Not Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

I've been seeing the trailers for "Buried" in theaters for months now, the Ryan Reynolds thriller that has the actor trapped in a coffin and buried underground for ninety excruciating minutes. It's been in limited release since late September, and was due to go into wide release on October 8th, last week. I was reading interviews and reviews for it from all the usual corners, and was surprised when it didn't show up in the box office rankings Monday morning. Unfortunately, it looks like the film only expanded to 92 theaters and is unlikely to go wider because of tepid audience reaction. Faced with a potential bomb, distributor Lionsgate is apparently trying to cut its losses. Since "Buried" was made on a shoestring budget of less than $2 million, and Lionsgate acquired it for around $3.5 million, they shouldn't have much trouble making back their investment and whatever they've spent to market the film so far. However, this means that a huge chunk of the potential audience is going to have to wait to see it.

But at least "Buried" was actually released within a few months of of its acquisition in January, back when it was considered a hot property after its premiere at the Sundance film festival. "I Love You Phillip Morris" was another title that premiered at Sundance, but a year earlier. Because of its dark comedic tone and homosexual love story, it had trouble finding a domestic distributor. When one emerged, the Consolidated Pictures Group, they missed the original February, 2010 release date, though the film was released in other markets like Taiwan, which is where I saw it. In the US, "Phillip Morris" was pushed back to March, then April, and then a California District Court Judge slapped an injunction on the release of the film in July when the filmmakers sued Consolidated. The film was picked up by a new distributor, Roadside Attractions, in August, which is planning a December 3rd release, just in time for the Oscar rush.

But at least "Phillip Morris" was picked up for distribution. Look at the case of "Tucker & Dale vs. Evil," a horror comedy that premiered with "Buried" at Sundance, and then went on to the SXSW Film Festival in March, where it won the Audience Award, but failed to find a buyer both times. It's played a slew of other festivals since then, but according to its IMDB page has only managed to secure distribution for upcoming Canadian and Dutch releases so far. And then there's the great independent animator Bill Plympton, who is self-distributing his latest feature, "Idiots and Angels." It premiered in New York at a single theater on October 6th, and is slowly making its way through other major cities like Los Angeles and Chicago. He's keeping a blog about the whole experience here.

All of these films have received good-to-great reviews from those who have seen them, and these are all titles that I'd love to see. However, aside from "Phillip Morris," which I only encountered by a stroke of good luck while I was out of the country, they've all been largely inaccessible unless I want to spend several hours driving to a theater. I wouldn't even have known about the latter two if I didn't follow the reviews coming out of the festival circuit in the case of "Dale & Tucker," and if I wasn't already a fan of Bill Plympton's, in the case of "Idiots and Angels." It's one of the frustrations of being a real movie nut like I am, to know that we get so much dreck like "Jackass 3D" passing through mainstream cinemas every day, while exciting, interesting indie films are stuck in distribution limbo. I can't count the number of films I would have loved to have seen in theaters, but ended up catching on DVD or Netflix's streaming service.

In the course of finishing up the films of 2009 earlier this month, I kept tripping over 2008 releases I'd missed, like Olivier Assayas's "Summer Hours," Hirokazu Koreeda's "Still Walking," and Jan Troell's "Everlasting Moments," so I take this as a good sign that everything that generates a decent amount of interest will find its way to audiences eventually, even if it's not under optimum circumstances. I mean, at least all of the films I've talked about were actually financed, completed, and made it to their premieres. There are a lot of would-be films out there from big studios and big names stuck in perpetual development. A film with troubled distribution is, at the very least, still a film.