Johnny Depp tops the cast of stars headed to Venice this week for what is shaping up as something of a watershed edition of the world’s oldest film festival.
Amid the usual mix of big-budget Hollywood productions and more cerebral offerings from international auteurs, this year’s event breaks new ground with the first major feature film to be produced in-house by Netflix among 21 works competing for the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion.
Four years after it started acquiring its own original television content with Kevin Spacey’s acclaimed House of Cards, the US streaming giant is hoping for a similar publicity, credibility and subscriber-generating hit with Beasts of No Nation, a child soldier drama featuring Britain’s Idris Elba as a warlord and an otherwise largely unknown cast.
The Cary Fukunaga-directed film, based on a novel by Nigerian writer Uzodinma Iweala, is to be released on cinmes on the same day next month as it is made available for Netflix’s 65 million subscribers around the world to stream into their homes.
CONFLICT
That has not gone down well with major cinema chains in the US and elsewhere who have point blank refused to distribute the film, saying that to do so without any period where it is only available in their theaters would be suicidal.
However, Netflix has been able to find one chain which will ensure Beasts opens in 19 US cities on the same day as its digital release — and that is enough to qualify the film as a bona fide made-for-cinema piece of work eligible to be nominated for an Oscar.
Against a backdrop of fragmenting business models, most industry figures, Venice director Alberto Barbera among them, see the barriers between home and cinema viewing being eroded. Consumers are asserting their right to choose when and how they watch their films, while the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime are beginning to put significant resources into filmmaking.
“They are going to be important players in production and distribution. We simply can’t ignore them,” Barbera said at the festival’s launch in July.
Pirates of the Caribbean star Depp will be treading the red carpet to promote his performance as Irish-American mobster James “Whitey” Bulger in Scott Cooper’s Black Mass, one of two blockbuster productions being shown for the first time during the festival, which runs from today to Saturday next week.
CURTAIN-RAISER
The other is Everest, a 3D thriller based on the 1996 disaster on the Himalayan mountain, which stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Kiera Knightley, and opens the festival today.
On a roll after the opening slot provided the global launchpad for Gravity two years ago and then Birdman last year, festival director Barbera is hoping the Baltasar Kormakur-directed curtain-raiser for this year’s season has a similar impact.
Despite their big names and huge budgets, Everest and Black Mass appear to have been matched in terms of pre-festival buzz by The Danish Girl.
The latest work by The King’s Speech director Tom Hooper features Eddie Redmayne in the role of a Danish-born artist who was one of the first people to undergo sex reassignment surgery.
The tale of how Einar Wegener became Lili Elbe in 1930s Germany is already being tipped as a potential source of another Oscar for Britain’s Redmayne, a best actor winner for his portrayal of physicist Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything.
Depp’s portrayal of the middle-aged, largely bald Bulger sees him return to the territory of 1997’s Donnie Brasco, in which he played an FBI agent who infiltrates an Italian-American crime family.
Bulger also helped the FBI break up Italian organized crime, but used the protection he acquired to build his own powerful criminal empire in Boston.
For Depp, 52, the role marks a return to more conventional roles after several years in which he specialized in playing larger-than-life, fantasy figures, and his backers say his legions of fans will not be disappointed.
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