The timing just wasn't right.
It's a statement Hollywood executives often use to explain a movie's failure at the box office. It's not the movie's fault, they say, but external circumstances beyond its control: cold weather, the Olympics, anthrax scares, anything that might keep moviegoers home.
But what is often a hollow excuse has become an increasingly reasonable justification for how poorly movies about difficult subject matter have been faring. In the middle of anxious and unsure political and economic times, film fans have been hesitant to head to the multiplex to witness even more heartache.
Almost every recent drama about a thorny subject -- especially Middle East conflict, most spectacularly with October's bomb, "Body of Lies" -- has struggled at the box office. And this holiday season holds new movies about an array of plot lines that hardly scream Christmas: failing marriages, drug addiction, Nazis, broken homes, sexual abuse, suicide.
Some filmmakers are looking for any opportunity to make their films feel more upbeat. In his cattle-drive epic, "Australia," writer-director Baz Luhrmann changed the period film's original ending, making it less tragic, he says, "in response to the world we are in now."
It's an understandable feeling. Viewer demand for escapism has most likely increased the fortunes of any number of mindless comedies, including "Beverly Hills Chihuahua," "Four Christmases" and "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa."
So where does that leave December's films? Will hard-edged topicality be an albatross or an opportunity? Early results have been surprising.
Few new movies are benefiting as much from their newsworthiness as "Milk," the biography of slain gay rights activist Harvey Milk. Supported by strong reviews (especially for star Sean Penn) and positive word-of-mouth, the film, in its first weekend, generated the nation's second-highest single-theater gross, as "Milk" in San Francisco's Castro Theatre trailed only "Bolt" at Hollywood's El Capitan Theatre.
Although it's impossible to assign "Milk" a precise monetary benefit from the continuing debate over Proposition 8 and the ordination of a gay bishop in the Episcopal Church, it's clear that the film -- which grossed an estimated $2.6 million last weekend in limited release and has grossed $7.6 million since premiering Nov. 26 -- has become part of the conversation on gay and lesbian rights.
