The unrated, extended director's cut of The Wolverine is now available across all platforms from Fox Home Entertainment, and director James Mangold has unveiled his ultimate vision of the blockbuster film. The $414 million the movie made at the global box office was impressive, but Mangold had his hand in a different blockbuster earlier this year. Mangold directed the commercial for Activision's (ATVI) Call of Duty: Ghosts, which featured Megan Fox shooting down drones in Las Vegas with a group of gamers. Ghosts made more than $1 billion in its first 24 hours at retail.

    "I don't do ads that often, but I got to work with several crew members who I wanted to reunite with," said Mangold. "They had a really wonderful concept for how to create a piece about regular gamers, instead of celebrities, that were living inside the game. They had a lot of ambition about the spectacle and the characters they wanted to put on screen for 90 seconds."

    Mangold keeps a close eye on the evolving entertainment landscape, which includes the video game business. He's also open to exploring new social networking opportunities when it comes to connecting fans with his films, such as using microvideo service Vine to release a six-second trailer for Wolverine, which Mangold said was downloaded 250 million times in the first three days.

    "Movie studios are trying to be really progressive about using and utilizing new technology to reach fans, and I think that should be encouraged," he said. "Movies can't exist on just the old full-page ads in the papers and on 30-second spots on a couple of hit TV shows. The reality is that there's a lot of ways to reach people now."

    Fox was able to reach more consumers earlier by releasing The Wolverine on Digital HD across digital stores like iTunes (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Google Play (GOOG), Xbox (MSFT), and Target Ticket (TGT) on November 19, two weeks before the Blu-ray and DVD release. It's part of a growing trend in the home entertainment industry.

    "A lot of people are consuming pictures as digital property, not only as discs, so the adaptation of the business to embrace that -- and also to begin including the extras and links to sources with more extra material -- is a huge function in adding value," said Mangold. "The more savvy audience that is on computers is really interested in a lot of the background material that has historically been buried only on discs, so offering that material and offering ways of accessing that material to audiences online is a huge change -- and an important one."  

    现在，福克斯家庭娱乐公司(Fox Home Entertainment)已经在所有平台上发布了尚未评级的导演剪辑版《金刚狼》(The Wolverine)，导演詹姆斯•曼高德也推出了这部超级大片的终极版本。这部电影在全球各地赚取的4.14亿美元票房收入的确令人印象深刻，但曼高德今年初还执导了另一部大片——他为美国动视公司(Activision)的视频游戏巨制《使命召唤：幽灵》( Call of Duty: Ghosts)拍摄了一部广告。在这部广告中，著名影星梅根•福克斯与一群游戏玩家在拉斯维加斯击落了数架无人机。进入零售市场仅24小时后，《使命召唤：幽灵》就斩获了超过10亿美元的收入。

    “我不是经常拍广告，但我非常想跟制作团队的好几位朋友重新团聚，”曼高德说。“对于如何制作一部讲述生活在游戏中的普通玩家（而不是名人）的广告，他们构思出了一个绝佳创意。他们非常希望这则90秒钟的广告片能够展示出他们心目中的场面和人物。”

    曼高德一直密切关注不断变化的娱乐业格局，其中就包括视频游戏领域。为了让更多影迷看到自己的电影，他也以非常开放的心态探索全新的社交网络机会。比如，曼高德使用微视频服务Vine发布了一段时长6秒的《金刚狼》预告片。他说，这段预告片的下载量在上线头3天就达到了2.5亿次。

    “电影公司正在非常努力地尝试使用和利用新技术接触影迷，我认为这种做法值得鼓励，”他说。“电影的推广方式不能停留在刊登整版报纸广告，也不能光靠几个热门电视节目发布30秒的广告片。现实情况是，电影现在可以通过多种途径抵达受众。”

    11月19日，在发布蓝光和DVD版本两周之前，福克斯公司率先在iTunes、亚马逊(Amazon)、谷歌电子市场(Google Play)、Xbox和Target Ticket等多家数码卖场发行了《金刚狼》的数字高清版本，从而让这部影片能够更早地抵达更多消费者。这种发行方式已经成为家庭娱乐行业的一大发展趋势。

