Guerrilla epic "Che" finally finds a buyer
TORONTO (Hollywood Reporter) - More than three months after its underwhelming premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, director Steven Soderbergh's four-hour "Che" has finally found a buyer.
Indie studio IFC Films sealed a low seven-figure deal for all North American rights to the two-part story of the revolutionary icon's campaigns in Cuba and Bolivia. Benicio Del Toro stars as Guevara.
The deal, which closed Tuesday night at the Toronto International Film Festival, is a coup for IFC, which is owned by Cablevision's Rainbow Media unit. It marks one of the highest-profile acquisitions in IFC's history, and it will also be the most expensive film by far to open in theaters and on cable/VOD simultaneously.
During the summer, French financier/seller Wild Bunch said at least four U.S buyers were pursuing the film, for what it apparently hoped would be for a $3 million to $4 million upfront purchase that would quickly reimburse the film's Spanish investors. In the end, the company settled for an unspecified lower upfront figure from IFC.
IFC will first offer the four-hour version of the movie in a one-week, Academy Award-qualifying run in Los Angeles and New York in December. In January, it will roll out part one, beginning in L.A., New York and a few other cities and quickly ramping up to the 300-400 theaters, including New York's Ziegfeld Theatre, that are willing to play a film appearing day-and-date in theaters and on VOD.
The second part of the film will follow a week or two later, with both parts then remaining available in theaters.
Soderbergh on Wednesday acknowledged the challenges in releasing the film. "I know it's an unusual commercial proposition," he said, referring to the picture's length. "We're hoping that the combination of curiosity and brand identification makes audiences show up."
A total of about twelve minutes have been cut from the Cannes version, which clocked in at just over four hours.
Meanwhile, Summit Entertainment scooped up U.S. rights to Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker," a well-received thriller about an Army squad defusing bombs in Iraq, for about $1.5 million.
Summit originally offered an estimated $2 million but the filmmakers decided to continue shopping the picture. When they returned to Summit, the company lowered its offer to closer to $1 million. Eventually, the parties agreed to meet somewhere in the middle in a deal that provided a significant profit-sharing portion for the filmmakers.
Summit plans to release the movie no earlier than the spring. The trick will be to market a film that's set in Iraq -- a setting that has not exactly excited filmgoers -- as a broader action title.
"We went into this with our eyes wide open," said Summit co-chairman and CEO Rob Friedman. "But we think the action and drama this movie creates will overwhelm any of the anxieties about the Iraq setting."
Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
