The Twitter account for Ava DuVernay’s Origin has gone rogue against Neon
Irritated by the lack of promotion, whoever runs the Twitter account for Ava Duvernay’s Origin is accusing Neon of botching the film’s release
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Photo: Dia Dipasupil
The Twitter account for Ava DuVernay’s latest film, Origin, is getting spicy on main. Calling out the movie’s distributor Neon of, among other things, not inviting DuVernay to the company’s Oscar party, the film’s social media feed is filled with messages for Neon, accusing it via retweets of bungling Origin’s release. The account’s 750 some-odd followers were treated to tweets and retweets lambasting the distributor for allegedly putting all its advertising dollars toward the Oscar-winning Anatomy Of A Fall, leaving the likes of Origins and Ferrari to wither on the vine.
Yesterday, the account retweeted a photo from the Neon Oscar party, wondering why Duvernay wasn’t invited. “Is it odd that the filmmakers of Neon’s current film in theaters weren’t invited to this Neon celebration? Nope. Standard operating procedure for [Neon founder Tom] Quinn and team. That’s how Neon rolls. More on this later.”
We don’t know if there was a mandate to invite every Neon-related director to the party, but DuVernay was at the Oscars, so it was rude not to ask.
Origin marked another commercial disappointment for DuVernay. Her previous work, Disney’s A Wrinkle In Time, crawled across the $100 million mark on a reported $100 million budget. Origin was considerably less expensive but grossed less than $5 million on a $38 million budget.
In addition to explicitly calling Neon out, the account has become a repository for negative reposts of the company’s handling of Origin’s Oscar campaign. One tweet from actor Wendell Pierce calls Origin “one of the best films of our time” that will “receive no accolades but will be remembered long after most of the Oscar-awarded films reach obscurity.”
@ORIGINTheMovie also retweeted news articles reporting on several distribution-related lawsuits against Neon, including those filed by the producers of Clemency and the Aretha Franklin documentary Amazing Grace, both of which, like Origin, center on Black women. The account also directly shared a screenshot from the website Showbiz 411, criticizing the distributor for its handling of Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, an Oscar-nominee released in mid-February, saying that Origin and Michael Mann’s Ferrari were “snuffed out” because Neon put “all their eggs in the Anatomy Of A Fall basket.” Of course, Anatomy Of A Fall had already been nominated for two Oscars, including Best Picture, and would go on to win Best Original Screenplay.
Earlier this year, DuVernay expressed frustration with Neon’s handling of the film—though not nearly as pointedly as the more recent posts. “It’s been disappointing it has not had the reach in the Hollywood community in terms of the industry that considers awards, and that’s a mechanism of our distributors’ limited budget and strategy in the way that it’s been rolled out,” DuVernay told AP in January. Though even there, she seems optimisitic of the film’s future, saying that “when people do see it, the response has been overwhelmingly positive […] Time will tell and time will reward the film for its merits.”
This is a sharp turn from where the film began. In November, Deadline reported that Origin was DuVernay and Neon’s highest-tested movie. On February 28, Neon re-released Origin in 500 theaters across the U.S. for a one-night-only special screening.
DuVernay financed the film through nontraditional means, finding backing from philanthropists, including the Ford Foundation, Melinda Gates, Laurene Powell Jobs, and 23andMe CEO Anny Wojcicki. At the time, this was hailed as a way to free her from the restraints of budgets, allowing metrics other than box office to determine its impact—at least according to Jobs. However, without the push from Neon, the film was unable to break through the awards season noise.
Even more nontraditional was its marketing. After seemingly giving up on Neon promoting the movie as they saw fit, in January, Origin star Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor began handing out fliers for the film outside a Los Angeles AMC. DuVernay later shared the video on Instagram, writing that her “heart aches” for her star. She wrote:
“Someone posted this footage, and I burst into tears. This was apparently taken last Sunday, Golden Globes day. This is a video of Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. Our lead actress in Origin. She wasn’t nominated that day. She was handing out postcards for our film at a local AMC in LA to passersby. She had told me that she wanted to remind herself about what matters. That she wanted to invite people to see our work, and that she would stay low profile, keep on her mask. That it wasn’t about her, but about the movie. Someone noticed her. And recorded her. And now I see this – and my heart aches.”
17 Comments
Boring movie.
