Big Oscar Bet for '127 Hours'; Major Expansion Planned

Danny Boyle's Oscar hopeful, now in 76 theaters, will expand to 600 screens Jan. 28.


Fox Searchlight is plotting a big return for filmmaker Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours.

On Jan. 28—three days after Academy Award nominations are announced—the film will up its theater count to more than 600 locations. Currently, 127 Hours is playing in only 76 theaters.

The move is designed to take advantage of expected attention from the Oscars. But while all indications are that James Franco will be nominated for best actor, additional nominations are not necessarily a given. Searchlight is campaigning in the best picture and best director categories, among others. The film scored one of the 10 best-picture nominations from the Producers Guild, but Boyle was not among the Directors Guild’s five nominees.

There is a sense among box office observers that 127 Hours hasn’t gotten the love it deserves. At the same time, the stranded-hiker drama is tough sell given its subject matter. But attention from Oscar could help draw in audiences.

Opening on Nov. 5 in four theaters, 127 Hours has grossed $11.1 million to date. At its widest, the film played in 433 locations (that was in late November).

In re-launching the film Searchlight is borrowing a page from its past.

The Last King of Scotland, opening in late September 2006, had only grossed $3.7 million by the time Forest Whitaker was nominated for an Academy Award for best actor.

The weekend following Oscar nominations, Searchlight upped the film’s theater count from four to 497. King of Scotland went on to gross a total of $17.5 million.

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Fox Prepares to Take a Swing at 'The Three Stooges'

With MGM in the final stretch of its Chapter 11 reorganization, The Three Stooges, one of the longest-gestating high-profile projects in Hollywood, is in the process of finding a new home at Fox.

The extraction from debt-riddled MGM is in the midst of final dealmaking, but upon completion Stooges will land at Fox with the long-involved Farrelly Brothers behind the camera. The cast that had been slapped together for the movie while it was at MGM -- Sean Penn as Larry, Jim Carrey as Curly and Benicio del Toro as Moe -- is likely to morph into a new configuration, although that too is being figured out.

A March 14 start date is being eyed.

For Peter and Bobby Farrelly, taking the project to Fox would be a homecoming, since the brothers have made most of their movies for the studio. (New Line is releasing their latest comedy, Hall Pass, next year.)

Stooges is not a biopic but a fictional treatment that maintains the Stooges’ gleeful slap schtick updated for a modern milieu. It has been a passion project for the Farrellys, who have been involved with it since C3 Entertainment Inc., the keeper of the Stooges brand, sold the feature rights to Warner Bros. in March 2001 for them to write and produce.

Early on, the project was originally set up at Columbia, which had produced the classic 1930s Stooges shorts. Eventually, Warner Bros. let the rights lapse and MGM’s Mary Parent scooped them up along with the Farrellys’ continuing participation. The movie was on the runway to go before cameras when first Penn took a self-imposed break from acting and then MGM’s financial woes whacked the whole project off track.

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http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/blogs/risky-business/fox-prepares-swing-three-stooges-55635