Good Luck Trying to See John Cusack's "War, Inc."

Our Generally Crappy Mainstream Media--John Cusack, a household name in almost every American home, has a new movie out that's a satire on our current era. The studios don't want you to see this film, obviously, because...get real, they're part of the problem in our business dominated society. Nonetheless, this movie is a really hard sell when reality is more absurd than almost any satire (even Dr. Strangelove).

Like the Scott McClellan book, it was decided that you and I don't want or need to see Cusack's movie. In case you haven't noticed, our culture is forced on us, rather than something that's created by ordinary people with something to say, as it used to. Looking through Sunday's paper, I couldn't find this "War, Inc." anywhere! By God, in 1985, we got Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" here, and it only hit 200-300 screens in America!

Hi Matt,

Thanks for visiting our web site. We're pleased that you took the time to inquire about "War, Inc." playing in South Bend. We hope to open this film soon!

Contrary to popular belief it is often the film's distributor who determines the availability of films, not the theatre. Some films will open in over 3000 theatres -- other films open exclusively in New York and Los Angeles and gradually expand from there. The majority of films have release patterns somewhere between these two extremes. The theatres potential for attendance is always a factor when determining availability.

The distributor opened this film in only 23 theatres.

Here's a sampling of other theatre counts for comparison purposes:

- "Indiana Jones 4" is playing in 4264 theatres

- "Chronicles of Narnia 2" is playing in 3851 theatres

- "Iron Man" is playing in 3650 theatres

We appreciate your interest and hope you understand the process we must go through.

Kindest regards, Scott Cottingham

Kerasotes.com

Do I blame Scott and Kerasotes? Of course not. The distributor was/is First Look Films, a very-very small player in the field, though very good at availability with the DVD format.

Nobody in Hollywood wanted to finance this film, and it was only able to raise $8 million, filming in Bulgaria to lower its costs. Hollywood is OK with financing pro-military ventures, so it's not a surprise. This is how things have changed with media distribution, but at least we have an economical format like DVD that smaller distributors can fall back on. VHS was the pits!