- Joined
- Aug 7, 2018
Still, there is this point that almost all of the great successes - like even Seinfeld and Friends - weren't huge hits at the time. They were a bit niche at first and the studio gave them a bit of time and then the series caught fire and became cultural touchstones.
Confusing shit big time. Friends was a HUGE fucking hit from moment one. To such a degree that NBC immediately changed their entire sitcom model, with rare exceptions, to churning out nothing but Friends clones during Friend's first season in order to both to try and recapture lightning in a bottle immediately and to keep other networks from producing their own Friends rip-offs.
Now Seinfeld, that show DID take some time to find an audience (most consider the masturbation episode to be the moment it caught fire with the normies).
As for the other topic; it should note that cable TV DID have a major role of turning flops into hits. While Blade Runner never saw much life on regular cable, Heathers is a film whose entire success can be attributed to WGN (a major cable channel based out of Chicago) and later, TBS, rerunning the fuck out of the film in the early 90s and late 90s respectively. Cable TV really helped a lot of cult films find their audience after the fact, which in turn spurned home video sales. Sadly, Cable TV is a joke these days and you can't really have a flop rebound Via syndication reruns or TV airings these days.
Hey, if Armageddon is so bad, then why does it have a Criterion release (and one of the first fifty, no less)? Checkmate!
Criterion actually had to explain (a lot) why they put out Armageddon on DVD as a Criterion.
They were bleeding money and having trouble getting their films carried in major stores like Walmart and K-Mart and other places where normies buy their movies. They had lost the rights to a lot of their early normie fodder they had licensed out (Robocop, This is Spinal Tap, Silence of the Lambs) and was recovering from the Salo debacle, where they got scammed out of a lot of money from a company that lied to them about owning the distribution rights to film let alone pissed off Barnes and Nobles (one of the few big stores that carried Criterion films) over it's release. The studio who made Armageddon, being a huge fan of Criterion, offered to license the movie to Criterion for release knowing that it would give them a huge infux of normie money to keep the company afloat. A decision that was agreed upon, because one of the heads of Criterion, in spite of being the head of an arthouse home video distribution company, was a HUGE fanboy of the film and it's soundtrack and fast tracked the licensing deal for the film.
Last edited: