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[cleolinda]

'Ice Age' Debut Nets $70.5M in Cold Cash. Meanwhile, Basic Instinct 2 makes $3 million. Yes, "three," single digit. An interesting theory I'm hearing from a couple of different places: in a nutshell, why pay $7-10 to see Sharon Stone naked in a crap movie when you can get porn on the internet for free?

United 93 trailer hitting too close to home"I

Comments

[skyblade]

why pay $7-10 to see Sharon Stone naked in a crap movie when you can get porn on the internet for free?

That's what someone says here, after paragraphs of Paul Verhoven saying people who make naughty films are this century's greatest pariahs.

The "sex can be free" certainly plays a part in the genre's demise, but Basic Insinct 2 also suffers from being a sequel to a fifteen year old movie that wasn't very good to begin with, and doesn't feature the star who hasn't been box-office poison in the last decade and a half.

[cleolinda]

I think movie stars--the kind who are just movie stars, and not very good actors--don't like to hear this, but the key ingredient to a hit movie is a good script. Pirates of the Caribbean could have easily flopped without one, and I think everyone expected it to anyway--it was the script that made the difference. Maybe sexual content as a novelty could get people into a crap movie 15 years ago, but supply/demand has taken away that dynamic now. If BI2 had honestly, on paper, been actually pretty good, I think it would have shown up in the trailers, and people would have actually gone to see it, sex and/or Sharon Stone be damned.

[oohasparklie]

Regarding United 93...I'm usually all about doing whatever people want to do with movies, but in this case, I think it's way too soon. I still have a hard time thinking about that day without crying. It's been five years, but it still feels like it happened yesterday. I won't be seeing it. At least not now. Maybe in 20 years I'll rent it.

[leucocrystal]

United 93 trailer hitting too close to home? "One lady was crying. She was saying we shouldn't have [played the trailer]. That this was wrong ... I don't think people are ready for this."

I seriously doubt audiences are ready for it, either.  As far as I know, there are two different 9/11 films in the works -- United 93 (or as I think of it, The One Directed By That Guy Who Directed Bourne Supremacy, which is actually a plus in my book), and one to be directed by Oliver Stone (which is a major, major minus in just about anyone's book, lol).  One is more than enough, I'm thinking.

I think there are several reasons people just plain aren't ready yet -- but the main ones that jump to mind are (a) it's only been five years.  COME ON., and (b) we were overloaded by the media coverage of 9/11 unlike any other event in U.S. history.
I think WWII films differ from this sort of thing in regards to that latter reason -- they cover something that's mainly recalled only by the memory of the survivors.  9/11 on the other hand was something we were

[schmoosey]

as a person who sold movie tickets all weekend I was actually sort surprised that BI2 didn't do better. Besides the point the only people that were going to the movie were old. Not judging..just saying it was mostly the 60+ set. Kinda creeped me out.

[riney]

I admit, I cried through the whole United 93 trailer when I saw it last Friday. I think the fact that I had just read the article regarding the released 911 calls on CNN probably didn't help, but I definitely wasn't prepared for it (and when it first came on the screen, a lot of people thought it was the trailer for Snakes on a Plane).

The fact that right after the trailer, they played the "Please Turn off your Cell phone" thing with Steve Martin being all funny and falling off his seat because his phone was on vibrate didn't help at all either.