 Starring: Clive Owen, Alex Kingston, Gina McKee, Nicholas Ball
Director: Mike Hodges
Year Of Release: 1999
Plot: A struggling author uses his father's connections to get a job running a roulette wheel at a casino. Soon he meets a woman who seduces him and then encourages him to join her associates in a robbery scheme. He joins, using his experiences for the plot of his book, I, Croupier. He start almost living his life through the alter-ego of his character in his book, allowing himself to go much further that he normally would. |
Although it’s generally accepted that it takes luck to make it big in the movie industry (as well as talent, of course, although many would argue differently), and that most of the time the best films don’t make the most money at the box office, Croupier is a good example of just how big a part chance plays in the movie biz, largely because as screenwriter William Goldman famously pointed out about those in the entertainment industry, “Nobody knows anything”.
It really does seem with Croupier that nobody knew what they had, despite the fact it was a crime thriller from the director of Get Carter. The distribution rights were sold to various companies around the world, but it seems few of them thought that it was going to be much of a success. The problem was probably that it had no readily identifiable international stars. In the late-90s, Clive Owen was just the guy off ITV’s Chancer and Gina McKee had won a BAFTA for Our Friends In The North, but neither were known outside the UK. The biggest name was probably Alex Kingston, who was famed at the time for having recently got gotten divorced from Ralph Fiennes, and between the time she filmed her scenes in Croupier and its release, she’d started her regular role in TV’s ER.
Croupier got a small release in the UK by Channel Four Films in June 1999, where it was received with polite applause by the critics, made a couple hundred thousand pounds and then completely disappeared from view, almost as if it had never existed. However then a slightly odd thing happened. The following April it got released in the US and received a rather ecstatic reception from critics. While the Brits didn’t seem to think much of the movie, the Yanks loved it. Although it didn’t make a vast amount of money, eventually grossing just over $6 million, it massively outperformed expectations and kept running in cinemas for well over six months.
The movie started out on less than 20 US screens in April, and a couple of weeks later it looked like it had already run its course when its theatre count dropped to 11. However despite almost halving the number of screens, strong word of mouth meant it actually made more money that weekend than it had previously. Its gross continued to slowly grow for the next seven weekends.
Croupier kept making in the $100-$300 thousand range weekend on weekend all the way through until early October. As I said, it may not have made a lot of money overall, but it’s incredibly unusual for a film to keep playing for six months, with its gross barely dropping. Its biggest weekend was $312 thousand in June, but then it had another $300 thousand plus weekend in September, showing just how long it ran and how audiences kept going to watch it.
Sadly though, as the company releasing it was the tiny Shooting Gallery (none of the big players had wanted it), they never risked releasing it on more than 141 screens at once – probably because they simply didn’t have the money for anything bigger. The likelihood is it could have made a lot more money, but due to the fact nobody had spotted its potential before it release, it was saddled with a relatively small US roll-out.
Despite this, from the moment the film came out in America, there were whispers that Clive Owen deserved an Oscar nomination for his performance in Croupier. The adulation grew over the summer, to the point where it seemed he was a shoo-in. Then a problem came to light. As nobody had expected anything of the movie, it had been sold to Dutch television and was shown over there in late 1998. The Academy Award rules prohibit any movie that’s been shown on regular television anywhere in the world before its American theatrical release, and so Croupier was ineligible for any Oscars, even though many thought Owen should win.
Realising they may have missed a trick, Channel 4 put the film back in UK cinemas during the summer of 2001, but by then it was too late, and it made little more money than it had during its first run, despite the fact it now had a much better international stature.
However while the vagaries of chance – as well as people in the movie biz not realising they had a potential hit on their hands – meant Croupier got a rather odd release around the world and never managed to capitalise on the promise its US reception showed it had, getting cast in the lead role was great luck for Clive Owen. At the time his career was in the doldrums. Chancer had ended seven years before Croupier started filming, and between the two he’d mainly filled his time with dodgy, unmemorable TV movies and arthouse flicks nobody watched. He got a chance to return to UK TV playing the titles character in the detective show Sharman, but that only lasted four episodes, while 2000s Second Sight was better received, but seemed a bit like a low-rent Prime Suspect. He did get his first Hollywood role in the 1996 Halle Berry movie, The Rich Man’s Wife, but that movie tanked and no one paid any attention to him.
Luckily for him though, thanks to the fact American moviegoers noticed that Croupier was a far better film than anyone in the entertainment industry seemed to have realised, people in Tinsel Town started noticing Clive and he was suddenly in the running for much bigger roles. He quickly got snapped up for BMW’s series of early internet viral videos, The Hire, where he was the only link between a series of short films made by directors like Wong Kar Wai, John Frankenheimer, Ang Lee, Guy Ritchie, Alejandro González Iñárritu, John Woo, Tony Scott and Joe Carnahan.
This led to Gosford Park and a role in The Bourne Identity and from then on his star continued to grow through King Arthur, Sin City, Closer and Children Of Men, getting praise as one of the few people who is respected both as an action star and a top flight dramatic actor. However without Croupier, it’s likely none of this would have happened.
There is undoubtedly a lot of luck at work in the movie business, and it’s because of this that the studios spend so much on marketing, in the hope they can bypass luck and make a hit anyway. Even so, if you release a film at the wrong time or in the wrong way, you can crush its chances without even realising you’re doing anything wrong. For example Croupier could have been an Oscar winner, except for the fact it got shown on Dutch TV, while Clive Owen would probably still be stuck on British TV if the film hadn’t got a far better reception in the US than anyone had even vaguely expected beforehand.
Careers really can be created or destroyed on the strength of a single film, and although it takes more than luck to remain famous, there’s undoubtedly a large element of chance involved. It’s for this reason that LA is filled with good looking, talented young people who are waiting tables, simply because they’ve never even had the chance to show off their star potential.
Success in the film business may not all be about good or bad fortune, but it certainly plays a far larger part than it ought to. The fact is, nobody knows anything, and so luck will always be part of the equation.
TIM ISAAC
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