More than likely, many of you have read the article that ran in USA Today on Friday, September 22nd (we posted it here) in regard to the Spokane, Washington screening of "The Crow: Salvation". Those who have followed ABaHB's weekly updates, as well as visited "The Crow's Loft"( www.thecrowsloft.com), know the article left out numerous pertinent facts. Miramax wanted to give the APPEARANCE that they did all they could to help "The Crow: Salvation" get a fair chance at a nationwide release. What the article did not include was the fact that Miramax failed to properly promote the movie. They only placed one small ad in a local paper. In actuality, they did very little when compared to radio and television spots and numerous newspaper ads they took out the same week for their movie "Scary Movie". Another detail not mentioned in the article was that the County Fair was taking place in Spokane the same weekend. The fair did a tremendous amount of business, setting records and drawing people away from indoor entertainment such as movies. And finally, to add injury to insult, it was the opening weekend of the Olympics. Also, the article failed to mention the overall lack of movie attendance nationwide. ALL movies did very poor business over the weekend of September 15th through the 17th. The number one movie in the land, "The Watcher", made only 5 million dollars for the weekend. A paltry figure for a movie that is favored as number one.
Of course, this "screening" fiasco is questionable in the first place given the fact that Salvation has tested very well at the screenings held this year during Comic-Con in San Diego and Dragon-Con in Atlanta. It has not only received fan approval, but has, overall, been given good reviews by the critic community. The failure of COA aside, why should a movie have to go to great lengths to prove its worth when it is obvious that fans want the movie released? Could there be something more going on here? The article asserts that Spokane was chosen since the first two Crows did well there, but this is really not the case. Crow I averaged $4,482 per screen, Crow II averaged $2,520 per screen with a full advertising campaign and Crow III did $1000 with no advertising. This begs to question, what is the motivation here? Could the folks at Miramax be feeling the squeeze of its parent company, Disney, to tone down the violence? Why would Disney do this you ask? A look at the news of recent weeks can answer that. It appears that Congress is back on the witch-hunt. They are taking a hard look at the R-rated movies that are being marketed, with the possibility of enforcing stiff regulations. Could this mean that we, The Crow fans, are in danger of never seeing the release of our movies as long as they are R-rated? Who knows. One thing is for certain, movies, not parenting and social teachings, are being blamed for our youth violence today. It is an election year and the pressure to be politically correct is increasing. Miramax is one of the prime R-rated film distributors. Thus, they could potentially be very susceptible to political pressure. We need to let Miramax know that we will not accept the strong effort put forth on their part to set Salvation up for failure in Spokane. We will not allow them to throw away Salvation for the sake of avoiding congressional coercion. It is time we adopt a rally cry, Regnat Populus! "The people rule". To see what Congress is up to, please check out the links below. This is a serious time and we should all take heed of these hearings.
http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/20000923/t000090526.html
http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/20000924/t000090763.html
http://www.latimes.com/news/comment/20000922/t000089589.html
http://www.calendarlive.com/went/20000921/tCB00a2475.html
Take care, LLcruize
