Too Simple?

This past week Universal Studios started airing promo material for the Blumhouse Studios release The Hunt, the latest movie to travel the ground broken almost a hundred years ago by Richard Connell. Then, following mass shootings in El Paso, TX and Dayton, OH, Universal pulled the promos. And then within the last day, the studio and moviemakers decided not to release the movie at all in the near future.

Judging by the trailers, people believed the movie was going to have wealthy lefty-types hunting down much poorer "deplorables." Many folks believed the potential victims were stand-ins for working-class supporters of President Donald Trump. Some talking heads on Fox News lamented this, so the president tweeted about an awful movie coming out, which he didn't name but which was almost certainly The Hunt.

In response to the cancellations, Universal has been praised by some, damned by faint praise mixed in with disapproval of greenlighting the project to begin with, and condemned. Since the announcement about the cancellation is skimpy on details, speculation as to why is widespread. The studio was scared of backlash from presidential supporters who don't think about what he says much more than he does. The studio was genuinely concerned about marketing a movie featuring people hunting each other in the immediate aftermath of two horrendous crimes in which people hunted other people and shot them en masse. Or other reasons.

My personal opinion was that someone figured the market for implausible and derivative hyper-violent movies which try to cover their shallowness with a patina of equally lame social commentary -- a Blumhouse specialty -- was going to be pretty shallow itself for awhile. Which means that a movie in that lane was going to find a much smaller slice of the ticket-buying pie on its opening weekend and be unlikely to build much beyond that. I don't buy their concern at all, given that Blumhouse releases violent movies right after weekends or weeks filled with shootings in cities like Chicago that, combined, far outweigh all but the very worst mass shootings. The Hunt is going to be held until a time when the studio figures it can make the most money possible on it. Don't worry. It'll still be stupid.