THE CLAIM

The Claim

The Claim was originally in development at Polygram in 1997 with a £25 million budget and about $1 million was spent on pre-production before it was sent into turnaround. Sets were built and production was about to commence, but Polygram became nervous about the mostly non-bankable cast and pulled the plug. The project began to move forward again in 1998 with the main financiers being Pathé and United Artists. UA would handle domestic distribution and international sales and Pathé would distribute in the UK and France. Additional coin came from the Arts Council of England, Canal+, the BBC and Alliance Atlantis. As the production began to near, the budget began getting slashed away and according to director Michael Winterbottom, about 20 pages were cut from the screenplay to accommodate the reduced budget — which was £15 million (just north of $20 million).

During the shoot, Winterbottom set up a website to document the process (this was back in wee ages of the internet, remember) and visitors could view dailies that were just processed at the lab (yes, the good ‘ol days of 35mm) and there was even a contest to rename the movie from the original title Kingdom Come. Unfortunately the site is no longer live, but you can see a semi-functional version on the way back machine.

The Claim was given an awards push by UA and was released in 1 theater on December 29 and received a lukewarm response from critics. It pulled in $7,131 and was then shutout from the award circuit and was yanked from its single theater after two weeks. The Claim was rescheduled for April 20, 2001 and UA did little in the way of a release. It was booked into 23 theaters and grossed $94,082 and never expanded beyond 29 locations. The domestic run closed with just $669,258.

The recorded offshore numbers were only $753,612 across a few distributors that gave The Claim a theatrical release.