WHAT WENT WRONG - Evan Almighty

Episode Date: May 11, 2020

Hollywood attempts to draw a churchgoing audience with a broad comedy - what could go wrong? Apparently, quite a lot, but shrouded in the backstory of this biblical flop are some praiseworthy characters and righteous causes.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What is the thing that you're most proud of in your career? Oh, Evan Almighty, of course. It's a good movie. That's a good movie. Fuck you, Thaddy. Steve, I just lead me right into that and smack me across the face. It's a great movie. Okay.

Regardless of all that, like it lost a lot of money and all that stuff. No one saw it and the budget was way over and no one was interested in seeing it. It's a great movie. In case you couldn't recognize their voices, that was Zach Gallagher. Fanaakis interviewing Steve Correll on Between Two Ferns, a little moment where they talk about the movie that we're going to talk about on this week's episode of what went wrong, the least successful podcast ever made about unsuccessful movies. We don't know that yet.

Evan Almighty. So let's dive in. For those of you that don't know, Evan Almighty tells the story of Evan Baxter, who was in the original Bruce Almighty with Jim Carrey from 2003. he's a news reporter who has now become a congressman fresh off of a campaign to change the world. Yeah, the most vague campaign of all time. The slogan is literally just change the world. It makes, make America great again very specific in comparison. And upon arriving in Washington, he is approached by Morgan Freeman as God to build an arc for a coming flood.

and hijinks ensue. Oh, do they ever? This movie was released in 2007, and at the time, it was the highest budgeted comedy of all time. Made for a reported $170 million, although many believe the budget went in excess of $200 million. Oh, my God.

And, unfortunately, it didn't do that well at the box office. In fact, it only grossed $170 million worldwide, on its $200 million budget, and then if you add in like another $50 million for marketing costs, which they did a lot of. Universal lost and upwards of over $100 million on this movie. So it's understandable why Steve Carell spoke about it in the way that he did. So a little bit of background on this film.

First of all, it's got an incredible cast. Lizzie, who are some of the favorites that you noticed? Obviously, Steve Carell, who I adore. There's Ed Helms, John Good. Goodman, Wanda Sykes. There's a very young Jonah Hill playing a prototype for many of his other roles, I would say. Yep. I can't remember Dean Norris, who plays Hank and Breaking Bad, shows up as Hank from Breaking Bad, as a police officer towards the end. He's like an incredulous police officer. You got to move this up now! Yeah. Ten seconds later, everybody get on the arc! Yeah, exactly. He has a strong

arc to the arc at the end of the film. He's great. So he's got an incredible cast. It does not. What's her face from? Lauren Graham. Oh, Morgan Freeman. Morgan Freeman, obviously, is God. It was coming off from Bruce Almighty, which was incredibly successful. But with the price tag of over $250 million, this was going to need to make at least $500 million worldwide to break even. As we said, it made $173 million. It's a fascinating misfire at multiple levels, and I think it exposed a rapidly changing industry and signaled the end of an era for a specific type of comedy that we had grown to love from the 90s. let's go back to how this movie got started.

And it really started with Bruce Almighty, which I don't think we remember just how crazy a hit Bruce Almighty was. No, I do. And just how big a star Jim Carrey was. So Jim Carrey in the mid-2000s is up there with Tom Cruise and Will Smith. Oh, yeah. He is one of basically three people who are bulletproof at the box office. His only unsuccessful film up until this point,

He kind of had two. One was Man on the Moon. Which is good. It's good. Critically acclaimed, he got a lot of press for his both antics behind the scenes and his performance. Right. And the other was the Majestic. It's a Frank Deribon film about a blacklisted writer in a small town a little bit treakly.

Didn't do horribly, but didn't do great. Also not a bad. Not a bad movie. He, we should just go back and do a brief look at just how huge Jim Carrey was. 1994, Jim Carrey had three movies come out in that year. Is that Dumb and Dumber? Dumb and Dumber. Ace Ventura?

Ace Ventura. And, okay, hold on. Dumb and Dumber, Ace Ventura. It's not a Batman, is it? Nope. He's the lead, the mask. Oh, wow. So in one year, 1994, he has Dumb and Dumber, Ace Ventura, and the Mask.

Production budget for those films combined was $55 million. Combined, they made $705 million. at the box office. So his first three lead roles brought in almost a billion dollars at the box office on $50 million in budget. So over the next decade, he becomes the biggest comedy actor in the world, which culminates in Bruce Almighty. Bruce Almighty was released in 2003,

the director's Tom Shadyak, who does Evan Almighty. Bruce Almighty is released on Memorial Day weekend of 2003. It's expected to be a hit, but maybe a modest, one. Instead, it opens at $86 million, making it the top Memorial Day weekend opening of any film in history. It topped The Matrix Reloaded, which was only in its second weekend at the time. In the end, it made $500 million worldwide on a budget of $81 million. It is a massive, massive success. I would also say, like, the fact that Jennifer Aniston is the co-star and that didn't hurt either. Oh, absolutely. That one had a bit more star power behind.

it. Totally. So Bruce Almighty does great. And of course, everybody's thinking sequel. So meanwhile, somewhere in Hollywood, that April, there's a spec script that's being shopped around. And a spec script just means speculative script. Some writers wrote something.

