I flew into Prague a couple of days ago; before boarding my flight, I spent a little time in the Dulles Borders browsing. I was a bit surprised to see a big display in the impulse buy area beside the cash register for “Snakes on a Plane.” Seems like a fairly odd marketing strategy to me – I don’t imagine that it’s likely to be the kind of movie that many people would want to watch on a plane, or even buy on the spur of the moment just before getting on a plane. The fun of watching people trying to deal with poisonous snakes in a confined space would pall quite quickly, I imagine, if you were in that confined space while watching it. I asked the asst. manager at the register how many he’d sold; he said none so far, but it was the first day it was on display. Not that I have any great wisdom to impart on this or anything, but just thought it was a little odd.
{ 16 comments }
Tracy W 01.12.07 at 4:35 am
Given that theme parks often advertise how scary their rides are, and the number of young men I have heard happily comparing how scary the rides at different theme parks are, I think there is reasonable evidence that a number of people enjoy being scared.
Ciarán 01.12.07 at 5:07 am
Galbraith reported a far more sensitive approach by airport bookshops towards his The Great Crash.
MR. Bill 01.12.07 at 6:54 am
OF course, in real life, a airplane full of snakes could be mostly taken care of by turning up the air conditioning to ‘cold’…
Seth Finkelstein 01.12.07 at 7:05 am
tracy – Right, I could see a certain type of person buying it as a “thrill” pick. Especially the hard-charging excutive type. Sort of “Me? I’m a fearless traveler. Look, I’m watching a movie about snakes on a plane while I’m on a plane – how *cool* is that?”. Fits the demographic of the movie.
Z 01.12.07 at 8:20 am
From what I heard about Snakes on a plane, the only place where I would consider watch it would be on a plane.
Samuel L. Jackson 01.12.07 at 8:38 am
I’m tired of these motherf**ing DVDs in the motherf**ing Borders!!!!
William Sjostrom 01.12.07 at 11:27 am
The plot is wildly implausible, so why worry. As the Steve Goodman classic, Somebody Else’s Troubles, says:
Yesterday I went downtown and saw an old-time picture show
And the hero got a pie in the face;
He didn’t like that, and he stormed around the screen.
Everybody else was laughin’ in that place.
That’s ’cause it ain’t hard
To get along with somebody else’s troubles,
And they don’t make you lose any sleep at night.
Just as long as fate is there bustin’ somebody else’s bubbles,
Everything’s gonna be all right.
Everything’s gonna be all right.
engels 01.12.07 at 11:28 am
Am I the only one who thinks that “snakes on a plane” sounds like it ought to be an Aussie interjection: “Snakes on a plane, John! I think that dingo’s drinking your tinnie!”
fyreflye 01.12.07 at 11:48 am
Maybe next they’ll be selling “Flight 93.”
Kevin 01.12.07 at 12:35 pm
A couple of years ago, my parents were on a flight, both engrossed in their reading, when suddenly my father muttered, “Oh my God”. My mother asked what was wrong, and my father said – holding up one of the books I’d given him for Christmas – “I forgot what this was about.”
The book was Alive.
Ginger Yellow 01.12.07 at 1:36 pm
I can understand people who are afraid of flying being put out by it, but is it really so amazing for everyone else? Do people in Atlanta cower when they see trailers for Gone With The Wind? Do you go out to the countryside to watch Godzilla? And what about all those drive-in horror movies in which people at drive-in movies get murdered?
Wrongshore 01.12.07 at 3:16 pm
I’m with ginger. What’s more, even if a majority of people will be put off by it, a significant minority will be turned on by it, and will probably buy a DVD where they would not have before. As long as you’re not deciding what everyone has to watch together, you can evoke strong negative reactions if you’re counting on just a fraction of strong positive reactions.
Tracy W 01.12.07 at 4:51 pm
Right, I could see a certain type of person buying it as a “thrill†pick. Especially the hard-charging excutive type.
Well if the hard-charging executive type is between the ages of 14 and 25 and has a y chromosome, and is not necessarily an executive but has any sort of job ranging from student to mechanic to chef to struggling artist to stockbroker, I agree with you.
I have a lot of male cousins. Some brothers too.
Randy Paul 01.12.07 at 10:43 pm
I was flying LAX to JFK once and the film being shown was Get Shorty. One of the key plot points is a man who misses a plane and the plane crashes, thus everyone thinks he’s dead.
On the plane it was a train accident.
Effie Crump 01.13.07 at 6:54 am
This is all a bit odd – I saw Snakes on a Plane a month ago on the Qantas flight from Sydney to Beijing. Most people on board (myself included) were watching it, and ejoying it in the way that you will enjoy anything on a plane. Certainly no-one else in Cattle Class was worried. I mentioned it to other expats in Beijing, and the response divided in two – the Aussies all said ‘yeah, what a hoot’ and the rest all said ‘oh no, how could you bear to watch it…’. I pointed out that it was fiction, but this seemed to make no difference. The I asked if they had watched movies with car crashes in the country just in case they had one on the way home. They said ‘don’t be silly’ ignoring the much greater likelihood of getting written of in a car crash. So I watched it on the way back again to make up the numbers.
It doesn’t make it a good movie, but it’s fun to watch a movie about a plane on a plane.
Effie Crump 01.13.07 at 6:56 am
Afterthough: Of course, it could be that Qantas has never had a crash, so we don’t worry as much about it.
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