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Gianni Nunnari (born 10 August 1959) is an Italian film and television producer and executive. [1]
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Gianni Nunnari (born 10 August 1959) is an Italian film and television producer and executive. [1]
After completing his studies, he followed the footsteps of his father, Alexander Nunnari, and began his career in the film business.
After graduating from Pareto college, Gianni began his career working at Dick Randall, a Hong Kong-based foreign sales company, known for distributing Bruce Le, Bruce Li and also the very first Jackie Chan movies. [2] Soon after the death of his father, he joined Mario Cecchi Gori and his son, Vittorio, to export their commercial Italian feature films.
At age 25, Nunnari moved to Hollywood to expand the market horizon and product slate for Cecchi Gori Pictures and to distribute European films for the US market.
In 1991, Cecchi Gori produced Mediterraneo, which Nunnari and Cecchi Gori sold to Miramax before becoming a hit in the United States. It was subsequently awarded the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Next, Nunnari convinced his friend Massimo Troisi, a Neapolitan film star primarily known for his peculiar comedic approach in film, to direct and star in Il Postino. The film became the final motion picture in Troisi’s career, as the star and director suffered a fatal heart attack the day after production wrapped. The critically acclaimed film was released posthumously and was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor, winning one for its musical score.
Nunnari’s most notable success in producing foreign films for the US market was Life Is Beautiful, directed by and starring Roberto Benigni. Nunnari orchestrated the distribution of the film worldwide, and it went on to win multiple awards, including the Academy Awards for Best Actor, Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Original Score. It returned over $25 million for Cecchi Gori, in addition to recouping the initial approximately $6 million production investment.
Nunnari was then appointed to oversee Penta Films, alongside Cecchi Gori and Silvio Berlusconi, to produce Hollywood commercial movies in the style of the Cecchi Gori films. Following his accomplishments in production, Nunnari expanded his business knowledge into entrepreneurial efforts, opening the popular Los Angeles restaurant Ago; among the restaurant’s partners are Meir Teper, co-owner of the acclaimed Nobu chain, and Robert De Niro. .
Striking out as an independent producer of motion pictures, Nunnari produced the hit film Se7en, which would take in over $327 million worldwide, and From Dusk Till Dawn, starring George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino for Miramax. It was Clooney’s first starring role on the big screen and became an instant success and a cult classic. In more recent years, Nunnari has produced several films for director Martin Scorsese, including The Departed, which would win Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director, Shutter Island, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio and earned nearly $300 million worldwide, and Silence, which received rave reviews and the AFI ranked as one of its ten Movies of the Year.
In the late 1990s, Nunnari founded the production company Hollywood Gang Productions. The company produced big-budget commercial spots, becoming one of the pioneers in using big Hollywood stars, such as Oscar-winners Robert De Niro and director Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso).
Segueing into feature film production, Nunnari and Hollywood Gang produced the feature film 300, directed by Zack Snyder, starring Gerard Butler, and based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller. The film took in over $700 million worldwide. Nunnari built the IP into a franchise with the sequel 300: Rise of an Empire, starring Eva Green, Lena Headey, and Rodrigo Santoro. The company also produced the features Immortals, starring Henry Cavill, Everybody’s Fine, starring Robert De Niro and Kate Beckinsale, and most recently, The Domestics, starring Kate Bosworth and Tyler Hoechlin, which became one of the first pictures produced under the revived Orion Pictures label.
In 2016, Hollywood Gang produced its first television series, Start-Up, released by Sony's streaming services Crackle, executive produced by Nunnari.
