Paramount is apparently so confident that Aeon Flux - starring Oscar winner Charlize Theron and opening this Friday - is going to do such boffo box office that they don't need to screen it for the media. This same strategy has served other studios well in the past, including the likes of Artisan Entertainment (Boat Trip - starring Cuba Gooding Jr., the African American Oscar winner nobody admires), Sony Pictures (Man of the House - there's that anti-Texas backlash...thanks Bush), and 20th Century Fox (The Order - maybe Heath Ledger should've gone gay in this one as well).
But I'm sure that won't be the case with Flux. How can you go wrong with a wire-fu sci-fi action movie based on an obscure Peter Chung cartoon that nobody understood when it first aired on Sunday nights on MTV?
Ha ha...seriously, the promo screening for Flux is this Thursday night. At 10 PM. By doing this, Paramount can ensure that no major market newspapers will have reviews in before the Friday edition goes to bed, and they'll have at least one decent day of opening weekend box office before word of mouth kills it deader than Natalee Holloway.
Ordinarily, this is where I'd put my "not screened for the press review," a concept I came up with some time ago, but the forces of justice and decency might conspire to get a Flux review up on FT this Friday afternoon. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: I wonder if CNN's Todd Leopold reads APCB (thanks to Jessica for the heads-up).
"...kills it deader than Natalee Holloway." LMAO!
My girlfriend saw the commercial the other night and turned to me and said "So I guess we're going to see that?"
"I dunno, it doesn't look... right."
The trailers make it look like a video game that you can't play, just one long cut-scene.
The strategy also...um...'worked' for (I believe) Warner Brothers and the godawful Avengers movie that ruined what could have been a great franchise.
Meanwhile Paramount has apparently forgotten about "the internets", since any story that won't make print can easily be posted to a website--and my guess is that hardcore fanboys and fangirls won't look to the LA Times but to sites like aintitcoolnews.
Ooooh the Natalee Holloway reference...OW!
I'm very very curious about Flux as well.
Just read the CNN piece. The resistance movement are called the Monicans?
Sounds like the film will, as it were, suck.
Sorry.
OK, I'm leaving now.
Hey Pete, great title 'shout-out' to GRRM's books and 'the bloody flux'. Everybody at the Barnes & Noble I frequent is reading those books at one phase or another, except for one guy who's holding out until GRRM is finished. He might be smarter than the rest of us...