Screenhead

The big news of the day, folks, is that The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus has actually found a distributor!  Heath Ledger’s actual last movie (he died midway through this one) is being carried by Sony Pictures Classics.

And that, sadly, is the bad news.

Basically, if Sony Pictures Classics lays hands on this one, there’s a real good chance that The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is going to get dumped into a really, REALLY limited release in a handful of art house theatres.

As far as strategy goes, this is a hugely bad idea.  Considering Heath Ledger just managed to pull off a nigh-impossibility by winning a POSTHUMOUS OSCAR (seriously, this is almost never done, and only fellow Australian Peter Finch had managed to do it before Ledger), Sony’s passing up a serious opportunity to really pull off a win.  Especially if they can stack the deck in their favor by dropping it into a weekend that doesn’t have much going for it, like, say pretty much anything in January.  January is commonly regarded in movie circles as a “dumping ground” month, where box office receipts are most likely to be down, often due to inclement weather.  If a movie fails in January it can be explained away: “Oh, what do you WANT?” the beleaguered exec can say in defense of his own job. “Half of Podunk was frozen solid last weekend!  That’s why it only made a couple thousand bucks!  It has nothing to do with the fact that it was a godawful movie!”

But looking for logic out of the studios is like looking for an aardvark on Neptune.  It just plain old don’t happen.