Originally posted by: ricarleite
When I first heard of the DOOM movie, I instantly thought of two things: "BOMB", and "straight to DVD". It's the #1 box office in america. What... the... hell?!

it isn't difficult to debut at the #1 position in america. the movie industry currently operates on the idea that blitz-advertising can outrun word-of-mouth. i.e. word-of-mouth is slow, so if the movie sucks, they just need to advertise it more in order to get people's money before they hear how bad it is. they also rush bad movies to DVD, further demonstrating the outrun-word-of-mouth idea. for example, xXx 2: state of the union came out on dvd literally just several weeks after it ran in theaters.

also, it isn't difficult to reach the position of "#1 ________ movie of all time" and claim that a movie made x times as much box office $$$ as star wars. for example meet the fockers was #1 live-action comedy of all time. made more money than any other live-action comedy. but that's only true if you don't consider economic inflation, and the fact that a movie ticket costs about $9 or $10 USD, whereas there used to be a time when you could go to the theater for 25 cents.

it has a lot to do with corporatization and the fast-food-chain effect, too. up till the early 1980s, there were a lot of drive-in theaters and independent theaters in the u.s.a. so it was easy for independent film-makers to get funding for a cheap little movie and have it distributed throughout various regions of the u.s.a. but they didn't need to get national distribution to make a modest profit. then most of the drive-ins closed, most of the indie film-makers started doing straight-to-VHS, and all of the theaters are now owned by a few big chains. so now there are less than a dozen films showing in mainstream theaters in the u.s.a. at any given time. people used to have a lot more to choose from... they could see hollywood movies, american independent movies, foreign independent movies dubbed into english... but now the selection is very, very narrow. people have relatively few choices, when they go to the movie theater now. it's no wonder that something like DOOM or meet the fockers is able to reach #1 so easily. it's no wonder that mcdonald's hamburgers are #1, when they're certainly not the best food in the world... they're not even the best hamburgers.