Did You Know Matthew McConaughey Recently Made A Movie Called "The Sea Of Trees"? No? Nobody Else Did Either Cause It Less Than Made $3,000
Yahoo- Matthew McConaughey is an A-list movie star who won a Best Actor Academy Award in 2014 for Dallas Buyer’s Club. Naomi Watts and Ken Watanabe are themselves top-tier Hollywood actors. And Gus Van Sant is one of America’s most distinctive directors, having earned two Oscar nominations for Best Director (for Good Will Hunting and Milk) and the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for 2003’s Elephant. So it’s amazing that together, they produced The Sea of Trees, a cornball indie drama that during its first week of domestic release, managed to earn less than $3,000 at the box office. Van Sant’s latest concerns a suicidal professor (McConaughey) who heads off into the Japanese forest of the title that’s infamous as a place where people kill themselves. There, he meets an injured Japanese businessman (Watanabe), all while flashbacks reveal the strained relationship with his wife (Watts) that drove him to consider taking his own life. With a reported production budget of $25 million, The Sea of Trees — playing in two theaters last week — has averaged only $1,447 per theater, a dismal showing. (It’s expanding to more theaters and is available on VOD platforms.)
Normally this wouldn’t be all that noteworthy. Big time actors wanna find their artsy fartsy side and make indie movies all the time. It usually happens after a few big time successes and they wanna show people they’re still a real actor. That’s nothing new at all. The thing that stands out about this Matthew McConaughey movie is that it had a budge of 25 MILLION dollars. Sure you can still call that indie money relative to other movies but for a movie with that kind of money to not even make $3,000 is astounding. I didn’t even know this movie existed. I hadn’t heard a single peep about it until 13 minutes ago. Had you? I’m gonna guess no. And it’s not like it was a small time director either. It’s Gus Van Sant. Who you may recall did a little movie called Goodwill Hunting once upon a time. Part of me thinks this was by design. McConaughey purposely picked this project so it would tank and it would come off extra artsy fartsy.
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PS- I realize it only opened in a couple theaters but still.