And now it's being shopped around to see if there's a buyer. It's titled The Passion of the Ark. Oh, no. And it's written by two unknown writers, Bobby Flesheim and Josh Stolberg. Apologies if I pronounce your names incorrectly. And it becomes the subject of a seven studio bidding war. And the reason is, with the success of Passion of the Christ by known pacifist Mel Gibson, which had made $600 million, largely off of what was previously believed to be an untappable audience of Christian moviegoers.

Which we now know certainly not an untappable audience. All of a sudden, the studios are a little more interested in the religious fair that they've been afraid of. since the last temptation of the Christ in 1988 with Martin Scorsese. Which is, by the way, a very good movie. So the script sells for, guess how much? This is a spec script written by two unproduced writers. Okay, spec script, the script sells for 40 million. So I overestimate?

You're off by an order. It's just the script. It's not like a budget. Chris, I don't know how budgets work. Here we go. I don't understand the money. It sells for two and a half. half million dollars, which is, we'll add it out your original guess.

No, please leave it in. They decide that the Christian market, which previously was believed to be unreachable by mainstream. Only talked by Kirk Cameron and the left behind series. There were the movies that Hollywood made and then there were the movies that like the Christian community made for themselves. They decide all of a sudden maybe there's a way to make inroads with this community. So the script sells for a record $2.5 million, which is the highest amount that any two previously unpublished writers had gotten for a spec script before.

Universal purchases it, and they immediately make a deal with Sony. They're going to co-produce it. Oh, that never goes well. Well, we'll get there. And they're going to have Steve Odeke, not Bob Odenkirk, Steve Odekeke, who made, do you remember those weird thumb movies? No. Okay, well, if you are listening to this podcast, look up Steve Odecirk's thumb parodies, like Thumb Wars and he would make movies.

Oh, like Star Wars, but with Thumbs? Correct. I do remember this. He made all those. He also made Kung Pow Enter the Fury, which was him playing a Kung Fu Master. It's really funny, probably really offensive now. He is going to rewrite it as a sequel to Bruce Almighty. Eventually, the studio decides that they, you know,

what, we don't actually like this original script at all, so they just throw it in the trash. Okay, out of curiosity, though, knowing what it became, what was the original script? The original script was, God approaches an everyday guy and says, you need to build an arc. I think it was more of a satire of that story set in contemporary time, not so much a the Santa Claus meets, you know, Mr. Smith goes to watch that we eventually get with this one. I think it was less broad, basically, than what we ended up with. That's interesting, because you can, you can kind of tell

that this got mishmashed and had band-aids put on it. Because basically what happens at the top of this movie is you get a really fast catch-up of how Steve Carell all of a sudden became a congressman, as we mentioned earlier, that he's going to change the world. That's his entire plan. His family's like, we're moving, we're here. Look at our mansion. We're rich now. We're Congress people.

I don't think they know how much Congress people get paid. That was my other question. We're only going to have rich friends now. I was like, doesn't the government pay you nothing? They live in a gigantic mansion. He's a new congressman. Which we're going to get to that mansion as well. Anyway, it's like, I want to, I'm going to be a congressman.

I want to be a good congressman. And then his wife is like, I wish you were a congressman that spent more time with me. I hope this is worth it. And then he's like, he says a prayer. And his prayer is, I want to change the world. That's the catalyst for the whole thing. Yes. I actually had less of a problem with it than you did. It made me mad. I was like, I'm tracking it. It doesn't make sense to me. It does not make sense. But, okay, so the movies, clearly it's been adapted from a different piece of material. That's the first thing to know. They bought one script. They adapted for something else. That's done all the time. Yeah, Ten Silverfield Lane was a example of a good version of that. Exactly. Or if you watch Bruce Willis's Tears of the Sun, originally, that was supposed to be a diehard script. And then if you watch Die Hard 4, that was not a diehard script.

So they do this constantly. So they buy this piece of property so nobody else can make it. Steve OdeCirk decides he doesn't actually like any of the original script. So they set the $2.5 million on fire. OdeCirk's the only credited writer. And so so far, we have not filmed a single frame yet, and we are over $2.5 million in the hole. So the movie now needs a director and it needs a star.

they get Tom Shadyak to come back. He directed Bruce Almighty. And if you don't know Tom Shadyak, you know his movies. He did Ace Ventura Pet Detective, The Nuddy Professor, Lire, Lyer, Patch Adams, Bruce Almighty, and Kevin Costner's Dragonfly, the early 2000s supernatural drama that you didn't see. But it's okay. It's really weird.

