I was kind of surprised that Captivity TANKED at the box office.

Despite all the hullabaloo, I thought it still kinda looked bad.

There's probably a lot of markets where they wouldn't open it thanks to all the bad press. "Family theater" chains and the like.

I was kind of surprised that Captivity TANKED at the box office.

I guess misogynistic fictionalized torture and rape just don't bring 'em in like they used to.

Despite the low theatre count (er, for a wide release), it's per screen average was still rubbish. It tanked. Given the amount of media hype, you would have thought it would have done better, so I think Steph is correct.

The studio tried to play a strange (but obvious) game towards the end -- they sighted the film as an example of female empowerment, for example, then had a launch party which they told the media in advance would send women's groups nuts, and had things like this at the launch party: [link]

That party also had the banners the MPAA had demanded they remove from distribution up. The MPAA got them to take them down at the party. It was a cynical publicity attempt.

I've been looking at Lion's Gate recently, and 'torture porn' accounts for just over half a million dollars of their theatre gross for the last few years, and totals $2bn (estimated) with DVDs.

Given the amount of media hype, you would have thought it would have done better

If media hype couldn't make Snakes On A Plane a hit, even gawking curiosity shouldn't make a big difference to Captivity's numbers.

I guess misogynistic fictionalized torture and rape just don't bring 'em in like they used to.

Steph, may I tag?

Matt, absolutely!

If media hype couldn't make Snakes On A Plane a hit, even gawking curiosity shouldn't make a big difference to Captivity's numbers.

Snakes On A Plane clearly wasn't going to be a hit, in my world -- I never thought on the online base around it would translate offline, as the online hype had emerged before much was even known about the film (even a trailer!). In short, the studio made the mistake of believing people laughing at their film title and premise was going to be a good sales pitch. Which it ain't. I wish Snakes wasn't used as an example of viral marketing, as there's plenty of examples of it working, and a billion dollar industry surrounding that, because of that.

There are, however, clear examples of studios hyping something controversal to big numbers successfully. When it all falls down is usually when the end product is also utter crap.

It's got to be more complicated than that. Utter crap makes money all the time.

Rob Schneider has built a career on that very fact.

Yeah, but rarely does utter crap make it big by mounting a campaign about how utterly crap something is. Which was the basis of the Snakes campaign, basically. The secret to horror marketing is, in my opinion, to have a good film that will create buzz about the fact it's good, and have people campaign about how it's 'bad'. Example: Saw. Budget: $1m. Box office: $100m. DVDs: around $200m as an industry average. Result: $299m profit. I also thought it was a good film, but it's used as one of the recent examples of torture porn.