Considering this is the second time I’ve heard ANYthing about this movie (the first was another article about its lack of promotion), I feel like whoever’s doing this is definitely not wrong.
They didn’t promote it because it’s a giant piece of shit.
Jfc… you think the marketing from the distributor is solely to blame for the fact that nobody talks about the movie? Rather than the movie itself being incredibly maudlin and dry? Do you not think that maybe, just maybe, there would have been some word of mouth if it was actually that good?Also pretty moronic to claim that Neon was wrong to focus on Anatomy of a Fall when it was nominated for multiple Oscars and won the Palme d’Or. Sure seems to have been a pretty good decision and to have worked out pretty well to me.
The ONLY on-air promotion was DuVernay on KTLA, a local LA news station, and the interviewer literally asked if it would be eligible for nominations NEXT YEAR! DuVernay had to spell out that its OUT NOW and eligible.I saw it with my entire family and we were all moved by it. Yes, its didactic in parts, but tbh, a lot of people NEED to be educated on the profound idea of the movie/book. People were stunned walking out of the movie and stood in the hallways talking to each other — and we NEED to talk to each other in America right now.
Anatomy of a Fall was just nominated for a bunch of Oscars, including Best Picture, and won Best Original Screenplay. I imagine Neon’s feeling comfortable with where it focused its promotional efforts.
It also won the Palme d’Or. And it has a great performance by one of the highest regarded actors of the moment. And it has a cute dog.
Meanwhile, Origin is an adaptation of non-fiction book into a docudrama that got the words ‘uneven’ and ‘didactic’ dropped a lot into the generally mostly positive, but certainly not rave, reviews. And for a movie like that reviews are important.
I didn’t know she was highly regarded!?
Origin was surprisingly good, better than the more publicised Ferrari, though not nearly as good as Anatomy of a Fall. Though for all the Oscar buzz that last one had, it also won the Palme d’Or, which also helps spread word of mouth considerably. I don’t think Neon does a lot of actual promotion for any of their movies, really, aside from trailers and some small web presence. Anatomy does have a website promoting it, but I didn’t know about it until after I’d seen the movie, which seems to be more or less as designed. But overall, I think of it as a much smaller distributor than even A24, which is also limited in just how much it can use for promotion, and for whom. If you have to pick one movie to focus your promotion on, it’s probably a safe move to do it for the one that stars one of those Star War people, even if it didn’t exactly work out for them.
It does seem like common sense to invite all your directors and lead actors to your Oscar party if you’re a small distributor, but they apparently released over a dozen movies this year, so that could probably get out of hand pretty quickly. I also think I remember reading this same basic story about some other director and production company in previous years, so I guess it’s just not customary to invite anyone not specifically nominated.
TIL there’s a movie distributor called Neon.
It’s just some guy in a late 90’s Chrysler compact driving around with stacks of DVDs.
this movie is having one of the wildest press runs i’ve ever seen.
It’s bad optics perhaps, but on the other hand Origin is just awful. Takes a good academic idea then waters it down to this incredibly maudlin, emotionally manipulative sl0w-mo, tears falling exercise in banality. I was so disappointed when I saw it.
There were parts I really liked and parts that really didn’t work. Would have been better as a doc.
Ava DuVernay is such a delusional piece of shit. She’s literally never made a decent movie, but constantly complains that everyone is being racist to her. Everyone. The Venice Film Fest was racist. The media is racist (lol), even the distributor that bought her piece of shit movie that no one wants to watch is now racist. Meanwhile, the reality is that no one has benefited more from racial grievance culture than her. She’s untalented and not particularly intelligent.
A) Pretty asinine to claim that Neon was wrong or should have done anything differently considering that Anatomy of a Fall won a Palme d’Or and was nominated for multiple Oscars.B) Origin sounds excruciatingly dry and boring, and pretty much everything I’ve heard from people who have seen it confirms as much, while adding that it is also maudlin and melodramatic. C) Considering that Wrinkle of Time was terrible, and considering the relative lack of success of some of her recent movies… mayhap Duvernay’s reputation as an amazing director is just a bit overstated?
Whoever runs the Twitter account?Ava DuVernay was a PR for something like 5 or 7 years. She even had her own firm. She’s directed some good stuff. Selma was really affecting for instance. But a film such as A Wrinkle in Time was heavily promoted through a strategy that emphasized her own achievements rather than the supposed merits of the film itself.