Shed No Tears for Olivia Wilde
Guilt-tripping people into buying tickets is not a successful marketing strategy.
Wilde seemed to suggest it would be deplorable not to see her movie. In a bizarrely counterproductive tweet, Wilde positioned the film as more political talisman than goofball comedy. This capped an exhaustive all-in campaign by the media to try to make an event movie out of a low-budget, no-star indie. The New York Times alone published a review, a profile of the director, a lengthy interview with the two lead actresses, an interview with a third actress from the movie, a think piece on lesbian films, and a piece on a musical sequence that was functionally a video advertisement for the movie. The subtext of all these pieces was: At last, a film by, for, and about women! Go see it or you’re a misogynist!
The media are now engaged in a fit of angst about the failure of Booksmart, whose financier Megan Ellison specializes in making films (Sorry to Bother You, If Beale Street Could Talk, Vice) that generate more column inches than they do paying customers. Yet another piece on (the poor performance of) the movie in the Times posed this question in the headline: “The ‘Booksmart’ Conundrum: Are Women Not Allowed to Fail?” A subhead asked, “Is it being held to an unfair standard?” We’re meant to answer the second question with a hearty affirmative. The implied reasoning is: Don’t hold this movie to an impossible standard of being a hit. That would be sexist. The Times noted that Twitter users were suffering various levels of conniption because a movie about, written by, and directed by women tanked. Some opined that it was unfair of the multiplex masters to pit a movie about people of color (Aladdin, which opened on the same weekend) against a movie about women.
Wilde, who spent much of her Times profile her whining that she was exploited for being pretty, by which she means “exceptionally well-paid for being pretty,” and her friends in the media have still not absorbed the lesson of Lady Ghostbusters, which is: The audience is not going to do you any favors. Ticket buyers don’t care whether millionaire Hollywood women feel empowered. People who want a laugh get very suspicious when you tell them a movie is imbued with (as the Times review put it) “an exuberant, generous, matter-of-factly feminist sensibility.” When people hear “feminist” and “generous” in the same sentence, their circuits begin to malfunction in the same way they did as when Wilde, an outspoken liberal, described Hillary Clinton as “exciting.”
Hollyweirds fail yet again to realize NO ONE wants to see their 'woke' bs
Booksmart
Academic overachievers Amy and Molly thought keeping their noses to the grindstone gave them a leg up on their high school peers. But on the eve of graduation, the best friends suddenly realize that they may have missed out on the special moments of their teenage years. Determined to make up for lost time, the girls decide to cram four years of not-to-be missed fun into one night -- a chaotic adventure that no amount of book smarts could prepare them for.
Guilt-tripping people into buying tickets is not a successful marketing strategy.
Wilde seemed to suggest it would be deplorable not to see her movie. In a bizarrely counterproductive tweet, Wilde positioned the film as more political talisman than goofball comedy. This capped an exhaustive all-in campaign by the media to try to make an event movie out of a low-budget, no-star indie. The New York Times alone published a review, a profile of the director, a lengthy interview with the two lead actresses, an interview with a third actress from the movie, a think piece on lesbian films, and a piece on a musical sequence that was functionally a video advertisement for the movie. The subtext of all these pieces was: At last, a film by, for, and about women! Go see it or you’re a misogynist!
The media are now engaged in a fit of angst about the failure of Booksmart, whose financier Megan Ellison specializes in making films (Sorry to Bother You, If Beale Street Could Talk, Vice) that generate more column inches than they do paying customers. Yet another piece on (the poor performance of) the movie in the Times posed this question in the headline: “The ‘Booksmart’ Conundrum: Are Women Not Allowed to Fail?” A subhead asked, “Is it being held to an unfair standard?” We’re meant to answer the second question with a hearty affirmative. The implied reasoning is: Don’t hold this movie to an impossible standard of being a hit. That would be sexist. The Times noted that Twitter users were suffering various levels of conniption because a movie about, written by, and directed by women tanked. Some opined that it was unfair of the multiplex masters to pit a movie about people of color (Aladdin, which opened on the same weekend) against a movie about women.
Wilde, who spent much of her Times profile her whining that she was exploited for being pretty, by which she means “exceptionally well-paid for being pretty,” and her friends in the media have still not absorbed the lesson of Lady Ghostbusters, which is: The audience is not going to do you any favors. Ticket buyers don’t care whether millionaire Hollywood women feel empowered. People who want a laugh get very suspicious when you tell them a movie is imbued with (as the Times review put it) “an exuberant, generous, matter-of-factly feminist sensibility.” When people hear “feminist” and “generous” in the same sentence, their circuits begin to malfunction in the same way they did as when Wilde, an outspoken liberal, described Hillary Clinton as “exciting.”
Hollyweirds fail yet again to realize NO ONE wants to see their 'woke' bs
Booksmart
Academic overachievers Amy and Molly thought keeping their noses to the grindstone gave them a leg up on their high school peers. But on the eve of graduation, the best friends suddenly realize that they may have missed out on the special moments of their teenage years. Determined to make up for lost time, the girls decide to cram four years of not-to-be missed fun into one night -- a chaotic adventure that no amount of book smarts could prepare them for.
