While the conventional wisdom is that America is a repressed puritanical backwater compared with the swinging overseas film market, Galley Slaves finds a “most interesting nugget” buried in the coverage of Basic Instinct 2’s spectacular crash and burn at the box office:
Despite the market downturn, “9 1/2 Weeks” and “Wild Orchid” scribe Zalman King is still penning erotic thrillers, including retro-sounding titles like “Nasty Girls Save the World.” But he admits that the appetite for the genre has taken a hit, and he blames the international market.
“Korea used to be a big erotic thriller market (in the ’80s and ’90s). Japan, too. You used to be able to cobble deals together based on those markets, but it has become more difficult,” said King, who also produced “9 1/2 Weeks” alongside Damon. “There used to be a way to finance erotic thrillers if you had the right cast based on the foreign market. The foreign market doesn’t support it in the way that it used to. They are now embracing more mainstream fare.”
Jonathan Last suggests, “Maybe the problem is the rise of the Christian Right in Korea and Japan. If Paul Verhoeven acts quickly, those countries can still be saved!”
HehTM. Elsewhere in the the bukkake-like explosion of media coverage on BI2’s failure, Scott Ott gets off one of the best shots:
At the box office this weekend, Ice Age 2 clobbered Basic Instinct 2 hauling in $70 million dollars, compared with less than $3 million for the Sharon Stone movie. One film is about a prehistoric creature
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