It will be interesting to see how "The Insider" is promoted when it opens here in May. If it wins a bunch of Academy Awards, then the campaign will be easy, but if it doesn't then the PR people will have to be creative. Most Japanese ad campaigns for foreign films rely on stars, but Russell Crowe, who has already won all sorts of citations for his acting in the film, is still unknown in Japan, and Al Pacino cashed his celebrity check here years ago.
They'll have to push the story, which won't be easy because it's basically a business thriller. Of course, "Jubaku" was also a business thriller (or, more precisely, a bureaucracy thriller), and it made a pile of money last year, but that was a Japanese movie about a banking scandal that the audience could identify with, since the papers have been full of banking scandals for the last five years.
"The Insider," a true story with names named, is about how CBS News, due to financial self-interest, suppressed the testimony of a corporate whistle-blower in a report on the newsmagazine program "60 Minutes" about tobacco giant Brown & Williamson's secret research into chemicals that would make nicotine more effectively addictive, even though the official tobacco industry line was that there was no evidence that nicotine was addictive.