It's a little spiritual, it's a little supernatural. It's a lot of Kevin Costner and not a lot of people saw it. That was his kind of only flop. He was comedy gold in the 90s. Up until Bruce Evan Almighty, his movies had made over $2 billion at the box office. So Tom Shadyak is very successful and he'd worked with Jim Carrey on three of his most successful films. Ace Ventura, Liar, Liar, Bruce Almighty. Tom Shidiak is a very talented guy.

He was the youngest joke writer for Bob Hope. he had ever hired. He was 24. And Tom Shediak hired Judd Apatow to be one of his joke writers on his early movies. So Judd Apatow wrote on a lot of those movies in the 90s, and we'll get to this as we kind of progress here, the passing of the torch. So Tom Shadyak's in. He goes to Jim Carrey, and Jim Carrey is like, I'm good.

Jim Carrey had a no sequels rule that he was following at this point. He had done the Ace Ventura when Nade. calls, but he turned down the sequel to the mask. Jamie Kennedy ended up dying in that fire. And then he turned down dumb and dumber two, dumb and dumberer. Eventually he did it. Eventually he did the trilogy concluder. But he turned down that one.

Eric Christian Olson died on that grenade, I think. And then he passed on Evan Almighty. He just wasn't interested in rehashing characters. And I think he had already started. Not a bad move. No, super smart move. Yeah. All the three of those movies tanked.

Yeah. So Tom Shadyac and the producers are getting together and they're trying to figure out who's going to star in this movie. And the guy that was kind of the unexpected scene stealer from Bruce Almighty. Was Steve Carrell. Was Steve Correll, who nobody really knew at the time. Right. But he had these great scenes as.

Well, not nobody knew. He'd been on the office. Not when Bruce Almighty came out. Really? The office started in 2005. Oh. Yeah. So Steve Corral was largely unknown.

So they filmed Evan Almighty before the office season two went back on the air. Oh. So he had been a correspondent in The Daily Show, and he got the office after Bruce Almighty, along with Anchorman, the Brick Tamlin role. But he had these great scenes where he had to do physical comedy that matched literally. Jim Carrey's performance as he like made him screw up on air. And he did a great job. It's like, great, we've got our new Elastic Man that can be the lead of this film. And then they don't have him do any of that in Evan Almighty.

We'll get to that. Not only that, he had just starred in an incredibly successful Judd Apatow movie. Oh, 40-year-old Virgin. The 40-year-old Virgin. Which is great. Came out in 2005, and I believe signaled a shift in the comedy tastes of the industry. Yeah. 2005, it's made for $26 million, and it ends up grossing $177 million.

So it actually made $4 million more than Evan Almighty at one-tenth of the price. And Jed Appetal was previously Shadyax kind of protege. So the perception is optimistic, but I would argue that this is the first thing that really went wrong with the movie. Steve Corell is immensely talented, immensely likable, and now certainly a huge star. but people don't know him internationally in the way that they know Jim Carrey at this point in time. Jim Carrey had been in 20 movies by the time he did Bruce Almighty. Yeah. Steve Carrell was just getting started.

Also, as you mentioned, they don't use him in the same way that they used Jim Carrey. No, they don't use him in the same way that they use him in Bruce Almighty. Correct. So they start budgeting the movie and it is not budgeted as a comedy. It's instead budgeted. as a biblical epic. So the initial budget is $140 million. Which,

to give you a good point of reference, this is what like basically Wonder Woman cost. Yeah, Titanic was like $200 million. Exactly. Well, yeah, and that was insane. Correct. So by 2006, the LA Times is reporting that the movie is, quote,

taking on water, really clever by them. The studio had pushed for a December release because they wanted to release it over Christmas to hit the Christian community right where it counts. Right. Christmas equals Noah's Ark. I get it. Yep. That's when all biblical events happen this Christmas. Jesus and Noah. So by aiming for a December release date, that cut the movie's prep time by over 50%.

So instead of having six months prep, they had just over two months prep. So the shoot is improperly scheduled as a result. Had they waited a month, they would have avoided a lot of bad weather, but instead they got hit by like a month of torrential rain. Yeah, because when is this shooting? In Virginia in the fall. Oh, yeah, it's a mess. Yeah, exactly.

I grew up in Richmond. It's a hot mess. It's pretty bad. But at this point, they are, quote, pot committed. They've invested in an incredible amount of money to this movie. They have an enormous cast. They have John Goodman, Academy Award nominee, Steve Correll, future Emmy multi-time

Emmy winner Lauren Graham Lizzie doesn't like her she's fine another number of other people but the problem is that simultaneous to this the industry is just changing so Jedda Apatow is the new hot shot

young comedy director of Hollywood the Fairley brothers Tom Shadyak Peter Siegel these guys all the sudden are kind of out the movies that were incredibly popular, the broad comedies of the 90s and early 2000s, all of a sudden aren't the surefire hits that they were supposed to be previously. So even Jim Carrey is no longer bulletproof.

