Tue Apr 10, 2007 — by Mike Gold

Grindhouse to amoeba?

Two for the price of two

Grindhouse executive producer Harvey Weinstein has been on a spree explaining why the movie  tanked last weekend. Without revealing the fact that the reviews and word-of-mouth generally noted people's tastes running towards one of the two movies on the double bill and against the other – with little consensus on which is better – Weinstein said the three hour running time was a major deterrent to sales. Certainly, film exhibitors agree.

So he's floating a trial balloon. He's "thinking" about rereleasing Grindhouse as two individual movies: Robert Rodriquez's  Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof. That should do wonders for this weekend's box office.

But here's Weinstein's dirty little secret: when they made Planet Terror and Death Proof, extra footage was shot. Yeah, that's always the case. But in the case of these two movies, a lot of extra footage was shot. Enough to add at least 20 minutes to each movie. The plan, of course, was to release "extended versions" on DVD and to seperate the movies for some overseas audiences. Now, it looks like these extra 40 minutes (give or take) is becoming Plan B.

Thus making Grindhouse ironically the longest trailer ever released.

You can listen to Matt Raub's review on today's ComicMix Podcast (below) or do a search for his ComicMix print review, which we ran last week.

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