Academic

THE DARWIN MOVIE?S NOT SELLING, but John Scalzi doubts those evil Creationmongers are the reason: ?

By Glenn Reynolds

THE DARWIN MOVIE’S NOT SELLING, but John Scalzi doubts those evil Creationmongers are the reason:

A producer of Creation, the film about Charles Darwin and his wife Emma, starring Paul Bettany and his real-life wife Jennifer Connelly, is griping that the film has no distributor in the US, apparently because so many Americans are evolution-hating mouth-breathers that no one wants the touch the thing; it?s just too darn controversial.

Well, it may be that. Alternately, and leaving aside any discussion of the actual quality of the film, it may be that a quiet story about the difficult relationship between an increasingly agnostic 19th Century British scientist and his increasingly devout wife, thrown into sharp relief by the death of their beloved 10-year-old daughter, performed by mid-list stars, is not exactly the sort of film that?s going to draw in a huge winter holiday crowd, regardless of whether that scientist happens to be Darwin or not, and that these facts are rather more pertinent, from a potential distributor?s point of view. . . . Maybe if Charles Darwin were played by Will Smith, was a gun-toting robot sent back from the future to learn how to love, and to kill the crap out of the alien baby eaters cleverly disguised as Galapagos tortoises, and then some way were contrived for Jennifer Connelly to expose her breasts to RoboDarwin two-thirds of the way through the film, and there were explosions and lasers and stunt men flying 150 feet into the air, then we might be talking wide-release from a modern major studio. Otherwise, you know, not so much. The ?oh, it?s too controversial for Americans? comment is, I suspect, a bit of face-saving rationalization from a producer

Exploding robots and Jennifer Connelly’s breasts? I’m in. So are a lot of Scalzi’s readers. Scalzi’s response: “Give me $150 million and we?ll talk.”

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on September 14, 2009 (boomark / email).