A few weeks ago I noted the tendency of big horror websites to overstate the communal nature of horror. When Hostel: Part II tanked, for example, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth about the future of “our genre” and not enough pointing out that it was a bad movie. Today we see the flipside, as the enormous box-office success of I Am Legend leads Bloody Digusting to wax rhapsodic in a post entitled “Horror Takes #1”:
In the midst of all of that holiday garbage (Alvin and the Chipmunks, Golden Compass, Enchanted, The Perfect Holiday, Fred Claus, This Christmas and more) horror has proven that it’s king of the world as Warner Bros. Pictures and their Will Smith starring post-apocalyptic thriller I Am Legend…took over the box office with an astounding estimated $76.5 million this weekend! If that’s not cool enough, next week DreamWorks is releasing Sweeney Todd, so expect the top two slots to be horror! Only time will tell how 20th Century Fox’s Aliens vs Predator: Requiem will do, but can you imagine horror taking over Christmas?
I hesitate to say “of course,” but of course, Will Smith proved he’s king of the world this past weekend. Horror proved no such thing, and one need look no further than to the similar The Mist for evidence there. Moreover, viewing the theoretical box-office triumph of three films as different in tone, origin, and intent as I Am Legend, Sweeney Todd, and Aliens vs. Predator 2 as a world-beating landmark for horror as a genre is just silly, like those posts you come across that lump together the success of Marvel’s Dark Tower prequel and TV’s Heroes and Drawn and Quarterly’s Exit Wounds as “good for comics.” The notion that AVPR or whatever they’re calling it is inherently more worthy an effort than, I dunno, The Golden Compass–even in terms of the fortunes of genre filmmaking–makes no sense to me at all.
And, ahem, Enchanted is not trash…
That’s fannish tunnel vison taken to its most idiotic extreme. If any of those clowns thinks that Legend would have done that well with, say Jude Law in the lead, then they’re sadly mistaken. Me, I await Chris Tucker or Bernie Mac in the sequel. Actually, I think I would pay to see Bernie Mac in a sequel, seriously…
They’re really bad about this at BD; every time a horror movie bombs or another horror movie is successful there’s a post about WHAT IT MEANS FOR ALL HORROR CINEMA. Ugh. Get a grip, guys.
Johnny: Exactly. And if you say “Tom Jane” or “Jeremy Renner,” the counterfactual examples are already out there.
Jason: Yeah, I really don’t get it. Actually, that’s not true–I totally recognize the mentality from superhero comic fandom, where the mere existence of a superhero movie was seen as some sort of victory for “comics” (which they conflate with superheroes, another problem entirely). It really wasn’t until X-Men kicked off the current and ongoing wave of comics adaptations that fans really learned to get excited about superhero movies based on whether they’re good, not on whether the answer to the question “is this a superhero movie?” is “yes.”
Cedric the Entertainer is Robert Neville in: I AM ROTUND.
Yeah, it’s Will Smith fighting monsters. Some people like Will Smith, some people like monsters. Put ’em together and it’s a lot more people, that’s all.