I am not sure if Fox Searchlight actually thought The Darjeeling Limited would be a big hit before all the interesting buzz that surrounded the film or not, but it seems they have finally decided to make the smart move and add the short film Hotel Chevalier in front of the film in the almost 800 theaters Darjeeling is already showing in.
The big draw for Chevalier, of course, has been the fact that it is Natalie Portman’s first nude scene as she appears completely naked, but only giving auds a look at her bare bum, but more importantly, I have been told that there is a scene inside Darjeeling that actually makes no sense at all if you have not seen the short already as Natalie makes a very short cameo. Portman used a body double for her nudity in Goya’s Ghosts and asked that her nudity be cut from Closer, as to why she decided to go with it for Wes Anderson in Chevalier she told The Hollywood Reporter, “I don’t know why, exactly. Sometimes you make rules for yourself and sometimes those rules are made to be broken. You have to test things out and see what works for you, and this felt right.”
Hotel Chevalier debuted on iTunes on September 26, three days prior to Darjeeling‘s limited release. On top of screen captures of a nude Natalie sprouting up online the short actually received great reviews and Fox Searchlight is hoping the short is Oscar-worthy and plans to promote it as a contender in the best live-action short category. So why not put it in front of Darjeeling in the first place? Obviously because articles like this wouldn’t exist and the “New York Times” wouldn’t have posted their article either, all of which just add more buzz to a film that no one saw and has currently only managed $3.9 million at the box-office. It was a marketing ploy plain and simple, but according to Searchlight, they gave the NY Times a different story, “We thought it would be too challenging to moviegoers to be exposed to the short in theaters right at the beginning of the run. We wanted to make sure The Darjeeling Limited got established first as a movie.”
I can only assume whomever gave that quote has never actually gone to a Pixar animated film, you know, the ones that make over $100 – $250 million at the domestic box-office alone. Yeah, they struggle and struggle and then go and release their shorts on DVD and make even more money. Unfortunately all of America is walking around in circles once the short starts in theaters not knowing what to do with themselves until the movie they actually paid for starts.
If people are so stupid that they get “challenged” by all the shit they see in front of movies then how about we get rid of the 10,000 Coke ads and 75 trailers that show for the first 15-20 minutes before a movie starts?
Anyway, now that Darjeeling has established itself as a movie (who knows what it was before it made $3.9 million) Fox Searchlight will give the same people that already saw the movie a chance to go see it again, this time with Hotel Chevalier in front of it. Good move. Sheesh!