    “许多消费者把电影视作数字财产，而不仅仅是光盘，所以电影业做出改变（其中也开始包括提供额外材料和更多额外材料来源的链接）以适应这种理念，具有增加价值的巨大作用，”曼高德说。“电脑旁边那些更加精明的观众对以往只埋藏在光盘上的大量背景材料很感兴趣。所以，为在线观众提供这些材料和评判这些材料的方式是一个巨大且非常重要的改变。”  

    The traditional Blu-ray and DVD discs are still important to the bottom line, and studios like Fox are luring technophiles through new features like augmented reality gaming. The Wolverine 4D Bullet Train Battle experience is part of a free Google Play and iTunes app that connects to any disc-based version of the film, allowing fans to experience a fight scene between Hugh Jackman's Wolverine and the Yakuza first-hand from multiple angles. Users can even snap a selfie at the end (complete with requisite Wolverine claws) and share their pic on Facebook and Twitter.

    "There are a lot of great tools for getting people involved in movies and getting movies connected to other things like gaming that people are doing," said Mangold. "Fox is putting a lot of effort into trying to reach people through movies in ways that we haven't before. The 4D world that they're building is really cool. "

    The Wolverine Multi-Touch Experience is another transmedia step for the franchise. The free app in the iTunes iBookstore is a 50-page digital book with links to behind-the-scenes footage, pre-visuals development, and interactive background materials on the movie and comics.

    Designed for the comic book fanboys that Mangold and Jackman visited with at San Diego Comic Con 2013, this onslaught of technology supports one of the most popular comic book characters in the world today. Wolverine will be featured in the upcoming Marvel Universe Live! show from Feld Entertainment and Marvel Entertainment. And Jackman reprises the role in X-Men: Days of Future Past and the untitled The Wolverine sequel.

    "Fans like the antihero aspect of the Wolverine and the fact that he doesn't embrace his superhero-ness," said Mangold. "He has a skeptical view of humanity, which is a really magical and wonderful ingredient that has been a part of heroes in films from the Samurai films to Western characters that John Wayne and Clint Eastwood played."

    Mangold directed his first feature, Heavy, back in 1995. That was long before Kickstarter and crowdfunding was an established way to raise money for movies.

    "My first feature wasn't crowdfunded -- there was no such thing at the time -- but it was a collection of $5,000 and $10,000 investments that allowed us to make Heavy," said Mangold. "There's a lot that can happen for young filmmakers when you can find a way to make your film, for a quarter of a million dollars or less and use new financing technology to actually still get a really personal film out there. I just saw that a filmmaker I really admire, Hal Hartley, is raising money for his feature Ned Rifle on Kickstarter.

    "I think it's an awesome way to involve an audience in the production of a very costly medium. Independent films have been struggling to find some balance in the face of -- not only the fact that it's harder to make independent movies because movies seem to exist more and more built around tentpoles now for studios -- but in some way it may be a new opportunity for movies to get made completely outside the studio system."

    That traditional studio system is also evolving with the advent of streaming entertainment empires like Amazon, Netflix (NFLX), and YouTube. Mangold said every agency and every director is taking streaming seriously.

    "Anyone who held up their nose at some of these platforms in the past has gotten burnt by seeing a good number of them become very serious delivery methods for delivering entertainment and art to a large audience," he said. "People are exploring every avenue now. I don't know a single filmmaker who doesn't admire what's going on on Netflix or on cable. These are really opportunities that you can't do in movies, whether it's the difficulty in marketing to an older crowd who appreciates more sophisticated movies in theatrical release, or it's also the rating system which can be quite restrictive on independent filmmakers. There are a lot of ways around that stuff now given all these new delivery methods."

    Now at the top of his game, the director is using every possible delivery method to get The Wolverine in front of eyeballs on laptops, TVs, game consoles, and tablets as part of entertainment landscape evolves.

