I tend not to pay too much attention to Hollywood news, better yet the details of box-office receipts, but apparently, conservatives have been closely following opening-weekend numbers for politically-themed movies. And they want to gloat.<\/p>\n
According to the AP<\/a>, “Bee Movie” was #1 this week, followed by “American Gangster,” and “Fred Claus.” Coming in fourth was “Lions for Lambs,” which made only $6.7 million, despite having been directed by Robert Redford, and co-staring big names like Redford, Tom Cruise, and Meryl Streep. I haven’t seen it, but the AP said the drama features “three [interlocking] stories in the war on terror.”<\/p>\n Apparently, the movie approaches the subject from a progressive point of view, which makes the right deliriously happy, now that the film didn’t do well in its opening weekend. One far-right blogger bragged<\/a>:<\/p>\n Memo to Hollywood\u2026we don’t hate America as much as you do. Want to make some money? Make a movie where Americans are the good guys and the terrorists are the bad guys. It’s not like there’s a shortage of stories that fit the bill.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Another said<\/a>:<\/p>\n The message is clear enough, for anyone who wants a piece of it; Americans are tired of limousine liberals making their moral judgments for them…. This is particularly true since the limousine liberals in question don’t seem to have any morals themselves; All that’s needed to confirm that has to the latest tabloids.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And another<\/a>:<\/p>\n At some point, the studios are going to realize that their declining revenues are somehow tied to their poor judgment in selecting targets to bash.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n There were many more<\/a>, but you get the idea.<\/p>\n I can appreciate the political landscape doesn’t offer the right much in the way of encouragement right now, and reflexive culture-bashing is a reliable staple for conservatives, but this excessive gloating over a movie having a bad opening weekend seems terribly misplaced. Or maybe the movie just isn’t very good, which is why people didn’t go to see it. Rotten Tomatoes<\/a> is a great site that collects movie reviews from across the country, and gives every movie a score between 100% and 0%, based on the percentage of critics who liked the film. The higher the score, the more critics gave a positive review. “Lions for Lambs” got a 26%<\/a>. Among the top critics at major news outlets, the number drops to just 16%.<\/p>\n In other words, movie-goers skipped a movie that the critics widely panned. Maybe, just maybe, this explains why it didn’t do well on its opening weekend. It’s not because Americans think Hollywood “hates America,” but rather because adults who see serious dramas care about critics’ reviews, and this one got slammed.<\/p>\n Just a thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I tend not to pay too much attention to Hollywood news, better yet the details of box-office receipts, but apparently, conservatives have been closely following opening-weekend numbers for politically-themed movies. And they want to gloat. According to the AP, “Bee Movie” was #1 this week, followed by “American Gangster,” and “Fred Claus.” Coming in fourth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n
\nI’ll be the first to admit that I know very little about how Hollywood works, and why some movies do better than others. Maybe “Lions for Lambs” wasn’t marketed well. Maybe people don’t like Tom Cruise anymore. Perhaps, given Americas’ anxiety over the bloodshed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and recent news coverage of Bush administration torture policies, movie-goers just aren’t emotionally prepared for films like these.<\/p>\n