Robert Zemeckis has always been about a great technological or storytelling conceit in his movies whether it’s the live-action animated hybrid of the 3x Oscar winning Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the insertion of Tom Hanks in famed historical footage in Oscar Best Picture Forrest Gump or the motion capture of The Polar Express.
However, his latest movie, the $50M Miramax financed and Sony released Here, which brings back together the Gump gang of Tom Hanks, Robin Wright and scribe Eric Roth, was a situation of technology outshining the story. Critics deep sixed the multi-generation family drama which takes place in one location throughout time at a fixed angle with 36% Rotten while audiences weren’t any better with a B- CinemaScore, 57% RT audience score and 69% positive on PostTrak.
It’s no wonder that the movie opened to $5M, and it’s unfortunate box office streak for the once blockbuster mass-appealing Back to the Future, Oscar-winning Forrest Gump director, his most recent bombs being Welcome to Marwen ($2.4M opening, $10.7M domestic, $13M WW) and 2015’s The Walk ($1.56M opening, $10M domestic, $61M WW); titles which also saw technology trump story. Here was fastidious in its fixed angled drama, but also it lacked the warmth and humor of Forrest Gump. Hanks and Wright’s couple in this movie are mired in a dead-end marriage and middle class problems — not exactly cinematic escapist fare.
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Zemeckis’ told me on the latest episode of Deadline’s Crew Call, which dropped on Friday that when it came to Here, “I have to give all the credit to (former Miramax Head) Bill Block who had the courage and had the vision to understand the movie and make it. He’s the one guy who had the conviction to do this. That was fantastic. Thank God that he was there to do it.”
Sources tell Deadline that all studios passed on Here at the package stage seeing how it was a risky and difficult movie for broad audiences. The movie was largely financed by foreign sales (which is typically around 60%), however, Miramax co-owner, Paramount, even passed on handling the movie globally.
Part of the problem here is that Here, a very Americana type of movie, was made without a domestic distributor in place from the onset. That’s an enormous challenge when the global marketing campaign stems from the U.S. campaign, and most of the box office is from U.S./Canada. Here was close to finished by the time Block exited Miramax back in October 2023. The notion was that the film would find a U.S. home once it was shot, and Sony rescued the movie in a distribution deal given its relationship with Hanks on such titles like A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and A Man Called Otto. Sony fronted the P&A we understand and is recouping it as part of their deal.
Initially, Here was on the calendar as a platform release throughout November heading into Thanksgiving week before Sony shifted it to a wide release this weekend at 2,647 locations. Smart move: Testing showed that the movie didn’t have the staying power to be a platform release nor to have a fall film festival troika launch. Had Here went to TIFF, Venice or Telluride, it would have sat on Rotten Tomatoes with sour scores for months ala Joker: Folie a Deux. Going wide will get Here into the home window faster so that it can make some cash.
Marketing proved hard for the moody drama Here per sources: There were few clips that could be cut to wow on talks shows. It’s a hard movie for film marketers to distill in 60 seconds. The most salient selling point wound up being the return of the Gump gang, evident in the one sheet which had a very Forrest Gump sensibility in Hanks and Wright.
Zemeckis was entranced by the Richard McGuire graphic novel and believed that the Gump gang were the best to make it a reality. He was also fascinated by the fixed angle on life and how it withstood the test of time. He shot the movie over 50 to 60 days which is shorter than the 70-day schedule of Forrest Gump, and the 104 days it took the filmmaker to shoot Back to the Future II (not including Back to the Future III).
Sometimes these big swings for Zemeckis pay off: When the $170M animated production of Polar Express opened to $23M stateside, it was eviscerated by the box office media. But Zemeckis has had the last laugh telling us that the Christmas movie which has survived several generations is “a very profitable movie”; the then box office for the 2004 feature being close to $190M domestic, $318M worldwide.
“It was very risky to open a Christmas movie before Thanksgiving,” Zemeckis says looking back.
However, times have changed for adult movies at the theatrical box office, evident in how hard it was for the filmmaker to make Here.
Says Zemeckis, “I think the theatrical movie business is in a stressful situation right now.”