'Safe'
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
I can't think of a single instance that I've heard of and know some of the details about where a test audience brought about an improved product.
That's not usually the goal, though.
I will bet money that lots of bad movies would be even worse without test audiences. But nobody cares, because even improved, they're still bad movies. That kind of process is going to tend to make bad things better, and good things worse.
Do Uwe Boll movies have test audiences? Because if there are movies out there that are worse than the versions of his movies that make it to the theaters, we should all Be Very Afraid.
Oh, oh! Yes, they do, and I hope those poor people got paid. Because originally Alone in the Dark had a different ending, and somehow that led to them adding captions or something that completely contradicted the visuals. And they added that extraordinarily long crawl at the beginning because when they tested it the first time, nobody understood what the hell was going on.
I don't think the crawl helped, really. But it did make the movie even funnier, so that's kind of an improvement.
I'm still holding a grudge against the test audience members who audibly gasped at Ralph Fiennes nude scenes at the end of Red Dragon. It was them that got some of the scenes...um...snipped.
Eh...I tend to assume that any reports of "we had to cut this scene because X's penis is too frighteningly large" are urban legends, until someone produces pictures to prove me wrong.
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I'm waiting...
But I believe test audiences prefered getting the rich guy in the end.
I heard that Molly Ringwald pushed for the non-Ducky ending. I'm sure I read that in an interview when it came out.
Or, once again, I could be making shit up.
I heard that Molly Ringwald pushed for the non-Ducky ending. I'm sure I read that in an interview when it came out.
No, I heard the same thing. And that Some Kind of Wonderful was made to essentially right the PiP ending.
In some PiP kismet, it's the movie that Lorelai showed at April's birthday party on tonight's Gilmore Girls. Huh.
I used to be a test audience member in college. They don't pay you, and they certainly should - or at least provide coupons for talk therapy sessions - after having you sit through some of the crap.
Of course, it became something of a joke that I never drew a good movie. About one of the movies I saw was ever widely released.
Al Pacino has joined the cast of Ocean's 13.
I'm trying to decide whether this is a good thing. Mostly, I think it is.