with only 13 screens it brought in $61,000 dollars the opening weekend this is amazingly good! if they had released it in 2000 screens they probably would had made $10 million in only the first weekend! what would ever make them decide to only put it in 13 screens? that is nothing
sharei also tend to wonder about this. i mean, the interest drummed up by project greenlight alone should have bee good to at least break even at the box office. youn wouldnt even need a wide release pattern, but a few theatres in big cities should have drawn something. as it is, i watched all of the TV show, and have yet to see stolen summer...so, the point is kind of made there. they could have made their money back quite easily, i would think.
shareReleasing a movie to theaters is not cheap, especially when you take into account the marketing and distribution costs. If they thought they could break even with a theatrical release I'm sure they would've done so, but this movie probably tracked so poorly in test screenings that they didn't want to take a chance of a costly roll out, and just gave it a token theatrical release to fulfill the Project Greenlight contract. I thought it was an okay movie, but it's definitely not an easy sell.
shareProject Greenlight and Stolen Summer were in the wrong decade.
Long ago, people who understood the real movie business (i.e. studio bosses) would've had the contest be for an amateur director OR an amateur screen writer, but never both at the same time. Certainly not the same person!
A few decades, from now, enough theaters will have converted to digital thus removing the need to make and ship expensive (old-fashioned) movie prints. So distribution costs would've been very low. And wider (even limited) will be much cheaper than today.
But no matter the decade, PGL success needed the greedy Hollywood types to cut a deal to share "back end" with HBO. Then HBO runs short ads featuring Damon and whats-his-name inviting people in certain cities on certain dates to go to certain theaters to watch the movie. Simple.
But no.... that's just not how "it" works.
Okay. 3 movies that last money for "Hollywood."
Ultimately "Hollywood" didn't want PGL to succeed, and by extension, neither did Damon or his buddy (although I'm sure they didn't believe this in the start). A choice between PGL success ("a whole new way to make movies" ) and a continued career in the Hollywood system. Easy choice for them. Easy.
Next.
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