Disaster film director Roland Emmerich can save some time brewing up marketing schemes for his latest end-of-times flick, White House Down. All he needs to do is peek at the strategy Olympus Has Fallen deployed … since it’s exactly the same movie that debuted last week.
For a while now, Hollywood has been lambasted for shuffling through the same ideas it's used since the dawn of the Blockbuster era (est. summer of 1981), tweaking the concepts and rolling them out in an awkward dance of dueling pictures.
Right from the jump, each film’s title smacks you right in the face with their laziness.
Despite the fact that Fallen and Down take two different approaches in their trailers, it doesn’t take the viewer any more than 90 seconds to realize he's being sold the same goods.
Let’s peek at the IMDB summaries for each film.
I won’t bother to differentiate between the two. It's insulting that Hollywood assumes American filmgoers will pony up $13 twice to see the same film.
On the other hand, television no longer has the stank it had in the past. Film actors' success in shows such as Breaking Bad and Homeland have begun a mass exodus of other matinee from film to television. Think of House of Cards and The Following. Television is less time-consuming for actors. Television critics reward film actors who act on television.
More garbage like Fallen and Down is only going to expedite that exodus.
Emmerich has made his bones in the disaster film genre. His career’s crown jewel was the seminal film Independence Day. He's been on the record saying he wants to make a sequel, but Will Smith won't commit. Emmerich just sounds sad he won’t get to work with Big Willie Style again.
Since the German director threw a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2007, though, in his fantasy America, couldn't he have written the president's role for a woman?