I have no particular sentiment for, or against, Kevin Smith. Dogma was good, but I thought Clerks was mediocre and overrated. His video rants can be intermittently amusing, but he hasn’t made a movie I was remotely interested in seeing in over a decade. When I became aware sometime last year that he was making a film called Red State, about those sinister, inbred redneck freaks of Jesusland, it was just another example of liberal Hollywood bias I wasn’t going to see.
So today I’m browsing the new Amazon Blu-Ray releases when I see it listed there.
Wait, you mean they’ve already released it? I wasn’t even aware it had even hit theaters.
Evidently, neither was anyone else. It brought in just barely over $1 million at the box office. Given that it cost $4 million to make, and the rule of thumb is that a film must gross three times production costs to turn a profit, it’s likely that Red State probably lost the studio somewhere in the neighborhood of $11 million.
In this, it joins a long line of money-losing, America-bashing films coming out of Hollywood. It turns out that those sinister, gun-toting, bible-thumping residents of Jesusland just happen to be the people who pay to see movies in theaters, and there evidently aren’t enough liberal urban hipsters in the world to make anti-American films profitable (unless you disguise them as science fiction and throw in hot blue chics).
Think Hollywood will take note and stop greenlighting them? I doubt it. But one can always hope.