Andy Vajna: Last News

Nick Holdsworth Csaba Káel, head of Hungary’s National Film Institute (NFI), hopes to emulate an 18th century Magyar hussar hero at this year’s Berlinale European Film Market. Swashbuckling Count Andras Hadik occupied Berlin for one day in 1757 — in return for 300,000 silver thalers, left without destroying the city. Hadik’s adventure is the subject of one of the films the NFI will be marketing at the EFM. Káel plans to spend more than a day in Berlin, but also hopes Hungarian producers will leave with handsome sales ledgers after the market — without having to raise a ransom, like the handsome hussar. It is the first EFM for the NFI, since it was established in 2020, just as the pandemic hit, closing down the Berlinale’s market until this year.

Disney will soon find out the wisdom of its massive acquisition of Fox and ownership of the billion dollar investment in Avatar blockbusters that should give the studio a fresh supply of blockbusters over the next decade. Avatar: The Way of Water opens Friday, with only a modicum of budget drama, considering every movie he made since his breakthrough film The Terminator has been preceded by media pearl clutching that Cameron’s penchant for big budgets would finally ruin a studio. It never happened, not on Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Abyss, Aliens, True Lies, Titanic (where a chastened Cameron surrendered his backend after doubling the budget of a film that won Best Picture and became Hollywood’s highest grosser; and again on Avatar, whose gross surpassed Titanic and is the largest worldwide grossing film ever. Not that it hasn’t been stressful; former Fox chief Bill Mechanic once told me he wouldn’t get a physical during one of these pictures, for fear his doctor would hospitalize him over blood pressure. But nobody to date has lost betting on Cameron.