Advance Screening of The Mechanic Jan 24th!

Alliance Films called me today and asked about doing an advance screening of Jason Statham's new film The Mechanic. Naturally I said yes, advance screenings are cool to do, especially a movie I think will be popular. We are doing the screening on Monday the 24th at 7pm. The movie opens Jan 28th.

I don't yet know how Alliance wants to handle distributing the passes. Usually they are given away as prizes by various media and groups. If there are any leftover we usually have them at the door for walk ups. It's a pretty big theatre so there's usually extra passes.

Here's the Red Band trailer: Red Band also means NSFW.

Next Week's Film May 12 - 18

Next week was a weird week to book. The only new film that came off the first run screens was Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, however that Studio (Alliance) usually puts a week between first and second run so I initially wouldn't have been able to book it for next week. That left me in a bit of a scramble as I didn't have any other movies that I wanted to play. Nothing recently had done well enough to bring back. So I was going to have to play something I hadn't planned on playing. I was looking at these options.

TWO LOVERS: Not a high profile movie but a good one. I saw it at the Hyland and they kept it for a couple weeks. The showing I saw it at had a fair number of people. There weren't any prints of it available though.

WALTZ WITH BASHIER: This is one of those films I don't think will do well but I could get surprised by. However I decided not to take the chance this time of year.

ADVENTURELAND: a fairly good movie aimed at an audience who isn't here right now. (students), didn't do great in First Run though.

17 AGAIN: an okay movie aimed at an audience we don't really get a lot of, young girls. However it does star Zac Efron and did fairly good first run. It's also the highest profile so I decided to go with it and see what happens.

However in the end I ended up getting Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. The booker decided this was a good time to question the one week wait policy at Alliance. They had been inconsistent in applying the policy, doing it in some places with some movies but not in others. As a result we won't have to wait a week any more and I was able to book Ghosts. I did have to wait until Tuesday to get an answer which caused a bit of a reworking of the things the staff and I do on Monday and Tuesday nights.

Now watch the movie bomb, romantic comedies are usually a pretty safe bet for us.

The following week should be Wolverine, it's not playing anywhere first run as of Thursday. Fox also does the waiting bit but at least does it consistently. I'm pretty sure they usually only make us wait a week so Wolverine should be available. If it's not I'll probably try 17 Again as there isn't anything else new I see coming off.

R.I.P. New Line Cinema.

One of the more prominent smaller studios has been erased. New Line Cinema has been owned by Warner Bros for a while. Warner has decided to fold New Line into Warner's film division effectively leaving New Line a shell with a name. New Line is known as the House that Freddy built based on the fact that it's earliest successes were the Nightmare on Elm Street films. It has in recent years produced some classic films including the Lord of the Rings films. New Line had been having some bad times lately, except for Hairspray they hadn't had a hit in a while. They produced The Golden Compass which is getting a rep as one of the biggest bombs ever. I think there's more to it than that, probably a clash of personalities with the studio executives. All studios have bad times, movies are an inherently unpredictable business. New Line took one of the biggest gambles in movie history and won. The three Lord of the Rings films were all shot at the same time at a cost of some $300 million. If the first weekend of the first film has been a bust that would have resulted in a huge loss.

I read they were keeping New Line but it would no longer produce, distribute or market films. My first thought was 'what else does a studio do?'. After a little more thought I think they are keeping the name to attach to certain future films. For example if Warner makes the Hobbit films they will probably release them as New Line for legal or continuity reasons. New Line also has some films that haven't been released yet.

This could get interesting here in Canada. A company named Alliance is the biggest Canadian movie distributor. They tend to release a lot of the high profile award magnets (Atonement) as well as some lower films (Good Luck Chuck). They also release most Canadian films. New Line's films are distributed in Canada by Alliance and constitutes a large portion of Alliance's releases. Alliance will presumably release the New Line films that haven't come out yet but after that who knows?

Alliance was just bought by new owners including the Quebec government. Their investment may have just taken a turn for the worse.

There's an extensive posting on New Line at Cinematical. including a list of all their films. There's some real classics there.