Blood, guts and glory: Neil Marshall's 'Centurion' hits Video On Demand before an official theatrical US release.

There are a three pet peeves of mine in regards to Hollywood studios. One is messing around with a film’s release date to the point where no filmgoer could find it and/or could care less about the film when newer, better hyped films come out. That’s also around the time folks say the famous five words (“I will wait for video”). Two is not screening theatrical films for mainstream film critics- nine times out of ten, the practice is done to show a studio’s lack of confidence in that film (we think it’s junk/know it’s junk we’ll give you this junk and hope you won’t care)…and then there’s Magnolia Pictures and their genre arm Magnet Releasing.

What does this film company do? Well, if you are not familiar with the young studio, this is it in a nutshell, from thier own website:

Magnolia Pictures (www.magpictures.com) is the theatrical and home entertainment distribution arm of the Wagner/Cuban Companies, a vertically integrated group of media properties co-owned by Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban that also include the Landmark Theatres chain, the production company 2929 Productions, and high definition cable networks HDNet and HDNet Movies.

So what does this mean? Well, if the film is distributed by other studios (such as the terrific James Gray film We Own The Night) nothing too unusual – the studio sets a wide or limited theatrical run just like any other film. If, however, the film, produced or picked up by Magnolia and/or it’s genre arm Magnet releasing (such as Gray’s equally compelling Two Lovers or Let The Right One In, Ong Bak 1 and 2, Splinter and the upcoming Centurion…? Then, a week or less before the film goes to a North American theatrical release, it “premieres” on Video On Demand and/or HDNetMovies. The problem with this is that the majority of theatre chains (with the exception of Landmark) know this- and will not have these pictures screened in their theatres. The theatrical release, therefore is limited.
So let’s say you saw the trailer for Neil Marshall’s film Centurion or even the ‘red band’ trailer (red bands usually contain extra shots of R rated material, a practice which I still don’t get-there have been many R rated films in the past which never needed Red Band trailers. Did A Clockwork Orange or GoodFellas ever need one?) Now, some films like Centurion have been picked up for distribution by Magnolia/Magnet; they have already played theatrically overseas.
Centurion has also appeared in a number of US film festivals as well. There are a number of people out there who are familiar with director Marshall’s work- I’m a big fan of his first film, Dog Soldiers and many others are huge fans of probably the best horror film of the previous decade, Descent. His third film, Doomsday, had some nice touches, and there was nice apocalyptic action in there, with homages to other sci-fi action films, but the film was uneven overall. In some genre geek circles, his name is a name to watch,
Continue reading →