Today’s news that Summit Entertainment has already chosen a release date for Eclipse, the third entry in theTwilight series, suggests the studio is in a hurry. With New Moon, the second entry in the series, currently in a production surge under the direction of Chris Weitz for a November 20 release date, Summit’s latest decision raises the bar even higher, by placing Eclipse right in the heat of summer 2010’s blockbuster season. What’s the rush?

Former New Line marketing chief Russell Schwartz, whose resume includes a steadily successful franchise about hobbits and rings, offers one piece of advice for the newbies at Summit: Slow down.

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It could mean, in short, that New Moon will be a little bit bloodier than anticipated. Or certainly the Twlight film after that. Is there any filmmaking/distribution outfit with a more pronounced reputation for being deeply in love with arterial gushings? That’s Lionsgate in a nutshell.

So declares Jeff Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere, in response to Sharon Waxman’s report (for which “executives at Lionsgate and Summit declined to comment”) that Lionsgate (home of the Saw, Hostel and Tyler Perry franchises) may be buying Summit Entertainment, including the company’s library and slate, which includes teenage necrophilia phenom franchise Twilight.

But of course, Wells’ “nutshell” definition of Lionsgate is out of date. It’s an open secret that Lionsgate is so desperate to distance itself from its bloody past that the distributor has spent the past year engineering the failure of its remaining genre stock — dumping Midnight Meat Train in rural dollar theaters; taking the ultra-cinematic The Burrowers off its theatrical release schedule entirely; killing Cabin Fever as a theatrical franchise by releasing its Ti West-directed sequel straight to DVD. If anything, in Lionsgate’s hands, the Twilight sequels are likely to go even more tame.

In its depiction of mid-80s Eastern European Communist social hell, Cargo 200 makes 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days look like Sesame Street. There are plenty of films that use real history as the jumping off point for genre fantasy, but Aleksei Balabanov’s brutal, fetid vision of personal sadism and political policy intermingled is the only work of serious, modern social criticism in recent memory that actually made me want to puke. This is a compliment of the highest order.

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In its depiction of mid-80s Eastern European Communist social hell, Cargo 200 makes 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days look like Sesame Street. There are plenty of films that use real history as the jumping off point for genre fantasy (and even a couple of others at this festival), but Aleksei Balabanov’s brutal, fetid vision of personal sadism and political policy intermingled is the only work of serious, modern social criticism in recent memory that actually made me want to puke. This is a compliment of the highest order.

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Today Lionsgate releases Midnight Meat Train –– by all indications a cousin to the studio’s, um, classic fare like Saw and Hostel, but actually starring some name actors –– in just a hundred-something theaters, with no reviews. According to Grady Hendrix, it’s part of the studio’s effort to essentially slap the R-rated horror fans responsible for a decade’s worth of success in the face.

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It happens eventually to every filmmaker and actor associated with R-rated movies*, and now Eli Roth, the “torture porn auteur” who gave us Hostel and Hostel II, is making the transition to family-friendly fare — in order to make the kids happy, of course.

No, it has nothing to do with the money, which comes more easily with younger-targeted, lower-rated releases (especially when your last movie disappoints). It has to do with the realization that kids don’t have enough movies made for them, and they’d apparently like to see what Eli Roth’s talent is like. Only, up until now, they haven’t been allowed. As Roth defends the move:

“Everyone I know has been saying ‘When are you gonna do a movie my kids can see?’ And finally, I’m gonna make a movie that 13-year-old kids can see.”

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Either the URL is broken or the post has been removed, but according to my Google Reader, the horror site Bloody-Disgusting did a post this morning titled “Barack Obama Loses Our Vote, Insults Horror Genre,” in response to some comments the presidential candidate made at Thursday night’s Democratic Debate. Here’s the text of the post, from the RSS feed:

Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) said Thursday that he is concerned about TV content and that he believes as president, it would appropriate to “work with the industry” to address issues of sex and violence, including the marketing of violent films in TV shows, but he believes parental control, not government control, is the best response, reports Broadcasting Cable. Obama literally “calls out” our genre and indicates it’s a problem.

