Anne Hathaway and Matthew McConaughey are said to be furious at film distributor Aviron Pictures, after a planned marketing campaign for their new thriller Serenity fell through, leading to a dismal opening weekend and the worst flop of either star’s career.
Serenity was released last week in the US after little to no fanfare, and it crashed hard at the box office, coming in eighth spot and earning around $5 million. Critics had nothing kind to say, either, and the film currently sits at 38% on review aggregator Metacritic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbrOMrjhyvI
Just what led to this messy situation?
According to Deadline, Anne Hathaway and Matthew McConaughey are both laying the blame on the distributor, saying that a promised marketing campaign, including numerous TV spots, simply failed to materialise, and that therefore, few people even knew the film was even coming out.
Reportedly, the pair were all set to depart on a press junket for Serenity, including talk show appearances and interviews, when they discovered the night before that the planned promotional spend had fallen through. Per Deadline’s report:
“They believe that they were fed excuses and got a lot of unreturned calls when TV spots didn’t show up and it became clear to them Aviron wasn’t going to support the movie and was essentially dumping it.”
This certainly gives additional context to an Instagram post that Anne Hathaway made in January, in which she implored her fans to go and see Serenity, a film that “asks a lot of the audience” and “isn’t easily broken down into sound bites.”
To make matters worse, the only memorable moment to come out of the Serenity press tour was when Anne Hathaway confirmed that there’s a script for The Princess Diaries 3, a film that has nothing to do with Serenity and is not even in production yet.
While distributor Aviron initially declined to comment on the situation, they eventually released a lengthy statement on the fate of the film, saying, essentially, that reviews for Serenity were so bad that the whole thing was simply impossible for them to market.
In the statement, Aviron said that it has the “best intentions” for Serenity, and was excited to work with such a talented cast, but as feedback came in, they realised that the film was “not going to be able to perform” at initial expectations, and adjusted their marketing budget accordingly.
The statement continued:
“Regardless of the spend, it’s next to impossible for an adult-skewing drama to overcome a 23% score on Rotten Tomatoes and a D+ CinemaScore. To have spent more would have been irresponsible to our capital partners and wouldn’t have made prudent business sense for an independent distributor. We have enormous respect and admiration for the talent and all the hard work they put into the film and wish the box office results were better.”
It’s pretty uncommon for a distributor to torch their own film like that, so this probably shows how dire the situation was for Aviron when they knew they were looking at a financial disappointment.
Anne Hathaway and Matthew McConaughey were last seen together in 2014’s Interstellar. She is soon set to appear in a TV adaptation of the Modern Love column, while his next film, The Beach Bum, also stars Zac Efron, Isla Fisher and Snoop Dogg.
