I was in a bar earlier having a pint and listening to some heavy metal when I looked up and saw a giant lady, she was over six feet tall at least, not terribly skinny and her midriff was right in my line of sight. She had massive hair and was wearing very tight white spandex trousers with some sort of two-tone leopard print on them and not much else. Basically she seemed to be stuck in 1986. Nothing wrong with a person loving the alternative fashion delights of the 80’s, unless they’re alive of course, in which case there’s a hell of a lot wrong with it.
For some reason I thought of Snakes On A Plane…I didn’t immediately think of Snakes On A Plane, that was the end of the thought, but to put it into reverse - everybody probably thinks that SOAP should have done better at the box office considering it got more free publicity than any cheesy horror movie ever thanks to its name. Hell it’s known that Samuel L Jackson nearly pulled out of publicity for the movie because the studio wanted to give it the more pedestrian title of Flight 121.
Upon release the media were all over that movie, I remember it making prime time 6 o clock news just because of the name. It should have actually done a lot better than it ended up doing, problem was it wasn’t very good, I know this because I was unfortunate enough to see it in the cinema, I bet Satan has it in his dvd collection for eternal torture purposes. So yes it bombed, but not that badly as it made its money back and more - 30 million bucks or so in the US alone. Now I tend to believe that all the free publicity in this case actually worked because Flight 121 wouldn’t have made half as much money as Snakes On A Plane. You can probably get an incredibly bad movie to make more money just by giving it a better name. Not a huge amount of money, but more than you’d think.
Now I haven’t seen that recent movie Teeth, nor do I really need to because I know someone who has. Teeth completely bombed at the box office, Hiroshima bombed, less than half a million in the US and not much more elsewhere. A little surprising because I thought that movie had a lot of free publicity too, for obvious reasons. But then I realised it didn’t really get any free publicity at all because not everyone is into movies that much and would have known what it was about.
The self-descriptive properties of the name Teeth aren’t all that great, the movie might as well have been called Dental Appointment at 2pm.
However, had the studio had given it a better name…who knows? Which leads me back to the large lady in tight spandex. When I looked up and saw her middle area, for some reason the words “Scary Vagina” popped into my head. That’s what they should have called Teeth, they probably could have turned that $400′000 into five times the amount with those two simple words.
Chris.