Sony & Paramount's International Presentations
Sunday, March 30th, 2008Universal's impressive presentation was followed by similar deals from Sony and then Paramount, though neither of the two studios showed nearly as many exclusive clips or as much footage in their run-down of movies. Hence, they're combined together.
Perfect Stranger with Bruce Willis and Halle Berry, Reign Over Me with Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle, and Vacancy.
Since Sony is handling Eli Roth’s Hostel: Part II outside the U.S., they showed the same clips that were shown at New York Comic-Con, which was essentially two guys running by a river talking about some guy who had come back from Europe noticeably changed (obviously Jay Hernandez). This is followed by a scene with three girls standing in a hot spring pond and applying mud to each other while talking about a fourth girl who was absent and probably “getting some.” Nope, the girl in question, Heather Mattarazzo, is suspended upside down by chains, naked, on a device that pulls her into a torture room where someone then cuts the lights. (Again, this same footage was shown a few weeks back.)
Next up were the teasers for Sony’s big summer animated film Surf’s Up and Resident Evil: Extinction, also basically the same things that have been online for a couple weeks.
Of course, they couldn’t do a presentation without showing something from Spider-Man 3, so they basically showed the six minutes that was online last week, though I have to admit that the Spider-Man/Goblin fight sequence looked a lot more impressive when on a big screen with the full surround sound in effect. (The Sony exec mentioned that the movie would be opening on 20,000 screens globally; not sure if that’s a record.)
Paramount had a hard act to follow, but they made up for Sony’s screening of already seen trailers and footage with an extensive collage running down all of their movies in the works, cut together especially for international exhibitors, and it did include a couple first looks at movies that are a ways off. Before the footage, Paramount International President Andrew Cripps came out and went over the line-up for the various imprints under Paramount including DreamWorks Animation, MTV Films, etc. It was a fairly standard PowerPoint chart, but he mentioned that Things We Lost in the Fire and The Kite Runner were being positioned as their Oscar movies. He then ran the footage reel, which began with the Oscar-winning Dreamgirls before showing bits and pieces from upcoming movies like Will Ferrell’s Blades of Glory, Disturbia and Stardust, and then a quick clip from Owen Wilson’s Drillbit Taylor, the thriller Case 39 (coming out in 2008), Ben Stiller’s The Heartbreak Kid (which they were still calling Untitled Ben Stiller Comedy for some reason), Kim “Boys Don’t Cry” Peirce’s war drama Stop Loss, the family film Hot Rod and some footage from The Spiderwick Chronicles and Stardust. Sorry, all of it went by so fast that it was impossible to take notes, but it was a cool montage, ending with bits from the trailer of Transformers, which had the metallic logo transforming into different languages of the movie title before ending on the image.
Jon Anderson, Executive Vice President of International Marketing, then came out to give a Powerpoint presentation of how they plan on marketing Shrek the Third (DreamWorks’ first partnership with McDonald’s!) and Transformers, showing the trailers for each. (Oddly, he also mentioned the recent speculation that Shia LaBeouf was going to be in the next Indiana Jones movie as another strong marketing point for the latter.) Again, most people have already seen both these trailers and it was nothing new or special, though it’s obvious that Paramount and DreamWorks expect big things from both movies.