Nunnari is the father of two girls, Giulia, from a previous marriage, and Caterina, with actress Vanessa Hessler, whom he currently resides with in Malibu.
| Year | Title | Director | Box Office | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | Se7en | David Fincher | $327.3 million [3] | as executive producer |
| 1996 | From Dusk Till Dawn | Robert Rodriguez | $25.8 million [4] | as producer |
| 1997 | The Blackout | Abel Ferrara | $0.11 million | as co-executive producer |
| 1999 | From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money | Scott Spiegel | as producer | |
| 1999 | From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter | P. J. Pesce | as producer | |
| 2004 | Alexander | Oliver Stone | $167.3 million [5] | as executive producer |
| 2005 | O Casamento de Romeu e Julieta | Bruno Barreto | as executive producer | |
| 2006 | The Departed | Martin Scorsese | $289.8 million [6] | |
| 2006 | N (Io e Napoleone) | Paolo Virzì | as producer | |
| 2006 | 300 | Zack Snyder | $456.1 million [7] | as producer |
| 2009 | Everybody's Fine | Kirk Jones | $16.4 million [8] | as producer |
| 2010 | Shutter Island | Martin Scorsese | $294.8 million [9] | as executive producer |
| 2011 | Immortals | Tarsem Singh | $226.9 million [10] | as producer |
| 2014 | 300: Rise of an Empire | Noam Murro | $337.6 million [11] | as producer |
| 2016 | Silence | Martin Scorsese | $27.3 million | as executive producer |
| 2018 | The Domestics | Mike P. Nelson | $59,766 [12] | as producer |
| Year | Title | Director | Original Release date | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | StartUp | Ben Ketai | September 6, 2016 [13] | as executive producer |
Il Postino: The Postman is a 1994 comedy-drama film co-written by and starring Massimo Troisi and directed by English filmmaker Michael Radford. Based on the 1985 novel Ardiente paciencia by Antonio Skármeta, itself adapted from a 1983 film written and directed by Skármeta, the film tells a fictional story in which the real life Chilean poet Pablo Neruda forms a friendship with a simple Procida postman (Troisi) who learns to love poetry. The cast includes Troisi, Philippe Noiret, and Maria Grazia Cucinotta. The screenplay was adapted by Radford, Troisi, Anna Pavignano, Furio Scarpelli, and Giacomo Scarpelli.
Richard Stuart Linklater is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is known for making films that deal thematically with suburban culture and the effects of the passage of time. His films include the comedies Slacker (1990) and Dazed and Confused (1993); the Before trilogy of romance films: Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013); the music-themed comedy School of Rock (2003); the adult animated films Waking Life (2001), A Scanner Darkly (2006), and Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood (2022); the coming-of-age drama Boyhood (2014); the comedy film Everybody Wants Some!! (2016); and the romantic comedy Hit Man (2023).
Marc Forster is a German-Swiss film director, producer and writer. He is best known for directing the feature films Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland, Stranger than Fiction, Quantum of Solace, World War Z, and Christopher Robin, and has directed numerous television commercials as well. He is a BAFTA, Golden Globe, and Independent Spirit Award nominee.
300 is a 2006 American epic historical action film directed by Zack Snyder, who co-wrote the screenplay with Kurt Johnstad and Michael B. Gordon, based on the 1998 comic book limited series of the same name by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley. The film, like its source material, is a fictionalized retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae in the Greco-Persian Wars. The plot revolves around King Leonidas, who leads 300 Spartans into battle against the Persian "God-King" Xerxes and his invading army of more than 300,000 soldiers. As the battle rages, Queen Gorgo attempts to rally support in Sparta for her husband. This is the actoral debut of Michael Fassbender.
Cinergi Pictures Inc. was an American independent film production company founded by Andrew G. Vajna in 1989, after he had sold his interest in his first production company, Carolco International Pictures. The company had a number of major hit films, most notably Tombstone, Die Hard with a Vengeance and Evita. However, the majority of their films lost money. A string of box office bombs – including Super Mario Bros., Renaissance Man, Color of Night, Judge Dredd and Burn Hollywood Burn – ultimately did the company in, and it was dissolved in 1998. Cinergi Pictures' library is now owned by Disney.