In May of 2006, 20th Century Fox pulls the plug on a film that he was supposed to star and used guys, which was a $15 million dollar Jim Carrey comedy due to its price tag. So it's not in good shape. And then the question really becomes, Lizzie, why do you think this why is this movie so expensive? I think it's got to be the animals. Right? Yeah. There's so many animals.

Don't shoot with animals. Don't shoot with kids. Yeah. There's a couple kids. They're not super young, but like the animals, they, first of all, the end of this movie ends up being that a flood comes not across the planet,

but just in their little neighborhood. And it's all related to John Goodman's like bad bill. It's the most insane. So the third act of the film concludes not with a storm of biblical proportions, but upscale housing development being threatened by a local watering hole. Which makes my question, why did God tell the zebras to show up? They didn't need to be there. We don't need to get into that.

There's no zebras in Virginia. At the zoos, there are. They were fine. They put them in harm's way. Yeah, the big issue became not only shooting with the animals, but that the animals couldn't shoot with each other. Yeah, because there's lions next to, like, skunks. So I liked the skunks a lot.

The skunks were great. So what looks like one shot in the movie is actually 50 shots stitched together. And also, correct me if I'm wrong, didn't they, they had some problems with the, like, male and female pairing? So they had to do, like, male and male and female and female because they were banging each other. There's a lot of that, a lot of dominating, banging, fighting. The dog was really into Steve Krell's crotch. They put that in the movie. They did, but that was real.

That was like on set happening. They didn't have to train him or anything. That adds up because it's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable to watch. Steve Carell doesn't seem to enjoy it. It's not. It's, he's not. He's, he's, I don't, I think Steve Carell had a really hard time in this movie.

He twisted his ankle really bad. He had to go to the hospital. Birds were, the, like, first scene that they shot, there's like 40 birds on him, pooping all over him. I think it was a rough experience. And I think that the, the big problem was that they were, trying to visually make something that was this huge spectacle. Which I have to say they did do.

It is nuts to see that many animals and even to see the dam break at the end of the movie. It looks good. It does look pretty good. But it begs the question why. So the CGI alone took a year to complete just to do the arc spill, the flood spill at the end. So industrial light and magic are friends that we've talked about. Lucasfilm. Yep.

Uh, are higher to do the flood. And the reason that this flood is really hard is because no one had done daylight water CGI of that scale. So when you're doing animation, doing things in lower light makes it a lot easier to make it look realistic. Furthermore, you want to restrict the amount of bounce light and ambient light because that's much harder to animate. So like one of the reasons that Jurassic Park looks so great, the 1993 one, it's dark.

it's dark and they use a single source light that's high key above the Tyrannosaurus racks that puts it in silhouette most of the time. So as a result, it looks really good. Yeah, it does. It holds up. It's really hard to animate things during the day. But when you're shooting a broad comedy, you never want to shoot things dark. You want it to feel light and up. So what should be not as expensive becomes incredibly expensive and doesn't look as good because of the constraints of the genre. So ILM is hired to do the flood. It takes them a year. They spend three months shooting miniatures by themselves, like just people in a room shooting like bulldozers getting knocked over by water. It takes them like 15 to 20 weeks to render out a single shot. So they're having to do

these things staggered on top of each other. It's really just, it's absurd. They have 80 engineers and VFX artists that are working on it. And that's only handling the flood. They also have to CGI a lot of the animals and composite them in. So the studio hires Rhythm and Hughes, which ends up doing Life of Pie. Oh. Immediately afterwards. And it's through the technology that they developed on Evan Almighty that they were able to do Life of Pie.

So Rhythm and Hughes comes in and they make 300 CGI animals, all unique, for wide shots, and then 15 hero animal pairs, 30 animals for like close shots. all animated. They then hired a third company to pick up additional CGI shots that they needed. For example, the fish and the fish tank that follows Steve Carell's head around as he's going. So they've an incredible amount of CGI that's going into this comedy movie. What's infuriating is that like the fish and the fish tank, for example, not a necessary thing that you needed to sell this movie. Well, these were, like those were the gags. Like that was the whole running, the one running, they had two running jokes.

There's the animals follow him. And he can't stop growing beard. Yeah. Those are the two running jokes. So the other incredibly expensive part of this movie was that they decided not to rely entirely on CGI. And instead, they decided to build an actual arc at biblical proportions. Oh, my God. So in Virginia, what, 15 cubits high or whatever? At the Shenandoah base of the Shenandoah Valley, they built an arc that was 450 feet long. Oh, my God. 80 feet wide. And 51 feet high. Oh my God. They built it for real. They had to build a foundation and like a skeleton out of steel. And then they had to build the arc in conjunction with shooting it so they could show the progress being made as they were going through this process.

