See that? That’s Vinnie Jones. And all those empty seats represent the people who went to see Midnight Meat Train this past weekend…
Controversies, whether they be real or make-believe, are fun. They rile people up. The horror community likes to be pissed off. Maybe that’s just in our genes (unless you are Jeff, who got the mutated Happy Horror Fan Gene). Public enemy #1 is usually Hollywood, who many of us decry as destroying and/or taking advantage of the genre. Those greedy rat bastards in Hollywood! For the past week or so you have probably been hard pressed to visit a horror website and not see something related to Midnight Meat Train and how the evil corporate conglomeration known as Lion’s Gate was making the filmmakers, and horror fans, pick up a bar of soap in a federal prison shower. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think some injustice is being inflicted on a personal level of every horror fan.
Clive Barker himself is joining in the chorus to “save” this film. The buffoon known as Mr. Disgusting has a big masturbatory news item that is trying to get to the bottom of why the film doesn’t have a release (really, how does anybody take that site seriously?). And the controversy has even spread to our little catacomb of cyberspace, as a friendly disagreement has sprung up on our message boards.
First, let me state up front that I do find it disappointing that the film is not being shown in most places. That’s just a natural reaction due to the fact that the film looks pretty cool and I can’t walk three blocks to see it. That being said, I find the “uproar” over this simply mind boggling. So what if you can’t see it in your local theatre. There are tons of horror films that never get wide releases that I would have liked to have seen in the theatre (The Last Winter springs immediately to mind). This happens all the time, so why the much-ado-about-nothing over MMT?
We as horror fans love to think of ourselves as a tight nit community. We support one another, support our filmmakers, and support the movies. Or do we? We like to think of ourselves as millions strong, ready to flock to our multiplex and plunk down our hard earned dollars to support a worthy cause. But do we? The bitter pill that horror fans need to swallow is this: get over yourselves. You aren’t as big or as important as you think you are.
This past week, Bloody-Disgusting has led the charge of a “grassroots” uprising. They’ve been trying their best to mobilize their visitors into petitioning, calling, and ordering tickets for this past weekend’s showings of MMT. This call to arms (great Foo Fighters song, by the way) has been echoed by every other horror site. You’d think that since our community is so uptight about what happens to “our” movies that we would answer that call, right?
A quick look at the numbers shows that, so far at least, the response has been pretty pathetic. MMT is only in 100 theatres but is being shown in some pretty decent sized cities. Denver, Phoenix, and Indianapolis. It’s also being shown in some out of the way locales, here in our state of Nebraska (Omaha) for example. It’s even in the backyard of our friends at the Sleepy Cast, playing in Memphis. A full week of shouting at the sky and trying to stick it to the man by the big names in web horror should have had a better impact than this:
Midnight Meat Train : $32,000 total for an average of $312 per screen.
To put that in perspective, a film called Brideshead Revisited starring nobody that you’ve ever heard of and showing on only 33 screens the previous weekend grossed over $300,000. You can read my more detailed observations on this in our message board thread. The point is that Lion’s Gate dumped Midnight Meat Train because it wasn’t going to make any money.
Now perhaps Lion’s Gate could have handled the PR of this a little better. I’m not going to defend how they went about this. Knowing that you have a growing number of angry people who dress in black (I’m one of those people, so don’t feel offended) ready to cause problems for you online should have been something Lion’s Gate was ready to deal with. They weren’t and they should be chided for that. But what horror fans have to understand is that these companies, in order to get these movies into thousands of theaters across the country, have to pay millions of dollars to do it. One of the ironic things about MMT is that the majority of people freaking out about this haven’t even seen the film. It could be total dogshit for all anybody knows. Oh wait. Mr. Disgusting said it was great, so let it be written, so let it be done (thick sarcasm there, people). But let’s just assume on good faith that the movie is pretty good. Well worthy of being on more than a 100 screens. The question then becomes, can you sell this movie to the populace?
