Eugenio Derbez: “If we reach the $6 million mark, it will be a success!”.
“If we reach the $ 6 million mark, it will be a success!”, Eugenio Derbez, Mexican actor and filmmaker, was told about his movie “No se aceptan devoluciones”, or in English, “Instructions Not Included”.
Pantelion, Hollywood’s biggest distributor of Hispanic movies, set up by Lionsgate and Grupo Televisa gave this forecast of the new movie by Eugenio Derbez.
“We reached the $ 6 million mark in just 48 hours,” Eugenio Derbez recalls. “The first weekend closed with over $ 10 million, and we had a screen average of $26,000, the same figures as Avatar or The Avengers; the total box office was over $ 44 million.”
Eugenio Derbez’s debut movie as a director, he also wrote and starred in the film, has now become the highest-grossing Spanish language film in the U.S. ever , overtaking the Spanish film, “Pan’s Labyrinth at $34.3 million.
“The word on the street in Hollywood, is that Latinos are the most important cinema audience in the country”, says Santiago Pozo, founder and CEO of Arenas, the first agency to start prosing the entertainment industry to the Hispanic audience 26 years ago.”Latinos make up 16 percent of the population and buy 27 percent of the movie tickets. They are the cinema’s alpha consumers.
The Hispanic audience is the one that has grown the most, but Hollywood still does not know how to tackle it. Hollywood is searching for the perfect formula. This is why they see Eugenio Derbez a TV star as a key for entering the Hispanic market.
“I have received emails from important people saying, that finally they realize that Latinos, in fact, do go to the movies. But as I say, they do go , but when there is something that interests them. There is a market that is badly neglected and that needs films that connect with them, says Derbez.
He attributes the success of his movie to the fact that the story is “full of magic, and very bright, like “Life is Beautiful”or “Cinema Paradiso”, not another drama about drug trafficking and poverty. It was the first time my US agents had seen a Latino as a winner, not as a criminal. They saw themselves reflected in a good father, a good man, who wins out, even though he does not speak English.”
(to be continued…)
