It’s never a good sign when a studio cancels the premiere of a film they’ve spent buckets of money promoting, but it happened this week. The film? Aliens Versus Predator. So if you were looking forward to footage of an Alien working its way down the red carpet, you’re out of luck. Now, there are only two reasons why something like this would happen.
Reason one, and this is the most common one: the film sucks so bad that the studio doesn’t want anybody to see it in advance so that negative word of mouth won’t have a chance to spoil the opening weekend business.
Reason two, and this is the excuse the studio is actually using: things are so incredibly disorganized that the director has missed his deadline and prints aren’t physically ready yet. That much disorder cannot possibly bode well for a film, and word is that not only are the final prints not ready but the final edit hasn’t even been completed, which raises the very real possibility that prints will not be ready on time for the film’s advertised release date.
With any luck this thing will suck so bad, and lose so much money, that nobody will ever let Anderson make a film again …
I’ve just seen the premiere of AVP in the cinima in Denmark, GOD that movie STINKS… Paul W. S. Anderson ruined a perfectly and excellent idea, the dude should be forbidden to even WATCH a comicbook or a computer, his ideas should be deleted before they even thouched the table…
there are so many stupid mistakes in this movie i have no idea where to begin…
1) promotion of the movie was awesome, just a shame Paul W. S. Anderson got a buttload of cash from us poor people who thought that AVP was actually a good idea!
2) how can the leading female character stand in the antarctica with only a sweater on, it’s maybe 50 degrees below 0..
3) THIS MOVIE SUCKS :(
I’ve just seen the premiere of AVP in the cinima in Denmark, GOD that movie STINKS… Paul W. S. Anderson ruined a perfectly and excellent idea, the dude should be forbidden to even WATCH a comicbook or a computer, his ideas should be deleted before they even thouched the table…
there are so many stupid mistakes in this movie i have no idea where to begin…
1) promotion of the movie was awesome, just a shame Paul W. S. Anderson got a buttload of cash from us poor people who thought that AVP was actually a good idea!
2) how can the leading female character stand in the antarctica with only a sweater on, it’s maybe 50 degrees below 0..
3) THIS MOVIE SUCKS :(
i saw the movie… it was pretty good… not what i expected but good
Yeah I was really hoping for this to be a good movie… I grew up with Aliens and Predator and this movie would have bundled my childhood dreams of a great showdown into a wonderful mature package… but guess what… all my dreams will live in the video games instead… can we say Aliens vs predator 2 for PC???
Fuck you piece of shit hacks who make millions and waste millions on shit… again… FUCK YOU!
It’s not about the premiere. That’s just an outcome of this pathetic process.
Look, Dark Horse, the games – this thing could have been a real winner. It was developed up the ass! But when you have 20th Century thinking, producers and executives woefully out of touch with anything current or relevant, this is what happens. The authors of this crap are OUT OF TOUCH. Enjoy your money and STOP MAKING FILMS. Your time is OVER.
Where were the checks and balances at FOX? Someone with their pulse on the real world should have vetoed creative coming from Paul Anderson. Throw a rock and you could hit a better director from HK, or Korea. This is 2004 people, not 1994. Geez…
Who’s worked up? I’m responding to someone’s comments about a post I wrote. I help run a movie news website and the cancelling the premiere of a $70 mil tentpole film counts as news. Hence, I posted about it. Having Fox lackies turn up incognito is also news, as well as being pretty darn amusing, so I posted about that, too. So, worked up no. Moderately entertained, yes.
Bubba,
Why are you so worked up about the premiere? I can’t imagine you would be invited to one either way. Why jump to conclusions? See the movie and then make up your mind. Is this movie so important to you that you? Don’t you have anything else going on in your life. Chill out. Maybe go on friendster or lava life and try and meet someone. Anyone this worked up about a movie clearly has no friends. Alien vs Predator, whoever wins, you are still a loser…
Drew: the only advance screenings were tightly controlled on the Fox lot. Those are cast and crew screenings and far, far from being a legit premiere. There were no press screenings whatsoever, a fact openly acknowledged and generally mocked by all of today’s dailies here in Toronto.
Christine’s dishonesty lies in referring to Fox in the third person. Fox is not ‘they’ to Christine, it is ‘we’. Like I said in my following post, she was working from a computer with an IP assigned directly to Fox Studios.
