David Segal
Four years after Disney bought the Weinsteins out of Miramax, the company that first ushered indie films into the multiplex, Bob and Harvey Weinstein are under serious stress. A full accounting of their agita begins, naturally, with a batch of underperforming movies. Since opening its doors in 2005, The Weinstein Co has released about 70 films, and more than one quarter of them failed to break the $1 million box-office mark in the United States. Thirteen of these took in less than $100,000. To complicate matters, the company?s beloved reality television show, Project Runway, was until recently sidelined by litigation. Harvey decided last year to move the show from Bravo to Lifetime, prompting NBC, which owns Bravo, to sue, contending that it had the right to match Lifetime?s bid and keep the programme.
In April, The Weinstein Company settled for an undisclosed sum, and those backstabbing fashionistas will return to the air, at long last, last week. Yes, the brothers have had triumphs as well. Bob, who handles the lowbrow genre stuff, scored with the supernatural thriller 1408 and Scary Movie 4. (These brought in $72 million and $91 million, respectively.) Harvey showed a bit of the maestro?s touch with Hoodwinked, and with The Reader, which has taken in $101 million around the world, despite some tepid reviews, and won Kate Winslet an Oscar. But the Weinsteins? flop-to-jackpot ratio has been high enough to prompt the brothers to hire Miller Buckfire & Co, financial advisers who help troubled clients restructure. Last week, the firm finished its review and is urging Team Weinstein to release and promote only 10 movies a year, unload unpromising titles from its film library and avoid empire-building.
To shore up their finances, the brothers received a bridge loan a few months ago estimated at $75 million from Ziff Brothers Investments, according to two people familiar with the loan who requested anonymity because they weren?t authorised to speak publicly about it. ?We are a private company and aren?t going to comment on unsubstantiated claims from unnamed sources,? Harvey says of the bridge loan. He points over and over to what he describes as a robust pipeline of film, theatre and television projects, not to mention a library of 250 films. Sit tight, he advises, and don?t bet against us. But some backers of The Weinstein Co say they?re getting anxious. They were corralled in 2005 by Goldman Sachs, which helped raise $1billion for the company. At the time, film-making had acquired a certain cachet in private equity circles, and here was a chance to bankroll what were arguably two of the greatest movie producers in modern cinematic history.
Starting in the late ?80s, the Weinsteins produced Pulp Fiction, Shakespeare in Love, The English Patient, My Left Foot, Good Will Hunting, The Piano and hundreds of other movies, garnering 249 Academy Award nominations and three Oscars for best picture. In one 11-year stretch, they racked up 13 best-picture nominations. So what happened? In part, The Weinstein Co is coping with the same problems facing every other studio, the grim slowdown of the DVD market. But plenty of the Weinsteins? wounds are also self-inflicted. Instead of using their lush, Goldman-fuelled pile of start-up money to focus on film-making, the brothers ventured into such new realms as fashion, online social networking (through A Small World, known as MySpace for Millionaires).
Inglourious Basterds is one of several must-wins on a slate of roughly 10 Weinstein films on their way in coming months. The others are Nine, a film version of the Broadway musical. There?s also Halloween II and an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy?s post-apocalypse bummer, The Road. For some of these films, ?Inglourious? among them, the brothers had to bring in partners to split production and promotion expenses that means they?ll split profits, too. Will these guys be around to shepherd all these movies into theatres?