Another entry in the "gosh isn't it cute when journos do this?" category

My editor in DC sent me an email today to say that Snakes on a Plane had disappointing box office receipts. I was rather surprised by this given the fact that the theater sold out Thursday night and was sold out for Friday also so I took a spin around the WaPo site and found this article.

It's called "'Snakes on a Plane' Fails to Charm Moviegoers" and over on the side is something else, called "Snakes' Is Defanged at Box Office." Both of these stories lament how poorly SoaP did over the weekend.

But did it?

Well it's number one for the weekend and it took in 15.3 million dollars, about half as much as it took to make the film. That's described as tepid by one of the pieces.

Look at this quote:

The college comedy "Accepted" opened at No. 4 with a solid $10.1 million.

Hmm, so Accepted had a solid opening while SoaP had a tepid opening, despite bringing in fifty percent more? Isn't that funny?

And there is some debate about whether or not SoaP's numbers even count since there was a Thursday night sneak showing, which could be said to distort the numbers. Never mind the fact that when they say the show opened on Thursday they aren't really being accurate because in a summer market there would be showings of the film starting in the morning and going all day and the sneak preview was for the ten o clock showing only, I guess that's too complicated for us readers to understand.

As I said in my column last week much of the media attention SoaP got was a sort of sneering looking down the nose and these two stories seem to me to be more of the same. It's like they're so determined to say "We told you this would never work" that they can't bear to look at the numbers as anything but a failure. As with much of life it's both funny and sad.