Thu, July 24, 2008
The trends are taking over!—5:19 PM
Lately I've noticed an annoying trend of "trend pieces" in Entertainment Weekly, in which they proffer grand generalizations with little or no actual supporting evidence. For example, a cover story about Tina Fey's career explosion, which was simply a matter of her being in a movie while also running one of TV's lowest-rated sitcoms. Or a couple thousand words on the resurgence of the "pot movie," just because Harold and Kumar smoked out a few times and James Franco plays a marijuana dealer in The Pineapple Express. Why can't we just have a pot movie without having to declare "the pot movies are taking over!"?
This week, they declare that Comic-Con is taking over!
Crowd reaction at Comic-Con can rocket a film to riches (Iron Man) or kill it in its cradle (Stealth). "It's scary," says X-Men franchise producer Lauren Shuler Donner. "If they don't like the preview of a movie, [that reaction] is going online."
Really? Stealth? This is the one where a lightning strike grants artificial intelligence to a fighter jet, and the jet starts shooting things up and develops a crush on Jessica Biel. (I forget if it was in the trailer or just in my imagination that Biel was startled to see the jet hovering outside her window while she's changing clothes.) I'm pretty sure that film's crib-death fate was sealed at conception. No amount of blogger fandom would've made it profitable – probably not your best example of the mighty power of Comic-Con buzz.
Bad word of mouth is not exclusive to Comic-Con. Reviews – whether online, in a newspaper ("Daddy, what's a 'newspaper?'"), or just among friends – are going to give people a sense of what a movie is like. Ignored is the fact that you can make a movie – even one with a sci-fi theme – and not take it to Comic-Con. You think comic fans would've avoided Watchmen in droves if Zack Snyder hadn't screened some clips at Comic-Con? Of course not. You go there hoping to grab a little buzz by wooing them early; but if your movie is truly excellent, people are going to see it anyway. A big movie has to make $200 million to cover its production and marketing costs, but a lot of that is the cost of marketing at Comic-Con to try to boost it to $200 million. When does it end?
(Answer: August 16, 2017.)
Joe Mulder — Fri, 7/25/08 5:07am
Hey! It ends on my 14th wedding anniversary. Cool!
Bee Boy — Fri, 7/25/08 8:59am
Dammit! My feeble mind can't even generate a random date any more! Happy anniversary in advance.