And, yeah, I generally don’t go by much of anything that AICN posts, I just found some of those quotes really amusing. Once the legit press starts running reviews tomorrow I’ll put together a nice collection of pull quotes. In the meantime, here’s Peter Howell’s excellent article on the whole no-press-screening approach to the film from today’s Toronto Star.
And here’s the capsule review posted by Now Weekly (one of Toronto’s entertainment weeklies)this afternoon:
And here are the choice bits from Eye’s review (they’re the other Toronto entertainment weekly), posted today:
Hey … Rotten Tomatoes has got a good block of quotes already, and the film currently has a whopping Tomatoe-meter score of 8. It’s early yet, but that’s still the lowest score I think I’ve ever seen there …
Fox didn’t screen this one in Canada either. They had a promo screening for contest winners last night but no media (a bunch of people I know are in the press) were invited. I got told that they got a last minute email about a screening this morning (Fri- Opening Day). However there was already another screening this morning so no one went.
Basically anyone who called the local fox rep trying to get into the sole screening last nite didn’t get in. Hmmm.. I smell a bomb. Oh wait, i talked to someone who did see it last night and he said it sucked bad.
Bad move fox.
I usually agree with you guys, but I think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill on this one. It’s pretty much established that there were indeed advance screenings, and Christine said she went to an “advance screening yesterday,” nothing about a premiere. And really, quoting AICN advance reviews to bolster your case against fake reviews is a bit disengenous, when it’s already been confirmed that at least some of those bad reviews for the same movie were also fake (see here). Her post seemed pretty benign, and I’m thinking she very well could have been acting on her own without Fox’s direction or blessing.
Just my two cents. :)
Ah, what the hell, here’s the email in question:
“where did you get this info about fox “cancelling” the AVP premiere? i know you’re going to say i’m biased bc i do work in the office of one of the producers of the movie (we have a deal w/fox but i don’t work at fox) but i never ever heard of a premiere at the chinese, and neither has anyone else in this office. last night was what they were considering to be the “premiere.” it was at the fox lot, with the party on the lawn outside the commissary…yeah it wasn’t a big shebang but as far as i know they never planned for there to be a big one…i mean the entire cast are unknowns and most of them live in europe and they didn’t want to fly everyone (although i know they did fly in some people from london yesterday to come to the “premiere.”) sanaa lathan was there, and lance henriksen.
and yeah, you can say my opinion is crap or that i’m some kind of fox mole but i was honestly moderately entertained by the movie. the first 30 min are pretty slow, but there’s some fun stuff in there after that. my date actually liked it more than i did, and he’s a snob (and not connected to fox in any way, shape, or form.)
oh- and i noticed that on the blog you guys keep calling it alienS vs predator and it’s actually just alien vs predator. in the singular. a quibble, but it’s true.
that’s all.
jenn”
No planned premiere for a large budget, tentpole film? Riiiiiiiiiiight. You were planning to slip it out quietly, right? If you’re going to try to spin this, at least try to make it a little bit credible. And when the best the insiders can say is that they found it ‘moderately entertaining’ that’s not a good sign. Let’s pull some quotes from the non-Fox employees who saw it from the reviews AICN posted, shall we?
“only a small dose of trash”
“Paul W.S. Anderson makes films that bring two adjectives to mind, cheap and stupid.”
“It‚Äôs without any merit and its existence is a blight on two franchises that deserved better.”
“Anyone who really values these franchises will avoid this film like the plague. Spending money on it only encourages the suits at Fox to further sully the already tarnished reputations of both film franchises. ”
“Too bad Paul Anderson: Dream Rapist had to come in and single-handidly destroy everything I love in a quick 100 minutes. ”
“There isn’t a single good or fresh idea in the script.”
“The fights between the beasts are so badly shot and edited, I didn’t care for one solitary second.”
“the creatures look HORRIBLE.”
“Paul Anderson has not made a movie for the fans. He’s taken a beloved franchise, stripped it of it’s soul, and marketed it to 10-year-old boys.”
“Fuck you, Paul Anderson. I hope you rot in Hell.”
“AvP is, simply, hands-down terrible.”
“At this point, the fighting begins, and it’s fantastically stupid.”
“There isn’t a memorable character, scene, quote, or death.”
Yeah … sounds like a winner to me …
Yeah, somebody from Fox emailed me all pissed off saying they hadn’t cancelled all screenings and that they had a premiere on the Fox lot. Well, guess what! A screening on a closed lot open only to studio employees and their dates doesn’t count as a premiere. And there is still the matter of no advance press screenings at all – a sure indicator that the studio is afraid of the bad press they know will result if they let anyone outside their immediate control see it.
Oh there are prints out there all right. Today, I was down at the Paramount in the downtown core of Toronto and found out that tonight they’re having a premiere screening of it. Not that I wanted to go. I wisely spent my money on Garden State.
it’s not exactly true that they cancelled ALL advance screenings of AVP….i went to the “premiere” & after-party last night at fox- lance henriksen & sanaa lathan were there and they flew in a bunch of the cast that live in other countries. there’s another screening at fox tonite.
On the other hand, this film does have one of the most incredible marketing campaigns-
Oh. Right.
Knew this one was shit when FOX obviously dialed-down on their ad dollars. And the posters, the key art, the spots and the trailer? It’s common practice NOT to go with the first round in-house creative, but, hey.
Not the push one would expect for a big movie like this.
SOMEONE had to make a decision to save money SOMEWHERE on this shiny, shiny, turd.
THIS is why the digirati download movies.
It’s certainly why *I* will.
FOX could screw up a wet dream.
Hey! I’ve got an idea! Let’s make an Alien/Predator movie, but, like, how NEW LINE would make it! Y’know, with a bunch of unknown 20somethings and a barely competent director?
This is the franchise that spawned David Fincher?
Remember kids, it’s still called “20th” Century FOX. Not “21st”.
Amatuers…
I was panick stricken for a moment that I had to spend money on this. Then I remembered that I was given a couple passes after I saw Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle when it turned out that the block of ice in the bottom of my drink was in fact a nozzle from one of the drinking fountains at my local theatre.
Then I was panick stricken again because I wanted to save those for The Incredibles in November [more on my reasoning for that at another time].
But then I was okay because I picked up one of my all time favortie movies from the 80s this week – Predator, and they must have known something was up because they included a free pass to the damned thing.
:::wiping sweat from brow:::
That was a close one.
damn it, damn it, damn it!!! I’ve been waiting for this film for years, and when it turned out that fuckin’ hack was making I tried to keep my spirits up, after I saw all the stupid shit he was doing to the original make ups I still kept hoping, but now……hope is lost. Fox dropped the ball on a potentially huge film, way to go.
There is one simple reason for not seeing this one in the theaters: PG-13.
Oh this is going to really really suck bigtime.
And for that reason alone I have to go see it.
Herby
PS ED WOOD LIVES!!!!!!!!!!!!
I have friends who work for Fox and have seen an advance screening. Apparently it sucks HARD.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you our first confirmed plant. Christine has posted from an IP of 216.205.224.10 which is a direct line assigned to Fox. Seriously. Check it out. You can do a WHOIS search on the address here. So if you, like me, were wondering how somebody saw an advance screening of a film which has cancelled all of its advance screenings, you now have your answer.
That IP has now been banned from posting, by the way. If you want to get word out on a film you can just go ahead and email it to us and declare your affiliation openly, thanks …
I’m still gonna go see it and i’m still excited to see it
I actually went to an advance screening yesterday of AVP and it was not bad. It was actually entertaining. They probably dropped the screening because FOX has been having movies released almost every other week and they have more movies coming out in the very near future. Also the stars in the movie are not that well known.
John is sticking his fingers in his ears and yelling “LA LA LA LA AVP will be a great movie… LA LA LA LA AVP will rock… LA LA LA LA..”
Living in denile is fun.
Rodney – that’s exactly why I think this is actually a ploy to keep anybody from seeing the film in advance. They’ve got a bad film on their hands and they know it. The best they can hope for at this point is to make sure nobody else knows it until they’ve already spent their money to see it … the bad word of mouth will come, but as long as it doesn’t come until after the opening weekend they’ll make at least most of their money back …
Not that this affects my manliness…
keep in mind that Princess Diaries 2 is already open.
It would appear if they are pushing back the release date, then they are going to wait for the last minute to do so.
I downloaded the interactive desktop from the official website, which includes a countdown. This countdown, like the voting tallies, are in realtime, and didnt change when I altered my system clock, so they have the ability to change it on their end.
Still reads 1day 20hrs…
Is this the countdown to them announcing the delay? Maybe Princess Diaries 2 has a chance after all!