wither in the light

The MPAA, responding to the slew of incredibly bad movies that were released this year (The Hulk, Gigli, and Charlies Angels to name a few), blamed the problem not on the fact that the movies were targetted at the least common denominator and were therefore devoid of plot or quality, but on the people who use their phones to send text messages (often while still in the film) to tell their friends that the movie sucks.

"In the old days, there used to be a term, 'buying your gross,' " Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax, told the Los Angeles Times. "You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience."

So: they make a few hundred million right at the beginning, because news of how bad a film is can only precolate through society so fast. Now technology is changing that, and they lose the ability to fuck you, though I suppose 'fleece you' might be a better term, since they think (rightly so, for the majority of Americans) that you are sheep: their biggest complaint is that your ability to broadcast your opinion to your friends undermines their carefully crafted marketing image, i.e. you didn't go where they wanted you to go.

Expect to be paying more corporate welfare over this issue... the film companies are going to be declaring these flops as losses, which means they pay less taxes, you pay more, and Bush the Lesser will give them a handy financial boost to get over these hard times.