Movie industry vs. technology

Wednesday, August 20th, 2003

The movie industry is blaming SMS messaging for a drop in box office sales.

“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.”

In other words, “We know 95% of our movies are complete crap but we’re banking on most people not finding that out until it’s too late.”

Gee, here’s an idea: Make better movies and people will come see them.

Speaking of better movies, we saw 28 Days Later this past weekend. I’m not real big on writing film reviews beyond saying “I liked it” or “It sucked”, so I’ll just say that I liked it, it was pretty scary. We saw it at one of the indie theaters in Pasadena, so we didn’t have to sit through any commercials and the matinee price was only $4. Overall it was a pretty decent movie-going experience for a change.

Another good movie I’ve seen recently is The Handmaid’s Tale, which I got from Netflix a week or two ago. This one was really good and very faithful to Margaret Atwood’s novel. If anything, it conveyed a real creepiness even better than the book did. The use of color in the costumes gave it an interesting look as well.

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Comments

miss_pixie
August 20, 2003

Chris and I saw 28 Days Later before they changed the ending so you’ll have to tell me what the ending was like that way I can decide if I want to go see it again in the theater.

kchrist
August 20, 2003

They changed the ending? I didn’t know that. There was an alternate ending shown after the credits ran. The alternate ending wasn’t very interesting and didn’t change the story in any significant way; we shouldn’t have bothered hanging around to see it.

*** SPOILERS ***

Highlight the area below to read:

Jim dies in the alternate ending. Was that the original one? At the end of the actual movie they all lived and escaped to the country where they spent their time trying to attract the attention of passing airplanes from the mainland.
miss_pixie
August 20, 2003

Ok it sounds like they didn’t change the ending they just added the alternate to the end of the credits. There was a commercial saying that the ending had been changed, so I assumed that they were doing a Clue kind of thing. Where you had to go see the movie more than once to see all the different endings. I liked 28 Days but I didn’t really want to pay another 7 dollars to see it again.

angeldye
August 20, 2003

YOU JUST RUINED IT FOR ME!!! with yer secret boys club EYE SPY TRICKERY!!!

like I care.. now Im made that I never thought to use white font color cus that rules.
angeldye
August 20, 2003

yeah like that should have been MAD! now IM REALLY MAD!!!

angeldye
August 20, 2003

been a long time since I’ve seen the handmaids tale.. but it is such a very good movie. the creepy factor was way better than the book..

anonymous
August 20, 2003

THATS WHAT YOU GET!!!

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