(It’s also important to note that Open Road put that film out in conjunction with an agreement it has with Amazon Studios.)
In fact, of the seven movies it released in 2016, only one opened on fewer than 1,500, and that was the documentary Gleason, about former pro football player Steve Gleason and his battle with ALS. Open Road, however, seems to tend toward the movies that the studios might not make, but that could still be put on 1,500 or 2,000 screens. There are companies that release more esoteric films, more feminine ones, more intellectual ones, films that appeal to a very specific audience, rather than a wider one. On the surface, that might seem obvious, that every company has that philosophy, but look closer, and it’s clear this isn’t the case.
That, perhaps, best of all, is the way to define the kind of movie that Open Road releases: something that might not always be of the highest quality, but does have a mass market appeal to it. Spotlight does not, on the surface, appear to fit in with a lot of the titles listed in this paragraph and above, and yet, it also sort of does, because it’s got some commercial possibilities. Likewise, Eli Roth’s controversial The Green Inferno, and Garry Marshall’s final film, the somewhat execrable Mother’s Day.
There is certainly the action-based fare, and lower budget horror films, but there are also attempts at more thought provoking work, like the Ashton Kutcher version of Jobs, a movie that Open Road actually produced and which, in fact, made money. While it’s not hard to see something of a throughline of the kinds of movies Roadside puts out, Open Road is not quite so easy to pin down. Especially when so few of these films are being developed in house. Mixed in, of course, is a healthy amount of films that did not fare so well - Triple 9, Snowden, Fifty Shades of Black, Rock the Kasbah, and Max Steel all are good examples of this - but therein lies the hit or miss nature of the indie film business. Over the next couple years, some solid hits came out of Open Road, including Steven Soderbergh’s last film (until next month, of course), Side Effects, the Marlon Wayans spoof A Haunted House, the animated The Nut Job, the Oscar-nominated Nightcrawler, as well as Chef, the Haunted House sequel, Dope (which it won in auction at Sundance), Mother’s Day, and, of course, the 2016 Oscar winner for Best Picture, Spotlight, the first Open Road movie to win any Academy Awards, much less the Big One. Honestly, that’s not a bad average, especially for a company just getting itself off the ground. It led to a solid showing of over $136 million in total domestic grosses for just five movies. Three more movies would come along that year, the Dax Shepard flick Hit and Run, the sequel Silent Hill: Revelation 3D, and, biggest of all, the Jake Gyllenhaal-Michael Peña cop drama End of Watch. Not long after came Silent House, a low budget horror flick that also made money. The $25 million film did over $77 million worldwide for a nice win.
A bigger splash was made in January of 2012, with the Liam Neeson wilderness thriller, The Grey, a movie it actually did help to finance. It hit the ground running in 2011 with the Jason Statham-Clive Owen-Robert De Niro thriller, Killer Elite, a movie that cost $70 million to make but, since Open Road only served as the distributor, wasn’t a bad way to get rolling with its $25 million domestic haul. This is the seventh year of Open Road’s existence.
Having said that, when a company puts a film like that on its slate, it’s going to be expecting a better result than that, because otherwise, what’s the point? The whole idea is to put films into theaters that you think the audience is going to want to watch, and so when that audience doesn’t show up, there are still costs that aren’t really recouped. Since Open Road didn’t finance it, it isn’t on the hook for the enormous loss the movie incurred, and therefore, unlike its studio brethren, doesn’t have to eat such an enormous poop sandwich. It’s for that reason that, when Open Road puts a movie like The Promise in theaters, about the Armenian genocide that occurred a century ago, and sees it do just over $8 million, despite a $90 million price tag, there’s no immediate cause for panic. Or this week’s entry, Open Road, which also mostly doesn’t. While some of the distributors do finance their own wares - a Weinstein Company, for instance, or, before that, Miramax - there are plenty of others that don’t, like last week’s entry, Roadside Attractions, which mostly doesn’t. The indie world is a bit of a tricky place, in that one is never entirely sure where the money to finance the various movies comes from.