Great. The problem was that they would have to film the actors during the day, as I mentioned, and then work the crew overnight. But even so, the construction crew couldn't keep up. So they would have to go shoot other scenes for like a week at a time. and leave them to build and then rush back to film more. But not only that, they needed some pretty specific looks and geography. So if you remember that really beautiful house that they moved into, they built that too.

And they built the four houses that were around it as well. That makes sense because that house is like it's in the middle of nowhere and there's no housing development that looks like that where it's just like flat dead grass and then a mansion in the middle of it. Yep. It was tough. So they end up shooting in Virginia for a lot of the production.

And the great thing is that Virginia gets a lot of production money from it as a result. So the Virginia government estimated that they generated between $25 and $30 million. Great. Where did it go, Virginia?

I don't know, Virginia well enough to make a joke about that. Production actually did a really good job, too, with not leaving a footprint behind. And we'll get to that in a second. The movie, they wrap up shooting in Virginia, and they've traveled back to Los Angeles where they shot most of everything

that has to do with the Capitol and Congress and all of the green screen and blue screen stuff. They have multiple animal trainers. They're shooting different plates for every animal multiple times. So the shots where it looks like there's 50 animals on screen,

that's just 50 shots that they're compositing in over and over and over again. In late May during production, so they're wrapping up post and they're aiming for a June release, Tom Shadyak's starting to get a little nervous. Yeah.

Because the production budget overruns have cut into the marketing budget for the movie. So Tom Shadyak starts complaining to producers. I'm not seeing any ads and I don't know why. I'm not getting any answers. People are giving me information that isn't true. Because you spent your money on giraffes, Tom. I'm only hearing about all the other summer movies and nothing about mine. He also fired his marketing team that had handled all of his previous films because he thought they were mishandling the marketing.

And I think you can start to tell even in his interviews with reporters that he's feeling nervous. And I have a quote here from Tom Shadyak doing press with a scrum of reporters. And he's clearly a very chill, sweet, relaxed guy. And when he talks about the budget, I think you can tell he's a little on edge. This movie has been widely reported. It's costing $200 million. Really? Wow. That's kind of expensive.

Yeah, I'd spend $200 million on Evan Almighty. And was the book that Steve Corral has in this movie influenced by your own love? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Just the hairdressing alone was like $98 million. Yeah, I kind of want to be, like the budget thing like kind of makes me smile because, you know, Spider-Man just costs around

300. We're 170 plus, I think, is the official figure. Although I don't even know what it was. We're one of the cheaper summer movies. And yet we're a comedy, so it's unique. But we're much more than a comedy. As you know, we're a biblical epic. We had an arc. We had thousands of animals.

We had a flood. And if you look at the screen, I could point you specifically to where the money goes. You know, CG generation of water. composite shots that are 100 layers thick and deep. And the good news is, ticket prices aren't going up because of this movie.

People will get more for their money. And in this very competitive summer climate, we're glad we could offer a lot for the dollar. And I'm also glad that a comedy is being given this kind of belief by a studio. You know, that a comedy is being taken this seriously. And again, we're a Bible story, too. We're a Bible parable.

You know, we're not just, quote, a comedy. It's not two guys on a, you know, on a road trip, you know, behind the wheel of a pinto, you know. Although I think I may do that movie. That sounds good. Oh, no. That made me sad. So it's tough. There was this real belief that this movie was going to break in like a different type of comedy.

And to be honest, like there were moments in the movie where I understand that feeling. because it's very clear that they are trying to make a movie that will appeal to families, a movie that's fun for everybody to watch, and a movie that does have a good message at its core, and that is kind of trying to, you know, send a sort of like, take care of your family message in a way that we don't necessarily see all that often anymore. Absolutely. It just didn't work.

And there was a lot of belief in, like, the IP of the movie. So, like, Universal Studios had David, Lindy, or Lind, before the movie, said, it's basically a sure thing. It's based on two story sources, Bruce Almighty and the Bible, both of which were incredibly successful. Bestsellers. Exactly. So the movie is really being pushed as not just a comedy. This is a movie that is, they say biblical, but what they're really saying is this is a Christian film. Yeah, which does get pushed significantly harder in this than it did in Bruce Almighty. And that's one of the things I think I was maybe most surprised by with this one is that, I know I haven't watched Bruce Almighty super recently,

but I don't remember, I don't remember the message being that strongly, is secular the right word when it's, or is that the opposite? This is not secular. This is not secular. This is religious. There we go. Ah, oh boy. Yeah, I don't remember it being that, strongly religiously message. There's a word. I just can't find it. It's not proselytizing to you. All right.

