I agree with you on that. As I just posted, people are too quick to proclaim Murphy's career dead. He might not be doing "Beverly Hills Cop" dollars, but he's still working. And to hear you say that you can take your child to a movie of his and enjoy it is good stuff to me.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Augustus Augustus" <jazzynupe_...@yahoo.com> To: scifinoir2@yahoogroups.com Sent: Friday, August 7, 2009 9:36:38 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: Re: [scifinoir2] Despite Flops, Studios Want Eddie Murphy Rave, i see where the article is going, but i disagree with the last movie being a flop. imagine that might not have made a ton of money, but my daughter and i truly enjoyed it. she is waiting on the dvd. made me take her 2 see it twice. Fate. --- On Fri, 8/7/09, ravenadal <ravena...@yahoo.com> wrote: From: ravenadal <ravena...@yahoo.com> Subject: [scifinoir2] Despite Flops, Studios Want Eddie Murphy To: scifinoir2@yahoogroups.com Date: Friday, August 7, 2009, 9:22 AM http://www.nytimes. com/2009/ 06/25/movies/ 25eddie.html June 25, 2009 Despite Flops, Studios Want Eddie Murphy By BROOKS BARNES LOS ANGELES — "If Eddie Murphy's career were an injured horse, it would be shot and the carcass buried in the remotest part of the desert to ensure no one ever stumbled upon it." That harsh sentence, written on June 12 by Rick Bentley in The Fresno Bee in California, is as good an example as any of the prevailing sentiment about Mr. Murphy these days. With two big flops in a row ("Imagine That" and "Meet Dave"), another risky project on the way ("A Thousand Words") and a diva reputation, people seem to be confused. Why does Hollywood keep hiring this man? The answer — multifaceted but almost universally agreed upon by moviedom's power players — offers insights into how the gears of the modern motion picture business grind. Mr. Murphy is still considered Hollywood royalty, if no longer a member of the A-list then the solid B-plus. One reason is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, studios have long memories. People who prophesied that his career was over in 2002 with "The Adventures of Pluto Nash," which cost about $100 million to make but only sold about $7 million worldwide in tickets, looked awfully foolish when "Norbit" arrived five years later. It cost about $60 million and featured him in a fat suit, sold $159 million worldwide in tickets and was a smash on DVD. "He is explosive, given the right project, the right circumstances, the right concept, the right director," said Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chief executive of DreamWorks Animation and a friend. What of the notion that Mr. Murphy has lost his movie mojo? "Absolute nonsense," Mr. Katzenberg said. Mr. Murphy, 48, is one of a declining number of actors whose name alone can get a movie made. While studios are increasingly balking at paying top dollar for brand-name actors — and Mr. Murphy still asks for $20 million a picture and a cut of the gross — they still want to be in business with them because they believe it lessens their risk. "The challenge with Eddie is that you have to put his brand on the right tin can," said the consultant James Ulmer, who compiles the biannual report "The Ulmer Scale," which rates the global bankability of actors. "His audiences are very straitjacketed in their expectations of him, and by that I mostly mean fat suit, fat suit, fat suit." In addition Mr. Murphy's name is a marketing hook on a DVD, and he remains one of the few American comedians who can deliver results overseas. Hollywood understands that big-time comedy careers are often volatile. Plot the box office runs of Will Ferrell and Mike Myers against those of dramatic stars like Will Smith and Tom Cruise, and the comedians' are all over the map. Because comedies tend to be easier to film (if not to perform), those players are at bat more often, and so a few misses are considered normal. That's not to say Mr. Murphy isn't paying a price for his track record. Paramount recently rejected a biopic about Richard Pryor that had Mr. Murphy attached to star. The studio's plans for a fourth "Beverly Hills Cop" are also stalled. Web sites like Studio System (studiosystem. com) that track movie projects list a remake of "The Incredible Shrinking Man" as one of his next films, but Universal Pictures put that project on the back burner more than a year ago (around the time "Meet Dave" tanked). Arnold Robinson, Mr. Murphy's publicist, said he would not trouble his client with an interview request from a newspaper. "Mr. Murphy does not do print interviews," he said in an e-mail, adding, "For his age and body of work there are only one or two other actors that can compare to his career box office numbers." Mr. Murphy has other potential projects floating around — a third "Nutty Professor" is in development at Universal — and he has a guaranteed hit next spring in DreamWorks' "Shrek Forever After," in which he reprises his vocal role as the sassy Donkey. But the star also has difficult decisions to make about his career. His longtime agent, James A. Wiatt, the chairman of William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, is leaving the agency. Mr. Wiatt declined to comment, but a spokesman for the agency said it expected Mr. Murphy to remain a client. He hasn't been doing himself many favors when it comes to staying in Hollywood's good graces. It didn't help, for instance, when he fought a paternity claim by the former Spice Girl Melanie Brown in 2007, only to have a DNA test prove him wrong. And he can be difficult when it comes to promoting his movies. He arrived at the "Imagine That" press junket nearly two hours late — far from normal behavior for stars, even major ones — and was 45 minutes late to the premiere. At least he showed up; last summer, he failed to attend the Los Angeles premiere of "Meet Dave." Mr. Murphy, according to his publicist, was unable to attend because he had already started filming "A Thousand Words." That excuse was tough for 20th Century Fox to swallow, since the director of both films, Brian Robbins, managed to do so. Mr. Robinson also said "Imagine That" was not a failure. The comedy, in which Mr. Murphy played a financial executive who enters his daughter's imaginary world, cost about $55 million to make and tens of millions more to market. North American ticket sales appear to have topped out at about $12 million. "Paramount Pictures will make money on `Imagine That' when all is said and done, because it was not an expensive film to make," Mr. Robinson said. (Wall Street analysts say the movie was such a disaster for Paramount that its corporate owner, Viacom, may be forced to take a write-off.) Mr. Murphy's next chance for a comeback will be early next year, when Paramount plans to release "A Thousand Words," a high-concept comedic drama about a fast-talking agent who realizes he only has 1,000 words left to utter before he dies. It's a risky bet, and not just because there is no fat suit involved. The $60 million movie is something of a stepchild at the studio, having been put into production by DreamWorks Pictures, which in turn left the project behind when it cut corporate ties to Paramount last year.
