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BOG: Were you surprised that the film shot to number one at the box office the day after the Globes?
JS: No, because we've been watching not only the aggregate numbers. As you know, what you watch carefully and what you track are inside those numbers - where they're coming from, what's driving them, where they're growing. And we have been for the past four weeks both stunned into a kind of waking stupor, but also very proactively astonished at the numbers coming out of places like Little Rock, Arkansas or Fort Worth, Texas, or Pittsburgh or Columbus. The stereotype would be that you would continue to get huge grosses out of San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, etc. And then as you expand you'll get these smaller numbers from so-called "less sophisticated" markets. But, when you're doing $40,000 weekends on screens in Salt Lake City, you better catch up to reality fast! We're seeing this in every corner of America, and that's the real story.
[...]
BOG: What would an Oscar nomination for Best Picture mean to the film's domestic and international potential?
JS: The international releases are just starting to come into play. We opened in the U.K. a couple of weeks ago and hit number one at the box office there on Wednesday. We opened in France on Wednesday and are in the top three somewhere. We open in Italy this weekend and expect a similar response. Denmark has opened extraordinarily strongly. So everybody is already on a roll. The film is right around $6M in the U.K., and we haven't even started yet. And then we just got nine BAFTA nominations. So every step of the way, you're poised to seize the opportunity to present it. When the Oscar nominations are announced, and we hope we'll figure prominently but you never know, Brokeback will be on over 1,000 screens in North America.
BOG: Three years ago, the movie Chicago was slowly expanding and also grossed about $30M as of MLK day and was playing in about 600 theaters. It went on to do over $170M. Do you think Brokeback Mountain could be on a similar course and have the bulk of its audience still ahead of it.
JS: I do. I will allow others to speculate and allow myself only to dream of anything like the heights of a movie like Chicago. We made a specialized film. It was targeted towards the specialized niche market originally, and has proven to be a crossover hit. We didn't make this movie to be the next Star Wars. When we hit $10M, you have to understand, we were really happy! So all of it, and I mean literally all of it, is gravy. All of it is just simply mind-bogglingly extra. So yes, to answer your question directly, I believe that the bulk of the audience for this movie has yet to show up.
[...]
BOG: Finally, what impact do you hope the film will have on both mainstream America and the film industry?
JS: On the film industry, not just Brokeback but this whole year with everything from Capote to Good Night, and Good Luck, there's so many movies that were made because people just felt passionate about making them and they were able to convince their colleagues and partners to help them. And so when you have a year when that happens, and there are so many good ones, that's a great signal to the industry that the only way you're going to actually stem the tide and win back audiences is to make films you believe in and not the films that some computer program tells you will have the best chance at success. As far as changing America, we didn't make the movie so that straight people would be nice to gay people. We've gotten thousands and thousands of emails and people literally want to share what they're experiencing. It's been one of those weird ancillary experiences of making and releasing this movie that's been amazing. People are really involved in this feedback. It's a really intense thing.
http://boxofficeguru.com/oscarspotlight2006.htm
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JS is James Schamus, one of the producers of Brokeback