So, correct. At the end of Bruce Almighty, he does have to learn how to pray, but it doesn't have quite the same religious driver at the end of this movie. And the truth is that this movie is hard to market. The Passion of the Christ was supposed to be a very Christian yet realistic,

quote, look at the death. of Christ. Right. This is a broad comedy that is the sequel to what the Christian community considered to be a raunchy comedy, by the way. Yeah. It's something that I can see upsetting people who are, so like this, that's, that's kind of the disconnect for me. It's like if I'm somebody who is perhaps born again or, or very scripture oriented, I'm not going out to see Bruce Almighty. Exactly. So the sequel to that, regardless of how nice the messaging is, is not something I'm to show up for. Especially not with your kids.

No. When in the first one, a lot of what Bruce uses his powers for is making ladies' boobs bigger. Correct. And blowing up their skirts on the street. Like, yeah, it's... Literally pulling the moon closer to... So that Jennifer Aniston will bang him? Will not be on her period anymore?

Does you know how the tides were? I don't know what's happening with it. Is that what that is? No, it's not. That's a bad joke. So it's a really, really hard movie to market. David's Joe's This is his least favorite episode of the podcast ever

I'm trying to be nice to Christians because my mom's born again My family is mostly It's hard It's hard They're silly No it's fine It's good

It has a nice message But what's interesting is there is a church-going audience Out there The movie's just having a hard time reaching them Not only has the marketing budget been cut But they are trying to take a very different approach and how they market the movie. Yeah, it's a very mixed message.

I think the general thought is, people that saw Bruce Almighty will want to see this movie. So we're not going to worry about them so much. Instead, we need to attract the even more hardcore church-going crowd through the help of Grace Hill Media, which is the company that none of you have heard of. No, I have heard of this.

But it influences every single movie you watch every single year. So Grace Hill Media is a company that was started by this young, man Jonathan Bach. He's not a young man anymore. He cut his teeth working on movies like Bruce Almighty, Elf, Signs. And these days, every major studio uses this firm. So Bach is a, he's a deacon at a Presbyterian church, and he runs this company. He got his start as an assistant to the former senior VP of publicity at Warner Brothers. He wanted to be a TV comedy writer. And I think he quickly realized that there was this gulf between Christian audiences in Hollywood. And that cynically you could say there was a way to make money off of that.

And charitably, there's a way to say he realized that he thought Christians need to be patrons of the arts again in the way that they were back in the early days of Roman Catholicism in Italy. And so he has a quote, in Italy you see evidence everywhere that there was a time when the church partnered with the artistic community to create timeless transcendent art. True. But today's relationship between the church and Hollywood is a long way from that. Also true. Not as far as we used to be, but we've got a ways to go. I feel like Christians need to understand what their role can be as patrons of the arts. And he basically says that as ticket buyers, that is you being a patron of the arts.

It's honestly super smart. It is super smart. I have met someone that works for this company at a junket. And I did not know that this existed. The only reason I know is because I was at a junket covering a movie and I always talked to the people that are there. And one of the guys that was there was talking about that this. This is what he does, that he helps market films to a Christian audience. Correct.

Which is fascinating. They not only help market films to a Christian audience. They also test screen films with Christian audiences. To get feedback. And then they do rewrites and reshoots so they don't offend Christian audiences as well. And this is not just movies that you might think are faith-based movies. So a lot of people will hear this and they'll think about the company Pureflex, which did God Is Not Dead, for example.

What is that? God is Not Dead is a movie that was made for $2.2 million dollars and made $64 million. at the box office five years ago. What? Yes. And I've never heard of it. Well, my grandma's seen it five times, and she would be happy to watch it with you. It is an incredibly successful Christian film.

This, like, disconnect, it blows my mind. This is our, everything that's happening in this country boiled down to one movie. It's like, God is not dead. But they don't just do faith-based movies. So here are some other films that they've worked on that you've probably seen. Man of Steel, Enchanted, Hotel Transylvania, Cinderella Man, Signs, which makes a lot of sense. The Pursuit of Happiness, Elf, Love, Lord of the Rings, Gravity, Le Miserab, crazy heart, lone survivor, the conjuring,

which is super smart. The conjuring specifically leans... Oh, my mom loves the conjuring. It leans as heavily as they can into Christianity without making it too hardcore for a secular audience, and that movie was incredibly successful. It's great also. It's a great movie. So, they are doing these targeted screenings.

Basically, what Grace Hill Media does is they say, we're going to send this movie to every Christian blogger that, we know. And they're going to watch it and they're going to give you a good review to all of their audience. Which is huge. Which is huge. Especially in the evangelical community, they also send the movie in advance to 50 congregations. And they host private screenings led by the pastors of the congregation of the movie with all the families. This is brilliant. And also, I feel like if this is kind of happening at the same time that Evan Almighty is happening, it's happening at the uprising of social media as well. this is 2007.

Right. So Facebook is still just college people, but it's happening at the right time. YouTube exists. And we're only a couple years away from really the resurgence of, to a certain degree, I think, maybe I'm totally wrong, but the resurgence of a very popularized form of Christianity, which I think has. All the blog stuff was doing that at the time. It's making it more accessible.

