Monday, January 2
Finally, the culprit for Hollywood's financial woes is revealed! It's... Matt Drudge?
Studios have to battle snarky media reports
By Gregg KildayIt's far too early to write any obituaries for Universal Pictures' "King Kong." As of Tuesday, the end of its first two weeks in release, Peter Jackson's remake had amassed $128 million domestically and $153.6 million abroad, for a combined worldwide haul of $282.1 million. With those numbers, it's just about halfway home to recouping its $207 million production costs, give or take the added millions spent on marketing as well as the participations earmarked for Jackson.Still, the fact that "Kong" didn't automatically prevail as king of the jungle -- but instead has found itself in a day-to-day battle with "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe" -- has created its own suspense.One of the problems for "Kong" is that the much of the media covers the boxoffice battles with all the subtlety of color commentators at a demolition derby.At one holiday gathering this past week, when the conversations turned to movies, one friend mentioned that her sister said she wouldn't be going to see "Kong." When he asked her why, her woman replied, "Because I read on Drudge that it was bombing."In fact, the always hyperventilating Drudge Report first responded to the early, ecstatic reviews of "Kong" by reporting unrealistic expectations that it could challenge "Titanic" as the biggest film of all time -- a feat that no movie has come anywhere close to since "Titanic" set sail in 1997. Then, on Dec. 16, Drudge headlined the first reports of "Kong's" less-than-record-breaking first day with the ominous words " 'King' Bomb?"Now, if there's someone out there saying she doesn't plan to check out "Kong" simply because Drudge was erroneously hinting it was dead-on-arrival, it's quite possible that person never seriously intended to see the movie in the first place.But the anecdote also suggests that in this media-saturated moment, Hollywood doesn't just have to worry about genuine word-of-mouth coming from moviegoers who actually attend a movie before spreading the word -- good or bad -- it also has to defend against secondary word-of-mouth based on little more than a half-baked opinion or a snarky headline.

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So the Hollywood Reporter wants to call out Matt Drudge as writing “hyperventilating,” “snarky” headlines and say it's the reason the industry’s revenues are in the toilet. We’re talking about an industry that went out of its way to promote The Chronicles of Narnia to the blue states as NOT A CHRISTIAN FILM, and then turned around and promoted Brokeback Mountain to the red states as NOT ABOUT GAY COWBOYS, NOSIREE! Also, every critic and their brother salivated over Munich’s "moral ambiguities" and Syriana’s anti-American propaganda, though the more honest ones also begrudgingly mentioned that, on yeah, politics aside, the films pretty much sucked. But congratulations, Matt. Just like Dubya, it’s all your fault.
 
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