Beating Word-of-Mouth
| By: Dr. Ted Baehr; ©2002 |
| Dr. Baehr suggests that one reason bad movies are making so much money is that Hollywood has found a way to get around public displeasure. But there is a way to defeat them at their own game! |
Contents
BEATING WORD-OF-MOUTH
With regard to movies, the summer of 2001 was strange. Movies opened big and died quickly, but because of the nature of their wide-releases, they were able to amass a lot of money in spite of bad reviews and bad word-of-mouth.
Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times pinpointed the answer to this puzzling situation. He notes that the big Hollywood studios have gotten around the movie critics with their outlandish press junket strategy, and, more importantly for the studios, they have gotten around bad word-of-mouth by releasing their movies so wide that they make tons of money before anybody gets a chance to find out how bad they are. Kenneth points out that the drop from the first weekend to the second weekend for many of these movies was so large that it resembled the plummeting dot-com stock prices: Tomb Raider dropped 59%; Planet of the Apes dropped 58%; AI dropped 52%; and The Fast and the Furious dropped 50%.
Clearly, these and other movies did not sit well with their audiences. The word of mouth was so bad that people told their friends not to bother, but the studios beat the system with their wide releases.
This is a very troubling situation. It means that miserable movies like AMERICAN PIE 2 can succeed in spite of all odds, and it means that studios will continue to make immoral and decadent films now that they’ve figured out a way to avoid the censure of a disappointed public.
In years past, good movies such as Driving Miss Daisy and Chariots of Fire may not have opened strong but they got great word of mouth and went on to be listed among the top grossing films of their release years. This word-of-mouth, audience discretion helped our Annual Report to the Entertainment Industry. Last year, however, the studios have blitzed word-of-mouth and the critics, so now we just have endless complaints about the rotten film fare at the box office.
Therefore, the burden is on the audience to be even more careful about choosing the good and rejecting the bad. Please consult MOVIEGUIDE® and our website on the Internet at www.movieguide.org. Don’t let the studios blitz the American public with immoral film fare.