Charles Richard Shyer is an American film director, screenwriter and producer. Shyer's films are predominantly comedies, often with a romantic-comedy overtone. His writing and directing credits include Private Benjamin (1980), Irreconcilable Differences (1984), Baby Boom (1987), Father of the Bride (1991), Father of the Bride Part II (1995), The Parent Trap (1998), The Affair of the Necklace (2001), and Alfie (2004).
Mark Canton is an American film producer and executive.
Robert Anthony De Niro is an American actor and film producer. Known for his collaborations with Martin Scorsese, he is considered to be one of the greatest and most influential actors of his generation. De Niro is the recipient of various accolades, including two Academy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, the Cecil B. DeMille Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2009, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from U.S. President Barack Obama in 2016.
Brad Krevoy is a film producer, entrepreneur, and founder and chairman/CEO of the Motion Picture Corporation of America. Over his 37-year career, Krevoy has been involved in the production and distribution of more than 250 film and television projects, most notably Dumb and Dumber, and Christmas-themed entertainment, including the A Christmas Prince and The Princess Switch trilogies, as well as Falling for Christmas and Irish Wish.
Immortals is a 2011 American fantasy action film directed by Tarsem Singh Dhandwar and starring Henry Cavill, Stephen Dorff, Luke Evans, John Hurt, Isabel Lucas, Kellan Lutz, Freida Pinto, Joseph Morgan, Daniel Sharman, and Mickey Rourke. Loosely based on the Greek myths of Theseus and the Minotaur, and the Titanomachy, The film was previously named Dawn of War and War of the Gods before being officially named Immortals.
The decade of the 2010s in film involved many significant developments in the motion picture industry as Disney towered all over its competitors. The studio's titles occupy exactly half of the top 50 highest-grossing movies at the worldwide box office of these ten years with solely one of those entries not reaching a billion dollars and the only three features on the entire list to cross the $2 billion mark, while Universal and Warner Bros. share the distant second place at eight titles each. Furthermore, non-Disney films managed to become the top-grosser of a year merely twice during the decade. This domination culminated in the acquisition of 21st Century Fox by Disney.
Bradley Fuller is an American film and television producer. He co-owns Platinum Dunes, partnering with both Michael Bay and Andrew Form.
Allspark, formerly known as Hasbro Studios, LLC, was an American production and distribution company owned by toy and multimedia company Hasbro and based in Burbank, California that was in operation from 2009 to 2019. Originally just a television division, many of its shows were based on Hasbro properties and were broadcast on multiple media platforms, including Hasbro's joint venture Discovery Family.
300: Rise of an Empire is a 2014 American epic historical action film directed by Noam Murro from a screenplay by Zack Snyder and Kurt Johnstad, based on the then-unpublished comic book limited series Xerxes by Frank Miller. A follow-up to 300 (2006), it takes place before, during, and after the main events of that film, and is a fictionalized retelling of the Battle of Artemisium and the Battle of Salamis in the Greco-Persian Wars. The cast includes Lena Headey, Peter Mensah, David Wenham, Andrew Tiernan, Andrew Pleavin, and Rodrigo Santoro reprising their roles from the first film, alongside Sullivan Stapleton, Eva Green, Hans Matheson, and Callan Mulvey.
Andrés Walter Muschietti is an Argentine film director and screenwriter who had his breakthrough with the 2013 film Mama. He gained further recognition for directing both films in the It film series, the 2017 film adaptation of the Stephen King novel and its 2019 sequel, It Chapter Two. In 2023, he directed the DC Extended Universe film The Flash.
Hollywood movies refers to the cinema of United States of America. The Hollywood cinema industry plays an important role among the world movie making studios. It is the third largest film market in the world. Hollywood movies in the 21st century are sometimes called "New Hollywood". Starting from the 2000s, American movies began to earn more fans and contributed to the box office. Science fiction, fantasy films, and animated movies have been globally impacting the movie industry. Research shows that compared to 20th century, the value of the movies approximately doubled. International advertising had a crucial role in making "New Hollywood" bigger, compared to 20th century. Most of the movies` box office numbers are increased by overseas viewers.
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