PR Liars: Movie Edition

You can find all sorts of stories how Ex Machina is supposed to the "summer sleeper hit of 2015". And the critics do love it, it seems.

Audiences? Not so much. It didn't do terribly well the first weekend it went into wide release and slid down in the second.

The production budget hasn't been made public, which is probably not a good sign. Hollywood accounting practices are arcane enough to make even the Enron boys say "really?" Hollywood accountants buy red ink by the barrel and black ink by the ounce. A rule of thumb is that a film has to make at least 2.5 times its production budget to turn a profit, maybe closer to four times, but the dishonesty in accounting in Hollywood is so rampant that there never should have been another Eddie Murphy movie, since Coming to America, which made over nine times its production budget, was declared to be a loss.

(Moral: If they offer you a percentage of the profits, punch them in the throat.)

But I digress.

Science fiction fans may love the movie, but there is a one-word retort to that: Serenity.