Sunday, August 20, 2006

Not so great "Snakes"

From The Hollywood Reporter: "It might be that the R-rated [Snakes on a Plane] suffers from the same problem as the 1990 Buena Vista film Arachnophobia, which underperformed at the boxoffice because no one wanted to see a film about spiders. Snakes might sound great on paper, but in the theater they could be a bit too scary for even the most hardened horror fan."

Gee, maybe this also explains why Eight-Legged Freaks emptied out theaters quicker than someone yelling "Fire!"

4 comments:

ThinMe said...

Or maybe it didn't sound scary *enough* to the hardcore horror audience. To me, "Snakes on a Plane" sounded like a film that would be campy, crazy, sorta-scary fun, which I found appealing. The whole concept didn't really sound like it would be too frightening or I wouldn't have seen it...I generally avoid films that seem as though they will be too scary (The Ring) or too gory (Saw). So was SoaP it too scary...or not scary enough?

Anonymous said...

I wonder to what extent the decision not to screen SoaP for the media affected its weekend performance. Yes, yes, I know, I know, I know ... these movies are supposed to be critic-proof. But I think this film may have been an exception to that general rule due to its unprecedented amount of buzz. That buzz included a lot of awareness for weeks before the release date that the studio intended to hide the movie from critics. As a result, an atypical percentage of the audience was handed weeks before the release date a solid, buzzing reason to conclude that SoaP must suck.

Which would be supremely ironic given the surprisingly positive reviews SoaP ended up getting.

Joe Leydon said...

I wonder what the response would have been if they'd started running ads quoting a critic saying: "Hey! It doesn't suck!"

ThinMe said...

I wonder if they might yet change the ads to incorporate some praise from reviewers. It will be interesting to see if that happens.