One Stone

It seems in their zeal to denigrate America and her armed forces including it’s former Commander in Chief, Matt Daemon, Paul Greengrass, and Universal (as in Universally detested) have killed another America-hating franchise:

But here’s the problem: Desperate to find a way to open the picture, Universal marketed the movie — as anyone who saw the TV spots can attest — as another installment in its wildly successful “Bourne” series. The trailers (as you can see below) sold the Paul Greengrass film as being “from the director” of “The Bourne Supremacy,” complete with action-packed scenes of Matt Damon — the “Bourne” star — rocketing around Baghdad with “Bourne”-like abandon, being pursued by bad guys amid hundreds of flying-glass explosions, squealing cars, gun battles, fiery helicopter crashes and epic chase scenes. In other words, the “Green Zone’s” marketing pitch had all of the iconograph trappings of a “Bourne” movie.

If the movie had had a strong opening weekend at the box office, this tactic would’ve paid off. But since the movie did a belly flop, it leaves Universal having poisoned the well for its most successful action series. After all, you can’t go back to “Bourne 4″ after you’ve already sold “Green Zone” as a Bourne sequel — and it flopped. Audiences will be justifiably wary, having clearly been unsatisfied by the results of this Damon-Greengrass collaboration. It was bad enough that Greengrass had already put some distance between himself and directing another “Bourne” actioner. Now the studio will have to put some distance between this flop and any continuation of the series.

When it comes to a bad movie, the behavior of movie audiences is remarkably consistent: once burned, twice shy. And for the near future, that shyness will extend to any new “Bourne” project.

We’re used to spies getting the hater treatment — after all we all — on some level — want the government to not spy on us, love a good conspiracy, etc. The CIA is an easy target (though not for the reasons Lefties assume) on some level. But the military — especially the combat units — is generally off limits to most normal Americans. Even the anti-war MASH folks limited their fire to Army bureaucracy, the Truman administration, the quartermaster — never — as far as I can remember was the infantryman ridiculed (patronized perhaps, but their demise was not a cause for celebration as in The Green Zone. I doubt this will have a Heaven’s Gate effect — where war movies become verboten. The message Hollywood… make good war movies. You don’t have to be American propagandists, but just don’t be anti-American propagandists or you will lose your shirt.

h/t: Big Hollywood

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