Pre-packaged films find greenlight

Steve Carells involvement with 'Crazy Stupid Love' helped sell it to studios, which are increasingly emphasizing tentpoles, like 'Transformers Dark of the Moon.'Hollywood's obsession with franchises and recognizable brands has caused a quiet power shift in the film biz, with the decline in development budgets at the major studios whetting appetites for prepackaged, ready-to-shoot projects. The result: Producers and filmmakers now have more control at the mid- and small-budget levels.With faster greenlights as the prize, filmmakers have new incentives to fully develop their ideas before taking them to the studios. Agents and managers, meanwhile, are attaching talent to projects earlier in the process -- a shift that, as any one of those players will attest, beats fighting with studios for approval."It's really more about making (movies) and less about developing them in today's marketplace," says one lit agent.As one manager puts it: "Companies like Relativity only want packages they can pull the trigger on. They don't have the time or attention span to develop something from scratch. They assume that's your job, and it's why you're bringing a script to them in the first place."None of that is expected to change, as the corporatization of Hollywood has made studios less likely to take risks on unproven projects, and instead turned their attention to big-budget tentpoles that can perform as franchises at the box office and in retail aisles. Since the 2007 writers' strike and the 2008 recession, the studios have felt more pressure to appease parent companies that have become more cost-conscious and profit-hungry. They increasingly need to produce content that moviegoers will instantly recognize and embrace. Last summer alone saw the studios focused on familiar properties like the Transformers, the Smurfs, Thor, Green Lantern, Captain America and Planet of the Apes.But even as they devote their development dollars largely to tentpoles, studios still have distribution pipelines to fill. They need to feed the megaplexes year-round, even if they're not directly creating that product.That's opened the doors for producers to put together the rest of the studios' slates with original fare."Ten years ago, studios would take a package, but they weren't necessarily looking for them," one top agent at a tenpercentery tells Variety. "Now it's more of a priority. Studios see them as an opportunity to put money into something that they know is going to happen instead of paying a couple million on developing something that will never happen."That doesn't necessarily mean it's easier to get a greenlight. Tenpercenteries need to assemble packages that grab the attention of studios bosses and are easily marketable to moviegoers.The packaging process, in fact, is now being discussed before scripts are shopped to the studios, and agents and managers are being trained to do the extra legwork to make projects salable.Warner Bros.' "Crazy Stupid Love" was a spec that several studios were high on when it was put on the auction block a couple years ago. What helped attract attention to the romantic comedy wasn't just its scribe, Dan Fogelman -- hot off Disney's "Cars" and "Tangled" -- but the attachment of Steve Carell as its star. Having set up a number of high-profile videogame and comicbook adaptations at the studios, Adrian Askarieh has moved to take the independent route to package his own projects, such as "Alien Sleeper Cell," an alien invasion pic that Morgan Davis Foehl will write and Bill Block ("District 9") will produce through QED Intl. Askarieh is taking a similar approach with "Just Cause," an adaptation of Eidos' hit vidgame -- with Michael Ross ("Turistas") scripting and Eric Eisner's L+E Pictures co-producing -- in order to retain more creative control and speed up the development process.Most recently, even the music industry has gotten involved: ICM has begun packaging a narrative-style pic revolving around music by the Grateful Dead, after being granted unlimited access to the band's music catalog.Another package that drew attention was Universal's deal to buy an R-rated college-based comedy that will star Seth Rogen and Zac Efron, based on a script by Andrew Cohen and Brendan O'Brien. Rogen will produce with Evan Goldberg through their Point Grey Pictures shingle.The commitment of additional talent early in the process has helped boost the pricetag of such deals, reps say, doubling or even tripling what they might have landed for a traditional spec sale in the past.In the Rogen-Efron deal, the scribes pulled in seven figures and the thesps pocketed higher-than-usual quotes along with backend fees after a bidding war took place to secure the project. Rogen will earn $8 million on top of a seven-figure producing fee.Locking down talent, however, can prove just as difficult as selling a project to a studio. Just getting talent to read the material can hold back a package, reps say. But it doesn't stop there."It's one thing to get the right talent to like the material and come onboard. It's a completely other thing to get that director or actor to read it," says one lit agent. "Sometimes it takes three days, other times it takes them three months, so a lot of the issues we run into come down to timing."The involvement of multiple agencies can also cause delays, considering that each has its own idea regarding who is right to topline a particular piece of material.For the raunchy college comedy set up at Universal, UTA and Principal repped Rogen. The tenpercentery also repped Goldberg. Efron's deal was handled by CAA and Alchemy, while the scribes are also repped by CAA. Financing is a key factor that often comes into play when packaging such projects before they get their footing at a studio.A handful of auteurs got their projects up and running thanks to the Annapurna Pictures banner, headed by Megan Ellison.Over the past year, Ellison has come onboard to finance pictures such as Paul Thomas Anderson's "The Master," "The Wettest County" and Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal's untitled project about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. And last May, Creative Artists Agency attached "Fast Five" helmer Justin Lin and producer Robert Cort to the two-picture "Terminator" package that sold to Annapurna for around $20 million in an auction at the Cannes Film Festival. In almost every case, Annapurna has come onboard as part of the packaging process before any of these projects were brought to a studio. (Ellison's brother David, by contrast, has made a name for himself by boarding studio tentpoles, such as "Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol" and the "Star Trek" sequel, at the financing stage.)Outside financing has fostered other nontraditional development.India's Reliance Group invested $325 million in DreamWorks, and gave CAA clients Brad Pitt, Jim Carrey, Brett Ratner, Jay Roach and Julia Roberts $2 million each to develop films. It provided $5 million to Imagine Entertainment to launch an inhouse writers lab to produce scripts. These development funds, however, have yet to yield any projects.Though it may feel like fewer specs are being sold to studios these days, some reps believe the majors are still willing to take on such work if the material feels right, as it was with Fox's "Chronicle," a low-budget horror pic that's already passed $50 million at the domestic box office. And at least one lit agent is adamant that spec sales aren't dead, and that the reason so many go unnoticed is because a simple pitch with no one attached doesn't arrive with the same fanfare that a pedigreed package typically does."Packages just jump out more in the media because of the talent attached," the rep says. "Let's say I sell a pitch for $375,000 but then someone else sells a pitch with Tom Cruise attached. That just makes a bigger splash." What: Studios see pre-packaged projects as more efficient, less costly.The takeaway: Packaging gives filmmakers more control over mid-range budget pics.Return to Movies & Money >> Contact Justin Kroll at justin.kroll@variety.com