Bob Yari Sets Three-Year Plan for Canadian Domination
Still smarting from his inglorious Oscar Night '06 jilting at the hands of fork-tongued Crash co-producers Paul Haggis and Cathy Schulman, real estate magnante-cum-film industry dilettante Bob Yari has a whole new territory to divide and not quite conquer. It's called "Canada," reports Adam Dawtry, where the would-be mogul this week locked up distribution for his slate of around 10 middlebrow indies per year through 2010.
The films will go out through Entertainment One, a distribution upstart operating in the long shadow of the Canadian monolith Alliance Films. First up is the Mischa Barton/Bruce Willis flailer Assassination of a High School President, followed by Kate Beckinsale's turn as a Judith Miller-esque reporter in Nothing But the Truth. Yari also has the much-anticipated adaptation of Killing Pablo forthcoming, directed by Joe Carnahan and starring Javier Bardem as the mythic drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. (His own Yari Film Releasing will distribute in the US.) Canadian sources close to Defamer denied the rumor of a clause requiring an honorary Genie Award being added at the last minute, however, thus vexing Yari's trophy-case aspirations until at least 2011.