Posted 1:44 PM by Gene

I promise this is the last time I mention AUDREY'S MONSTER, until I post my letter to Hershey's chairman: but a film like this didn't just flop at the theaters (and yes, I said FLOP, because this was supposed to be one of those Lucas Spielberg-style megahits; it may not make even $100 million now); it flopped with every @#$%&* consumer-products firm that financed it, that's stuck with untold millions of inventory tied in to it, and that now must swallow hard on the loss. And all this corporate waste happened with little more than OKs on memos, memos that probably had little more than a couple of production stills and perhaps a paragraph of synopsis; and because the CEOs (or somebody) said they HAD to be in this picture and RUSH RUSH RUSH to beat deadlines, that meant spending zillions blindly, with nothing more to work with than some innocuous studio art. When the people who go to movies saw the overwhelming MARKETING, then saw the used cat litter on screen, what were they supposed to think? One wonders if the losses on this corporate vanity will be big enough to trigger layoffs. (The problem was, it used to be just toy companies took the risk on licensing deals; now practically the whole Fortune 500 does.) If you could get an honest answer from the idiot CEOs who financed this if they had ANY idea what their blessed movie was like, they'd say "NO." This will be a classic b-school case study of how excessive marketing combined with willful ignorance created a show-biz BOMB.

P. S. From Ranesh Ponnuru on NRO's "The Corner":

There seem to be a lot of ads recently that are selling several products. Many of them involve the Cat in the Hat. The whole trend should be liquidated.

Case closed.