Films by well-regarded international auteurs such as Michael Haneke rarely receive the critical drubbing afforded to Funny Games. Haneke’s scene-for-scene remake of his own film did actually earn high praise from a few major critics (Owen Gleiberman and Scott Tobias among them), but most critics concurred with J. Hoberman: “Haneke is pretty much a humorless pedant,” the Village Voice critic wrote. And then, the antithetical poster quote: “Professional obligations required that I endure it, but there’s no reason why you should.”
So you know things are bad when the one story that makes an effort to rehab your film’s rep from “atrocious” to “polarizing” is itself something of a trainwreck, boasting quizzically misread facts and apparently rushed to publication before its time.
I’m particularly troubled by the effort within this Variety story to make excuses for Games‘ disappointing opening weekend performance. Diane Garrett writes: “The pic did resonate with a certain aud, generating $520,000 at 289 theaters for a $1,799 per-screen average in its opening weekend.” How many screenings do you get from Friday-Sunday––say, 15? So $1,799 divided by 15 is about $120. Assuming the average ticket price is $8, that means 15 tickets were purchased for each screening. Is that the kind of number that passes for “resonance” these days? We know it’s Variety’s job to tell the studio’s side of the story (at least, apparently), but isn’t this a little extreme, even for them?
But it’s also pretty clear that this version of the story was not meant for our eyes. I screen capped the story at 1pm EST (see below the jump), after waiting five hours for a glaring editorial note to be removed from the online version. As of this writing, it hasn’t been. See my screencap, with the gaffe marked in red, after the jump.
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