In the last few days, online film journalist veteran Eric Vespe has been publishing a series of fascinating articles about “The Mist,” one of the most well-regarded film adaptations of one of Stephen King’s best novellas.
As part of the series, which is being published on Slashfilm, Vespe interviewed the film’s director Frank Darabont, among many others, about the film and the topic of the movie’s release came up.
The film arrived in cinemas fifteen years ago this week (November 21st 2007) and received mixed reviews, but managed to make $57 million globally off an $18 million budget. As time has gone on, it has become a cult classic and has grown more lauded.
Even so, the film was widely perceived as a box-office failure at the time and Darabont puts that down to the timing of the release. He says distributor Dimension Films and its chief Bob Weinstein shoved the film out in the pre-Thanksgiving holiday rush – something Darabont literally begged them not to do:
“I begged [Bob Weinstein]. I begged him, let’s wait until February when there’s nothing in the theaters. Don’t release this as the holidays are approaching. Please don’t. People want to go see ‘Elf.’ They want to see Christmas movies. They don’t want to see flesh-eating tentacles and this hopeless, despair-filled movie. Not now. He threw that word at me that you’ll hear from executives in Hollywood and every time it’s f—ed me: counter-programming.
I think if we’d waited until February and actually done some real promotion leading up to it, we might have had … It wouldn’t have been a Marvel movie in terms of its box office, but I think we could have done a lot better than we did.”
“The Mist” opened against Disney’s “Enchanted,” holiday film “This Christmas” and new release action thrillers “Hitman” and “August Rush”. The result was over the five-day Wednesday-Sunday holiday weekend, “The Mist” debuted in eighth place with $12.8 million.
