When 20th Century Fox greenlit James Mangold’s “Ford v. Ferrari” — an original movie with a nearly $100 million budget — the director’s agent had some advice.
“Enjoy this,” Mangold recalled him saying. “This will be the last one of these you ever make.”
“Ford v Ferrari,” which viscerally recounts the efforts of an automotive designer (Matt Damon) and a race car driver (Christian Bale) to build a Ford that could beat Ferrari at the Le Mans 24-hour race in 1966, has a lot going for it: big-name movie stars, a director coming off an Oscar-nominated hit (“Logan”) and a marathon, nearly hour-long racing finale.
But it doesn’t have what typically scores such a large budget in today’s Hollywood: franchise making IP (intellectual property). It might as well be a unicorn.
“With the number of mergers and streaming operations coming up to speed, I think there’s a real question whether the theatrical film is really just the tentpole. Independent films are struggling. Even mainline dramas are struggling to find an audience,” said Mangold, who has been a regular filmmaker at Fox, which Disney acquired earlier this year.
“In that sense, we’re a throwback film,” he continues. “We’re a modern movie in all the senses of modern storytelling, modern technology, modern sensibility. But we’re trying to do something that I really miss seeing in the movies, which is a movie for grown-ups that’s entertaining and thought-provoking and moving and isn’t selling you the same old thing.”
And this fall movie season, in particular, Mangold is far from alone. Oscar season always brings a welcome wave of originality after the reboots, remakes, and sequels of summer. But this fall is especially rich in big, audacious bets on original films that will try to invigorate movie theaters with the most time-tested of methods: megawatt movie stars, genre twists, innovation.
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