Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Soderberg's Stirring Up Some "Bubble" Trouble

"Man I just saw the coolest new movie at the theater, I've got to tell you about it?"
"Oh yea, we just rented a movie that was awesome too, It was so interesting? But what did you see?"
"A new movie called Bubble. What did you rent?"
"You saw Bubble at the theater? We just rented Bubble at Blockbuster...i don't get it?"

Steven Soderberg, academy award director of Traffic (2000) , Erin Brokovich (2000), Oceans 11 (2001) among many, many other films has directed & produced a new movie called Bubble.

Well he did more than Produce it and Direct it...he also shot the picture (under the name Peter Andrews) and edited it (under the name Mary Ann Bernard).

This new movie is a mystery that takes place in a small town in Ohio and the movie is cast completly with locals (there's no George Clooney or Julia Roberts in this film).

On January 27th the movie comes out in theaters as well as will be available on the high-definition TV channel HDnet. Then 4 days later on January 31st the movie will be released on DVD for rental. What's the deal and who in the world is behind this madness...

Well it's Soderberg's doing in conjunction with Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner (Cuban & Wagner with there company HDnet, Landmark Theaters, Magnolia Pictures and 2727 Entertainment), and the reasons people site range from trying to give power to the art film, cut cost, and make a statement to the large theater companies.

Todd Wagner in an article on news.com says:
"This way we can cut through the clutter once, spend the money once and allow
people to buy it however they want to consume it, whenever they want to watch
it," Wagner said. "Imagine that, literally listening to consumers."

But the movie looks intriguing and it will be interesting to see what type of splash a movie like this might make?

(The picture above is a still from the movie, as a large part of the movie, shot in three weeks, takes place in a doll factory).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

One of the things I just thought about in regards to this film: I'm curious what kind of extras there will be on the DVD. Typically with big budget features, you see a lot of deleted scenes and extras to try and draw the buyer into making the purchase. Extras like deleted scenes I would think might hurt the box office on the front end. There are more layers to the marketing angles on this than I had originally imagined.

Anonymous said...

Didn't really know how many theaters it would show in...but looks like less than 40 this friday...i'll probably check it on dvd next week.