ATHF: Movie film for DVD
I had a good chuckle reading this week’s Entertainment Weekly. They had the stats for last week’s film box office takes and the ATHF flick only managed $3 mil. Well, what was [adultswim] expecting? This should have been straight to DVD. I heard nothing but bad buzz for it beforehand, Mooninite Massacre aside (although I guess you can count that as bad too), and somehow the reviews were mixed?
Okay, I say that having read two… EW giving it a B- and Ty Burr giving it one star in the Boston Globe. Burr may go a little heavy on the stoner vibe — probably more a point for Swim’s latest crap than ATHF — but he has a point. No one outside of regular viewers were ever going to see this in theaters, so why didn’t they just go straight to DVD? I guess they probably got the $3 mil for free as those same goers will opt for the DVD as well, but still… I don’t want to wait (if it turns out to be good).
Oh… and no, I’m not playing along with their joke with my title…
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This post has 2 comments (now closed):
JFCC
Tue :: 24 :: Apr :: 2007 :: 08.41 am
I can offer absolutely no excuse for it, but I’ve been watching Saul of the Mole Men.
Never liked ATHF much, though. I miss Space Ghost.
Ed
Tue :: 24 :: Apr :: 2007 :: 10.24 am
The $3 million for free?
The studio won’t see a penny of that once you work in production & marketing costs + the $2 million they ponied up to the city of Boston for the March fiasco.
You are exactly correct. They should have gone Direct-to-DVD. A theatrical release of such a marginal property is simply asinine. It doesn’t help that most active viewers of ATHF feel the show lost it after its first season so they may not even get the shear numbers they would have once upon a time.
If they absolutely wanted a theatrical run they should have released it on DVD and then made a few prints to farm out to college towns for midnight runs and build a cult following. Of course, the only problem there is – in this day and age – the college crowd is more prone to hunker around a pirated copy on YouTube than head out to the Nickelodeon for a communal experience.