Bad Marketing 101: movie posters that tell me what to do.

You're a movie poster. Your job is to advertise a film and make that film look enticing to me, the ticket buyer. You are not a parent, teacher, advisor, or self-help guru. Therefore, it is not your job to tell me how to live my life. It is not your job to offer theoretically empowering suggestions about how I choose to lead my existence. A moment of scorn for obnoxious movie posters of the last decade or so that saw themselves fit to tell me (and you) what to do. You're a movie poster. You are not the boss of me and I don't need your advice. Your only advice/order should be 'buy a ticket for this movie' and/or 'buy some popcorn and a soda'. Period. Enjoy some examples after the jump.

What may keep me out of theaters in 2011 part II: Movies out of theaters in a flash.

Tonight is 'Babysitting Night'. One Friday a month, our daughter's preschool hosts a pizza/movie/pajama party after school hours from 6:00-10:00pm, meaning we overworked and overstressed parents get a guilt-free night off. So tonight, my wife and I were planning on catching an evening screening of Season of the Witch. Why Season of the Witch? Well, um... sometimes we enjoy schlock. And we had no interest in No Strings Attached, I've seen the other Oscar bait pictures, and there's no way in hell I'm convincing my wife to blow a date night on Blue Valentine or The Way Back. So Season of the Witch it was to be. Except it's not. Because Season of the Witch is only playing at our local cineplex at 9:50pm tonight. At the AMC Promenade 16, Season of the Witch, currently entering its fifteenth day of release, is now only playing at one late-night show.

Weekend Box Office (01/09/11): True Grit takes the lead, while Season of the Witch, Country Strong lead off 2011.

The crowd-pleasing, critically-acclaimed Coen brothers western remake/adaptation True Grit took the box office crown in its third weekend of release, setting itself up as a major Oscar contender. The Jeff Bridges/Hailee Steinfeld vehicle grossed $14.6 million in its third weekend, dropping a reasonable 40%. The post-holiday weekends usually see hefty drops, so this isn't anything to be concerned about. What is impressive is that, in its third weekend, True Grit has a Fri-Sun amount right on par with the opening weekends of recent (justifiably) acclaimed westerns such as 3:10 to Yuma and Open Range, both of which opened with $14 million within the last seven years. The (slightly overrated) film crossed the $100 million mark on Saturday, and ended day 19 with $110 million. That makes it the third-biggest grossing western in domestic history, behind the sci-fi tinged Wild Wild West ($113 million) and the revisionist epic Dances with Wolves ($184 million). It is also now the highest-grossing picture amongst the Oscar-bait contenders this year, although probably nominees Inception ($292 million) and Toy Story 3 ($415 million) are obviously out of reach. Alas, unless you only count pure traditional westerns, most of these genre-related box office records will likely fall when Jon Favreau's Cowboys and Aliens (trailer) is released this summer.

A tale of two trailers: Season of the Witch gets new cheap mass-battle scene(s).

Notice anything different around 1:45 of the new trailer? Notice any brightly-lit mass battle scenes that were inexplicably missing from the earlier Lionsgate trailer? And yes, they all look like they are from the same scene (perhaps the prologue or a new ending), and they all look like cheap reshoots that don't match the color scheme of the rest of the movie. Fascinating...

Scott Mendelson