solace in cinema : A vast wasteland of movies

$11.6 million is what Grindhouse took over the weekend on its stateside opening. It was beaten into 4th place by ‘Blades of Glory’, the fittingly titled Ice Cube comedy ‘Are We Done Yet’ and Pixar’s ‘Meet the Robinsons. Fourth place is apparently still a loser to the Weinstein company, and 11.6 million is a figure that was obviously well below what Harvey Weinstein was expecting. So once again the press start hunting around for what to blame for the films ‘failure’…

‘Internet Hype’ has already been bounded around, “oh yeah it’s just like Snakes on a Plane”.. yeah..original.. well done. A great list of supposed failure points have been gathered together by Mark Bell over at Filmthreat…

It opened on Easter Weekend…
Um, yeah, WHAT THE HELL!?! A grindhouse film or films should not open on a family holiday weekend. The normal movie-goers were out in force, sure, but as it’s a holiday, they were there with grandma, grandpa and the kids. When you’re looking over the marquee trying to figure out what film to watch so as to make everyone in the family happy, chances are you don’t pick “Grindhouse” (unless you have the coolest family ever… most people don’t). The only R-rated zombie film that can get away with an Easter opening and do well is “The Passion of the Christ.”

Check out the full list here

It seems obvious to me that no matter what you can’t predict how audiences will travel, especially when it comes to giant marketing-saturated movies like ‘Grindhouse’. Critics have very little if any sway (the success of ‘Norbit’ proved that), the Internet has fuck all to do with it, star potential has some sway but its becoming less and less powerful.

Jesus Christ, at the end of the day does it matter?, does it fuck. Harvey will make his money back ten fold in foreign territories and on dvd. Of course they don’t see it that way, instead Miramax get all angry, stomp their feet and decide to cut the film into two to try and maximise the revenue. Yeah good one idiots….. cutting it in to two will do nothing except piss audiences off and encourage piracy…

You can read about the numbers wrangle for ‘Grindhouse’ here

so far… i’m having a bad week.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 7:28 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.