What's wrong with this formula?
Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, two on the most successful pop culture inspired independent filmmakers, want to go off and make two films, and combine them into a "double-feature" concept called Grindhouse. Collectively they make a 3 1/2 hour ode to b-film thrillers and 70s exploitation cinema, complete with fake trailers, missing reels and scratches. They give it a postmodern feminist edge and throw in Bruce Willis and Nic Cage to boot.
Rodriguez's first half is called Planet Terror, where the entire alien world is enveloped in fear, and a gun legged woman has to save everyone from a zombie army. Quentin's half is beautifully named Death Proof. It stars John Carpenter favorite Kurt Russell, as a demented serial killer called "Stuntman Mike" who has "Death Proofed" his 1971 Chevy Nova and hunts down and kills women with it. It's part slasher film, part homage to the great Monte Hellman and Richard C. Safarian's Vanishing Point (1971).
The producers then go about and release it on Easter weekend.
It makes a little less than $12 million. It opens in fourth place behind light weight films Blades of Glory, Meet The Robinsons and Are We Done Yet? Why? Because Easter weekend is a time to spend with your family, and not in a 3 hour gorefest with Grandma. The people want to see lightweight comedies with their family.
Now, a $12 million take would sound alright if the double feature didn't cost between $53-$67 million to make, and at least $30 million was spent on advertising. Of course, very little of that advertising was spent where its core audience was: surfing online. Just one month before 300 broke records for a March release with an opening weekend box office total of $70 million, driven primarily by strong word of mouth from Ain't It Cool News and solid web presence on myspace.
Grindhouse seems like a marketing no brainer. One of the fake trailers in between Planet Terror and Death Proof is amusingly named Werewolf Women of the SS and directed by Rob Zombie. Where else would the audience be for that film if not for the web?
Considering that the producers are the legendary Bob and Harvey Weinstein, it's surprising that they would misjudge a film this badly - a Quentin Tarantino film no less. This is the man who gave us Pulp Fiction, a major factor in the Weinstein's former company, Miramax Films rise to almost United Artists heights of success during the 1990s.
But web hype doesn't necessarily translate to big box office numbers. Snakes On A Plane played well below estimates considering that the film was circulating gossip for more than a full year before the release of the film. Savvy use of podcasts by Filmspotting fanned the flames, and by then the buzz was so high for that film that the filmmakers re-shot to accommodate the wishes of their web audience. In the end, the filmmakers could only disappoint once the audience saw what a hackneyed concept it actually was.
With such a capricious audience these days perhaps the Weinstein's thought that good old fashioned TV spots for Grindhouse were the right thing to do. The film did extremely well with test audiences, but it seems viewers were confused to what Grindhouse actually was. Harvey Weinstein is quoted in the New York Post as saying:
"I don't think people understood what we were doing. The audience didn't get the idea that it is two movies for the price of one. I don't understand the math, but I want to accommodate the audience."
IMDB is reporting that people were walking out after
Planet Terror, the first of the two features ended. The question to ask is: were they just confused, or did they just not like Robert Rodriguez's half of the film? Most reviewers are saying Tarantino's
Death Proof was by far the stronger of the two pictures.
Next weekend seven new films open and that will also take a chunk out of
Grindhouse profits, and with sequels to
Spiderman,
Shrek and
Pirates of The Caribbean due out all within May, there is very little time left before the audience forgets all about this little experiment.
So, how do Bob and Harvey make back their money?
The solution to this problem is apparently to recut and repackage Grindhouse, and release each film independently.
So much for the authentic grind house double-bill.
And those missing reels in each film? Well, they contained the sex scenes. Sure everyone loves meta-filmmaking these days, but what's a pastiche homage to seventies exploitation film without the sex? And even with the "missing reels" the film clocked in at 3 hours and 12 minutes - long enough to keep people home and theatres from maximizing its rotation. But, since they shot the scenes they can easily splice them back in. The
Weinstein Co. will release them fresh and new and this way
Planet Terror and
Death Proof can be exploited to make a buck like true grind house movies.
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Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily has an interesting article on the situation at the link below:
What Went So Wrong With Grindhouse?
