It wasn’t just the international box office draw of stars like Denzel Washington that concerned Sony Pictures or related producers, as revealed by the Sony email hack and reported by the Inquisitr .
As it happens, newly posted leaked images of hacked Sony emails uploaded to Twitter show that Sony executives had concerns about the worldwide box office appeal of Colin Farrell, as well.
Noriaki Sano, Director of Sony Pictures Entertainment (Japan), Inc., wrote to Sal Ladestro (EVP of Marketing at Sony Pictures Entertainment) and Nigel Clark — president of Sony’s marketing efforts overseas , according to the Hollywood Reporter — about his Colin Farrell concerns.
The email from Noriaki Sano, who also had concerns about The Interview , as reported by the Los Angeles Times , talks about a recently read script and his trepidations perhaps with Farrell starring within the vehicle.
“Have read the script with excitement. Very well written script and enough hard-boiled for male audience. Could be too violent for women. The Mexican/U.S. border story is not a popular genre in our market as you can see from the comp titles listed below [the Twitter image contains a list of Colin Farrell movies and their box office numbers] including the recent 2 GUNS. Even NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, which was also a great script and won the Oscar only grossed 335M JPY [$2.8 million U.S. dollars] box office. [sic]”
Sano next turns to speak about Colin Farrell’s box office take, specifically.
“As for Colin Farrell, only TOTAL RECALL, which we spent 600M JPY [$5 million U.S. dollars] ad/pub grossed 1B JPY [$8.4 million U.S. dollars] and the rest has been a very small release except for FIRST NIGHT, which also lost money. [sic]”
According to the Colin Farrell IMDb page , Farrell starred as “Jerry” in Fright Night in 2011. In the remainder of the email, Sano goes on to predict a best, middle, and worst case scenario in terms of the amount of money the unnamed film might bring in via the box office, and lays out the previous box office revenue of Colin Farrell movies in their own column. London Boulevard, In Bruges, Fright Night, Deadman Down, Total Recall , and Seven Psychopaths are all laid out on the spreadsheet, which also compares the box office take of other films in the aforementioned border genres, like Frozen River, Machete, Sin Nombre Without Name, No Country for Old Men, 2 Guns , and The Mule/Border Run .
[Image via Broadway World ]
