The female- and food-friendly pic, tracking to open in the $20 million range domestically, with older females driving interest, could solidify her status as the industry’s only serious veteran actress who, in the right vehicle, can carry a midbudget movie to blockbuster status.
With movie-star reliability continuing to buckle and such younger male actors as Eddie Murphy, Will Ferrell and Jack Black recently receiving the back of the hand from audiences, Streep’s success in nontraditional summer fare is delicious indeed. It was enough that Forbes recently listed her among the industry’s top female moneymakers. By the magazine’s estimation, Streep placed behind only Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston in 2008 with income of $24 million.
“Isn’t that magnificent?” Sony Pictures Entertainment co-chairman Amy Pascal says. “It’s just awesome. It makes us all really happy.”
ACADEMY ACCOLADES
Sony (Columbia’s parent company), which has fielded some notable underperformers this summer, is banking on an actress who has been nominated for 15 acting Oscars – 12 lead and three supporting. On average, that’s one every other year from 1979 (The Deer Hunter) to 2009 (Doubt). She won statuettes for supporting turns in Kramer Vs. Kramer (1980) and for her lead performance in Sophie’s Choice (1983).
But critical kudos often means bupkis at the box-office. Such talented actresses as Kate Winslet and Hilary Swank – both of whom are building impressive, award-winning bodies of work – have, with one titanic exception, managed only modest returns at theatres. Although there are a handful of younger actresses, who can get a prestige project off the ground, none approaches Streep’s ability to trigger a green light for a nongenre, mainstream Hollywood movie.
Some forget that big box-office is not new to Streep. The Bridges Of Madison County grossed $176 million worldwide in 1995; Death Becomes Her, $149 million in 1992; Out Of Africa, $240 million in 1985; and Kramer, $106 million in 1979. Without much fanfare and with an old-school lack of celebrity-tabloid gamesmanship, she has been drawing wide audiences to theatres for decades, often in (gasp!) challenging dramas.
“There’s never quite been a career like this,” says Julia writer-director Nora Ephron, who remembers Silkwood director Mike Nichols predicting Streep’s success in 1983. “It’s hard to think of any woman who not only kept working after a certain age but didn’t have to do character roles. This thing of hers, where she is as hot as Will Smith, it’s hilarious, and it is such amazing news for those of us who write movies that she’s perfect for.”
Streep’s longtime colleagues have their theories as to why she’s capable of commanding interest on such a wide scale. “She plays people who we identify with or wish we could identify with,” Pascal says. “And she’s completely authentic.”
Ephron explains it this way: “For a great many people, there is such pleasure in watching her hit another one out of the ballpark. That’s the expression that the focus groups will say. They start talking about her as if she’s a ballplayer who’s hit (for) the cycle or something.”
Prada, in which Streep played a no-nonsense fashion-magazine diva, was released June 30, 2006, and grossed an unexpected $324 million worldwide. By contrast, The Break-Up, an anti-romantic comedy released a few weeks earlier with Aniston in the lead, grossed $205 million.
When Streep sang, danced and flirted in the 2008 musical adaptation Mamma Mia!, the film grossed $603 million globally, the fifth-highest-grossing release last year – ahead of James Bond, Iron Man and Sex And The City. Streep certainly isn’t above a bomb; such pics as Dark Matter, Evening, Rendition and Lions For Lambs have failed to resonate. But she remains in that increasingly rare position in Hollywood: She gets a movie green-lighted based solely on her interest.
