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Topic subjectRE: Owen Gleiberman spoke on this a little (swipe)
Topic URLhttp://board.okayplayer.com/okp.php?az=show_topic&forum=23&topic_id=93489&mesg_id=93579
93579, RE: Owen Gleiberman spoke on this a little (swipe)
Posted by LES, Wed Aug-18-10 02:12 AM
>from this article:
>
>http://movie-critics.ew.com/2010/08/16/tales-of-the-box-office/
>
>>Those who didn’t care for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World may be
>chortling a bit about the fact that it came in fifth at the
>box office. I would say that the movie, with its culty-cool
>Ghost World– meets–Kick-Ass vibe, was never meant to be a huge
>smash — that it was probably destined to find a culty-cool
>audience, and therefore a limited one. Still, one could
>reasonably ask: Given the generally excited reviews (including
>mine), the whiz-bang marketing, and the sneaky appeal of stars
>like Michael Cera and Jason Schwartzman, why didn’t Scott
>Pilgrim find a bigger audience? Was it too clever for its own
>good? Did it have too much kung fu fighting and not enough
>bubbly confessional freshness?
>
>I think the answer is simpler, and something that we might, by
>now, refer to as the Reality Bites principle: When a movie is
>targeted, relentlessly, at what Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny
>would call “the yutes,” and when the marketing attempts to
>flatter those same yutes by telling them that the movie will
>appeal to them because they’re the very sort of hipsters who
>are too cool to be marketed to…well, that’s the single fastest
>way to turn off a generation of moviegoers. Years after
>Reality Bites was scorned, to a large degree, by the very
>twentysomethings it was aimed at, it remains a terrific film,
>one of the best of its kind, and Scott Pilgrim, I suspect,
>will have a vibrant and influential pop cultural life long
>after its opening-weekend box office mini-disgrace is
>forgotten. It’s worth reminding ourselves that in the real
>world, numbers matter…except when they don’t.
>
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>
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>
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nice, I definitely agree with what was said there. props for referencing Ghost World and Reality Bites(a new favorite film of mine), and Joe Pesci's "yutes" i always loved that... I think I was a bit too naive in estimating this movie's appeal, but like Kick-Ass I think the marketing saturation and mangled marketing hurt as well. like this review and many others have said i think Scott Pilgrim's cultural impact will outweigh its box office numbers so its whatever