{"id":965,"date":"2008-05-26T17:10:26","date_gmt":"2008-05-27T00:10:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/?p=965"},"modified":"2008-05-26T17:10:26","modified_gmt":"2008-05-27T00:10:26","slug":"indiana-jones-and-the-management-of-fanboys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/?p=965","title":{"rendered":"Indiana Jones and the Management of Fanboys"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My fanboy sense is tingling &#8211; and not in that special, Wilma Dearing sort of way. OK, now they&#8217;re tingling in that Wilma Dearing sort of way, but only because I mentioned her, and I got to thinking&#8230; I shall reign myself in.<\/p>\n<p>Is it just me, or did we get manhandled a little over the new Indy movie? The film&#8217;s opening weekend is officially over and the worldwide bean counting says that a $200M investment turned into $300M, and there&#8217;s a whole Summer to go, then the DVD for Christmas. Which is great for the filmmakers. We&#8217;ve been griping for years that we wanted more Indy, and they did it&#8230; 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&#8217;t shoot them in the foot. Because, let&#8217;s be fair &#8211; we can push for a dream movie, and then kick it in the nuts if it doesn&#8217;t leave us twitching like Joe Dorsey in Brainstorm. But we, as fanboys, can&#8217;t pay for a Summer blockbuster &#8211; the straights have to go see it as well.<\/p>\n<p>Two things about the opening weekend have piqued my interest, and suggested we&#8217;re being handled &#8211; and firstly, let&#8217;s be fair, the studio had <a href=\"http:\/\/news.google.ca\/news\/url?sa=t&#038;ct=ca\/5-0&#038;fp=483b29ff967e0566&#038;ei=EUw7SK_0NZK-hAOP0YVm&#038;url=http%3A\/\/slashdot.org\/article.pl%3Fsid%3D08\/05\/15\/166219&#038;cid=1214005804&#038;usg=AFrqEzemObUTe5uSsJ6WPfVtD8hpugLCSQ\">more than enough heads up<\/a> that geeks everywhere were starting to grumble that they weren&#8217;t experiencing multiple oh-faces over Indy 4 &#8211; something any studio suit worth his front-door parking spot wouldn&#8217;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 &#8211; holiday weekend coming, the geeks are poised to critique&#8230; what to do?<\/p>\n<p>1) Friday became a holiday &#8211; while Canada had their long weekend the week before, and America wasn&#8217;t having it&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>2) So, offhand, what&#8217;s Indy 4&#8217;s Tomatometer rating? Go ahead, I&#8217;ll even let you go check out the front page of Rotten Tomatoes&#8230; what&#8217;s that? It&#8217;s not there? Surely not &#8211; after all, it made double the coin that Prince Caspian did. But there you have it &#8211; if you search for the title, you can find it &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rottentomatoes.com\/m\/indiana_jones_and_the_kingdom_of_the_crystal_skull\/\">a respectable, but by no means Earthshattering 79%<\/a>. Why? Why isn&#8217;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&#8217;t an encapsulated rating anywhere. It couldn&#8217;t be an oversight, so one can only assume it was deliberate &#8211; someone wanted to make sure that there wasn&#8217;t even a whiff of &#8220;meh&#8221; or (shrug) for the opening 4 days.<\/p>\n<p>And I don&#8217;t know how I feel about that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My fanboy sense is tingling &#8211; and not in that special, Wilma Dearing sort of way. OK, now they&#8217;re tingling in that Wilma Dearing sort of way, but only because I mentioned her, and I got to thinking&#8230; I shall reign myself in. Is it just me, or did we get manhandled a little over [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[296,321,327],"class_list":["post-965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","tag-crystal-skull","tag-harrison-ford","tag-indiana-jone"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}