Using their Bean

Everyone concerned with a studio movie in the hyper-competitive summer season gets distinctly nervous as release date nears. The financial stakes are so high that films need to gross at least $100 million as a baseline for box-office credibility.

No wonder then that the people closest to “Johnny English,” starring Rowan Atkinson, can afford the luxury of looking distinctly relaxed. The comedy, about an inept, bungling British spy who mistakenly believes himself to be suave and competent, doesn’t even open in the U.S. until Friday, yet it has already grossed a cool $120 million(.

“Johnny English” has already opened in more than 40 international territories, and in most of them it was the No. 1 film in its opening weekend. In its native Britain alone, it has grossed $32 million, and in Germany $21 million. Its bandwagon is still rolling; it has yet to open in two major foreign territories, France and Japan. “It did $100 million without blinking,” said Tim Bevan, who with Eric Fellner runs the British production company Working Title, which produced “Johnny English” as well as Atkinson’s previous global hit, “Bean,” and other British successes such as “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” “About a Boy” and “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

But how successful can a thoroughly British film like “Johnny English” be in the huge but insular American market? “Bend It Like Beckham,” a $100-million hit overseas, has recently enjoyed a long run on the U.S. box-office chart, largely due to favorable word of mouth, but has still grossed about $24 million -- a solid hit but not a blockbuster.

Bevan, who likes and admires “Bend It Like Beckham,” insisted: “ ‘Johnny’s’ a much more commercial film.” Employing a cricketing term, he added: “You’ve got to give it a whack, and it’s got all the ingredients, and a studio behind us [Universal] where we can give it a whack. For ‘Johnny English,’ you can cut a tight trailer with five good laughs, and a TV spot with three. Whereas if you tried that with ‘Bend It Like Beckham,’ it would still look weird. It’s more like ‘Billy Elliot,’ it had to [be released] organically and get that word of mouth.”

“Johnny English’s” release in the U.S. raises questions of what unfamiliar or foreign elements American audiences are prepared to tolerate in films. Because of Hollywood’s domination in the global marketplace, this tolerance is definitely a one-way street; non-American audiences are expected to go along with scenes, situations, jokes and references to American culture in Hollywood films that they often cannot understand. A recent example? The Colombian coffee gag in Jim Carrey’s film “Bruce Almighty”; its humor depends on familiarity with a commercial shown on U.S. television, and it’s almost certainly baffling to audiences in the rest of the world.

There’s also the problem of the difference between British and American humor. Many British people think Americans have no sense of irony -- curiously, given that the humor of some of America’s leading comics (Jerry Seinfeld, David Letterman, Jon Stewart, among others) is drenched with irony. While much British humor is literate and waspish, another strain, exemplified by Benny Hill and by Atkinson, has not a shred of irony about it. Most American films aimed at this audience (think “Shrek”) operate on two levels: a main, straight-faced narrative for the kids, laced with ironic pop-culture references to keep parents amused.

So what are the elements in British culture that traditionally weaken the resistance of U.S. audiences? Zany and cute, mainly. Zany, as in the Monty Python films and TV shows, so surreal it didn’t matter if all their arcane references traveled successfully. Cute as in Hugh Grant, tripping over his words as he fired off throwaway zingers in “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “Notting Hill.” And cute as in the five stripper guys from “The Full Monty” breaking into an impromptu, shuffling dance routine while lining up for welfare checks. (Intriguingly, “The Full Monty” was widely viewed in Britain as a somber meditation on the bleak job prospects for unemployed steelworkers. Americans mostly saw it as an adorable, feel-good comedy.)

In terms of breaking down the resistance of audiences not quite attuned to its every nuance, “Johnny English” would seem to have plenty going for it in America. This is, after all, a film that aims solely to make kids giggle. “Most boys who see it, it’s their film of the year,” says Bevan, laughing. “It’s their ‘Citizen Kane.’ ”

Reverse release

For films like “Johnny English,” it’s customary to open in the U.S. first, then to fan out gradually to the rest of the world. So why the switch in strategy? According to Bevan, speaking in his offices above London’s Oxford Street, it was all about timing.

“A year ago, we were trying to date [the release of] the film, and we noticed that Easter 2003 was empty for a good solid family film,” said Bevan, who says the budget for “Johnny English” was less than $40 million. “The thing about Rowan, when he’s the star, it’s a bit like putting the Disney stamp on the front of a film. He’s family-friendly. When it’s one of his characters, parents feel safe about taking their kids to the film. And kids love him.”

Easter is a more significant holiday break in many parts of the world than in the U.S., so Working Title suggested dating “Johnny English” for that weekend throughout Europe and in many other territories. “We didn’t have that really strong date in America, but we had it in foreign, so we decided to go for it, basically,” Bevan recalls. “And we were lucky. No other family film moved on to that date.”

Yet Working Title has collaborated with Atkinson (and his longtime associate, screenwriter Richard Curtis, who was not involved with “Johnny English”) since the late 1980s. And Bevan knows there’s more to the success of “Johnny English” than getting the right release date.

“It wouldn’t have happened at the level it did without Rowan being such a big star,” he noted. “We knew from ‘Bean’ that this guy in foreign [territories] is a big, big star. It’s true even in places you wouldn’t maybe expect -- like Egypt. Or you go to Italy with him, and he gets mobbed.”

The character Johnny English was not known as such when he made his first appearance, on a series of British TV commercials for a credit card company. In what amounted to a James Bond spoof, Atkinson played the nameless spy whose smug arrogance and incompetence leads him into various problems from which he is extricated by his loyal, common-sense assistant Bough (played in the film by Ben Miller). These TV commercials became the most popular and talked-about in Britain for several years.

For the film, extra characters have been added. English now has a boss, code-named Pegasus (played by Tim Pigott-Smith); a love interest (Australian singer-actress Natalie Imbruglia); and an adversary: John Malkovich as Pascal Sauvage, a fiendish French businessman who wants to force the queen of England to abdicate so he can seize the throne.

Bevan observed that Atkinson was involved at all stages, from having input to the script (credited to Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and William Davies) all through post-production: “Rowan completely committed to it, so it’s lovely for him that the film went out and found an audience.”

A harder road than ‘Bean’

It happened before for Atkinson in 1997 with “Bean.” That film’s release in America was also held back until after it had opened to massive success in the rest of the world. As it happened, “Bean” grossed only $45 million in the U.S. market, but that was beside the point; Atkinson’s massive international popularity gave the film a worldwide gross of some $240 million.

Still, “Johnny English” faces an arguably tougher task in the U.S. The appeal of “Bean” was a physical, clownish humor that needed no translation. That much is true of “Johnny English,” but to a lesser extent; it also contains non-American references that might fall flat in the States. (A good example is a scene in which Johnny English destroys cameras on a freeway, placed there to catch speeding motorists. These devices are widely disliked in Britain, where audiences have applauded the scene enthusiastically. But it is unlikely to resonate as much in America, though similar devices have begun to be used in some cities in the U.S.)

“Johnny English” also faces direct competition for its target audience from a slew of strong studio films, including this summer’s family blockbuster, “Finding Nemo,” from Disney/Pixar; DreamWorks’ animated “Sinbad”; and even the slightly more mature “Pirates of the Caribbean.” Bevan is making no predictions about how he expects “Johnny English” to fare in America, but in such a cutthroat market, the film would do well to emulate the U.S. grosses of “Bean.”

A crucial factor in the worldwide success of “Johnny English” has been its strict adherence to a targeted market. “We are aiming for 8- to 12-year-olds with their parents as our core audience for this film,” Bevan reflected. “It’s interesting: If you stay on point and don’t say, ‘Ooh, let’s [try to attract] teenagers too,’ then it will work.”

This focus on the 8- to 12-plus-parents market has helped differentiate “Johnny English” from a franchise about another comically inept British spy, Austin Powers. “Johnny English” is definitely a PG zone, with nothing more offensive than its infantile humor about bodily functions. (OK, poo jokes.) In contrast, last year’s “Austin Powers in Goldmember” received a PG-13 rating in America for “sexual innuendo, crude humor and language.”

There is a comically lascivious air about Mike Myers’ Powers, but Johnny English’s courtship of Imbruglia’s character, Lorna Campbell, is chaste by comparison; there’s nothing overtly sexual to turn off the kids at whom the film is targeted. Noted Bevan: “The difference between us and Austin Powers is that we are not lampooning the genre. Rowan’s character firmly believes in England, the Secret Service and all that that stands for. He is serious in all of this, it’s just that he makes mistakes.”

Consequently, when “Johnny English” opened in Britain to lukewarm reviews, neither Atkinson nor Bevan lost heart. Working Title had asked British critics to see the film with an audience of children, if possible. “But the national [newspaper] press said no, we don’t watch films in that way,” Bevan recalled. “So a bunch of older, cynical reviewers watched it by themselves rather than having the benefit of seeing it through the eyes of their 8-, 9- or 10-year- olds. It didn’t work for them.

“But the magazine press in the U.K. subscribed to the idea and said ‘great.’ You could see it worked with them. The reaction was, ‘Well, it’s not necessarily my cup of tea, but my God, my 12-year-old thought it was fantastic!’ Well, guess what -- that’s who the film was made for!”

Working Title liked this screening strategy so much that it urged Universal to follow suit, and U.S. media screenings of “Johnny English” have been notable for the number of kids present.

How does Bevan account for Atkinson’s youth appeal? “I think there’s a childlike nature to his comedy. He genuinely has a funny face, which kids just seem to adore. And then there’s ‘Bean.’ The whole thing about ‘Bean’ was, it was probably much bigger than we even realized. It had such a huge life, on video and on television, and you can’t really gauge how deep that audience has gone, how many families, how many repeat viewings.”

Whatever the reason, Bevan regards Atkinson as one of only two British film actors with global appeal: “There’s Hugh [Grant] who’s a big movie star, and there’s Rowan, who’s, guess what, a big movie star. No one can open a film like those two. Certainly none of our more ‘serious’ actors.”

He observed that for British films in the U.S. market, “exceeding $60 [million] or $70 million is hard to do. If you think of the British films that have done that recently -- ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary,’ ‘Shakespeare in Love’ and ‘Notting Hill’ -- all three had American leads, albeit playing British in two of them. But now breaking $100 million is what it’s all about. Because with ‘Johnny English,’ we way exceeded expectations in foreign, we don’t need to do that.”