It's reaching a larger audience. So they're doing all of this targeted marketing, trying to get the Christian audience. to come out for this movie. And it's projected initially to have a $50 million opening, which actually is close to what Bruce Almighty did, because Bruce Almighty would have done $68 million over three days because it was Memorial Day at $2,85. So it's released on June 22nd of 2006, and it flops.

Original projections were $50 million, studio adjusted that target down to $40 million, and it ended up bringing in $31 million on its first weekend. Now, because it's a family film, the head of distribution for Universal Pictures, Nikki Rocco declares, we never expected it to be much higher. It's not really true. It is not unusual for family films to open at a level like this and build. This film will have legs.

The problem is I had no idea this was a family film. That's, I think, the big issue is that coming off of Bruce Almighty, there is that disconnect. This didn't really turn out to be true. the movie made $175 million as we talked about. Now, it would be easy to say that the marketing strategy failed. But if you look at who saw this movie, it actually worked. So its business was strongest in the South and the Midwest. That's unusual for a movie.

And especially for a comedy, usually they do better on the coasts. It did better in the mountain regions as well. And it was softest in the east and on the East Coast and in Canada. because it marketed heavily to faith-based sectors, it didn't translate to multitudes of moviegoers, but exit polls showed that 40% of the audience considered themselves frequent attendees of religious services, which is surprisingly high.

And the ratings were markedly higher amongst those frequent religious service attenders than non-frequent religious service attenders. So what they basically said was, if you didn't have that church-going audience attending this movie, it would have literally been the biggest box office bomb in Hollywood history. They looked at this Christian audience. They saw how it was turning out for other movies.

They said, this is an audience we can tap into, but then they spent $200 million on the movie. Exactly. The movies that do incredibly well with this particular audience don't cost $200 million. So there just simply wasn't the audience of the right size to support this movie. Well, and they spent no money on making it. a crossover hit.

Exactly. The brutal truth of the movie is it looks great. It's the CGI is good. The animals are great. The movie's not funny. It's not. That's the biggest issue. I mean, really, like, that's just, that's the biggest issue.

It's just not a very funny movie. And as a result, you aren't going to get all of the people that are coming to Bruce Almighty because their friends have said, this movie is so funny, you have to go see it. I do also want to point out that the amount of money they spent on the soundtrack of this cannot have been small. Because there is a needle drop about two minutes in. I checked it. It's a Creedens Clearwater Revival needle drop, obviously.

Which song is it? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's that called? Have you ever seen the ring? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That shows up real fast. They got Zizi Top in there. They got a Beatles song that's not by the Beatles.

That's nominated for a Dove Award. Oh, what's that? A Dove is a gospel music award. Okay. Yeah. The movie comes and goes. Basically, no one sees it. And everybody moves on.

Universal still had a profitable year. They had the breakup that year with Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn. That movie is depressing. Very dark. Steve Krell went on to do huge things with the office. His career obviously stabilized. John Goodman did incredible things. Always fine.

Ed Helms went under great things. John Michael Riggins. Wanda Sykes did her stuff. Jonah Hill has been nominated for an Oscar now. Yeah. Um, but, basically what's really interesting is the person who disappears is the director, Tom Shadyak. And it's not for the reasons that you might think. So the typical explanation when you come off of box office bomb is that if you've done enough

successful movies up until then, you're okay. You get one. Right. And so you would expect that Tom Shadiac, who'd made $2 billion at the box office before. Right. Would be fine. Would come back in a couple years and make something else. What's really interesting is,

that Tom Shadyak turned around and sold everything he owned, gave it all the charity, and moved into a trailer in Malibu. So he was involved in a bike accident in 2007. Oh no. And he suffered a concussion. He had had some head injuries earlier in his life. And he had a post-concussion syndrome where he was suffering basically prolonged symptoms. He was unable to process stimuli correctly. He ended up sleeping. in his closet. He isolated himself. And he had already been feeling disconnected from Hollywood and the lifestyle that he was living. This is someone... You can tell in that clip. Yeah. This is someone who was worth $50 million. Yeah. Who owned a 17,000 square foot house in Pasadena. His movies had made

billions of dollars at the box office. He was the king and he wasn't happy. He was lonely. His marriage had imploded. And when he was working on Evan Almighty with a crew of construction folks, largely, he kept thinking to himself, why do I have so much money? And these people don't. And to his credit, he made an incredible change in his life. If he turned around and he sold his house, he sold his assets. Now, this trailer in Malibu is still expensive. I was going to say, trailer's in Malibu, like $700,000. It's a million, it's a million dollar Malibu in trailer, but it's not the $15 million house that he lived in. And he stepped away from Hollywood and tried to start getting some answers.

