Um, maybe, but I think feminist activism had a lot more to do with it.
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That feeling when you’re excited to join a new film project, Billionaire Boys’ Rub, and later realize you misheard, but now everybody knows.
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Wonder what the take will be next week after all this free publicity?
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Nice! I was going to suggest that perhaps the movie should have been renamed, but your comment is a whole level higher.
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Yeah iirc it was filmed and completed years ago.
And it wasnt released because its purportedly awful. As i understand it this originally would have been release before the accusations against Spacey became a thing. They started pre production in 2010 and apparently shot and completed it in 2015.
This reeks of dumping a stinker. 3 years late. It was quietly dumped to streaming months ago. Its only been put out on 8 screens in out od the way places. Early rumors of hot garbage (friend of mine was really excited about this loves the 80s Judd Nelson flick, he got disapointed fast). This is exactly what would have happened anyway. This movie was only natable at this point because of the Spacey accusations. And its probably only coming out to check some contractual or tax boxes.
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Why release it at all?
Contractual obligations?
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Usually.
This is very much a “straight to dvd” situation. Maybe lose some rights if they dont release. Maybe need a release to properly write it off on taxes.
Often times this sort of thing is done to check off some oblogation so you can make some sort of money on home release. But the releae here is pretty perfunctory. Very typical when some ones looking to bury a movie but cant just park it in storage unreleased.
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Poor costar Cary Elwes. The guy never seems to catch a break.
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I very much doubt they care about them (releasing to six art-house studios is not going to do them any favors), but simply because of the threat of litigation if they did not release (and maybe tax reasons etc.). I think releasing to any cinemas at all crosses a legal line that certain executives needed crossed.
All nine viewers of the film reviewed it! That’s got to make the statisticians happy – a perfect poll.
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That they didn’t go straight to DVD/streaming is like they wanted to punish someone.
Or… If they can keep it in Los Angeles County for a couple weeks, it’ll still be Oscar eligible. Yeah, that’s it!
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They did though. It was released on VOD back in july.
And distribution contracts often require some sort of theatrical release before you can move on to home distribution. Most films that get dumped that way see some theatrical release. Even if its a single showing.
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Meaning, then, that Jane Q. Taxpayer is ultimately funding Spacey’s fuckery? Doh!
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The media would love to declare that no one went to Billionaire Boys Club in the theater strictly because of Spacey, when the real reasons are that a majority of people didn’t even know the film was playing and never saw any national ads (an online trailer dropped two months ago but not in a massive way);
Billionaire Boys Club never was positioned for a theatrical release in the specialty sense of the word like a Focus Features or even an Amazon release. By and large, cable contracts with theatrical-VOD distributors dictate a one-week, 10 big-city market theatrical run. This is so that a film, like Billionaire Boys Club, can be slotted in the “In theaters” portion of a VOD menu and be rented/sold at a higher price. Furthermore with a VOD release, the distributor “four-walls” the film for a week at a theater, which is what happened here with Billionaire Boys Club, meaning the distributor literally rents each theater in each market for around $5K-$10K a week.
Some AMC theaters were part of Billionaire Boys Club ‘s play, and they have a policy of not playing national theatrical/VOD releases. So the only way to get around that rule is for a distributor to rent or “four-wall” the theater . In the case of Billionaire Boys Club, Vertical rented in L.A., Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit, Phoenix, Sarasota, Tampa, Minneapolis, Miami, New Orleans and Hartford, CT.
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Start a conspiracy theory that the movie is being suppressed by the 0.0001%
So if I rent this online for a schadenfreude fix I am going to subsidize the rental of those empty theaters by paying a premium ‘in theaters’ price? This transition to direct to VOD can’t happen soon enough.
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