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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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