I actually took notes on that part of the debate, in the hopes that there would be a discrepancy between Clinton’s answer and Obama’s that might reveal something about which candidate is more beholden to Hollywood donors. Unfortunately, Hillary wasn’t given a chance to answer the questions. Reviewing my rough transcription of Obama’s comments today, what’s amazing is how it transitions from typical, weaselly politician non-response––which seems uncharacteristic for Obama––into a minor strike against the Hollywood publicity machine. But of course, he’s not actually pledging to do anything, and any horror fan who takes this as the sole evidence that Obama doesn’t deserve their vote probably shouldn’t be voting in the first place.

My rough transcription of the debate quote follows after the jump.

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Several movies that we’ve covered previously on SpoutBlog are opening in theaters today:

• Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, starring Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman, has been widely hailed as a “return to form” for director Sidney Lumet. That’s probably not inaccurate, but the last thing Devil feels like is the work of an old man recycling old tricks. Ballsy and occasionally incredulous in its illustration of extreme, self-manufactured desperation, Devil’s not exactly a masterpiece, but if can roll with its plot contortions, it’s a deeply satisfying bit of pulp melodrama. And it’s got the opening sex scene to end all opening sex scenes. Read my NYFF review here, and listen to Lumet talk about his late-career embrace of digital video here.
• The Darjeeling Limited expands yet again this weekend, but the real news is the theatrical unveiling of Hotel Chevalier. See a review of the feature here, and coverage of Wes Anderson’s short here, here and here.
• Saw IV’s opening box office has been positioned as a test of the lasting allure of the torture porn genre. But it’s also a test of the power of sex to sell blood.

• The Hollywood Reporter predicts Saw IV will open huge this weekend, and Variety concurs. The Variety story is a bit more skeptical as to whether or not this latest installment in “the flagship hardcore horror franchise” can reverse the course on the torture porn down-turn, but THR is looking at the bigger question of “whether the gore-filled sequel can pump some blood into a recently lifeless fall theatrical season.”
• Variety’s headline says there’s “new life” in pre-strike talks between the WGA and the AMPTP, but the story reads like you literally couldn’t pay the Writer’s Guild not to strike. The Reporter’s headline seems more accurate: “WGA seems unimpressed with new AMPTP proposals.”
• Kurt & Courtney director Nick Broomfield has hopped from the William Morris Agency to ICM. Broomfield is looking for North American distribution for his second narrative feature in two years, Battle for Haditha, and his new agency has been tasked with aiding that cause.
• Reason #907 why this Taking of Pelham 123 remake seems like a bad idea: John Travolta.

Another Halloween season is ’round the corner, and that means Lionsgate is promoting yet another Saw movie and yet another tie-in blood drive. Paul sent me an email this morning, asking my thoughts on this “softer side of torture porn.” I’m certainly not against it–at the end of the day, it’s just William Castle stuff with a humanitarian twist. But it is interesting that last year, although Saw III grossed about $7 million less domestically than its predecessor, the 2006 blood drive more than doubled the volume collected in 2005. As the films have become less popular with the general public and more of a niche concern, Lionsgate’s influence over that core, horror fan audience has seemingly increased.

Or maybe, they’re just moving away from the torture and upping the porn.

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Despite having the best Wednesday ever, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix earned a relatively small sum of money for a five day release. Here’s how a handful of scribblers spun the numbers:

To Box Office Mojo, the big-Wednesday, small-weekend phenomenon is a sign of “burning off demand”–that is, the huge fans showed up at midnight on Wednesday, and there’s little to no potential for the sequel to build on word-of-mouth.

But don’t tell that to Paul Dergarabedian, the industry blurb whore recently targeted by New York Magazine who hints that the release of the final Harry Potter book next Saturday could
actually reinvigorate ticket sales. “They’ll be walking book in hand into the movie theater,” he promises. Gag.

So many blockbusters in the marketplace leave little room in the writeups for attention to indies, but there’s always space to gloat over the failure of torture porn. The New York Times devoted two paragraphs to Captivity’s sub-top-ten debut; Nikki Finke’s sole sentence on the matter can be reduced to two words: “how nice.” Meanwhile, HecklerSpray asks the rhetorical question that’s surely on everyone’s mind: “[License to Wed] is still in the weekend box office top five and a film where Elisha Cuthbert has to drink a milkshake made out of mashed-up eyeballs isn’t?”

