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A colossal radioactive lizard and a giant ape may do what Christopher Nolan, Mulan and Wonder Woman couldn’t: help a hamstrung international box office get back on its feet.
After a year of dispirit ticket sales, cinema operators have been on the look-out for the next big hard-hitter to pull them out of their pandemic-inflicted slump.
Between Nolan’s time-warping
Mulan and Patty Jenkins’s superhero sequel
Wonder Woman 1984, the film industry’s revival seemed like a sure thing. But three of the most anticipated films of 2020 barely managed to break even at the box office.
There were a number of reasons for this. Audiences were understandably still wary of flocking back to the cinemas, and many theatres across the world remained closed. And where they were open, social distancing measures prevented venues from operating at full capacity. Films such as
While the pandemic has been responsible, in part, for delaying the release of
The Misfits – billed to be the first-of-its-kind blockbuster to be shot entirely in the UAE – it has allowed time for diligent revision to the film’s soundtrack and visual effects.
Now
scheduled to be released this summer,
Mansoor Al Dhaheri, chief executive and founder of Filmgate Productions, says viewers are going “to have a blast” when they see the film.
“We made some changes. We made the film better through the music and the visual effects,” Al Dhaheri tells
The National. “We managed to get Trevor Rabin, the composer behind
by international artists
, which Hedayah says leaves many interesting works out of the picture.
“In 2021, you shouldn’t have to have an album to be eligible for an award,” he says. “The digital era we are living in is singles-based.”
Hedayah says
in the past, artists have had to release albums because of the large-scale production and distribution costs involved. The music had to be printed on vinyl records, CDs and tapes before making distribution rounds. If profit was to be made from
these enormous expenses then artists had little choice but to release full-length albums. But this
is no longer the case.
Production of the final episodes of the post-apocalyptic series was delayed but has also creatively affected how the story unfolds, says its showrunner