The Must See Netflix Movie That Bombed At The Box Office

We all know that a movie isn’t worth seeing just because it has a big budget. As Marvel Studios has found out to its peril, audiences are growing tired of costly effects-laden films, regardless of how well-known their cast is or how embedded their plot is in an overarching storyline. Despite plummeting ticket takings, studios continue to churn out movies which cost north of $200 million to make and this has opened the door to a new wave of upstarts.

Although it would be highly unusual to watch a movie purely because it cost a lot to make, the reverse is much more common. In 2023, monster movie Godzilla Minus One went viral when it came to light that its effects were up there with blockbusters from Disney and Universal even though it only had a budget of $15 million. It helped the movie gross $113.7 million at the box office and led to it becoming the first-ever number one on both Netflix and iTunes at the same time. That’s not all.

Last year Godzilla Minus One beat Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One to win the Academy Award for best visual effects. There was good reason why its achievement deserved acknowledgement.

Its low budget effects gave aspiring film makers hope that they too could reach the highest echelons of Hollywood. Moreover, if innovative movies like this aren’t made then Hollywood will forever be dominated by big budget cookie cutter blockbusters.

Historically, studios’ flagship films were designed to be tentpoles meaning that they make so much profit they can outweigh the losses generated by riskier, but often more critically-acclaimed, productions. However, as costs have increased and theater admissions have fallen following the pandemic, studios have become increasingly cautious. It has made riskier productions less appealing and led studios to gravitate to films featuring A List stars and famous franchises.

With hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal, the production teams behind these movies have little need nor incentive to be innovative and this can cause the end result to feel formulaic. There are of course exceptions to this but often franchise films come across as being hollow with a concept which has been copied and pasted from a predecessor.

Making matters worse, it appears that studios find out what their competitors are working on at an early stage and commission similar movies of their own. It perhaps explains why summer this year will be dominated by movies from rival studios based on classic superhero characters Superman and the Fantastic Four whilst a few years ago martial arts was the order of the day when Paramount released Snake Eyes the month before Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Just a few years before that, Warner Bros. brought out Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice two months before Marvel’s titanic superhero tussle Civil War.

These films aren’t famous for their innovation causing critics to complain that big budget blockbusters are sucking the creativity out of cinema. Netflix is proof that the two can comfortably co-exist in a studio. As this report revealed, Netflix spent $207 million on Back in Action, its current number one movie, whilst another recent addition wasn’t just far cheaper, it pioneered groundbreaking techniques to keep costs down.

Called Here, the Miramax movie is a drama about events that take place on a single plot of land in New England. It stars Tom Hanks, Robin Wright and Paul Bettany and spans almost the complete history of time. At the start, dinosaurs are shown roaming around the land whilst the conclusion covers the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond. It’s a bold premise but what makes it so innovative is the way it was made.

Here is directed by Robert Zemeckis, who is acclaimed for his visual effects innovations which began with the insertion of hand-drawn animation into live-action footage in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He followed it up with some of Hollywood’s earliest uses of computer graphics in Back to the Future Part II and Forrest Gump, which also starred Wright and Hanks. More recently, Zemeckis has become famous for his eerily human-like computer animated movies made with live action performance capture including The Polar Express, Beowulf and A Christmas Carol. Perhaps surprisingly given its more sober tone, Here is more groundbreaking than all of them.

Aside from a scene at the end, the movie is filmed from a fixed perspective in order to maintain the connection across a tremendously-long timeframe. This keeps costs down and forced Zemeckis to get back to his roots.

As he explained to The Wrap, “when you have a fixed view, the camera isn’t going to tilt up or down or boom up and down to keep the actor in frame.” Instead, he had to resort to old school movie-making techniques such as ramps hidden in the stage which were used for shorter actors getting closer to camera whilst their taller counterparts had to stand in a trench. That’s just the start.

Unlike many movies, Here uses artificial intelligence technology and is proud of it. It is made by Metaphysic, the British company behind the famous Tom Cruise deepfake and the photorealistic avatar of Elvis which sang on stage during an episode of America’s Got Talent. It caught the attention of executives at Miramax who felt the technology could unlock new opportunities in Hollywood.

This led to the creation of Metaphysic Live which enables film-makers to create photorealistic faceswaps as well as de-aging effects mapped in real time on to footage from actors performing on a set. It is used to great effect in Here to show the lead characters transforming over time as Zemeckis explained to The Hollywood Reporter.

“I’ve always been attracted to technology that helps me to tell a story.” he said. “With Here, the film simply wouldn’t work without our actors seamlessly transforming into younger versions of themselves. Metaphysic’s AI tools do exactly that, in ways that were previously impossible. Having tested every flavor of face replacement and de-aging technology available today, Metaphysic are clearly the global leaders in feature-quality AI content and the perfect choice for this incredibly challenging, emotional film.”

The movie features 53 minutes of full face replacement with some shots lasting up to four minutes each so the technology needed to scrutiny. The end result in Here is flawless and it’s thanks to Metaphysic’s learning process. As Metaphysic’s visual effects supervisor Jo Plaete explained to leading VFX industry magazine Befores & Afters, “it’s based upon photographic reference that goes into these neural models that we train.”

