August War Glut?
Coming Soon's Ed Douglas reports that during a Hurt Locker presentation at last weekend's New York ComicCon, someone from the audience yelled out to star Jeremy Renner when the movie was coming out, and he yelled back "late August!"
If this is true (and I do say "if"), Summit has decided to release the only Iraq War film that really works in an audience-popcorn sense -- it's Aliens -- in a month that has two other big-time, hot-ticket war films -- Paramount and Stephen Sommers' G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (8.7.09) and Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds (8.21.09). And If Renner's late August projection is accurate, he would be speaking of Friday, 8.28, which would make The Hurt Locker third in line that month and facing an audience that will be almost certainly be feeling well-fed if not sated as far as bullets, tanks and helmets are concerned.
Could Summit really be contemplating opening The Hurt Locker this way? I can't believe any smallish distributor would willingly put its own war film in competition with two other high-profile, sure-to-be-aggressively-marketed war films within a three-week period. Am I missing something? Is jumping into a genre congestion situation a strategy that has worked before, or which makes any sense to anyone?
Summit must at least be considering a Friday, 8.14 opening, which will put them second in line (right after G.I. Joe) but will also probably ensure a sharp fall-off in business when Tarantino's film comes along a week later. Opening directly against the Tarantino would be death, of course, but if I were Summit I'd want to be far, far away from it.
I wouldn't dream of coming out this August. All along The Hurt Locker has been a movie that has screamed (a) spring, (b) counter-programming in an especially empty or puerile mid-summer period, or (c) between Labor Day and late November. Summit has been so flaky and indecisive and under-energized about this film all along, and now this. It would be well and good if Renner was passing along bad info. Let's hope so.
Note: Apologies for the disappearance of this and other stories earlier today.
Posted by Jeffrey Wells on February 10, 2009 at 7:23 PM
comment #1
D.Z.
says ...
G.I. Joe looks a little too much like Watchmen with bullet-time. Plus, the cartoon wasn't really as big as Transformers, even in its heyday, so it might not score as well at the box office as Paramount hopes. Basterds is probably going to suffer from the opposite problem of not being enough of an action movie. So if Hurt Locker can deliver in its ads on promising to give audiences what the other two flicks lack, it might just at least be able to steal their PTA.
Posted by D.Z.
at February 10, 2009 9:58 PM
comment #2
Reint
says ...
It's coming out August 20th in Holland... so maybe in the US as well?
Posted by Reint
at February 11, 2009 2:19 AM
comment #3
PastePotPete
says ...
GI Joe isn't remotely a war movie aside from a pretense that some of the characters are in the military, it's more like a more comic book-like James Bond flick, from everything I've seen. Which is probably overrating it. For your own sanity Wells you should probably ignore it. It's kind of the embodiment of things you hate about studio films. It looks like Sommers just took Transformers and put ninjas where the robots were. He also managed to steal imagery from Iron Man and Dark Knight(the Joes' armor suits).
I don't think Inglorious Basterds will be a hit and thus suck the air from war films, but I don't think Hurt Locker will be successful either...I'm thinking Iraq movies won't be any more popular under Obama than Bush. Even IF they can function as an action piece.
I'm really just wondering WTF The Hurt Locker is doing at a comic con in the first place.
Posted by PastePotPete
at February 11, 2009 3:33 AM