No Secrets on the Internet: The Fall of Sucker Punch

Once upon a time, before the internet: if a film was horrible the distributor would have at least one good opening weekend to recoup their loses on as many screens as they possibly could play their film. Now thanks to twitter and the web in general, word of mouth spreads at the speed of light and can kill a dud before it even opens at your local mulitplex.

Take Sucker Punch for example, word started to spread from “insiders” that the film was “troubled” from the get-go. These days the people in the know are the first strike in most troubled productions. Because how would Johnny the blogger know if a production is having issues and start to investigate, unless someone on the inside sends out an distress call.

It’s from there that the bloggers/press then come into the picture, because nothing makes for better headlines than a troubled big-budget production; just look at the ongoing feeding frenzy over the Spiderman musical. People love misery and disaster and watching these big projects crash and burn for film buffs is like watching a semi run into a Mini-cooper. Now that the press has come to dissect it now it begins to leak into the mainstream consciousness.

People who are more general fans of “movies” then begin to ask their more in the know friends, “So what’s up with that sailor girl movie?” See here is the tricky part, there are are two ways a studio can go with this. They can hide the film from critics till release, which is a sure sign of defeat from the studio that their film is DOA . Or they can screen it and just hope people will abide by NDAs till release and they can hope to get the rest on Redbox rentals.

This is where it gets messy, because even if a critic can’t review a film “officially” they will still start to view it negatively and start to feed the fire. Thanks to the internet this is the final deathblow and thus begins the preverbal gang-bang. Before the reviews even hit the articles start to post about the “troubled” nature of the production and for Sucker Punch critics were even seen fighting publicly on twitter about their very negative thoughts on the film.

Now that the release date has finally come, making fun of the film has already been reduced to nothing more than a meme on twitter. Sucker Punch never stood a chance and should it have in the first place? While I think that Hollywood should be making better films in the first place, I think sometimes people get so wrapped up in the “gang-bang” mentality that they forget to even read a proper review or even see the film for themselves to form their own opinion.

I will still probably see Sucker Punch though, I just have to.

After all I have a real affinity for bad films.