Chapter 649: Actor Candidates

The film's three heaviest roles were the male lead, Sam; the female lead, Mikaela; and Lennox, the American military representative. Duke had put the word out early that they would be casting newcomers for the primary roles, drawing a massive crowd of young actors and actresses dreaming of stardom to the auditions.

Over two hundred and fifty actors had submitted their resumes to the production crew just to audition for Sam and Mikaela.

Almost every agent who thought they could pull strings with the crew was scrambling for an opportunity. Even if they couldn't win Duke's favor, simply landing an audition was a mark of status and a way to build hype for themselves.

However, a significant portion of the candidates who passed the first round of auditions for these three roles came from Nancy Josephson's ICM.

Duke didn't mind. Nancy was a core member of his team, and as long as it fell within reasonable bounds, he wasn't inflexible.

Besides, the actors Nancy Josephson sent to audition were generally top-tier choices.

It was just that when Duke opened the folder and flipped through the audition profiles, the first photo to greet him was an unusually familiar face: Steven Spielberg's godson, Shia LaBeouf.

"Spielberg introduced him," Tina Fey chimed in at just the right moment.

Duke nodded, but inwardly he had essentially doomed Shia LaBeouf's chances. Unless they absolutely couldn't find anyone suitable, he definitely wouldn't cast him.

People naturally played favorites. If George Lucas had recommended him, Duke would have undoubtedly given him priority.

He skimmed through the male leads' profiles. Quite a few familiar names stood out, such as Chris Hemsworth, Andrew Garfield, Robert Pattinson, and Chris Pine; Duke even spotted James Franco's name.

Actors born in the seventies were absolutely out of the question for Duke.

Closing the male leads' profiles, Duke set them aside for the moment and picked up the actresses' batch. The requirements for the actresses were actually simpler: as long as they had basic acting chops, they needed gorgeous faces and incredibly hot bodies.

This was, after all, a teen-oriented popcorn flick.

He flipped through them roughly. More than half of the actresses had ICM listed as their agency. Seeing those names, Duke couldn't help but nod; Nancy Josephson had a fairly good eye.

There were quite a few names he vaguely recognized, like Emma Stone, Blake Lively, Emma Roberts, and Emma Watson...

However, Duke wasn't very satisfied with any of them. The issue lay mainly with their looks—they still fell a bit short of the hot body requirement. Instead, two newcomers recommended by ICM seemed quite promising, at least purely based on their physical attributes.

One was named Amber Heard, and the other Margot Robbie. Both were quintessential blonde girls.

Although the names felt a little familiar, Duke truly couldn't remember what roles they had played.

He made a note on both of their profiles and then said to Tina Fey, "Have Anna pay special attention to them in the next audition."

"What about the male actors?" Tina Fey asked.

Reaching for the male actors' profiles, Duke thought for a moment. He made marks beneath the names of Andrew Garfield and Robert Pattinson, then pulled out the final file. He heavily highlighted a male model named Channing Tatum.

Briefly organizing the files, Duke handed them over to Tina Fey. "Give these to Anna. I might head to the Pentagon in a few days. You and she will handle the second round of auditions."

Duke wanted to shoot on location at the Pentagon. However, since 9/11, no Hollywood film crew had shot on location there, so this required coordination and communication between both sides.

Just as Tina Fey was turning to leave, Duke thought of something else. "Finalize the candidate for Lennox as soon as possible. We can take our time with the male and female leads."

The leads didn't need any special training, but the actor playing the special forces officer had to undergo professional training with a team sent by the military, right alongside the other actors playing soldiers.

All major Hollywood productions involving special military subjects did this; it had practically become an unwritten rule.

Take James Cameron's crew, for example. Shortly after finalizing several key actors, the "King of the World" took his cast and production staff into a Maori tribe in New Zealand to experience primitive jungle life.

Making a movie was never a simple task, and this was especially true for major commercial blockbusters.

Before leaving for the Pentagon, Duke attended the priority audition for the role of Lennox and locked in Channing Tatum for the part. Coming from a modeling background, the actor's physique and muscles fit the image of a soldier quite well. His biggest flaw was his stiff face, but for a military role, that wasn't an issue.

Leaving Channing Tatum and the other actors in the hands of Colonel Daniel Ferris and his team for training, Duke caught a flight to Washington D.C. to meet with the top brass at the Pentagon, aiming to completely finalize a series of filming arrangements.

