Hmm.. the last part is pretty.. uhm.. wrong. They make it sound like the advance screenings were secret sneaks and not the announced showings they were. Sounds like they got pretty confused with the second screening, where the cities were announced later.

Trienco | July 22, 14:19 CET

Is it just me or is Universal rewriting history to make themselves sound good?



Hmmmm ummm yeah not quite what happened (remember all those fans finding out about the screenings before the official links went up?), but it plays well to the the press.

Simon | July 22, 14:31 CET

I meant this part:

"The studio staged three waves of word-of-mouth sneak preview screenings (which do not advertise the name of the film) in 35 cities"

I thought they even DID prepare a marketing campaign and had to shelve it, because it sold out before they could get it started. How would they promote a sneak? "Go and watch this great movie of which we won't even tell you the title"?

Minor things like the official board not exactly being a blog and not mentioning that there was even a site for no other purpose than the screenings can be forgiven. And others are sounding too positive to really complain (like all tickets every time selling out within 5min). And finding out about the screenings before the announcement, wasn't that just (second screening), after told us the date, but not the cities?

But then, this way it sounds even more impressive *g*

Trienco | July 22, 14:46 CET

The Hollywood Reporter is a big media paper, they are striving to replace Variety as THE big entertainment paper, so having this juicy article is a great thing. As far as the 'spin' on the information goes, they do say that Joss Whedon went online to inform fans about the screenings so it isn't like they are pretending that we didn't know what we were going to go see. But it is also true that when we bought the tickets the name of the movie was not attached, so that someone couldn't just go to fandango and look up 'Serenity' and find it. You had to know where to look.

embers | July 22, 18:38 CET

What else is good is that Reuters is syndicating this story.

Simon | July 22, 18:42 CET

What else is good is that Reuters is syndicating this story.

Beat me to it, but for those who may want to see, try here (Simon and I must be signed up for the same Google News Alerts or something).

The One True b!X | July 22, 20:24 CET

He didn't know that Gene Roddenberry had set out to do the same thing back in the 1960s, when he created "Star Trek," a smart TV show that was saved by its fans.

Actually, he did know. Joss has mentioned this and said that Star Trek didn't really pull it off.

electricspacegirl | July 22, 21:56 CET

The thing I find most encouraging is that SERENITY only cost 40 million. So it can show a profit much faster and easier than "bigger" movies. And that means sequelly goodness if we do our part. And we will.

batmarlowe | July 22, 21:57 CET

Yeah, STAR TREK got away from Roddeberry's "WAGON TRAIN in Space" concept pretty quickly. I've heard that Roddenberry never really intended to do WAGON TRAIN in Space in the first place. He just pitched it that way to network suits so they'd understand what he was talking about. Of course, I don't know if that's true, but that's what I've heard. Whereas Joss pitched Science Fiction with a Western feel. And that's what we got.

batmarlowe | July 22, 22:11 CET

Just noticed that the syndicated version of this is a front-page item on Yahoo news -- under "Most Popular!"

Whedonage | July 24, 08:20 CET