"Che" The Movie Winds Up Being A Major Bust

In December I blogged about movie producer Peter Soderbergh filming a two-part, four-and a half hour epic about Che Guevara, starring Benicio del Toro. (Go here.) Released at the end of 2008, the producer of "Traffic" and "Erin Brockovich" got some Europeans to invest $58 million in the movie. Unfortunately, the movie has grossed on $30 million -- and that's worldwide earnings. Soderbergh now regrets having made the movie.

In an interview with Henry Barnes of the Guardian, Soderbergh lists some of the reasons for the movie's flop (emphasis added):

Lack of funding fuelled his fear. And the money wasn't there partly because of Soderbergh himself. In the characteristically noble pursuit of authenticity he decided to film Che in Spanish, a decision that effectively blitzed any hope of finding significant investment within the US.
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Soderbergh blames piracy ("We got crushed in South America. We came out in Spain in September of last year and it was everywhere within a matter of days. It killed it.") but it probably didn't help that his film is a foreign-language marathon with an admittedly distant and impersonal lead.

Che seems, in retrospect, like a glorious, sad aberration: a niche-audience epic it would be impossible to commission in these straitened times. Today, the willingness of the studios to take such a punt has all but evaporated – a fact that Soderbergh is more alive to than most.

"I'm looking at the landscape and I'm thinking, 'Hmmm, I don't know. A few more years maybe,'" says Soderbergh. "And then the stuff that I'm interested in is only going to be of interest to me."

It would all sound depressing if Soderbergh didn't pepper his speech with fits of incredulous laughter. Perhaps the last few years – capped by his recent run-in with Sony over his revised script for Moneyball, a baseball movie starring Brad Pitt, that saw him elbowed off the project – have left him punch-drunk.

"In terms of my career, I can see the end of it," he says. "I've had that sensation for a few years now. And so I've got a list of stuff that I want to do – that I hope I can do – and once that's all finished I may just disappear."

"Straitened times?" He gives that as one of the reasons for the failure of "Che?" What about that maybe not so many people worship Che like the Liberal elites in Hollywood. And, why would anyone want to idolize a murderer? (See a previous post here about Del Toro having his butt handed to him by a Miami reporter while questioning him on his hero Che, and go here for a prior post about Che.)