Richard to rescue his stricken Boat
Richard Curtis is going back to the edit suite in a bid to preserve his reputation as a box office colossus following the disappointing results for his latest film, The Boat That Rocked.
In an unprecedented move, the acclaimed writer-director has agreed to re-cut the movie for US audiences.
He’s planning to trim 20 minutes from the running time of the raucous tale about the crew of a pirate radio station in the Sixties, starring Bill Nighy, Rhys Ifans and Gemma Arterton.
“It will be a shorter, leaner version,” said James Schamus, president of Focus Features, which is releasing the film in America for parent company Universal.
“We think it is a real crowd-pleaser. We love a challenge and we love working with Working Title,” he added of the UK company that produces all Curtis’s pictures with hits including Four Weddings And A Funeral, Notting Hill and Love Actually.
But The Boat That Rocked – his second film as director – failed to match those successes when it was released in the UK in April.
It earned less in the first 12 weeks since release – £6.1million – than Love Actually made in its first three days of release in November 2003 when it pulled in £6.6million, a record for a British romantic comedy.
The film was expected to do giant business but proved less critic-proof than Love Actually, a fact partly attributed to the absence of Hugh Grant. It received the harshest reviews of Curtis’s career as critics complained about the film’s length – 129 minutes – and took against the picture’s schoolboy humour.
It was dubbed “The Film That Sucked” by one critic, while another wrote it was “worryingly deficient in laughs for a worryingly large amount of time”.
Overseas the box-office results have also been poor, with an international gross so far of £15million. Making matters worse for Curtis it was the most expensive film of his career – costing in excess of £30million.