So, as Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain… um… fails to set the box office alight, shall we say, retailer site ICv2 looks at the potential upsides for retailers:
Critical reviews of the film have been split with 52% of the reviews on the Rotten Tomatoes Website negative. Critics who disliked the film tended to really hate it and described it with adjectives such as “artsy-fartsy,” “pretentious,” “incoherent,” and “turgid,” while those who admired the film found it “hugely ambitious,” “visually commanding,” “gripping,” and “utterly transcendent.”
As it turned out the mass audience rendered a negative verdict as The Fountain averaged a mere $2,530 per location over the weekend. But it has already earned nearly as much money in its first five days as Ghost World, which sold a ton of graphic novels, took in over its entire run; and The Fountain could be the kind of metaphysical science fiction that will inspire its partisans to purchase the graphic novel as well as a hardcover illustrated screenplay (Universe Books $30).
Something that’s been interesting about the press that I’ve read about the movie is that almost everything I’ve read contains something to the effect of “Of course, this movie is the cheap version of what the director really wanted to make. If you want to see the full version, there’s a graphic novel that came out a couple of years ago.” It’s been unusual for comic tie-ins to be mentioned so matter-of-factly; perhaps there really is something to this whole “comic culture becomes mainstream culture” meme.
November 28th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
The Fountain was an awesome flick. People just don’t like thinking when at the movies. Hell they don’t even like thinking while reading i.e. The DiVinci Code i.e. a conspiracy thriller for dumbasses.
November 28th, 2006 at 1:49 pm
I loved the OGN