You made what is arguably the worst movie of all time. It only took in $20 million- half of what it cost to make. Careers were ruined, and those that weren't ruined were at the very least derailed. So what's a smart distributor to do? Well, silly, you try to make lemonade out of lemons- and it looks like MGM just might succeed.
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- It was "42nd Street" with pasties, "All About Eve" with a G-string. Only those movies were cinema classics, while "Showgirls" was so bad that adjectives such as awful, wretched and appalling somehow seemed too kind....
Since it imploded critically and commercially in 1995, "Showgirls" has gained such a fringe following of movie masochists that distributor MGM is releasing a "V.I.P. Edition" DVD set on Tuesday, playing up the film's campy atrociousness.
The elaborate package includes shot glasses and playing cards for "Showgirls" drinking games; glossy pictures of star Elizabeth Berkley; plus pasties, a blindfold and a poster of Berkley for a "pin-the-pasties-on-the-showgirl" game.
Among DVD extras are a tutorial on how to give a lap dance and audio commentary titled "The Greatest Movie Ever Made."
"We've targeted the DVD release to adults who have embraced the campy, fun and even outrageous aspects of the film and provided extras that deliver on that notion," Blake Thomas, MGM executive vice president for worldwide marketing, said in a statement.
That's right; if there is one thing Americans LOVE, it's a bad movie done well. "Rocky Horror Picture Show", anyone? Besides, anything that you can use for drinking games can't be half-bad, eh?
I never saw the movie when it originally came out, and I doubt that I'll be seeing it this time around. If I really wanted to thoroughly and completely waste two hours, I'd read one of Ann Coulter's political comic books. Of course, I'm not big on that sort of self-abuse....
Only in America would someone try to make "bad" into "even worse" and end up making a profit. It's trite, but it's true: you will never go broke by misunderestimating the taste of the American people.