    传统的蓝光和DVD光盘依然是重要的收入来源，像福克斯这样的电影公司正在通过增强版实境游戏等新功能吸引技术爱好者。《金刚狼》的4D“子弹头列车战斗”体验是一款发布于谷歌电子市场和iTunes的免费应用，它可以与这部电影任何一种基于光盘的版本相连接，让影迷从多个角度亲身体验休•杰克曼饰演的金刚狼与日本犯罪集团的战斗场景。在结尾部分，用户甚至可以拍摄一张自拍照（金刚狼爪当然是必不可少的背景），还可以把照片分享到Facebook和Twitter上。

    “许多非常出色的工具不仅可以让人们参与到电影之中，还可以把电影与其他事物——比如人们正在玩的游戏——连接在一起，”曼高德说。“福克斯公司正在投入巨大的精力，希望让影迷们以前所未有的方式融入电影。他们正在打造的4D世界真的很酷。”

    《金刚狼》的多点触控体验是另一个跨媒体步骤。这款发布于iTunes iBookstore书店的免费应用是一本50页的数字图书。书中包含幕后花絮的链接，前期视觉开发，以及一些关于电影和漫画的互动性背景材料。

    参加2013年圣地亚哥动漫展(San Diego Comic Con 2013)时，曼高德和杰克曼为动漫迷们带来了这本专为他们设计、极富技术冲击力的数字图书。它所支持的是当今世界最受欢迎的漫画人物之一。金刚狼也将成为菲尔德娱乐公司(Feld Entertainment)和漫威娱乐公司(Marvel Entertainment)即将主办的“奇迹宇宙展！”(Marvel Universe Live!)的重要角色之一。在《X战警：逆转未来》(X-Men: Days of Future Past )和尚未命名的《金刚狼》续集中，杰克曼将再次扮演这个角色。

    “影迷们非常喜欢金刚狼反英雄的一面，以及他并不认为自己是超级英雄这个事实，”曼高德说。“他对人类持怀疑态度，这的确是一个非常奇妙的要素。从武士电影到约翰•韦恩和克林特•伊斯特伍德扮演的美国西部片角色，这一直是英雄人物的特征之一。”

    早在1995年，曼高德就执导了他的第一部独立电影《说不出的情话》(Heavy)。当时距离众筹网站Kickstarter的出现还有很长一段时间，众筹还远远不是筹集电影拍摄资金的主流方式。

    “我第一部电影的资金并没有采用众筹方式，当时还没有这样的平台，但《说不出的情话》的拍摄资金确实来自一笔笔5,000和1万美元的投资，”曼高德说。“年轻的电影制作人其实拥有许多筹资渠道，他们完全可以采用全新的筹资技术募集25万美元左右的资金，拍摄出一部真正个性化的电影。我刚刚看到哈尔•哈特利正在Kickstarter上为他的独立电影《内德的步枪》(Ned Rifle)筹集资金，他是我非常钦佩的一位导演。”

    “我认为，这是一种非常好的方式，它可以让观众亲身参与非常昂贵的电影制作过程。独立电影一直在努力寻找某种平衡，它面临的不仅仅是令人气馁的现实——由于电影现在似乎越来越多地围绕着电影公司的帐篷杆来拍摄，独立电影的拍摄比过去更艰难了。然而，在某种程度上，这或许是完全脱离片场系统来拍摄电影的新机遇。”

    随着亚马逊、网飞(Netflix)和YouTube等流媒体娱乐帝国的崛起，传统的片场系统也在不断演化。曼高德表示，每家制作机构和每位导演现在都非常重视流媒体。

    “看到许多流媒体平台业已成为向广大受众提供娱乐和艺术作品的重要渠道之后，那些过去轻视这些平台的业内人士都懊悔不已，”他说。“人们正在探索各种途径。我不知道还有哪位电影制片人不钦佩网飞或有线电视网络的分销力量。这些是你无法在电影中获得的机遇。拜这些全新的传播方式所赐，我们现在有很多方式绕过许多令电影人头痛的事情，无论是向喜欢在影院观看大片的老年群体营销电影的难度，还是有可能严格限制独立制片人的评级系统。”

    詹姆斯•曼高德，这位正处于事业巅峰期的导演正在顺应娱乐产业的演变趋势，使用一切有可能利用的传播渠道，让电影《金刚狼》进入笔记本电脑、电视、游戏机和平板电脑前的眼球之中。（财富中文网）

    译者：叶寒