More than five years after launching his film financing and production company Hammerstone Studios, producer Alex Lebovici is at “a major turning point.” After years of working on “kit” projects that had little to no interest to him on a story level, he has recently been able to put together an increasingly dense studio roster and devote himself exclusively to producing the “fun, commercial, star -Projects”. “driven films” that he enjoys watching.
The exciting horror thriller will be released in September 2022 BarbarianUnderlining the company’s commitment to fresh genre fare with big, original ideas, Hammerstone aims to recapture the zeitgeist this weekend Boy kills worldan action thriller with BarbarianThis is Bill Skarsgard. Directed by Moritz Mohr, he plays the boy who vows revenge after his family is murdered by Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen), the deranged matriarch of a corrupt post-apocalyptic dynasty that once left him orphaned, deaf and voiceless.
Boy kills world has had an unusual path to theaters: its world premiere at TIFF took place in the middle of an actors’ strike and lacked any public relations talent. After a recut of the first act and the addition of a voiceover by H. Jon Benjamin, who delivers Boy’s inner monologue, the film received a distribution deal from Lionsgate/Roadside in January.
Lebovici is aware that this violent flick is not for everyone. The producers take charge of P&A, which was financed by Nthidah Pictures. Currently, the film is expected to gross around $2 million from just under 2,000 theaters, according to Deadline midday projections. It’s “one of those that people either love or hate,” says Lebovici, something “you have to be a fan of the genre to really appreciate.” Still, he hopes for the film’s future as a discovery title, “one “those midnight movies that play for years.”
A producer who prides himself on his involvement at every stage of the film’s run, Lebovici began his formal training in the film business at the New York Film Academy on Universal Studios’ main campus, where he used his student ID to sneak into the adjacent theme park. However, he learned his greatest lessons at home in Toronto, Canada.
After his internship at Neal H. Moritz’s Original Film – the company behind it – he got into a confrontation with a director whose parking space he accidentally parked in Fast & Furious franchise and other tentpoles – he was fired and lost his visa, forcing his return to the Great White North. Nevertheless, he didn’t give up on his Hollywood dreams, but doubled down.
At this point, Lebovici felt he had understood the creative side of filmmaking, having been making short films since he was 13. His company takes its name from the street in Thornhill, Ontario, where he and his friends were arrested as children while filming an outdoor action scene with fake guns. “Someone called the police and said, ‘There’s a children’s militia outside,'” he recalls, “and so we were held at gunpoint by about six patrol cars.”
When Lebovici returned to his home country, he dedicated himself to learning the basics of business administration. “A door-to-door salesman by nature,” he achieved this not by working on set but by starting and running a window cleaning business for six or seven years. At first he worked alone with his father and brother. But soon he would be training hordes of neighborhood children to work for him. Within three years, he says, he had 150 employees and was earning “approx. $2 million per summer” by installing and repairing water heaters and the like in the winter.
Looking back, he says running that company wasn’t all that dissimilar to running a major Hollywood production. “In Canada the weather is only good for a few months of the year, so you basically had to have this production where you didn’t have work, you could generate work and then hire 150 people for a period of four or five months to save time and then managing all these different trucks and things,” Lebovici explains. “There was a ton of drama every day that I had to be prepared for.”
After doing this for a while and making money “hand over fist,” Lebovici had saved enough that when he sold his part of the business, he returned to Los Angeles and began working as a producer, four or four dollars Five years of building contacts, taking risks and working for free when necessary.
“It’s a trick in this business, and that’s why there are so many people who were rich before. Because it’s so expensive and complicated and there’s a learning curve,” says the producer. “I was the right age, had the right experience, and had enough money to take risks and turn down paychecks to work on projects I believed in or projects I thought would support me.” one good position.”
Early on, Lebovici worked on a “truly terrible” zombie film, “a group of little action programmers with Dolph Lundgren and Nicolas Cage” as well Billionaire Boys Cluba true-crime thriller that looked good on paper but turned out to be “invisible” and got lost in Kevin Spacey’s #MeToo scandal.
