> Foreign movies are often brushed aside in the US, as well. When "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" came out, Mike and I searched for a theater which was showing it in the Springs area, and when we had no luck here, we looked through the Denver listings. Still nothing.
>
> Six weeks later, the local arthouse one-screen theater premiered it. They remained the only theater showing the movie until the media blitz started. Finally, about two months after the US release of "CT,HD," the chain theaters picked it up.

I agree with you that CTHD, despite the unprecedented commercial and critical success it has enjoyed in the U.S. for a foreign language film, is underrated. And I also agree that theater owners were cautious and dubious about screening it.

But it's not entirely their fault. CTHD was given a "platformed" release in U.S. theaters. Platform releases are given to films that studios believe are good and will connect with audiences yet which are not immediately saleable. And CTHD *isn't* especially saleable. Subtitles don't sell, and the stars, Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh, may indeed be huge worldwide box office draws, but they don't really have the power to open movies here. So rather than rely on big advertising campaigns to sell the movie, they do a platform release to encourage word of mouth to build and eventually get people into theater seats in the long run. Basically, they start with a small number of screens -- maybe just a tiny handful of screens in New York and Los Angeles. The next week it expands into a few more big cities. Then more. CTHD took something like eight weeks in release before it reached a mere thousand screens (I'm not entirely sure on the number of weeks), which is less than a third of what a typical wide-release film opens on, and a fifth of what huge movies like The Lost World open on.

So the delay before CTHD became available in your area was the intention of the studio rather than theater owners underrating it. The marketing scheme worked. People heard about the movie via word of mouth and got pumped to see it *before* it came and left their local movie theaters rather than *after*.

Curiously another movie on your list, "Rushmore," had a platform release as well. It opened on December 11, 1998, in NY and LA, but didn't go wide until February 5. The platform release cycle, alas, did not serve Rushmore nearly as well as it served CTHD. Rushmore tanked. But it does have a pretty devoted cult following. (I'm not among them, but I do not dismiss the wealth of love this movie gets from others.)

Anyway, the moral of this story is not to get me started talking about movies unless you want to see long, rambling posts from me.

S "could still go on" am