Bad Movies - Industry upset your telling friends

Paul Bartlet · 08-19-2003, 06:46 PM

Seen this on slashdot.org , was surprised at some of it.

Quote:

Movie Industry Blames Texting for Bad Box Office

Posted by michael on Tuesday August 19, @05:07PM
from the buying-your-gross dept.
cybercuzco writes "The movie industry is blaming poor sales of such movies as Gigli, The Hulk and Charlies Angels not on the fact that they were poor quality, but because people text message other people telling them that the movie stinks. Industry executives say that this undermines a carefully crafted marketing image. Expect texting to be banned by the MPAA in the near future."

Some quotes from it -

Quote:

"No, the executives are not blaming such bombs as The Hulk, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle or Gigli on poor quality, lack of originality, or general failure to entertain. There's absolutely nothing new about
that."

Quote:

"In the old days, there used to be a term, 'buying your gross,' " Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax, told the Los Angeles Times.
"You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience."

So, remember the (insert bad movie) you saw and thought, how could they release a movie this bad, they knew.

In case link didn't show up properly inside quote - it's here

mods, wasn't sure to post in "Movies" or "After Hours", but it does relate to Movies in general.

Jeff Kleist · 08-19-2003, 08:44 PM

I would welcome a ban on text messaging. It's silly. Just call the person rather than spend 5min typing in your message

Chris Atkins · 08-19-2003, 08:47 PM

As a movie fan, I take offense to HULK being mixed in with that other dreck.

Jesse Skeen · 08-19-2003, 09:05 PM

Well, I'd rather have someone text-message someone in a theater than call them on the phone- at least I won't hear them that way!
I saw this subject on another forum and honestly thought it was a joke! They seem to say that people should be locked up in isolation chambers after seeing a movie so that they don't tell anyone how bad it is!

Jeff Kleist · 08-19-2003, 09:13 PM

Quote:

Well, I'd rather have someone text-message someone in a theater than call them on the phone- at least I won't hear them that way!

But their phone is supposed to be off anyway

**HTF Ads**

TheBat · 08-19-2003, 11:06 PM

As a movie fan, I take offense to HULK being mixed in with that other dreck.

I AGREE Chris..Hulk was the best movie of the summer.. I didn;t see CA 2 or gigli.. they look like crap.

JACOB

Chris Lockwood · 08-19-2003, 11:11 PM

> Expect texting to be banned by the MPAA in the near future.

That's the funniest thing I've read in a long time. The MPAA doesn't have any authority to ban something like that. (They could start by "banning" non-stop talkers, crying babies, etc.)

Glenn Overholt · 08-19-2003, 11:20 PM

Unbelievable! They are out of their friggin' minds!

I'm still cracking up that they even thought about this, let alone put it in print form - of any kind.

Did they bother to even think about the TV reviews too? The news, entertainment shows and that pair over in Chicago.

I'm not even going to mention free speech - oops!

It is funny, because if you went back pre-PC people just used the phone, and the word got around the country almost as quick, especially when a film would start in a few cities, and hit the rest the next week.

I'm waiting for a gag order to pop up for the schools, too!

I think we have a good cause to get the MPAA broken up now.

Glenn

Paul Bartlet · 08-19-2003, 11:26 PM

I dunno, reading posts here, I'm not sure you get the meaning. The Movie Big Wigs are upset that news travels to quickly today that a certain movie is BAD/Sucked.
Five years ago, they could release a movie knowing full well it wasn't any good, and by the time word of mouth got around they had made their money back and some profit.
Today, they are saying, word of mouth is traveling to quickly on the "bad movies" (via cell phone) and sales are dropping off to quickly.

It boils down to, if you have seen a movie that you think wasn't any good, they would like to " s l o w " down how many people you tell that too.

Malcolm R · 08-20-2003, 12:12 AM

They just need to stop making bad movies. Problem solved!

Morgan Jolley · 08-20-2003, 01:35 AM

In the videogame industry, a bunch of companies have started mass-cancelling bad games nearly halfway through development (Capcom just cancelled 70+ game projects earlier this year). Why? Because they realized that if a game sucks, everyone is probably going to know about it before it comes out.

Shiny fixed this problem by not letting anyone see a final copy of their game (Enter the Matrix) until it was already on store shelves. After that happened, Eidos was unable to get away with the same thing with Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness in late July because people already knew their strategy and were cautious of the game's quality.

What's my point? That you can't release a crappy product (in any industry) and blame someone else when it isn't successful, especially if the same tactic has been tried before. Prevent it from being made and you won't have to worry.

To be honest, I think the idea of text mesages isn't that bad of an idea. Sure, you could call someone, but if they set their phone to vibrate and are in a movie theater or somewhere else where they can't talk on the phone, you can still communicate with them. If text messages are going to lead to less crap films, then I fully support their use!