Arguing that now is perhaps “the worst time in history” for filmmakers, given rising production costs, rising capital costs, the depreciation of the US dollar abroad and the expectations streamers have created by increasing actors’ upfront salaries , Lebovici says he experienced “some of the worst situations” in his first few years on set. Nevertheless, his early projects served their purpose: they served as an opportunity to learn and gave him the opportunity to show people what he could do. Over time, his situation began to improve and he now feels fully “battle-hardened” after surviving both the Covid pandemic and the double whammy of last year.
Lebovici’s first film of any significance was the Tribeca premiere of a comedy The clapperStarring Ed Helms and Amanda Seyfried, Hammerstone has produced a total of eleven films in the few years he has been active. He currently manages six to seven films per year with an average budget of $18 million. Last announced At the seaa drama that Amy Adams collaborates with Pieces of a woman Filmmaker Kornel Mundruczó’s dance menu currently also includes the horror thriller do not moverecently acquired by Netflix, the animated creature feature mucus with Kid Cudi and Mel Gibson’s Lionsgate thriller Flight riskstarring Mark Wahlberg, which recently debuted its first trailer at CinemaCon. While the company now has a six-person team and yesterday announced the appointment of Jon Oakes as president of production and development, much of what it has accomplished so far has been accomplished through the efforts of Lebovici and an assistant alone.
At the heart of Lebovici’s business strategy is a major, if “calculated, gamble”, namely the fact that 90% of Hammerstone films are produced without a domestic distributor on board. Helping him realize this scenario is Christian Mercuri’s Capstone, which acts as Hammerstone’s foreign sales arm through a joint venture and brings in around 60% of a given project’s budget through pre-sales. To raise the remaining funds needed, he turned to both tax incentives and a pool of wealthy investors — some of whom he first met while washing windows — and positioned them to win big and risk little. In the best case scenario, there will be a bidding war for Hammerstone’s projects and its investors will be handsomely repaid. If they fail, he says, they take a small loss, although he can always pass on a dud to a “lower-level domestic distributor” to get some money back.
Admittedly, says Lebovici, Hammerstone’s financial results to date can only be described as “good”, although there are mitigating factors to consider. While the producer had high hopes Bill & Ted face the music – the third film in the Bill & Ted franchise starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter – this title proved only a modest success given its release at the height of the Covid pandemic. Lebovici was also enthusiastic about the actioner Kung Fury, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michael Fassbender, an adaptation of the crowdfunded short film of the same name that went viral in 2015 after screening the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. That project has been in limbo for years now, amid a legal dispute with a Chinese financier, although Lebovici believes it remains salvageable.
Co-financed with New Regency and published by 20th Century Studios, Hammerstone’s biggest success to date. Barbarian, grossed $4.5 million worldwide and increased its production costs tenfold. However, while the film was highly praised and director Zach Cregger sparked several hot bidding wars for other projects including weapons at New Line starring Josh Brolin and Julia Garner, in fact even that film may not have lived up to its full potential.
Lebovici attributes BarbarianThat’s a good result, but not a great one, as the film had limited reception both domestically and internationally and wasn’t given much care when it came to marketing. “There were only three of us going [international] areas. I don’t think they really believed it would work,” the producer reflects. “It was Regency that had an output deal through Fox. They created their own P&A. They said, ‘We’ll just pick a few areas that are good for horror and that’s it.'”
However, this does not mean that Hammerstone gained from the project and its cultural reputation. An exclusive streaming window on Max brought about another beautiful change that made the company a company to watch and opened up entirely new possibilities. “It was very meaningful because, first of all, we were getting horror movies sent to us left, right and center,” he recalls. “It gave our company prestige and opened many doors. We’ve always had a lot of access to content, but now we have a lot more respect for the taste we have.”
As Hammerstone begins its rise, Lebovici has the greatest visions for what the company can become. While he wants to continue producing groundbreaking works, he hopes to one day expand into distribution. “If I have the international side and we are good content creators and can self-publish our own films, that is also an ideal long-term prospect,” he says. “Because then we will become a mini-Lionsgate, a mini-A24.”