DAMN IT, they’re doing it AGAIN!!

Have you heard of Outlander?  Do you like the sound of a “Sci-Fi Viking Epic”?  Do you like aliens and dragons and spaceships and barbarian warriors and massive battles and Jim Cavieziel and John Hurt and Ron Perlman and Lord of the Rings meets Predator meets Beowulf??  Do you want to see a movie like that?

Good luck.

Once again, a movie that looks amazing, is getting great advance press, but doesn’t fit neatly into the “second-class sequels, unwanted remakes, or blatant Oscar-baits” corporate strategy is getting dumped unceremoniously and with as little marketing as possible onto a handful of screens then relegated to the bottom row of a Blockbuster wall, to be passed over by people who probably would have loved it on the big screen but “never even heard of it, so it must suck”.

Moriarty, from movie geek uber-site Ain’t It Cool News, posted an open letter to Harvey Weinstein, of The Weinstein Company (who owns the rights to this film) begging him to reconsider and give this movie the attention he believes it deserves.  The Weinsteins have brought some amazing and risky genre movies to us in the past (Grindhouse, Kill Bill, Sin City, The Mist); unfortunately they also have a habit of buying up the rights to some really cool foreign/independent productions and then sitting on them until everybody forgets about it (Shaolin Soccer) or chucking them out to guaranteed obscurity with limited screens or direct to DVD and no marketing (Equilibrium, Feast).  Sadly, it looks like the latter choice is the way they’re going for Outlander.

Maybe I have no idea what I’m talking about… maybe Outlander sucks horribly and they’re just trying to minimize their losses.  Unless I’m one of the lucky 50 or so cities that get to see Outlander in theaters I guess I’ll have to try and track it down on DVD to figure it out.  Somehow though, I get a feeling from the trailer below that this is my kind of flick.

Tags: Movies