Feast and Famine

So, in case you blinked and missed it, Feast finally opened last weekend, in 146 theaters across the country. Apparently most theaters just had it as midnight shows, though it seems to be playing at different times here and there, since it made about $4000 on Sunday and $1575 on Monday.

Total four-day gross? $56,131. Less than $400 per theater. Which means that the average crowd at each midnight show was about 20-25 people. I don't think theaters were rocking.

Suffice it to say that this is unlikely to catch on as a release pattern, expecially since it usually costs $1000-$2000 just to strike each print of a film. They may be carving some copies into guitar picks as we speak.

The sad thing is that last year, when Project Greenlight 3 aired, they actually did a good job selling this as an interesting movie. So much so that, if they dumped it directly into theaters as soon as the series was over, one would have to believe that they could have at least done $10 million or so. Because the TV series is invaluable free advertising.

Now, the TV series was so long ago that most people forgot why they wanted to see it. The underwhelmed reviews certainly didn't help, while since I'm no longer big on dragging my bones out to see a movie at midnight, I wasn't even tempted.

Had it been showing at a multiplex at 4PM last Sunday afternoon? I may well have gone to see it. Had it come out a year ago? Absolutely.

One of the features of Project Greenlight is supposed to be synergy. You get people interested in a film, you get them vested in wanting to see how it came out, and then you let them see it, immediately. It's hard to argue with that template.

But you need to get it out in theaters, or at least have popped it out on DVD a year ago.

Feast may well have been a victim of the Miramax-Disney divorce, that hit right around when the film should have come out.

And I suspect (though I have no real knowledge) that last weekend's release might just have been a contractual thing; they promised to give a theatrical release to the finish product, and did.

It's also a little advertising for the DVD release, which is coming out on October 17. And I'm sure some people will pluck it off the shelves at Blockbuster.

The Feast writers just sold a couple of scripts, and one assumes that Feast director John Gulager will get another shot to direct something. Maybe.

But for the movie that was supposed to show that Project Greenlight was commercially viable -- they had finally selected a genre film, just for that purpose, rather than the coming-of-age dramas that they had done as the first two films -- what could have easily been something of a success, if they had gotten it out right away, instead put a stake in Project Greenlight's heart.

They botched it.