The smartest thing that Business

The smartest thing that Business Week columnist Jon Fine says in his riff about New Line’s Snakes on a Plane (8.18) is “I can’t wait till this comes out…although on a certain level, I guess it already has.” Precisely. Snakes is the internet rumble about it…I’ve had lots of fun and laughed at a lot of hand-made songs and video spots…and I’m starting to think the hoopla has probably already peaked, in fact. (I told this to a Washington Post staffer who interviewed me for a Snakes piece yesterday morning — file it quickly!) Richard Williamson at Adfreak has suggested a headline for the final one-sheet, although he’s really suggesting an attitude: “You’ve read the title — why see the movie?” A certain snob know-it-all says the Snakes hoopla has been building for months (“since Comicon last summer”) and maybe it has, but by my sights it started to catch on only a couple of weeks ago. My son Jett (17) and Dylan (16) are only just starting to get wind of it, they told me last weekend, and they say their high-school friends in Brookline aren’t talking it up very much at all. Another week or two and the media will get bored, I guess, and then the Snakes thing will start to downshift…or will it? (Maybe not.) But the cynical view is that once the 2006 Summer of Hell begins it’ll be business as usual…one soul-suppressing, big-budget, heavily-branded film after another will open from early May and all through the hot months, and The Mob will run off the cliff like lemmings for each one, and then New Line will start in with the trailer and other aspects of the campaign in late June or July. I still say it would be smarter to get Snakes into theatres by June, say, rather than wait for August 18th to roll around. I’ve heard the estimates that the hard-core geek audience is only supposed to be worth $7 or $8 million dollars on opening weekend, but who’s not going to know about Snakes on a Plane two or three months from now? I’m just saying that four months and 20 days from now seems like a long time to wait.

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