Indiana Jones and the Management of Fanboys
Indiana Jones and the Management of Fanboys
May 26My fanboy sense is tingling – and not in that special, Wilma Dearing sort of way. OK, now they’re tingling in that Wilma Dearing sort of way, but only because I mentioned her, and I got to thinking… I shall reign myself in.
Is it just me, or did we get manhandled a little over the new Indy movie? The film’s opening weekend is officially over and the worldwide bean counting says that a $200M investment turned into $300M, and there’s a whole Summer to go, then the DVD for Christmas. Which is great for the filmmakers. We’ve been griping for years that we wanted more Indy, and they did it… and it looks like they took steps to ensure that we, the unwashed nerds, who helped keep the dream alive (meaning, more than a decade of free word of mouth), wouldn’t shoot them in the foot. Because, let’s be fair – we can push for a dream movie, and then kick it in the nuts if it doesn’t leave us twitching like Joe Dorsey in Brainstorm. But we, as fanboys, can’t pay for a Summer blockbuster – the straights have to go see it as well.
Two things about the opening weekend have piqued my interest, and suggested we’re being handled – and firstly, let’s be fair, the studio had more than enough heads up that geeks everywhere were starting to grumble that they weren’t experiencing multiple oh-faces over Indy 4 – something any studio suit worth his front-door parking spot wouldn’t want leaking out into the general populace. The general populace may not stand up and be counted a geek, but they like the same things about genre movies we do, and they often listen to what the well versed nerd has to say. So – holiday weekend coming, the geeks are poised to critique… what to do?
1) Friday became a holiday – while Canada had their long weekend the week before, and America wasn’t having it’s holiday until Monday, Indy 4 started showing everywhere at Thursday, midnight. Before the weekend had officially started, the movie buzz had it raking in $25M. And buzz like that sounds like quality to the average, ordinary bears.
2) So, offhand, what’s Indy 4’s Tomatometer rating? Go ahead, I’ll even let you go check out the front page of Rotten Tomatoes… what’s that? It’s not there? Surely not – after all, it made double the coin that Prince Caspian did. But there you have it – if you search for the title, you can find it – a respectable, but by no means Earthshattering 79%. Why? Why isn’t the biggest movie of the holiday weekend listed on the front page? It has features on the front page coming out the USB ports, but there isn’t an encapsulated rating anywhere. It couldn’t be an oversight, so one can only assume it was deliberate – someone wanted to make sure that there wasn’t even a whiff of “meh” or (shrug) for the opening 4 days.
And I don’t know how I feel about that.