So he started meeting with all of these spiritual leaders and guides, and he decided that he was going to make a documentary. And so in 2010, he released this documentary called I Am. And it's about the question, what is wrong with the world and what can we do about it? And it's told through his perspective. And I watched a bunch of clips from it. And it's very earnest. It didn't get great reviews.

But everybody that watched it was like, Tom Shadyak's really likable in the movie. it's a little all over the place. And he totally stepped away from the comedy game. He moved to Memphis eventually, and he formed a partnership with St. Jude's Children Research Hospital there, started a homeless shelter. He teaches at a historically black college. He donated an incredible amount of money to a city in Colorado. I can't remember which one it is to help them maintain a natural history site that they had there.

Um, he started another, uh, homeless program in Virginia where he'd been living when he had the bicycle accident. He's also, I think, a UVA graduate. Yeah, yes. Um, and, uh, UCLA film school, I believe. Um, I don't care about that. I only care about UVA. And what's interesting is that in a weird way, his life is the more interesting version of

the message that the movie was trying to sell. The movie is about stepping away from the rat race, getting pretty, perspective on what the important things are and focusing your attention and energy in the relationships and places that matter. And Tom Shadyak, it seems like, did that after this movie in a really sweet and interesting way that's completely unexpected. He's since made a return to filmmaking. He made a movie called Brian Banks, which is a true story about a former football player who

was wrongfully convicted of a violent crime, and it's about his fight for justice. and innocence. It did decently well. It came out in 2018, made it in and around Memphis, I believe. He... Memphis is great, but... Yeah, the comedy stuff that he was trying to get going wasn't getting going. He rediscovered his faith as he was like going through this process. And so now he's kind of breaking into a different mold and a part of his life. It's just, I think it's really interesting when his life ends up becoming the more interesting version of the movie that he ended up making.

Well, I'm glad something good came out of it. Well, more than one thing that's good came out of this movie. And so we like to end our show usually with two sections now, what we've learned and what went right. And I want to start with what went right, not on necessarily a creative perspective, but what this production did right in terms of its environmentalist angle. So, like, the movie has kind of this environmentalist angle that feels a little ahead of its time. The production decided that they were going to actually take a carbon neutral approach to the film. And movies are traditionally incredibly destructive to the environment. In Apocalypse Now, they literally were just blowing jungles up in that movie, as well as killing each other.

And also hacking up an actual bull during that. Exactly. And this movie is the opposite. So largely with the blessing and at the behest of Tom Shadyak, who is correct, credit, they calculated their carbon footprint, so all the costs to flying all of the animals to set, et cetera, and they decided that they would need to plant 2,050 trees to offset that carbon footprint. And so the production did that. They were the first production of Universalists to zero out their carbon emissions. Tom Shadyak personally bought every crew member of bicycle

so they could ride their bikes to set, 400 bicycles. This guy's really nice. He's great. The arc that they built was completely disassembled, and every piece was donated to Habitat for humanity. They melted down all the steel that they used. They sold it, and they gave those donations to Habitat to Humanity. They made a campaign through this website called Get On Board, leading up to the release of the film, where people could donate to the movie. If they donated, they were included on the DVD, their name as a contributor.

And that campaign resulted in another 15,000 trees being planted through donations. to the conservation fund. So the movie in terms of what went right actually did this trailblazing campaign to have a positive impact on the environment and meet the message of the movie as they were making it. So that's my What Went Right Takeaways.

Lizzie, what about your What Went Right Takeaways? As cheesy as it sounds, it is nice that they tried to make sort of an earnestly kind movie, however much it may have sort of missed on other parts, it does have a nice message. That's about it outside of the touching on the animals and all that and the water. I guess what went right is John Goodman as an evil congressman? That's great.

That's something he should do more. I love John. They missed him on House of Cards, I guess. Yeah, that was a real miss. Yeah. Well, he was in the Alpha House and Amazon at the same time. Didn't go anywhere. What did we learn watching this movie?

For me, what went wrong is when you try to make a movie for everyone, you make a movie for no one. Yes. And that's a classic saying that's used all the time. But this is, I think, a perfect example of learning what that really means. I also think it's don't alienate the audience you've already built. I mean, this was such a departure from Bruce Almighty in so many ways. You can't just count, first of all, don't anticipate. that people are stupid and don't anticipate that people are just going to show up because they liked the first movie with nothing bringing them to the second one. People are in general, I like to think, not that dumb. Like, sell them something.

Chris is shaking his head because I think he believes people are that dumb. I disagree. Yeah. We'll leave it at that. Remember, if you have any recommendations for movies that you would like us to Monday morning quarterback, Please send them our way. Please help us. You can find our contact information through the podcast notes below. Chris, his phone number is too. There's way too many correct digits in a row. Bye.

To support what went wrong and gain access to bonus episodes, subscribe on Patreon, Apple, or Spotify for $5 a month. Patreon subscriptions also come with an ad-free RSS fee. You can also visit our website, What Went Wrong, Pod.com, more info. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman.