Eschewing Formulas: Joey McFarland, left, and Riza Aziz founded Red Granite Pictures. The 12-employee company has eschewed a template for producing movies.
By Daniel Miller
Where movie studios see trouble, Red Granite Pictures sees opportunities.
The new finance and distribution company’s business plan is both contrary and simple: Make films the studios don’t.
Among its first projects are Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, which opened Wednesday, and next year’s Dumb and Dumber To, the intentionally misspelled sequel to the 1994 comedy.
On the surface, those pictures don’t exactly seem like the sort that a major studio would cast aside.
But both were complicated projects, fraught with thorny issues. Red Granite’s founders, Riza Aziz and Joey McFarland, said they thrive in these sorts of scenarios.
“One of our sweet spots is movies that have died in the studios – movies that are just great product that everyone was hot on but for some reason or another just didn’t make it to the greenlight stage,” said McFarland, 41, a Louisville, Kentucky native who is Red Granite’s vice chairman.
McFarland and Aziz, Red Granite’s chairman, started the West Hollywood company in 2009. That year, they began working on their first film, the comedy Friends With Kids, which came out in 2012 and grossed $12 million worldwide.
They were also a producer on the recent drama Out of the Furnace, which was released in early December, and Horns, a Daniel Radcliffe-starring horror film that will be distributed by Weinstein Co's Radius label next year.
Red Granite, which has 12 employees, has eschewed a template for producing pictures. In the case of Out of the Furnace, the company acquired the project’s international rights from Relativity Media and then used its own in-house foreign distribution arm, Red Granite International, to sell the movie oversees.
On The Wolf of Wall Street, Red Granite struck a deal with Paramount Pictures to have the studio distribute and promote the movie domestically for a fee. Red Granite sold the international rights to the film, mitigating the company’s downside risk.
“Every movie is different,” said Aziz, 37, who is the son of the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak. “We are very flexible in the model we pursue.”
Red Granite raises money from a pool of undisclosed investors in the Middle East and Asia, and finances its movies on a one-off basis. The company is able to greenlight a picture without a distribution deal in place. But because it doesn’t have a fund it can tap, Red Granite must convince its investors that an individual project is worth the risk, rather than having the comfort of money to underwrite an entire slate.
That’s a tough business to be in, because one flop could scare off investors.
Graham King, the veteran producer behind such critical and commercial hits as The Departed and The Aviator, knows the travails of this business well. He produced Scorsese’s expensive 2011 3-D family film Hugo, which won five Oscars but struggled at the box office.
“That’s when I started paying attention,” King said. “The studios know what they are talking about. They take the occasional risk and they know what attracts an audience.”
The Wolf of Wall Street is no Hugo when it comes to cost, but with a price of roughly $100mn, it wasn’t cheap. Red Granite paid for it all – a big bet for a fledgling company.
Wolf had an estimated five-day opening run of $34mn, enough to beat out the five other films that opened wide Wednesday – Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, 47 Ronin, Grudge Match, Justin Bieber’s Believe and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
But that’s at best a decent opening for such a costly project, which has an R rating and a three-hour running time.
“I take my hat off to anyone that wants to get in and dive in at the deep end, so to speak,” King said. “It’s all a gamble, isn’t it?”
Getting Wolf wasn’t easy. McFarland and Aziz fought for years to get the underlying rights to the movie, and then found their production interrupted by Hurricane Sandy.
Paramount Chairman and Chief Executive Brad Grey praised Red Granite.
“Getting Wolf made was a journey shared by many, and credit goes to Riza, Joey and their entire Red Granite team for believing in and supporting the project at a crucial time,” Grey said in a statement. “Marty delivered a wildly entertaining picture, and everyone at Paramount has been delighted to work with Red Granite.”
While Wolf has wound up being a hit, Dumb and Dumber To, slated for release in November 2014, could take the company even higher. The project, which cost about $40 million, reunites Dumb and Dumber stars Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels with the original film’s directors, Bobby and Peter Farrelly.
Red Granite worked for months to assemble the creative team from the original New Line Cinema picture and persuaded the company to cut a deal for the sequel, McFarland said. With that in place, Red Granite inked a domestic distribution agreement with Universal Pictures, which will release and market the film. New Line, a subsidiary of Warner Bros., retains a significant financial interest in the movie. – MCT
