By the 1920s the making and selling of films entailed increasingly high outlays and correspondingly high risks, and there was already an 'undeclared' trade war between the United States and Europe. It was their prestige value or the power of a particular personality that recommended Shakespearean projects to film companies, or at least overcame their reluctance. None of the first wave of Shakespearean sound films was a financial success. The 1935 Warner Brothers' A Midsummer Night's Dream was announced as inaugurating a series to be made with its distinguished co-director, Max Reinhardt, but after its failure at the box-office nothing came of these plans. The opulent Romeo and Juliet directed by George Cukor and produced by Irving Thalberg at MGM was an expensive showcase for Thalberg's wife, Norma Shearer. Paul Czinner's British production of As You Like It, starring Elisabeth Bergner and Laurence Olivier, with sets by Oliver Messel and music by William Walton, was no more of a success, for all its lavish production values. Olivier's wartime Henry V, released in 1944, came as an early glimmer of one of the false dawns that recur in the history of the British film industry's presence in the worldwide market. The appeal of classic material performed by British (and therefore 'authentic') talent was undoubtedly overestimated. The same director's Hamlet (1948) was a successful 'prestige' undertaking for the producer J. Arthur Rank, but after Richard III in 1956 the proposed Macbeth was stopped in its tracks by Rank's accountants. Roger Manvell, reviewing Hamlet on its appearance, summed up the limitations of a film that--like many others of the time--might well be a succès d'estime, but would never make good money outside Britain (and perhaps not even there):
Like other major British pictures, this film to a certain extent labours under the weight of a calculated technique, and so loses the heart and the sweat of passionate feeling. Months of planning become too evident; everything seems too meticulous. Nevertheless, there is a nobility in the production, a desire to give everything that the studio can muster to make Shakespeare effective on the screen at a cost of half a million pounds ('The Film of Hamlet', The Penguin Film Review 8, 1949, p. 24).
Less earnest, less self-consciously 'classic' Shakespeare films might stand a chance, but it would be a decade before they arrived.
The breakthrough seemed to come with Franco Zeffirelli's The Taming of the Shrew (1966) and Romeo and Juliet (1968). Shakespeare was established in the context of popular international cinema and potentially impressive profit: in the USA alone Romeo and Juliet earned fourteen times its negative costs. (One yardstick of box-office success is that a film should make at least two-and-a-half times the cost of making the master negative.) The success of Kenneth Branagh's modestly financed Henry V ($5m. negative cost) in 1989 appears to have inaugurated a new wave of confidence in Shakespearean projects, enhanced by the same director's Much Ado About Nothing (1994) which cost only $8m. to make and grossed over $22m. in the USA on its initial theatrical release. The films following immediately in the wake of these two seem not to have fared so well. Branagh's four-hour, full-length Hamlet, made for $18m., earned little more than $4.4m. in its first release in the US domestic market, which remains a crude but reliable index of the financial fortunes of English-language films. (Zeffirelli's 1991 Hamlet grossed approximately $20.7m.) By June 1999 A Midsummer Night's Dream (directed by Michael Hoffman) and an 'offshoot' of The Taming of the Shrew (Ten Things I Hate About You) had recently been released, and a number of other feature-film versions of Shakespeare were either about to be released (Kenneth Branagh's musical version of Love's Labour's Lost) or in post-production (Titus Andronicus and a Hamlet set in modern-day New York). Branagh had also announced his intention of filming Macbeth and As You Like It in the near future.
