them.
Cuaron’s 3D space thriller scooped seven Oscars, the most of any film, and was lauded for groundbreaking special effects conveying space and weightlessness, though it lost the best picture award to drama 12 Years a Slave.
The movie, which stars Sandra Bullock as an astronaut cut loose from her space shuttle, has already earned $700 million at the worldwide box office and Cuaron’s win is the first best director Oscar for a Latin American.
However, the 52-year-old Cuaron has spent most of his career outside Mexico, after he struggled to raise financing for projects back home, and fellow leading directors Guillermo Del Toro and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu also both moved abroad.
Back in his homeland, a new generation of Mexican directors has been quick to point out Cuaron’s work has had little to do with the domestic industry. Gravity was made for an estimated $100 million by Warner Bros. Pictures, while directors in Mexico have to scramble to drum up just $2 million for a film.
Many Mexican independent film-makers have had more commercial success abroad than in their home country, where film-makers complain they can’t compete against the big budgets of Hollywood studios, whose films dominate screens at cinemas.
“The only place where you cannot see Mexican film is in Mexico,” said Ivan Avila Duenas, who debuted his fourth feature film at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s International Film Festival, FICUNAM, recently.
Though Cuaron cut his teeth in Mexico, most of his best known works have been Hollywood-backed projects. In the 1990s, he left Mexico to work in the United States, then Britain, and became more known for his movie adaptations of British authors, including the third installment of J.K. Rowling’s work, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, as well as P.D. James’ dystopian Children of Men. Ironically, success abroad enabled Cuaron to direct with bigger budgets in Mexico, where his 2001 Spanish-language road trip film Y Tu Mama Tambien, helped launch the international careers of actors Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna.
When Cuaron scored his first hit in the 1990s, Mexican film output was anemic, with only 10 or so films a year. Last year yielded over 100, aided by tax breaks for corporate sponsors and co-productions between Mexican and foreign companies.

12 Years Oscar a golden ticket for box office, DVD sales

Historical drama 12 Years a Slave was awarded the top prize at Academy Awards show, claiming the Oscar for best picture and boosting the revenue its distributor Fox Searchlight can expect from added theatre and home entertainment sales. 12 Years a Slave won a total of three Oscars, including for Lupita Nyong’o for best supporting actress. Gravity, distributed by Time Warner Inc’s Warner Bros., was the night’s big winner with seven Oscars, including one for Alfonso Cuaron as best director.
The Oscars telecast, seen by an average each year of about 40 million people in the United States, is Hollywood’s biggest annual publicity event and can spark new interest in the winning films. Before the ceremony, studios generally spent upwards of $2 million for advertisements, screenings and other events aimed at the Academy’s more than 6,000 voters, according to industry insiders.
“There’s a bump when a film gets a nomination and another if it’s a winner in one of the major categories,” said former Columbia Pictures marketing president Peter Sealey, CEO of the Sausalito Group strategic marketing company. “It’s not big but it can be meaningful.”
Last year, Warner Bros. added nearly 200 theatres the weekend after Argo won best picture, even though the Ben Affleck film had been playing on the big screen for five months and its DVD was already on sale.
The film collected nearly $8 million in theatre ticket sales over the next month, according to the tracking site Box Office Mojo, boosting its overall box office by 5 per cent. Fox Searchlight intends to release 12 Years a Slave on Blu-ray disc , while the film is still playing in about 340 U.S. theatres. It also is on the big screen in 56 foreign territories. The studio has not yet said whether it might bring the film to more theatres after the Oscars.
The film had sold $140 million worth of tickets around the world before the Oscar ceremony, according to tracking firm Rentrak.