How movies like ‘Unplanned’ and ‘Gosnell’ make money without movie critics
Gosnell didn’t screen in advance for movie critics. And it didn’t really need to. The movie, based on the 2013 conviction of
While it wasn’t crowdfunded like Gosnell, the anti-abortion film Unplanned courted the same audiences when it arrived in local theaters on
That’s a pretty good opening footprint for Unplanned, but it won’t surprise people who are plugged into social media groups that track the progress and release of such faith-based movies, circumventing traditional publicity channels. Gosnell, in addition to its crowdfunding campaign, was heavily marketed on social media before its release, and kept its audience interested with an email newsletter directly from the filmmakers. Faith-based groups and churches raise money for trips to screenings of Unplanned. For such groups, Unplanned is as big a movie event as Avengers: Endgame is for general audiences.
Unplanned received an R rating from the MPAA for graphic depictions of surgical and drug-induced abortion procedures, which makes it harder to market to religious groups. Some television networks deemed Unplanned to be political and turned away advertising on that basis, and Twitter suspended for one hour the Unplanned account after mistakenly linking it to banned accounts (Sen.
Big Tech’s attempted censorship of @UnplannedMovie is deeply troubling. And reveling. Why is the Left so afraid of people seeing this powerful story? Regardless of where you fall on abortion, you owe it yourself to see this thought-provoking true story & decide for yourself. https://t.co/sfxsxULMb2
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The movie rolled on, though, and expanded by more than 400 theaters in its second weekend, on its way to making
It is sometimes determined by distributors that reviews are unnecessary and sometimes a hindrance to box office performance. And it’s not just faith-based movies that follow this strategy. Holmes & Watson, the Will Ferrell-John C.
But the majority of movies still actively court critical interest, including other faith-based movies. Breakthrough, a faith-based movie that opens
Unplanned didn’t do that. Apart from some fleeting mentions in the trade papers, the film’s distributors gave critics no advance notice of the release. This week, I reached out to the Unplanned distributor to ask about why screenings weren’t offered to critics, but did not hear back as of this writing.
I attended a showing Thursday night at United Artists King of Prussia, where I was joined by about a dozen other patrons. It wasn’t media coverage that drew them to the showing.
“It’s a powerful movie, I’m still kind of emotional about it,” said
“Part of the reason we are here is, I think,
Unplanned has received mixed reviews from critics. So did Gosnell, to which I eventually caught up. That movie -- hamstrung by its tiny crowd-funded budget -- struck me as a missed opportunity. There is enough substance there for a 10-part The Wire-esque deep dive touching on such issues as abortion, race, class, poverty, health care, and drug enforcement.
In the movie, a detective (
In his opinion, we’ve paid way too much attention.
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