The Motion Picture Association of America (AKA the MPAA, AKA the mysterious cabal that sits somewhere on the crux of government, religion and commerce, whose primary function is to devise movie ratings) has been paying an inordinate amount of attention to Captivity, a low-budget torture flick that opens this Friday. In March, the MPAA threatened to withhold rating the film unless the studio releasing it, Lionsgate, removed a series of billboards that were drawing complaints. Lionsgate complied, but still allowed Captivity producer Courtney Solomon to mouth off to the New York Times about how the premiere party for the film would feature cage fighting, torture rooms, and Suicide Girls as on-the-clock “dates” for select fans.

That party happened last night, and according to FishbowlLA, the MPAA threatened to pull Captivity’s R-rating after learning that Solomon and his party planners had actually used the discarded billboards to wrap the outside of the Sunset Strip club where the party was to take place. After receiving a call from the MPAA’s Marilyn Gordon a few hours before show time, Solomon says he had the billboards moved inside the event venue, but is nonetheless “expecting a call” from the ratings board this morning to learn his punishment.

If the MPAA were to remove Captivity’s rating, the teen-targeted pic wouldn’t be able to screen in most multiplexes when it opens on Friday. So obviously this is a big deal for Solomon and Lionsgate–but do the MPAA really have the jurisdiction to pull ratings based on the marketing materials used at a private event? Where’s Kirby Dick when we really need him–and would he even care about a breach of ethics involving torture porn?

I should say upfront that I’m strangely ambivalent when it comes to Hostel mastermind Eli Roth. There’s a kind of sick humor baked into his baroque, balls-out extended death sequences, that, as a Dario Argento fan, I appreciate, but like most modern horror movies, sitting through the bad dialogue and endless setup that threads together the torture scenes is, actually, torture. On the other hand, I kind of get a kick out of Roth’s pretentions about the socio-political allegorical value of his movies. There’s something about the petulance of a horror movie director favorably comparing himself to Dick Cheney that I can’t resist.

That said, is it just me, or does this whiny, panicky, super-dramatic blog post on Roth’s MySpace page kind of read like those coked-up interviews Dirk Diggler gave Amber Waves for her documentary in Boogie Nights? It’s like the beleaguered filmmaker’s equivalent of the ill-advised drunk dial.

“All over the map” would be an appropriate phrase to use here, if there were a map in the world big enough to encompass all of Eli Roth’s paranoia. The ostensible purpose of the post is for Roth to announce that he’s taking some time off from filmmaking, but in attempting to explain that decision, he manages to cast blame on every conceivable outside force for therelative failure of Hostel 2. Piracy, he says, “is really hurting us, especially internationally.” He then jumps to blame film critics (who aren’t usually allowed to see allegedly “critic proof” films like this before they’re released) for allegedly reviewing the pirated workprint of the film instead of the completed version. Which critics did that? Roth “wouldn’t dignify them by mentioning them by name,” but he’s going to make damn sure they’ll lose all legal access to his films (which doesn’t seem like much of a threat, since these critics would apparently rather watch a pirated workprint than go to a press screening anyway). My favorite part is when Roth tells his fans they can help fight piracy with … piracy? “Flood file sharing services with fake Hostel II downloads just so no one can ever actually get the movie,” he declares.

A rant like this is obviously candy for for haters. Nikki Finke, one of the most vocal opponents of the so-called “torture porn” genre, ate it up. “Notice how it doesn’t even enter his mind that moviegoers rejected his twisted content of torture porn,” Finke sniped. “Maybe this year off will help Eli get a clue.” Roth is obviously playing passive-aggressive, putting himself out there as a victim so that his fans will rally around and beg him to make another movie. It’s hard to imagine a successful film director actual being so immature that they would not see how such a tactic would be doomed to backfire.

What’s the real problem with Hostel 2? Did everyone who really wanted to see it really watch it online before it opened? Could it just be that the movie industry is cyclical, and the torture porn cycle is simply dying its natural, inevitable death? For what it’s worth, the Horror Movies 101 group here at Spout hasn’t really shown much interest in the Hostel films. Whether or not you’re a Roth fan, does such an, um, impassioned message from a filmmaker make you any more or less likely to support their work?