The movie’s production VFX supervisor Kevin Baillie added that “it is incredible to see Metaphysic’s AI-generated content flawlessly integrated into a shot live on set. The actors can even use the technology as a ‘youth mirror’ – testing out acting choices for their younger selves in real time.” It means that effects which would usually be created during post production could be implemented during the shoot at Pinewood Studios in the United Kingdom which saved time and therefore money.

It also made for a more authentic acting experience as the film-makers didn’t need to use mocap suits and spartan sets which are usually required for effects-heavy productions. Instead, three elaborately-designed sets were built at Pinewood – one for the outside shots whilst the other two were dressed in different time periods so that the actors could jump from one to the other with the software instantly adjusting their appearance.

The view through the window in the room on the set even changed with it. That’s because outside the window was a 7 meter x 3.5 meter LED wall which could convey 85 different eras thanks to images produced by leading VFX firms Dimension Studios/DNEG 360.

However, switching from one set to the other still required a return to traditional techniques as the camera had to be in precisely the same position on each set. The film makers had a rig on rails to ensure that the camera would move to the same spot on both sets but they didn’t reckon with England’s cold climate. This caused the rails to cool overnight moving the camera by a few millimeters. It meant that First Assistant
Camera operator Julian Bucknall had to check every day that the position was identical on both shots by zooming into the pixels at an 8K resolution.

None of this would have been possible if it wasn’t for the groundbreaking AI technology as the effects would have had to be created in post instead which would have added time and money to the production. The technology breaks down the barriers for other film-makers as Thomas Graham, chief executive and co-founder of Metaphysic, explained. “Metaphysic is demonstrating the transformative power of hyperreal AI to shape the future of entertainment and to eventually help people create AI-generated, photorealistic immersive content while they own and control their data.”

There’s no doubt about the impact that it had on the cost of Here. Budgets of films made in the United States are usually a closely-guarded secret as studios tend to absorb the costs of individual pictures in their overall expenses and don’t itemize how much was spent on each one. It’s a different story for movies which are made in the U.K. like Here.

Miramax chief executive Jonathan Glickman has been contacted through his Panoramic Media production company, and although he didn’t respond to an opportunity to comment on the cost, he didn’t need to. That’s because the cost of making Here is laid bare in Miramax’s own filings.

Studios shoot in the U.K. to benefit from the government’s Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit (AVEC) which gives them a cash reimbursement of up to 25.5% of the money they spend in the country.

To qualify for the reimbursement, at least 10% of the production costs need to relate to activities in the U.K. In order to prove to the government how much money they spent in the U.K., studios set up a separate production company there for each movie they make. The companies have to file financial statements which reveal everything from the headcount and salaries to the total costs and the level of reimbursement. It takes a bit of detective work to get the information.

The companies usually have code names so that they don’t raise attention with fans when filing permits to film on location. Tallying the company names with the productions they are responsible for requires deep industry knowledge which my colleague and I have built up over nearly 15 years. We are the only reporters worldwide who specialize in covering the financial statements of U.K. film production companies for national media and we have reported on them for more than 10 leading titles including The Times of London, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and the London Evening Standard.

The financial statements have a public interest in the U.K. media as the reimbursement to the studios comes from taxpayers’ money. Outside the U.K. the interest is in the bigger picture matter of the production costs.

The Miramax subsidiary behind Here is called Century UK Productions in a nod to the timeframe of the film. As with all U.K. companies, its financial statements are released in stages long after the period they relate to which is why its latest filings are for just over a year to July 22, 2023. That covers the filming period which began in January 2023 and, crucially, also incorporated a great deal of the work which would typically be done in post.

So even though the movie, which was distributed by Sony, didn’t debut until October 2024, its costs shouldn’t surge tremendously in future filings as is usually the case. The filings reveal that the “cost was in line with the budget” at just $43.9 million (£34.1 million). It didn’t stop there as the production benefited from a $7.5 million (£5.8 million) reimbursement bringing the net spending down to just $36.4 million with one one of the biggest costs being the $4.4 million (£3.4 million) spent on the 65 crew members.

As with any film shoot, the vast majority of the crew were freelancers, contractors and temporary workers who don’t appear on the production company’s books as employees.

The latest data from the British Film Institute (BFI) shows that in 2019, the fiscal incentives led to the creation of 37,685 jobs in London and 7,775 throughout the rest of the U.K. Filming doesn’t just create jobs for locals, it also drives spending on services such as security, equipment hire, transport and catering. The BFI’s data shows that when the wider impacts of the film content value chain are taken into consideration, 49,845 jobs were created in London in 2019 and 19,085 throughout the rest of the U.K.

Although Here was a winner for the U.K. and a triumph of cinema, it has had a lukewarm reception. Critics awarded it just 37% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes with audiences giving it a higher score of 59%. However, this hasn’t translated into ticket takings as it only earned $15.8 million in theaters according to industry analysts Box Office Mojo.

The movie now has an opportunity to get a second wind as it debuted on Netflix on January 30. Unlike other streaming services, Netflix releases detailed information about the popularity of its programming. Highlights appear on logging in to the service which are then used in reports by the fan community about the best shows. The streamer also releases detailed weekly results for the business community which show that in its first week Here was the fourth most-watched film in the U.S. so it seems to be getting better traction than in theaters.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether audiences like the movie or not because cinema, like any art, is subjective. The whole point of it is to showcase creativity and Here doesn’t just do this, it pulls it off in a way which enables grass-roots movie-makers to follow suit. Other studios could do a lot worse than to follow its lead.