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Is it perhaps your fault, movie-goer, that Grindhouse opened to startlingly bad box office? As the Times writes today, its take is $11.6 million, to be exact—less than half than had been projected. Grindhouse's disappointing opening, coupled with the less-than-stellar showings by films like Factory Girl and Breaking and Entering, has led to speculation that Harvey Weinstein—for so long, the Manhattan king of Hollywood and the pioneer of the sorta-independent film—might be vulnerable for the first (well, sort of second!) time in his formidable career. Is he suffering from outsized expectations? Or is there something more nefarious at work? To the evidence!

The Times article claims that Grindhouse and Breaking and Entering, both of which had marquee, which is to say expensive, filmmakers at the helm, tanked; Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.5 and Sicko have been endlessly delayed; and Factory Girl and Shut Up and Sing, while both buzzed-about, failed to live up to the hype, with only $3 million of tickets sold between the two of them. Ouch! What happened to the Weinstein magic touch?

There's some clues and distractions both in Nikki Finke's column from the other day, in which she spoke to Weinstein about the Grindhouse failure:

Weinstein pointed to several reasons why Grindhouse did so poorly in theaters over Easter weekend. "Our research showed the length kept people away. It was the single biggest deterrent. It was 3 hours and 12 minutes long. We originally intended to get it all in in 2 hours, 30 minutes. That would have been a better time. But the movies ran longer, the [fake] trailers ran longer, everything ran longer," Harvey told me. Weinstein also criticized his own marketing plan. "We didn't educate the South or Midwest. In the West and the East, the movie played well. It played well in strong urban settings. But we missed the boat on the Midwest and the South."

One, we don't believe the length thing. Not for a second. But. Really? Weinstein, the consummate bicoastal power player, somehow failed to hire anyone who knew how to market to the flyover states (not counting their solicitations of the Rodriguez hometown of Austin, which isn't in America anyway)?

Apparently it's not enough, any longer, for Weinstein to capture the Angelika crowd; too many of his films have been too successful, and he's too much of an Important Player to be content with catering to a discerning, but ultimately small, crowd.

Sure, you're always going to have your sleeper films like The Queen that build up their audiences and box-office take over the course of several months as critical acclaim rolls in and word of mouth builds. But no one expected The Queen to be a such a winner. So Harvey Weinstein might be learning that the audience for that particular brand of literate-lite films isn't as large as he'd like it to be.
Films From The Weinsteins Falter, But the Brothers Stay Focused [NYT]
What Went So Wrong With Grindhouse? [Deadline Hollywood]