I was eagerly awaiting this film to be released, as it seemed like it would be a solid action flick I could bring my girlfriend to, since she loves Butler... but after a few months I realized it never came out! When I did a little research I found out that it only made 0.5 million, and it cost 30 million to make. So my question... WTF? Did they not do a wide release on purpose? Is a wide release still going to happen? I would think an action film like this would most certainly make a decent amount of money.

Their idea for a roll-out in additional markets fell through, when the first week limited release failed miserably.

Maybe I just don't understand the politics involved in this, but wouldn't they want to at least attempt a wide release to try and regain some of the costs? I couldn't imagine this movie doing less than 20 million in a wide release (overall).

Take my words here with a large grain of salt, but in limited release it's opening in choice locations, which hopefully give the distributors some idea on the film's gross potential. A slow roll-out is intended to build word of mouth, and keep adding screens as you go along, (good examples are Midnight in Paris, Slumdog Millionaire, The King's Speech) but they need encouraging results from a large average per screen for the roll-out to continue.

You can see on http://www.boxofficemojo.com that MGP started out with just over 11k per screen in four areas; the week after it added two dozen more and the average went down to 2,5k. With P&A, it wouldn't make fiscal sense to widen its screen count, since their budget on P&A would probably eat into any potential profit.

There's quite a lot of films which distributors think have breakout potential, but after several weekends where slow expansion fails to amp up, the release instead dies slowly (127 Hours, Buried).

I hope my post makes some sense here, but to sum it up: If a film fails to build upon an audience during the first 2-3 weekends in limited release, going wide with the release would probably cost more in P&A than they could recoup, so a write-off is more sensible.

*Here's a nice link on per screen average, where you can see some of the slow releases that succeeded; http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/weeken ... AVG&p=.htm

Welcome to the 2010's -- where movies of substance rarely get a wide release.

Thanks for the info! I guess I'll hafta wait for the blu ray

I saw it the other day. It's most definitely not an "action movie." Better than the reviews gave it credit for, but I don't think would have ever had mass appeal.