Lion’s Gate has to make money. That is their goal. Now we can get into the eternal debate of artistry vs. economics, but that’s not really what I want to dive off into. The filmmakers have made MMT the best they can. The studio then sees it, scans the current market climate and makes a decision on what to do next. That decision has major consequences. If they look at this film and say “There is no way we can make money on this if we put it in theatres” then they won’t do it. A lot of people have this notion that Lion’s Gate just doesn’t believe in the film, therefore the motive is just to screw it. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. There very well could be some higher up at Lion’s Gate whose wife banged the director and now he wants revenge. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is whether or not they can make money.
In order to put the film in thousands of theatres, the studio must make thousands of prints. That costs a lot of money. Then, once they’ve secured it in theatres (whose owners will no doubt take a bigger chunk of the opening weekend receipts precisely because they don’t want to waste a screen that could be going to The Dark Knight to show some “garbage” that 5 people will show up to) the studio must buy millions of dollars in marketing in order to get people into those theatres. Here’s a huge splash of cold water in your face: This movie would not have made money. There. I’ve said it. That seems to be the huge 800 pound gorilla in cyberspace. Of all the self-righteous hating on Lion’s Gate, people don’t seem to realize that they are not as important as they want themselves to be.
Mr. Disgusting could be right. Midnight Meat Train might very well be awesome as hell. But Hollywood does not sell its theatrical horror movies to those of us who watch Cannibal Holocaust every other day. It’s incredible that so many people can be upset by this. When horror is booming in Hollywood, think back to who the majority of the people in the audience were. When you were watching Scream or The Ring or Final Destination, what made these films huge successes (and thus the trickle down effect to the rest of the genre) was not you and I who live and breath the genre. It was the casual non-horror fan. These are the people who infuse our genre with new life every ten years or so. These are the people who come in droves to The Ring and set off Hollywood’s money meter which in turn makes our genre that much better because of all the interest and booming creativity on the amateur level. Unfortunately, these people just aren’t going to come out en masse to a movie called Midnight Meat Train. It just wasn’t going to happen. Just like they didn’t come out to see Elisha Cuthbert tortured in Captivity. MMT is just one of those movies that is in the wrong place at the wrong time. So if you’re Lion’s Gate, you do the obvious: you don’t release it wide. Why waste millions of dollars just so Jo Horror Fan can walk three blocks and watch it in an empty theater? A business has to look out for their interests and they aren’t going to waste money just so horror fans can feel convenienced.
But what this really shows is that the horror community is not as mighty as some people may have you believe. We are dedicated, yet extremely small in the grand scheme of Hollywood’s design. Hollywood does not make movies for us, and if they accidentally churn one out, then we get it on DVD rather than the big screen. Every once in a while you’ll get a big hit, but those are almost always created on the backs of millions of non-horror fans that just happen to be in the zeitgeist of the moment. Once that passes, the horror community goes back to their message boards, occasional conventions, and podcasts.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, and I’m not trying to insinuate that people should just give up if they feel there is some injustice that has been committed. Perhaps more details will come out and we’ll find out that there is more to this story than meets the eye, but as it stands right now, there is simply no justifiable cause for the level of griping that is occurring. I’m the first to admit that a film should be seen on the big screen rather than on your home television. As I said before, it’s disappointing that this happened. But you also have to realize that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of movies that never get wide releases. If studios did that with every film then they would go bankrupt. It just can’t be done. We as horror fans should be proud that we have such a thriving niche community. It’s something to be proud of. Just don’t lose sight of the fact that, in all actuality, we are a very, very small minority of moviegoers. And it gets even more impractical when you come to the realization that there will never be any “max out” of our numbers going to a particular movie. There could be one million die hard horror fans, for example, but maybe only a third would ever go and actually see MMT in a theatre (if that, even. I’m being generous).
So calm down everybody. You’ll see Midnight Meat Train soon enough. It ain’t like Lion’s Gate is burning the negatives or anything 
Now, I fully expect every horror website to freak out just as much about Mother of Tears when the Weinstein’s release it later this year. Oh wait, there won’t be any bitching about that? Huh, that’s odd. You see, it’s by a famous director, Argento is his name? And it is the completion of a much anticipated horror trilogy…far more interesting than MMT.
But there won’t be any bitching about that movie not getting a wide release
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