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    "headline": "Arrival at 10: Denis Villeneuve’s alien-language film turned $47 million into $213 million and 8 Oscar n",
    "description": "Denis Villeneuve's Arrival, starring Amy Adams, opened in US theaters on November 11, 2016, earned $213 million and received eight Oscar nominations.",
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    "keywords": "Amy Adams, Arrival, Denis Villeneuve, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Ted Chiang",
    "articleBody": "A decade ago this week, Denis Villeneuve asked moviegoers to sit through a first-contact film where the big weapon turned out to be grammar. Arrival opened in US theaters on November 11, 2016, and the slow, sad, language-obsessed science fiction drama went on to earn eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. Ten years on, it looks like the hinge of Villeneuve’s career. Before it, he was the Quebec director of tense thrillers such as Prisoners and Sicario. After it came Blade Runner 2049 and the two Dune films. A script studios called too smart The film began as “Story of Your Life”, Ted Chiang’s 1998 novella, which won the Nebula Award. Screenwriter Eric Heisserer spent years shopping his adaptation without a bite; some studios reportedly passed because they found it “too smart”. The producers at 21 Laps took it on and brought it to Villeneuve, who had been hunting for a science fiction project but had “never found the right thing”. Two big changes shaped the final movie. Villeneuve dropped the novella’s title because it sounded to him like a romantic comedy, and Arrival was the very first alternative his team pitched, out of hundreds he considered. Heisserer also scrapped an early ending in which the aliens handed over plans for an interstellar ark. After Interstellar came out in 2014, the pair agreed the gift should be the heptapods’ language itself. Making the alien language feel real Amy Adams plays Louise Banks, a linguist recruited by the US Army after 12 vast shell-shaped craft appear around the world. Her job is to talk to the seven-limbed visitors parked over Montana, which were actually shot in Saint-Fabien, Quebec, during a 56-day shoot that began on June 7, 2015. The circular logograms were drawn by artist Martine Bertrand from Heisserer’s idea, and computer scientists Stephen and Christopher Wolfram analyzed them to give Louise’s on-screen work some logic. Three McGill University linguists advised the production. One of them, Jessica Coon, later praised how the film showed that decoding a language means starting small. Not every expert was won over. Northern Illinois University linguist Betty Birner argued that the movie pushed the Sapir-Whorf idea, that language shapes thought, “beyond anything that is plausible”. The numbers, ten years later For a cerebral drama, Arrival did well. It cost $47 million and took about $213 million worldwide, roughly 4.5 times its budget. Its opening weekend of $24.1 million beat studio forecasts of $12 million to $15 million. After the Oscar nominations it went back into 1,221 theaters in late January 2017. Oscars: eight nominations, one win, for Best Sound Editing Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, 2017 Ranked 27th on the Writers Guild’s 2021 list of the 101 greatest screenplays of the century so far One awards quirk still stings fans of the late Jóhann Jóhannsson. His score was ruled ineligible for Best Original Score because the film opens and closes with Max Richter’s existing piece “On the Nature of Daylight”. The line nobody translated The film’s most-discussed secret is the sentence Louise whispers to Chinese General Shang. Villeneuve left it without subtitles. Heisserer, who preferred to share it, revealed the English version at a festival screening in September 2016: “In war, there are no winners, only widows”. Villeneuve’s run of science fiction keeps paying off. Fans of his Blade Runner sequel can see where that world is heading in the Blade Runner 2099 final trailer, and the Academy will honor another eight-time nominee when Glenn Close receives an honorary Oscar on November 15. Adams, despite BAFTA, Golden Globe and SAG nominations for playing Louise, was not among the Best Actress nominees at the Oscars. Further reading Wikipedia: Arrival (film) Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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