manique

Weinstein wanted to cut 45 minutes from Princess Mononoke. From 135 down to 90. A third of the film, gone. The Japanese animation studio behind it hand-delivered a katana to his New York office. Two words attached: "No cuts." There's a backstory. In 1985, an American company acquired the rights to an earlier Miyazaki film, Nausicaä. They cut 22 minutes, renamed the lead character "Princess Zandra," and slapped male action heroes on the cover who aren't even in the movie. Miyazaki was livid. So when Disney signed a deal to distribute his studio's films in the US in 1996, he put one rule in the contract: nobody touches a single frame. Weinstein ran Miramax, a Disney division at the time. When the studio refused his cuts, he called one of their executives and screamed: "If you don't get them to cut the fucking film, you will never work in this fucking industry again." That's a direct quote from the exec's own book about his fifteen years at the studio. The katana wasn't Miyazaki's move. "Actually, my producer did that," he told The Guardian. Toshio Suzuki, his producer, bought the blade from a tiny shop tucked under the train tracks in Tokyo. At a meeting in New York, he handed it to Weinstein and shouted, "Mononoke Hime, NO CUT!" The film came out uncut. But Weinstein made them pay. Neil Gaiman (the author of The Sandman) wrote the English script after Tarantino passed on the gig. Gaiman later said Weinstein pulled the entire marketing campaign. No ads. A handful of theaters. The film grossed $2.3 million in the US. In Japan, 12 million people saw it in theaters. One in every ten citizens. It held the record for the highest-grossing film in Japanese history until Titanic showed up a few months later. A year ago, the film got a 4K IMAX re-release in 330 US theaters. Opening weekend: $4 million. One weekend earned more than the entire original US run. The same run Weinstein tried to bury 26 years earlier.