'Snowpiercer' Rolls On, But Track Was Cut Short
By Staff in Arts & Entertainment on Jul 28, 2014 9:45PM
Chris Evans, Kang-ho Song and Ah-sung Ko in Snowpiercer. (Image courtesy Moho Films, The Weinstein Co,)
Being carried over for yet another week at The Music Box, while also now playing at The Logan Theatre, Snowpiercer has been a sleeper success in Chicago and other big cities across the country (it also played briefly at some suburban Chicagoland multiplexes). It looks to make well over $4 million at the domestic box office—not bad for a film that played at only 356 theaters nationwide during its widest release (compare that to Transformers: Age of Extinction, which opened on 4,233 screens). Add another $2 million-plus from its video-on-demand (VOD) release (a mere two weeks after its theatrical release), and it might be tempting to celebrate Snowpiercer as “the little movie that could.”
Except it’s not. It’s really the potentially game-changing blockbuster that wasn’t.
A wildly imaginative, big-budget dystopian science fiction epic, packed with action and visual artistry, Snowpiercer is the first English language film from the exciting South Korean director Bong Joon-ho (The Host). It has set box office records in his native country and, with an international cast headed by Captain America star Chris Evans, it could have and should have been much more than an art house release stateside.
It is surely not everyone’s cup of tea and there are those who will say it’s too strange—or maybe too smart—for mainstream audiences. The Weinstein Company’s powerful co-chairman, Harvey Weinstein, certainly felt the film was too smart for its own good. He fought Bong Joon-ho to make additional cuts and add a voiceover narration to the film. It’s not clear what Mr. Weinstein thought wasn’t explained in the very straightforward narrative, but that’s what he wanted. Fortunately, Bong kept his movie the way he wanted it. Unfortunately, that cost him the wider release originally strategized for the movie.
“So what?” you might ask. Most of the really interesting films are in limited release, and more and more are going directly to VOD. True enough, but while Snowpiercer is indeed a smart genre movie, it is far from rarified, intellectual material. Snowpiercer is a big, brawling, sprawling spectacle. It is entertainment with a capital “E” and with proper marketing and the right release date here, it could have been a very big hit. Maybe even the kind of hit that would have reminded people there was a time when big, popcorn-friendly entertainment didn’t need to cater exclusively to Pavlovian crowds who eat up uninspired sequels like cows herded out to graze.
While certainly more inventive, the themes, storyline and action of Snowpiercer are not worlds apart from what made The Hunger Games movies or even the X-Men franchise successful. A little more exotic? Sure. But inaccessible to a wide audience? I don’t think so. If it is, the mass-market lobotomizing of American moviegoers is a done deal. Certainly, with the current summer movie slump, there couldn’t have been a better time to test something a little more original on a wider scale.
As a fan of the movie, I am happy for its modest success here. Still, if you want to see just how wrong theatrical distribution has gone in this country, look no further than Snowpiercer.
By: Joel Wicklund