I just took an international flight on USAirways. It is a pretty “bare bones” carrier (you get what you pay for). One thing I really noticed-the weird movies they show! None of the six movies I saw were ones I recognized…and none of the actors were familiar to me. I don’t remember any of the titles except one (“City of Ember”-which had one name actor (Bill Murray). They were all cheaply made comedy movies…but as I say, none were movies that I recall being shown in local theatres.
So, do they buy cheap “B” movies for their flights?
Oh, the food stinks as well (inedible entrees)…but the fares are dirt cheap, so I don’t complain.
Some more titles are necessary to see if they really are as obscure as you claim they are, or perhaps you don’t know as much about what’s out as you think you do.
Also, anything you’d be watching now would’ve come out in the theaters around August or September of last year–months that are common burial grounds for movies that can’t quite compete in the summer or holiday season.
So, City of Ember was pretty good, but admittedly small scale in going for the Kid Lit Fantasy Adaptation market. It actually came out Fall 2008 and mostly vanished without a trace.
The Informant! earned Matt Damon a Golden Globe nomination recently, directed by Oscar-winner Steven Soderbergh, and will almost certainly get at least one nomination when the Oscar nods are announced next week. It was ranked #2 its opening weekend.
Bride Wars has Kate Hudson and Anne Hathway (both quite famous, Oscar-nominated actresses), and I must’ve seen the TV ads for this constantly before its release. This was actually released almost a year ago, and was #2 nationwide its opening weekend. It made almost $60M domestically.
My Life in Ruins bombed, but it’s by the woman who created My Big Fat Greek Wedding, so it may have been off your radar, but not those of chick flick fans.
All About Steve had Sandra Bullock in the one movie of hers last year that tanked, but it was hardly obscure (again, tons of TV time)–just not very successful (though it was still #3 its opening weekend).
Love Happens starred Jennifer Aniston (again, a household name if not a major b.o. draw). This was a more straight-forward romance and vanished quickly.
While the reviews for the first two were generally good and the latter four generally awful, they were all smaller films (which is not the same as a “B”-film), with more modest budgets and ambitions that tried to get at least some box office traction by (mostly) being released in late summer and early fall, when the landscape was a little less competitive. None may have made much of a splash, but were airline-friendly in terms of content, running time, and at least nominal name recognition (I suspect most people won’t have seen them, but at least remember them being out).
I’m amazed you’ve never heard of Matt Damon, Kate Hudson, Anne Hathaway, Nia Vardalos, Sandra Bullock, Jennifer Aniston, Aaron Eckhart, Candice Bergen, Tim Robbins, Martin Landau, Martin Sheen, or Richard Dreyfuss!
Btw, The Informant! was one of the best movies of 2009. It would have been worth watching.
As I’ve read some of ralph124c’s other threads, I’m not in the least bit amazed or surprised.
I went to see this one in the theater, since the company in the movie (ADM) was an old client of mine, and I was curious to see how the story was handled. I wasn’t expecting the dark comedy that it wound up being (at least in places). Damon did a fine job, but it’s a strange little movie.
US Airways movies can suck on international flights, but at least it’s movies on demand, iirc. On United you get pretty much the same movies, that just cycle through. All movies cycle on the length of the longest movie. So if one movie is 60 minutes long and another 180, you need to wait just over 180 minutes for the 60 minute movie to start over again. And the monitors are fixed in the back of the seat in front of you. If the person in front of you leans back then you can’t see the screen. I think that there is some play in the US Airways monitor to help account for this.
Lufthansa is much better in this regard, but their seats have very little cushion.
All economy class food pretty much sucks now, although it’s still a bit better on European or Asian based carriers. And the European carriers still give you free drinks on international flights.
Moral of the story: be thankful for what you’ve got - it’s worse somewhere else.
Movies on planes are also edited to make them more family friendly.
USAirways is not a “bare bones” airline in the sense that Southwest, JetBlue, AirTran, easyJet, Spirit, etc. are (low fares and no frills). USAirways is a legacy airline with all the issues that have put legacy airlines in a financial descent for several years.
I watched Love Actually on United, and the whole story line involving John (Martin Freeman) and Judy (Joanna Page) had vanished, for some strange reason.
Some are and some aren’t. It varies by airline and by film. European carriers don’t edit their films. My last transatlantic flight (a week ago) - one of the films had words edited and another didn’t. I think that most US Airlines will show the “tv version” if it’s available, but for some of the more obscure films they don’t.
Saw a weird version of “The Hangover” that preserved some of the raunchiness but when the guy jumped out of the trunk he was wearing tighty-whities and not naked. But I think that they still dropped plenty of f-bombs.
In a famous example, 15 airlines had a major scene edited from the movie “Rain Man.” The scene was the one in which Raymond and Charlie are in the airport preparing to fly back to L.A. Raymond begins listing crash statistics and has a major panic attack. The filmmakers considered it a key scene as it explains why Raymond and Charlie traveled cross-country in the Buick and that there is a point to which Charlie can push Raymond just so far before Ray begins to get stressed and becomes a danger to himself or others.
Qantas was one of the few airlines which showed the movie intact, because as Raymond explained in the movie, Qantas had never had a crash.