Topic: Media Research Center
Brent Bozell makes the mistake of equating a movie's popularity with its quality in his May 1 column trashing the film "Kick-Ass."
Bozell cites positive reviews of the film claiming it would be a hit, then adds:
The “shrewd” people took a super-beating. The shock merchants ended up shocked. On the first weekend, it finished barely ahead of the family cartoon “How to Train Your Dragon,” and then by the second weekend, it finished a distant fifth, behind the smash-hit dragon cartoon.
John Q. Public’s reaction? The movie is pure junk.
Bozell then mocks one review who claimed that despite the disappointing box office, "Kick-Ass" "was a 'genuine success story' because the movie was produced and financed independently when no studio would touch it, and it would eventually turn a profit. This is like predicting the Dodgers would win the World Series, and when they don’t, they’re still successful because they didn't finish in last place."
The problem is that a movie's quality has no relationship whatsoever to its box office take. As we pointed out when MRC NewsBuster P.J. Gladnick embraced the same fallacy, "Citizen Kane" did not make a profit on its initial release, and nobody's calling that film "pure junk."
