In a year when Hollywood studios are finding it tough to get US moviegoers to buy tickets to any single film, leave it to Harvey Weinstein to try and get film fans to pay to see a story told from three points of view.
With the Weinstein Co.’s “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby,” which opens Sept. 12, the studio exec will have to come up with a plan to get fans to see the love story — and then come back a month later and pay to see basically the same movie, albeit in a double feature, one told from his perspective and the other from hers.
If marketing a three-piece, two-admission movie wasn’t hard enough, Weinstein will have to pull it off in a down US movie market.
US box-office revenue is off 5.2 percent through the first eight months of the year after a punishing summer season, according to Box Office Mojo.
“These days there’s a lot of reports about the box-office declines,” Stephen Bruno, the indie studio’s president of marketing, told The Post in a phone interview from the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. “We’re trying to be at the forefront of being unique and trying to distribute pictures of worth.”
“Rigby,” a love story that goes awry after a tragedy between the couple (played by Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy), was picked up by Weinstein Co. a year ago at the Toronto Film Festival.
The movies, the first of which is referred to as “Them,” while the perspectives are called “Him” and “Her,” is from first-time director Ned Benson, who insisted the eventual buyer market two movies before he made a deal.
Weinstein is already out stoking the first burst of interest before the movie hits theaters in order to catch the wave of film-festival heat and beat the rush of big commercial releases, including 21st Century Fox’s “Gone Girl,” which stars Ben Affleck and has a similar perspective. That movie is out Oct 3.
“We wanted to get up and out so we can play for a few weeks,” Bruno said. “Rigby”’ will go up against “No Good Deed,” from Sony and “Dolphin’s Tale 2,” from Warner Brothers Pictures in its opening weekend.
The actors are lined up to hit the A-list TV programs, “CBS News Sunday Morning” and “The Daily Show,” and late-night leaders Jimmy Fallon and David Letterman, among others.
Then, Bruno will have to go back at it all over again with the Oct. 10 release of the two perspectives.
Promos for “Him” and “Her” will be altered and Chastain and McAvoy will be back front and center with a heavy marketing schedule to stoke the second round of ticket buying.
“The publicity for the second movie will still help the first round,” Bruno said, giving a glimpse inside the Weinstein marketing manual.
The marketing for all three films will skew slightly female, he said.
Many in Hollywood will be watching to see if Weinstein is able to pull it off.
“If the first one catches a nerve and takes off, the other movies have a chance,” said one Tinseltown insider. “If it doesn’t work then they go out in little theaters [second time around] and hope the film students come.”
So far, “Them” has scored 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates critics reviews.
“From an art standpoint it is incredibly admirable and interesting,” an anonymous Hollywood rival said. “You don’t often get the chance to tell the story from another point of view. From a commercial perspective, it’s challenging.”