Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Snakes lacks legs

Before the movie Snakes on a Plane opened, my hero F. Brett Cox wondered aloud:
It'll be interesting to see how the movie does after all the hype.
Well, now we know: It bombed. The opening-weekend gross was $15 million, less than a third of what the virtually hype-free Talladega Nights raked in its first weekend.

Amid all the opinion pieces about why the movie tanked (precious few of which concern themselves with whether the movie was any good), has anyone speculated that the recent mid-Atlantic terror scare has put people off airliner-in-peril movies?

3 comments:

Mr. Cavin said...

Hi. Based on information I read at the New York Times (may require free registration), I was under the impression that Snakes on a Plane was reaping the norm for a late Summer horror release, and that any illusion of its poor performance was due to hopes being inflated by the internet hype phenomena (a lesson apparently no one took home after the halfhearted opening weekend of Steven Spielberg's AI). Certainly SOAP isn't bombing, though, just merely normal.

Reel Fanatic said...

I hadn't thought of that .... it certainly may be the case, cause I can't think of any other logical reason ... Perhaps the genre is just doomed before DVD .. if you look at a similar movie, Slither, earlier in the year, it also performed just abysmally at the box office

Anonymous said...

And I must stand as Exhibit A (or maybe G or H by this point), because I still haven't seen the movie. I suspect it'll do just fine in DVD, however.

Brett