It’s always easy to spot the movies that Anthony Hopkins only makes for the money, mostly because they aren’t very good. It’s hard to begrudge him when he clearly loves to work as much as possible, but signing on for a film that was released as an NFT was on a whole different level of what-the-fuckery.
The two-time Academy Award winner usually bounces between pictures that require him to actually act, and the ones that help the bills, like when he made Transformers: The Last Night and Thor: Ragnarok back-to-back immediately before earning an Oscar nomination for his performance in The Two Popes.
Along similar lines, he delivered his second Oscar-winning turn, making history in the process as the oldest-ever acting winner, and followed it up with the psychological drama Elyse, which was written and directed by his wife, Stella, in her feature-length debut, with Hopkins also executive producing and composing the score.
The pandemic was a strange time for a lot of reasons, and NFTs were one of them. People spent thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands, to attain digital ownership of various assets, some of which can be right-clicked and saved as an image file, which nobody seemed to notice would be an obvious flaw in the entire blockchain process.
It was a difficult time for the cinema business, leading director Richard Dugdale to devise a new method of presenting his latest film, Zero Contact, to the masses. It was filmed entirely over Zoom, as many movies were when everybody was confining themselves to their own homes, and having produced the 2015 thriller, Blackway, the filmmaker had a direct line to one of Hollywood’s most esteemed veterans.
“I thought there was a chance,” he told Cinema Daily, explaining how he landed Hopkins. “If we could spell it out precisely how to do it, if there was any kind of fear or complications of how it’s even possible, ‘This is going to be dumb and not worth my time’, we had to take all of that away and make it very simple. Once we spelled it out and demystified the process, he said to me, ‘Well, I made a lot of films in my career, but I certainly haven’t made a film like this’, so let’s do it.”
Dugdale’s ambitious plan would also, theoretically, protect Zero Contact from a critical drubbing and piracy. “If you own an NFT, are you going to write bad reviews? Well, no, you’re part of the community,” he reasoned.
Adding, “Are you going to pirate the movie? Well, no, you don’t want people to torpedo the value of your NFT.”
A sound plan, apart from the fact that people did see it through other means, and it was savaged. Did it herald the next great evolution in distribution and release strategy? No, since it was the first, last, and only movie to be rolled out via Vuele, an NFT platform built specifically for Zero Contact’s debut. His heart was in the right place, but it was a case of terrible art imitating terrible art, with a dismal film releasing through one of the most pointless mediums in recent memory.
