There’s no denying the failure Grindhouse saw in theaters this weekend. Regardless of being a guilty pleasure picture from the modern day masters of guilty pleasures, Grindhouse barely made any impact at the box office, boasting only $11 million towards its budget of $53 million.
There are a lot of factors in play here, of course, from the film’s extended running time and limited audience appeal to the fact that it was a family friendly Easter weekend. “L.A. Weekly” columnist Nikke Finke is calling the Weinstein company on those factors and more with her latest blog entry which details a conversation she had with Harvey Weinstein where he reveals a possible plan for making more money on the films: a re-release.
Weinstein tells Finke the company may pull the double feature version of the film and re-release the Grindhouse pictures as single movies – Tarantino’s Death Proof and Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. The move would involve inserting previously cut footage to bring each picture to a feature length on its own. This wouldn’t take much work since this is already what the Weinsteins had planned for the European release of the film.
Would this really fix the problems Grindhouse is facing? Sure, it might fix the running time and any other weekend would have helped the poor release date selection (exploitation of violence, gore, and sex – at Easter? Even this agnostic has to question that decision). Other critic complaints wouldn’t be appeased by this, however. For instance, right now Tarantino’s Death Proof slows the picture down tremendously. Without Planet Terror to ramp things up, could Death Proof even survive on its own?
Of course, this could just be speculation from the Weinsteins, and making this move might not help at all in the U.S., where the double feature version has already been released. In Europe they’ll build hype around each section with a PR push featuring Tarantino or Rodriguez. Here they’ve already pushed the movie and it flopped. Would a re-release of each movie really make that big a difference? It seems to me that Grindhouse got its shot and ground out. Better luck next time… or on DVD.
