I saw Independence Day: Resurgence last Thursday night at the Scotiabank IMAX theatre, along with about a dozen of the citys film critics. This was not unusual, except for one thing: wed all paid to be there, along with the rest of the audience. It was a regular commercial screening.
20th Century Fox, the studio that distributed Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerichs follow-up to their 1996 blockbuster, declined to screen the film for critics in advance of its release. This is almost unthinkable for a movie of this scale most big summer movies are screened for the media well before they open or at least on the Wednesday evening before release, to ensure the daily critics have time to turn a review around for Fridays papers.
Even when studios know they have a dog, they still have to go through the motions of a press screening so as not to telegraph weakness. In the old days before online publishing, that actually mattered: when a film was really bad, the studio would schedule the press screening at 7 pm on a Thursday night, guaranteeing the review couldnt make the next days paper.
(Warner Bros. infamously booked its press screening of the Nicolas Cage/Neil Labute Wicker Man remake for 10 pm the night before it opened … though that just made everyone kind of excited to see how terrible a film could be to get that sort of treatment.)
Anyway. Fox is one of the studios that makes a point of scheduling its press screenings early they showed us X-Men: Apocalypse nearly three weeks ahead of its opening and encouraged us to run reviews immediately, because they were pretty high on it and wanted to reassure Marvel fans know that this wasnt going to be another Fantastic Four.
But with Resurgence, there was nothing. No hint of a press screening either here or in the U.S. The film was screened for journalists on the press junket earlier in June, but that was going to be it. Something was up.
It got worse when Sony announced it was moving The Shallows from its long-scheduled opening on Wednesday, June 29 (ahead of the holiday weekend) to a slot on June 24, directly opposite Resurgence. Was it last-minute counter-programming, or a studio sensing a rivals weakness?
Finally, word came down that Fox would be holding a press screening for Resurgence after all.
In New York and Los Angeles.
At 11 am on opening day.
So, yeah. Thanks to the miracle of modern film distribution, I got to see Independence Day: Resurgence with a paying crowd, 16 whole hours ahead of the New York press. Except that most of the New York press was probably doing the same thing at their local theatre, because now we had to see how bad it was.
Was it bad? Eh. Its not good, or even entertaining. Its just clunky and dopey and empty. God knows Ive seen worse like Warcraft, which Universal dumped on us two weeks earlier with the studios standard Wednesday night screening. I wrote my review and filed it, and it was online Friday.
Look, I have no illusions. I dont think my review (which was ultimately negative) kept anyone who wanted to see Independence Day: Resurgence from catching it this weekend. But the $41.6 million opening was not exactly a record-setter, suggesting audiences were already wary enough of this particular sequel. (Finding Dory easily topped it at the domestic box office, earning $73.2 million in its second weekend of release.)
But the lack of a press screening, and the fumbling around it, definitely poisoned the waters in terms of the online coverage of the movie. This Slate piece is probably the most respectable take on it, acknowledging that movies like this tend to be critic-proof and pointing out that the film was indeed shown to the international press.
Heres the thing. A movie like Independence Day: Resurgence may not need critics, but it does need nerds. It needs the geeks who loved the first one as kids to feel confident about buying a ticket for the new one.
And the geeks and nerds are online, gobbling up every bit of news about the stuff they want to see. And if io9 a site that reliably provides clips and spoilers and teasers of everything even peripherally SF-related, with a special focus on genre TV and movies doesnt have a Resurgence review up early, well, the geeks and nerds are going to notice. And maybe theyll worry. And theyll definitely express that worry on social media, creating a snowball effect of uncertainty around the film.
Heres io9s Resurgence review. It went up Friday morning.
They didnt like it either. Cant say I blame them.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
