As I reported a few days ago, the new Charles Darwin bio-pic Creation has yet to find a distributor for the US market. Producer Jeremy Thomas was quoted as blaming anti-evolution sentiments in America for the problem.
I didn’t buy it. Lots and lots of extraordinarily controversial, religiously offensive movies get distributed every year. The suspicion I voiced was that simple economics was at play, not kowtowing to religious fascists. Perhaps American distributors found the film dull, or didn’t think it could muster enough ticket sales to make it worth their while.
The other possibility, which I didn’t raise (lest I impugn the motives of the film’s producers) was that this was part of a calculated campaign to stir up controversy in order to get a better distribution deal and guarantee boffo box office. (I did point out in the previous article that controversy sells, a well-established fact that makes the insinuation that religious pressure was preventing release in the US, of all places, far less plausible.)
A new article posted by NBC Bay Area quotes a “spokesman” as saying, “There is now a bidding war for the film in the US. A US deal will be in place by the end of the week.” Well, surprise, surprise. I’ve been looking forward to seeing this movie for months, and I’m very glad to hear that I’ll be able to go to a theatre and see it. But I’m more than a little suspicious now that this whole “can’t get a distributor” affair was nothing more than part of a calculated marketing campaign to a) stir up the 39% of Americans who affirm evolution as accepted science, and/or b) stir up the 25% who believe the world was created 6,000 years ago. Either way, controversy, like sex, sells, and I predict Creation will, even if it’s not a blockbuster, more than make back its production cost when it hits screens later this year.
Nitpick #1: The NBC Bay Area article, titled “‘Creation’ May Cause Big Bang in U.S.” wins the Best Mixed Scientific Metaphor Headline for 2009. Creationists are wont to lump together, inappropriately, evolution and the Big Bang, and this headline doesn’t help.
Nitpick #2: Speaking of which, can anyone explain why this movie is called Creation, instead of, say, Origins, or Evolution? Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection does not address the creation of the universe, or of the earth, or even of life itself; it only applies to the mechanisms by which life evolves once it exists. Again, this just adds to the confusion.
I think you are right to be suspicious about the distribution issue.
I think the same opportunistic mentality explains the title of the film being “Creation”. Surely the title promotes the maximum amount of controversy by riling up both creationists and those who accept Darwin’s theories.
Pingback: Darwin film gets US distributor « American Freethought