Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Movie studios struggling to silence bad buzz

Movie studios struggling to silence bad buzz - Business - International Herald Tribune: "The humiliating box office returns for "All the King's Men" trickled in during the weekend - a pathetic $3.8 million - but the death knell sounded almost a year ago, and unintentionally came out of the mouths of the film's producers.

When Sony Pictures announced, just two months before the film's planned Christmastime release, that its opening would be pushed into the next year, the official reason given was that more time was needed to complete the editing and score. But the unmistakable message sent to savvy audiences (pretty much everyone now) was: This movie is in trouble.

The studio ignored one of the harshest realities of movie marketing today: It is almost impossible to recover from bad buzz. It does not help that most delayed movies, like "The Alamo," really are turkeys. Last year's troubled delayed films included Terry Gilliam's leaden "Brothers Grimm" and the Jennifer Aniston dud "Rumor Has It.""

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