Remarkably good judgment on Sinatra’s part, I’d say.
I know that in software, companies are frequently bought up and dismantled to avoid having their product be competition. How often, DMark, does this sort of purposeful restriction of distribution happen in the film biz?
The Manchurian Candidate deals with the attempted assassination of a Presidential nominee and two senators. The President isn’t involved.
Delaying release for a few months would have been reasonable; decades seems to be a huge overreaction to me.
My favorite story about pulling a movie that stunk was Howard Hughes’ “Outlaw”. He pulled the stinker because it was so bad and let out rumors periodically that it was being held back because it had such “hot” scenes that the censors would never pass it. He finally released it, but the public had bought into his rumor campaign and it made money for him.*
[sub]*see Mencken quotation put forth by plnnr above.[/sub]
Nicely done DMark. 
Oddly enough, studios do just the opposite. When one starts to do a Volcano film, another rushes to put one in the pipes. Aliens attack from outer space - bam! You got two studios doing that too. Sometimes it gets cutthroat and you see them going full speed ahead to see who “wins” by putting their film out first. There have been a few cases when the duel looks to be expensive and one studio will blink and cancel their version of the hot plot de jour. But buying out the competition? Studios don’t really go up for grabs all that often - but when they do, just like in software companies, the real value isn’t the building or the employees or the stars - all that is really valuable is the library of films.
This is what you repackage and sell as VHS or DVD or whatever new technology comes along. This is also what you sell to Showtime and HBO and to foreign tv markets. You package and then repackage and package again.
The first time Kerkorian dismantled MGM, Ted Turner cleverly snatched up the library of films, including his favorite film, Gone With The Wind, and then created his movie cable stations using the library. A lot of those films later reverted back to MGM because the films were not really “sold” as much as they were “leased” to Turner for X number of years.
When Carolco went belly up on a few big duds, studios were scrambling to pick up the films they had in their library. When studios merge, the value of a studio is calculated by how big the library is (and the more boxoffice hits it includes, the more value).
BTW Re: Your postion in a software company…for a time, every studio also invested heavily into computer software development. There were big dreams of every film spawning a hit computer game. They figured, how hard could it be to create and market some video games for kids and make big bucks? (Stop laughing - they really thought it would be a snap!) Needless to say, most of those departments have long since been eliminated, or cut down to a bare-bones minimum.
A few things.
Manchurian Candidate was released but after the assaigantion was shelved for years by all involved. It was sad because JFK himself expressed how much he liked the book and hoped they would make a movie of it. IN fact his interest in it helped convince the producers to go ahead and make it. It is still the best political thriller I have ever seen.
Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure sat on a shelf for a long time and was pushed back several times and finally released during the spring. The studio (Orion IIRC) thought it was a bomb. So sometimes they can’t see a hit.
Most studios are part of a huge media conglomerate so when they are pushing the ‘With Music by’ in the ads they are frequently just trying to help another division of the parent company.
Not every film needs to make 100 mil + As long as a film makes more then it costs it’s ok. But big bombs are usually made by tons of little mistakes.
I did read once (I think it was a screenwriter or director) that when making a film you have to realize that some people at the studio (your own studio) may want your film to fail for various reasons. Maybe the previous head of production greenlighted the project, maybe a rival producer wants your producer to have a flop, but there may be enemies of your film where you least expect it.
SO TRUE!
There were many examples of people stabbing others in the back, and you have to remember, every young assistant is looking for the right moment to shine…this acutally gets back to the OP (which I apologize if I helped hijack).
Another reason Hollywood doesn’t see a bomb coming is that there are hands rubbing for glee watching it happen. The further up the rung the film goes, the more reputations are attached. The clever folks have learned how to take credit after the fact…the others are stuck holding the bomb. And when someone goes, you only have to read the Hollywood Reporter to see who steps up to bat. If you want to have an enlightening view into this process, buy or borrow a list of executives at a major film studio…I promise you, half the names are no longer there.
There is a lifespan of a fruitfly…I was only able to stay so long by being in a department that was somewhat immune…however, when my time finally came, I went down with a big crowd!
This brings up an interesting point which the OP didn’t clarify. Is a financially successful movie that most people think stinks a bomb?
Virtually everyone I’ve talked to thinks the latest Star Wars was the worst of the series. Yet it’s keeping Lucas and his company rolling in dough.
Particularly with Star Wars, I have the suspicion it’s not near to being a zero-sum game: the fact that Star Wars is in the theater means that some other (perhaps artistically better) movie doesn’t get to play. Madison Avenue spends millions to get what they call “mind share”, which is to get someone’s attention long enough to make your pitch. The less advertisting, the less chance of being a hit.
So if I was a movie studio mogul, I’d consider: how good I thought a film was, how big the audience, how much advertisting it would take, and what was competing against it in the theaters.
The other point, that big bombs (in the sense of artistic failures) are made by lots of little mistakes is true in some cases. It’s certainly one way a bomb could creep up on an unsuspecting studio. But the OP may have been talking about another kind of bomb–where some critical and fairly obvious mistake is made and it drags the whole film down. (In Star Wars, Episode 1, I’d argue it was the mediocre acting of the leads.)
I’m divided about the studios’ attempt. It’s certainly laughable in one sense–even expert teams of game developers with a couple successes under their belts have frequently come to grief with games that nobody liked or bought.
On the other hand, having recently spent a year running a little video studio for an ISP, and many years in software application development, I must say I’d be sorely tempted to make reuse of movie material to produce a game. Particularly if there were elaborate and/or computer-generated sets. A good part of the artwork, storyline, even voices might be reused. In practice, I suppose it wouldn’t cut development costs of a traditional PC/Playstation game more than slightly. But at least it could ride the coat tails of the movie’s advertising investment.
The “Harry Potter” DVD package added a “game disk” for the DVD player. It isn’t particularly good, and doesn’t last long, but they didn’t invest much in it, either. The most compelling part was a self-guided, 3D tour of the sets (as they appear to the audience). It was similar to an Internet virtual museum. The “virtual set” idea could be converted into a simple game without much trouble, such as a “Hide and Seek” or “You Don’t Know Jack”.
I’m not sure whether I played more than a couple of the PC games that were directly converted from movies. The “Star Trek” and “Indiana Jones” games were fairly well received, but none of them was a direct translation of a movie. For the “direct conversion” games I suspect a large part of the fault lies in the hide-bound attitudes of the gaming community about what constitutes a “normal” game. If it doesn’t fall within one of the dozen or so popular formats, there’s scant interest. As an example Sid Meier’s group, which has produced a number of classic games, produced one I saw exactly once at a computer gaming show. The user typed in a string of notes, and the program played them back as Mozart or Bach would have done. I was quite impressed. It vanished, in favor of the 200th release of shooting monsters with shotguns along dark castle corridors.
Turtle… Turtle!
Sometimes a bomb is so aparent they have to push the advertising to the maximum to make enough money on opening night before word of mouth finally kills it.
Turtle… Turtle.