We here at Inside the Headquarters don’t write much about Iraq. Everyone else seems to have cornered that market — including the film industry. There have been a cavalcade of movies about or based on current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And no one’s watching.
That’s right. It has been reported that these films, most critical of current operations, have been duds, flops, failures. Go figure.
Take from this what you will. People can catch quite a bit of “war coverage” on the nightly news and almost continuously on cable, so why shell out more precious dollars to see what one already can see, especially in a weakened economy.
Or maybe they don’t care. Maybe the everyday American (or at least the film-going public) just is not interested in current operations. They are bombarded by images, but there’s no home front like that remembered with fondness (?) from World War II. We’re not rationing cell phones and iPods, yet. Despite the firestorm of media coverage and regularly having one’s head slammed against the wall to see things from a news outlet’s perspective, some refuse to succumb to, oh, propaganda from any of the multiple sides out there. It is an exhausting endeavor, but some must remain steadfast.
So they don’t patronize these movies.
When a rerelease of the “Nightmare Before Christmas” beats out a new (war-related) film starring Reese Witherspoon (“Rendition”), something’s up.
Other than box office receipts, we have nothing to back our claim. We have no polling data, which probably bodes well for us. This is just a noted trend that may prove interesting to watch. Oh, and the PR machines for these films now are downplaying (all-but-denying) their films’ ties to the current operational landscape.
We guess it’s really about the money.