While Duke was busy, David Ellison—who had snatched The Man from Earth right out of his hands—was equally busy with his own movie.

After dropping two million dollars to purchase the rights, David Ellison naturally wanted to push the film into theaters. He tasked the distribution department of his Sky Film Studio with actively contacting theater chains to prepare for the fastest possible release.

Since he had already spent two million dollars, David Ellison didn't care about throwing in another two million to promote it. If this film could rake in over ten million dollars at the North American box office, he would have plenty of ammunition to mock Duke the next time they crossed paths.

Two million dollars sounded like a lot, but in this day and age, trying to promote a movie with two million dollars was like tossing a pebble into the ocean—it could only produce a negligible splash.

The film's advertisements were relegated to obscure corners and minor time slots across the internet, newspapers, television, and radio. Drawing the audience's attention was quite a struggle.

But David Ellison wasn't a fool. After injecting an additional 1.5 million dollars into the marketing budget, he capped the spending. This was, after all, just a niche independent film.

Even by the most optimistic estimates, David Ellison didn't believe the film's North American box office would surpass thirty million dollars. His actual target was ten million dollars; that alone would be enough for him to throw some cold sarcasm in Duke's face.

Following the bolstered promotional investment, The Man from Earth did manage to stir up some waves. Niche films might have a limited audience on North American soil, but they were never short on die-hard enthusiasts. The annual off-season was precisely when these moviegoers were most active.

However, while The Man from Earth caught some attention in its marketing, it ran into a considerable amount of trouble with its distribution.

Distribution wasn't something you could master just by setting up a department and hiring a few experienced employees. The North American theater companies shared deep, intertwined connections with the legacy Hollywood studios. Given identical conditions and investment scales, theater resources would invariably tilt toward the traditional powerhouses.

For a new player like David Ellison just dipping his toes into distribution, the theater chains offered an incredibly meager number of screens, and their locations were relatively remote.

If he hadn't paved the way with cash, the North American Theater Alliance might have delayed The Man from Earth's release until the following year...

Still, money could always work wonders in this country. Even though the screen count was lower and the locations were out of the way, The Man from Earth finally managed to officially land in the North American market in late September, securing a release across over 120 theaters.

In David Ellison's eyes, this wasn't entirely a bad thing. He could just treat it as a limited opening. As long as the limited release box office and audience word-of-mouth were stellar enough, the theater companies would expand the screening scale out of pure commercial greed.

Yet getting the film onto screens required hefty expenses, such as the film prints. Producing over 130 prints burned through three hundred thousand dollars of Sky Film Studio's funds.

The shooting quality of this movie was rather mediocre. Screening it with high-definition digital technology would be an absolute disaster, so they could only resort to making prints on traditional 35-millimeter film.

The cost of digital technology was currently dropping sharply, whereas the price of film prints continued to climb...

After sinking nearly five million dollars into the project, David Ellison finally arrived at the release date. His expectations truly weren't high. As long as The Man from Earth could maintain a per-theater average of over 5,000 dollars throughout its seven-day opening week, he could drum up enough attention during this off-season to secure wider distribution, thereby achieving his goal of crossing ten million dollars at the North American box office.

However, a wide chasm always separated imagination from reality. To the eyes of niche film lovers, The Man from Earth was indeed a fantastic movie. But just like how The Shawshank Redemption still failed at the box office when re-released under the gaze of countless sympathetic and eager eyes, not every good movie was destined to thrive in theaters, nor was it guaranteed that a good movie would automatically rake in a high box office.

On the second day of The Man from Earth's release, David Ellison received a statistical report.

"125 theaters, a total of 426 viewers, and a single-day box office of 2,556 dollars..."

Looking at the numbers on the report, David Ellison already had a grim premonition, though he still clung to a shred of hope. After all, it was only the first day of a limited release. Perhaps as time marched on and word-of-mouth spread, the film's performance would pick up.

On IMDB, the film's rating was actually quite high. Over the following days, the IMDB score for The Man from Earth remained stubbornly elevated; even after a full week in theaters, it sat at an impressive 8.6 points.

Meanwhile, movie fans were leaving reviews in the comment sections, hailing The Man from Earth as a great movie and a mind-bending masterpiece...

But in stark contrast, the film's attendance rates and box office figures were both appallingly low.