With the (seemingly) much-anticipated double feature GRINDHOUSE having a case of box office erectile dysfunction, Hollywood insiders and online journalists immediately speculated on the causes quicker than Tarantino can deliver a complete sentence. It’s too long! Too violent! Too self-indulgent! Too hyped! Released on the wrong weekend! Audiences didn’t “get” it! Milk Duds pull out my fillings! And so on.
Now comes the wicked rumor that the Weinstein machine known as Harvey was so utterly disappointed by the fiscal reaming that he’s actually considering the notion of slashing the package into two distinct flicks and tossing them at screens separately — in just a few weeks! Harvey points to the fact that this was the global release plan all along: “By splitting it up, we’re going to do a hell of a lot better internationally than we did here.”
This has to sting — the Weinsteins haven’t exactly churned out the hits since wandering off on their own, with a catalog and slate littered with expensive projects, foreign acquisitions and genre flicks that were all basically dead on arrival (including, ironically, DOA). And now even their two Golden Boys in tandem can’t open a flick to much more than what the equally graphic 300 pulled in its fourth week of release.
Of course, just striking prints of the proposed solo cuts seems like it would be to further financial detriment, let alone the price tag of re-promoting the flicks, so who knows what’ll happen. At least the fans will likely get a (probably bare-bones) DVD release with all alacrity in a ham-handed attempt to recoup cost quickly. As for why the project tanked at the box office, I stick with William Goldman’s Hollywood theory: “Nobody knows anything.”
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