mrconceited

Is it just me, or is there some weird offshores tax credit loophole that this company has tapped into that allows them to keep financing really bad movies with really big stars? They always seem to either go straight to DVD or bomb big tme at the box office, and I wonder how they keep attracting top tier talent to such dismal projects?

-Lonely Hearts (John Travolta, Salma Hayek, Jared Leto)
-The Wicker Man (Nic Cage remake)
-Labor Pains (Lindsay Lohan straight to DVD)
-Rightous Kill and 88 Minutes (the Pacino/Avnet double feature)
-Rambo (remake)
-My Mom's New Boyfriend (Meg Ryan, Antonio Banderas)
-Mad Money (Diane Keaton, Katie Holmes, Queen Latifah)
-Home of the Brave (Samuel L. Jackson, Jessica Biel, dir Irwin Winkler)
-The Contract (John Cusack, Morgan Freeman, dir Bruce Beresford)
-War Inc. (Cusack, Marissa Tomei)
-The Cleaner (Samuel L. Jackson, Ed Harris)

Just a small collection of the horrendous product this company keeps shoveling out. None of these are profitable (at least in the U.S.) and I'm wondering how this company keeps snagging such big talent (relatively, anyways) to be in below-average fare that most times ends up straight-to-dvd? And am I wrong, but didn't Nu Image start out making Skin-a-Max titles in the early 1990's?

Granted, I do want to see The Expendables, however, but even that seems a little iffy. This company reminds me a lot of Franchise Films in the early 2000's, which if I'm not mistaken was shut down due to some shady dealings that went on between the CEO's and some offshore tax breaks, or something like that...

The Bus

Rambo made $113MM on a budget of $50MM and I'm pretty sure it did well on home video.

88 Minutes seems to be, at the very least, breaking even.

I'm not sure what you're talking about.

islandclaws

Whoa, whoa, whoa... Stop. Right. There.

Rambo is NOT crap. That one film makes up for any shit they've put out.

mrconceited

Sorry, Killer Cannibal, have not seen Rambo as of late. I've heard the BR Disc is reference quality, so I may have to check it out. I am simply interested in the company's business model: I'm wondering how this company is attracting talented actors/directors when the projects' fates are mostly dissapointing.

d2cheer

I liked Lonely Hearts... but it is weird all those stars and most go straight to DVD...

RichC2

I think their business model is a pretty simple one - make movies with big stars and sell the rights to them to distributors (which is why, if you check imdb, all of their movies have like 60 different companies attached to the distribution part.)

For instance:
Rambo = $50m movie split across 24 companies whom pay varying amounts for theatrical rights, and then Nu kept non-USA media rights to the film (not sure what that really entitles).

The attraction to the actors are the pay checks. What attracts the directors are the freedom to shoot whatever the hell they want with minimal studio interference. The company isn't shooting $100m movies, and Rambo at $50m seems exceptionally high compared to the others (John Travolta, Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Sly Stallone aren't exactly names that pull big crowds anymore -- and it's a shame to use those 4 names in the same context).

Matthew Chmiel

Wow. Good to know the level of quality for a director going over to Nu Image/Millennium is beyond shit.

The only good movie this company has been involved with was Rambo.

DJariya

I think they are becoming the Cannon Films of the 21st Century.

I believe Nu Image started out making some really really low budget DTV action films in the late 90's like the Operation Delta Force series.

Honestly, I'm quite surprised to see them get this type of talent for their movies.

Torchur317

I loved the 4 films above & I thought they were really good....
Have you seen any of these?
And I thought these films were decent, not horrible at all....

Home of the Brave (Samuel L. Jackson, Jessica Biel, dir Irwin Winkler)
The Contract (John Cusack, Morgan Freeman, dir Bruce Beresford)
War Inc. (Cusack, Marissa Tomei)

88 Minutes was average but I didn't think it was that bad....

RichC2

Haha yeah.

NoirFan

I've been meaning to check out War Inc., it seems to have fallen through the cracks.

stingermck

I'm just saying

Matthew Chmiel

100% fucking disagree.

The difference between Cannon and Nu Image/Millennium is that Cannon made films that were entertaining and enjoyable.

With the exception of Rambo, which felt like a film that Cannon would've made if done in the eighties, every film that the studio has released has been a stinking pile of dog shit.

Torchur317

Not true....
Lonely Hearts, Rightous Kill, & The Cleaner were really good also....

Matthew Chmiel

By who's standards? There's a solid reason why most of their films have gone direct-to-video. It's because they suck.

