Uma Thurman's latest film....not quite a success

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

Apparantly Uma Thurman's new film Motherhood cost $5,000,000 to make.

It was released in London recently and takings for the first weekend on release were......£88!

One paying customer went to see it on the first day of release. Brilliant.

[Noah]

It should have been a red carpet event. When just one British cinema was given exclusive permission to launch Uma Thurman's new film earlier this month, the film's producers presumably hoped that exclusivity would create a buzz around the movie. Though limiting the release would obviously limit takings, they must have hoped word of mouth could make it a slow-burning success.

But the tactic backfired catastrophically. Instead of audiences queueing round the block of the Apollo West End in Piccadilly Circus, London, to see the star of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, they stayed away in record-breaking numbers.

Over its opening weekend, no more than a dozen people went to see Motherhood, a semi-autobiographical account of stressed-out Manhattan parenting written and directed by Katherine Dieckmann. The film made just £88 on the weekend of Friday 5 March. On its debut Sunday, box office takings were £9, meaning one person bought a ticket.

The disaster has now degenerated into a bitter confrontation between Metrodrome, responsible for marketing the film in the UK, and producer Jana Edelbaum, who blames the company for Motherhood's atrocious performance.

The film, thought to have cost $5m to make, earned just over £40,000 when it opened in the US last October, but Edelbaum had no idea quite how badly it had performed in the UK until contacted this week by the Guardian. "You're kidding?" she said. "We must have broken a new record for grosses."

Edelbaum is adamant that Metrodome must be to blame, and insisted that she would demand a full explanation. "Think how much crap succeeds at the cinema," she said. "Motherhood is not bad. It's a very decent movie. I've seen movies that are not half as good."

In fact, Motherhood, which also features Minnie Driver, Anthony Edwards and a cameo by Jodie Foster, cannot lay claim to the dubious title of Britain's lowest-ever grossing film on its opening weekend: that honour is taken by My Nikifor, the 2007 film about Polish artist Nikifor Krynicki, which took just £7 on its launch.

But it has, according to the veteran film critic Barry Norman, confounded expectations of quite how resounding a flop a mainstream film featuring a bona fide star can be. "Good God. I have never heard of anything like this before," he said. "This is not some small, independent movie. It's astonishing that only about 11 people could be bothered to go and see Uma Thurman. The reviews were very poor indeed but that alone isn't enough to explain this. It's a reasonable assumption that there was a marketing and advertising catastrophe, and people didn't know it was showing. But it should have attracted more than 11 people in passing trade alone. Apollo cinemas, after all, aren't in tucked-away places. They're all prominently located. I'm baffled."

The Apollo cinema chain – which later briefly screened the film in Burnley, Fareham, Redditch, Stroud and Altrincham – failed to return calls from the Guardian.

But Metrodrome, which has manoeuvred films including Monster, Donnie Darko and The Counterfeiters to financial and critical success, defended its approach in the week after the launch.

"Over the course of the week leading up to Mother's Day we also released the film on DVD, video on demand, and pay per view so customers could choose how to watch the film," the company said. "Inevitably some films will work better on some platforms than others. In this particular case the DVD was stronger than the theatrical result. It is important that experimentation is encouraged at a time when the entire film industry is in transition," the statement continued. "We all need to adapt to new models of distribution in the future and discover new opportunities."

There were, however, signs that Metrodrome had already begun to suffer a lack of confidence in Motherhood before it was premiered.

At the beginning of the month, 70 tickets were given away to members of the website Mumsnet for a special screening at which they were asked to give detailed responses.

"Interested to know why the company wanted opinion on the film so close to its general release?" queried one after the screening, to which fewer than 20 of the winners went. "It is proper pants. In fact it's one of the rare movies I didn't stay until the end for."

But Edelbaum defended the film. "Our effort was noble. It's a love letter about how difficult it is to be a mum and an individual, and have an identity outside of that. I think we have proved that mothers are too busy to have fun. That they are overstretched and overburdened by the difficulties of their job."

Others, however, disagreed. "It's a yummy-mummy newspaper column splurged onto celluloid, like baby sick on your best cashmere sweater," said Ellen E Jones on film review website, Total Films. "This whiny drivel makes me ashamed to be a woman," said Wendy Ide on the website Rotten Tomatoes – which gave the film a rock-bottom 20% Tomatometer success rating.

Edelbaum admitted she dreaded telling Dieckmann, who also directed the 2006 comedy drama Diggers, how badly Motherhood had gone down in the UK. The film was, she said, a labour of love that had "taken up many years" of Dieckmann's life. "I can't bear to ring her and tell her," Edelbaum admitted . "I'm a producer; I've got a thick skin but, well, she's a creative."

The film is no longer being shown at a single cinema across Britain. Indeed, it has sunk so quickly and untraceably that, back at the Apollo West End, it has not even left a ripple.

The woman behind the popcorn counter in Piccadilly Circus didn't remember the screening at all. "It's very strange," she admitted. "Even if I'm not paying attention to what's being screened here, I can usually tell you every film because customers talk to each other and the names just stick in your head. But I'm sure I've never heard that one being mentioned."

The man selling tickets also had no memory. "Have you got the right cinema?" he asked, looking puzzled. "There's another cinema down the road – perhaps it was on there instead?"

[LL!]

This movie has been available for rent here for the last month or so. To say that I even knew this movie existed before I saw it on video rental store shelves wouldn't be easy considering they didn't promote it at all. They did a completely shitty job of marketing the movie considering they didn't even use the internet to promote it.

Given that argument, the movie looked like shit anyway.

[EddieG]

Don't blame the UK for it, it only made something like $50.000 in American cinemas, it's the movie.

[LL!]

I never once blamed the UK. I blamed the marketing for it being done poorly. Internationally it seems.

[apsham]

Or the generally shit-tastic quality of the movie.

[livid]

No, you don't make that little of money just because it's a shitty movie. Seriously, the only way you can make so little is if you bother not to market it at all. Shitty movies consistently make more than that because they actually have a marketing campaign.

[LL!]

Although, like I said, it looks like shit, that has never stopped people from shelling out money for movies that look like shit. Such is life.

[METALMAN]

yeah nothing to do with shitty quality of movie. Being shit never stopped twilight. It's totally marketing.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

I'd say that being an utterly unremarkable middle-of-the-road movie that sounds like thousands of movies that have gone before it is gonna do far worse than a shockingly bad movie.

[munky]

It could have been worse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zyzzyx_Road

Unofficially, its opening weekend netted $20. The $10 difference is due to a personal refund by Grillo to makeup artist Sheila Moore, who had worked on the film, and her friend.

It eventually made a little over $360K, but that opening is the worst ever.

[TKz]

I blame Katherine Heigl.

Bitch be trippin'.

[reyrey619]

Tom Sizemore and his meth addiction probably scared everyone away.