Damien Chazelle is “trepidatious” about his next project after Babylon flop
Damien Chazelle knows he's not going to get a Babylon-sized budget for whatever film he makes next
Aux News Damien Chazelle
Babylon has its defenders, but a mixed critical reception and poor box office performance puts Damien Chazelle’s fourth feature film in the “flop” category. While Chazelle has “no problem heaping praise” on the “tremendous” performances (which included Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, and Diego Calva, among others), he regards his 2022 Hollywood historical epic with mixed emotion now. “I don’t think I’m at the point where I can evaluate whether I think I did what I wanted to do,” he tells Ben Mankiewicz on the Talking Pictures podcast. “It’s still very hard [for] me to watch anything I’ve done, but certainly something still fresh. So maybe in five years or 10 years I’ll have more of a sense of it.”
Chazelle is proud that his cast and crew were “all able to get together and put on a show,” but he’s cognizant that Babylon losing a bunch of money might affect future projects. “I’ve kind of been sort of head in the sand, just sort of writing. So I’ll get a real taste of how it’s changed or not once I finish this next script and try to get it made. So I’m in a trepidatious sort of state of mind,” he says of his post-Babylon reception in Tinseltown. “I mean, I have no illusions, I’m not getting a budget of Babylon size any time soon, or at least not on this next one.”
The filmmaker says he’s “learned the hard way” that when he’s working on a new movie, “there’ll be some fundamental part of me that’s anxious no matter what, whether the previous one worked or didn’t.” However, “on financial terms, Babylon didn’t work at all,” he acknowledges. Per Variety, Babylon made a paltry $15 million at the domestic box office and $63 million worldwide on an estimated $80 million budget.
“You try to have that not affect what you’re doing creatively, but maybe at some level, it can’t help but affect it. But then maybe that’s okay? I don’t know. I’m really of mixed minds about it. I guess, maybe at least [I have to] try to do what I would’ve done regardless,” Chazelle muses. “Who knows, maybe I won’t be able to get this one made. I have no idea. We’ll have to see.”
There’s no word, as yet, what Chazelle’s next project might entail. Matthew Vaughn of Kingsman fame and Argylle infamy recently told Deadline that his production company was working on a new Chazelle movie musical that Vaughn himself planned to direct, which is curious—putting Chazelle back in the driver’s seat of a musical could be an easy way to win back Hollywood’s favor, given how beloved La La Land is. But given Chazelle’s resumé so far, he may be too ambitious to tread musical territory again; perhaps he’s willing to pass off a musical script to someone else while he tries something new. (Vaughn also has a lot of projects on his plate, so maybe this musical thing won’t even come to fruition.) Financials are inescapable, but plenty of directors have had worse flops and got second chances. It would be a shame to keep one of the industry’s most prominent rising auteurs in director jail for too long.
8 Comments
wasn’t much of a chazelle fan before, but babylon is an absolute masterpiece to me.
I liked a lot of the craft on display in Babylon, but narratively it felt like it was from like 40 years ago. The lure of stardom, you say? The hollowness of the Hollywood machine, you say? What novelty!
There were a lot of great individual scenes and performances, but I didn’t really know what the point of the movie was (beyond the obvious). And, like a lot of movies of its ilk, it didn’t need to be that long. Cutting half an hour from it could have turned it into something so propulsive that you’re constantly entranced, but at its length there were a few too many lulls that made me start wondering what the point was.On the business side, I sort of can’t imagine who they were thinking was going to see this movie enough to justify its enormous budget. Maybe it was a tax write-off.
Agreed. At any given point, I was enjoying the scene I was watching, but the whole was less than the sum of the parts. The Toby Mcquire dungeon scene especially felt like it was from a different movie (but a surreal and darkly funny movie that I would like to watch).
Babylon made a paltry $15 million at the domestic box office and $63 million worldwide on an estimated $80 million budget. $80M doesn’t seem like that big a budget nowdays, and losing $17M doesn’t seem like the end of the world, especially when you add in all the streaming still going on (I want to check it out now), although I can see how the opportunity cost makes it worse.$15M at the domestic box office with that cast though? Oof, that seems almost impossible, considering it must’ve been a major release on lots of screens.
It’s generally accepted that a theatrically-released movie needs to make 2.5-3x its budget to be profitable to account for the theaters’ cut, marketing costs, distribution costs, etc. So an $80m movie needs to generate anywhere from $200-240m for the studio to break even. I.e. yeah, Babylon was probably quite a bath for Paramount et al. No doubt they made up some money on streaming, but not tons and tons.
Is there a 90 minute version? The length is intimidating
I thought Babylon was interesting but maybe not in the way it was intended to be. It was an effective portrayal of Hollywood’s lure, but it was hard to tell if it was a valentine or scathing critique. The thing of seeing people’s lives destroyed but, hey, whatever, we got Singing in the Rain out of it! It’s easy to draw a line from the culture the movie portrayed to the Weinstein/Weinstein-esque stuff we all later become aware of.
I liked it. I didn’t pay money to see it, but I liked it.