Open Road Attempts Comeback With Liam Neeson’s ‘Honest Thief’

Can one of the more prominent small-scale distributors of the early 2010’s succeed in an entertainment industry even further dominated by theatrical tentpoles and online streaming?

So reports Deadline, Open Road Films is apparently coming back from the dead. Thanks to funding from Raven Capital Management and in a partnership with Briarcliff Entertainment, one of the more prominent upstart distributors of the prior decade is having another go. Their first domestic theatrical release will be the Liam Neeson thriller Honest Thief, which is still listed as opening on September 4, 2020 (Labor Day weekend). Whether a boutique distributor has a shot in hell of survival in this current environment, it’s ironic that the first movie of the “new” Open Road will be a Liam Neeson action thriller.

Their second release, and their first hit, was Joe Carnahan’s acclaimed The Grey, a Liam Neeson survivalist thriller which earned $51 million domestic from a $19 million opening weekend in January of 2012. If you recall, the film was sold as a “Liam Neeson fights wolves in the forest” movie, even though that sequence was only at the very end of the film (and it cut to black before the big fight). The Grey the pulled a decent 2.662x multiplier, which was impressive both considering the misleading marketing and the fact that the film wasn’t an action movie but rather a grim drama about plane crash survivors contemplating their inevitable death.

As I always say, whatever gets them in the door is fair game, and if the movie is good than audiences won’t mind a marketing misdirect. Anyway, Open Road, founded in 2011 by Briarcliff’s Tom Ortenberg, was initially owned by AMC and Regal. The idea was to acquire mid-budget, star-driven, meat-and-potatoes studio programmers to give theaters more theatrical content during periods when studios weren’t dropping mega-bucks tentpoles. They actually won a Best Picture Oscar in 2016 for Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight ($42 million domestic in 2015/2016). It’s telling that three of the last five Best Picture winners came from new studios (Open Road in 2016, A24 in 2017 and NEON in 2020).

They also had some genuine successes like End of Watch ($41 million domestic in 2012), The Nut Job ($64 million in 2013), A Haunted House ($40 million in 2013), Nightcrawler ($32 million in 2014), Dope ($17 million in 2015) and Mother’s Day ($32 million domestic in 2016). Alas, things went to hell pretty much right after Spotlight. If you’re a regular reader of my ramblings, you already know why. First, the major studios started getting aggressive about year-round tentpole scheduling, so the notion of their being much time during the year without a major franchise flick or “event movie” quickly became a thing of the past.

Second, 2016 is about when we started seeing a generational demographic shift from theaters to streaming. Save for the oldest audiences who still saw indies in theaters, general moviegoers stopped showing up for the old-school studio programmers and instead got their non-tentpole filmed entertainment via VOD or streaming. With copious quality content, presented in HD and surround sound (and with home theater-type set-ups being more readily affordable), the smaller movies started to take it on the chin. That the various franchise-specific tentpoles like The Martian, Captain America: Civil War and Zootopia were able to appeal to both adults and kids made adult-skewing action movies almost irrelevant.

There’s a reason why Liam Neeson never opened a non-Taken actioner to the heights of Non-Stop ($30 million) after 2014. Open Road eventually became Global Road. All due respect to some films that I rather liked (Hotel Artemis is terrific and AXL is the genuine article of what Bumblebee was comparatively mimicking) and some I rather did not (Show Dogs is as bad as you may remember), Global Road didn’t exactly break out of the pack. Open Road was among the more visible of the various early 2010’s-era upstarts (including Broad Green, Bleecker Street and, playing on a slightly different plane, STX Entertainment), if only because of their initial successes and that Oscar triumph.

I have no idea if they can recapture that early glory, especially as the variables that caused their defeat (streaming and VOD along with year-round tentpole scheduling) haven’t gone away. However, speaking optimistically, if the big studios hold back on non-tentpole offerings for the near future as the industry recovers from the coronavirus-related closures, it’s possible that there may be an opening for star vehicles, studio programmers and the like amid the less prevalent tentpole flicks. That may be delusion on my part, but fingers-crossed. At the very least, I hope Honest Thief is as good as (offhand) Cold Pursuit, The Commuter, A Walk Among the Tombstones and The Grey.