As per Rotten Tomatoes on the films you mentioned:

Lonely Hearts: 51%
Righteous Kill: 21%
The Cleaner: 18%

And for shits and giggles, other winning Nu Image/Millennium Films that were given theatrical releases (let it be a four-screen release of a 3000-screen release):

Mad Money: 22%
King of California: 62% (their only "fresh" release)
Rambo: 34% (sadly the critics didn't enjoy the third act of nothing but pure violence or images of kids getting thrown into fires)
Blonde Ambition: 14%
Day of the Dead: 20%
War, Inc: 29%
88 Minutes: 5%
Home of the Brave: 23%
The Wicker Man: 15%
16 Blocks: 55%
Black Dahlia: 34%
Highwaymen: 13%
Undisputed: 49%

Quick Edit: Going back to that comment about directors given their freedom; when was the last time Jon Avnet, Brian DePalma, Neil LaBute, or Richard Donner made a good movie? Exactly. These are all directors past their primes; except for Neil LaBute who was a hack, but now he's a sell-out hack.

Out of the other 100 plus films they've been involved with; nearly all of them have been sent directly to the video shelf or right to television first.

Yeah. Cannon's track record? A lot fucking superior. At least I got The Last American Virgin, a plethora of Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson films (amongst others), and a guilty pleasure remake of Invaders from Mars.

mrconceited

What gets me is that I can almost guarantee a movie is shit just by the flash of this studio's logo in the trailer. That is never a good sign for a movie production company...
Anyone remember Franchise Films? Stallone liked making movies with them too (Get Carter, Driven)... Does anyone know what happened to them? I remember hearing something about the founder and possible financial crimes?

mrconceited

I was really looking forward to that movie, what with Cusack writing the screenplay and the promising premise. The movie was straight out of left field, it looked and felt really cheap and despite some intelligent zings here and there, the movie felt like a direct-to-video bargain bin clunker. Its how I feel about this studio's lot of movies: they all sound really promising (save for Labor Pains, of course) and without fail, they are curiously shoddy works.

mrconceited

According to Wikipedia:
"After producing Battlefield Earth, the German investment company Intertainment AG alleged that Franchise had defrauded it to the tune of over $75 million by systematically submitting "grossly fraudulent and inflated budgets". Intertainment won the case and was awarded $121.7 million in damages, bankrupting Franchise Pictures. Samaha himself was declared by the court to be personally liable for $77 million in damages."

Some of the great works this company is responsible for:
Driven
Battlefield Earth
Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (Greatest WTF title ever)
The Art of War
The Whole Ten Yards (I did like the first one, though, also produced by Franchise)
A Sound of Thunder
Alex & Emma
Avenging Angelo (another Stallone movie)
Feardotcom (the greatest WTF title spelling ever)
3000 Miles to Graceland (which I also liked)

The above company was producing shitty movies with inflated budgets and big stars in order to defraud potential investors. This is what got me thinking about Nu Image/Millenium, is this the same case? Or a similar scheme? Or they've got the power of pursuasion on their side? ...Or just a lot of money?

I found this quote from the IMDB Studio Briefing from July 2003, in regards to a failed movie starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas and to be directed by Stephen Frears:
"Friedman quoted director Stephen Frears as saying that the project simply "fell apart" last Friday. He suggested that the collapse may have been triggered by producer Elie Samaha's "mysterious ways of financing a film." Samaha, head of Franchise Pictures, is a nightclub owner who uses unconventional methods -- principally personal connections -- to finance films"
I'd be interested to know who the chief operators Nu Image/Millenium are and if they're running a similarly shifty operation...

Raul3

Yeah, it sounds like money laundering.

Torchur317

Have you actually seen any of these?
Or is it based off other people's reviews?
I could care less what the rating is on RT....
All of those films were good IMO, that's all that matters to me....

Matthew Chmiel

Does Boaz Davidson have you on his fucking payroll over there? There are some pretty awful films that I will defend as guilty pleasures; but I would never call them actual good films. Maybe Speed Racer, but that's about it.

I saw Righteous Kill and it was awful, especially considering the great cast the film had attached to it. I don't need to see the other shit because I can already smell it.

I've seen a slew of Nu Image's release state along with a good chunk of the output Millennium has out there; and besides Rambo, all of them have sucked. I've seen winners like the horrendous remake of Day of the Dead to Al Pacino Goes to the Bank to Cash His Paycheck (or what was released as 88 Minutes) to Josh Hartnett Plays a Retard (or what was released as Mozart and the Whale) to the movie Nicolas Cage should've won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy, The Wicker Man.

As you can tell; Netflix can be my best friend and my mortal enemy.

And yes; they all suck. Any film with the Nu Image or Millennium Films logo attached to it has a 99.9% chance of sucking. I don't need to waste another four hours of my life seeing some shitty John Travolta or Jared Leto movie to know it's going to suck. I don't even need the Nu Image or Millennium Films logo to tell me that one based off just the actors. Christ, for that I don't even need the Millennium Films logo to tell me that based off the actors alone. I can spend that four hours of my life doing something else slightly more productive.

mrconceited

Avi Lerner has produced over 270 Films...
Nu Image's motto is most definitely quantity over quality...