You recall Trump’s Friday meltdown, both on the south lawn and on Twitter, over the “Anger and Hate” of Hollywood. Trump was literally in meltdown, he was pouring with sweat, sparking innuendo about everything from a drug reaction to a pre-cardiac event in progress. Be that as it may, the target of Trump’s angst has been definitely ascertained. It is a movie called “The Hunt” starring Betty Gilpin and Hillary Swank. It provoked this scathing denunciation from the *resident.
….to inflame and cause chaos. They create their own violence, and then try to blame others. They are the true Racists, and are very bad for our Country!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 9, 2019
Universal announced Saturday morning that it was indefinitely postponing release of “The Hunt.” Deadline:
The studio released the following statement this morning: “While Universal Pictures had already paused the marketing campaign for The Hunt, after thoughtful consideration, the studio has decided to cancel our plans to release the film. We stand by our filmmakers and will continue to distribute films in partnership with bold and visionary creators, like those associated with this satirical social thriller, but we understand that now is not the right time to release this film.”
The Hunt follows 12 red-state strangers who wake up in a clearing and realize that they’re being hunted by liberals. Betty Gilpin and Oscar winner Hilary Swank play women on opposite sides of the political spectrum, conservative and liberal, who are targeting each other.
This opus by Blumhouse Productions was originally entitled “Red State v. Blue State” an unimaginative and on-the-nose title, which reflects a script of precisely the same qualities. Here are a few lines, which I seriously doubt will go down in the same lexicon as, “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”
“Did anyone see what our ratfucker-in-chief just did?”
“At least The Hunt’s coming up. Nothing better than going out to the Manor and slaughtering a dozen deplorables.”
Isn’t that scintillating? I was going to share the trailer with you, but it has been pulled from the internet, so you’ll have to take my word for it that the movie looks like gar-bage. My prediction is that “The Hunt” is going to end up in the same remainder bin at Blockbuster which “Assassination Nation” ended up in. It was also billed as a satire and “pitted the woke versus the unwoke in uber-violent fashion,”according to the Hollywood Reporter. It did great at Sundance in 2018, and was in the top earning slot at $10 Million. But when it was released it earned $2 Million, with no international rollout. “We thought people would get the joke,” said one of the filmmakers. Well, they didn’t and they’re not going to get this joke either. Plus Fox News is up in arms with Todd Starnes calling the film “a script straight from the DNC playbook. Remember when Maxine Waters said confront people at stores and gas stations? One of the first scenes in the movie involves a murder at a gas station.” There’s a culture war in progress for real, and this movie is just flat out dumb and not helping any cause — including, for now, the pocketbooks of the filmmakers.
Regardless of the reason, this doesn’t surprise me…Way back in the 90’s there was a Schwarzenegger movie set to release about a guy whose wife and child died in a terrorist explosion on the groud floor of a building in New York, and that was pulled for a LONG timme after the terrorist bombing of the WTC garage…
That was “Collateral Damage.” It was a decent movie. This movie is atrocious. It’s a shame they pulled the trailer, because two minutes of it would be more than enough to convince you. You wouldn’t have to take my word for anything.
As much as we hate the rat fucker in chief, I cannot imagine ANYONE in the in the lib blogosphere stalking a bunch of his adherents.
Bad premise = bad movie IMO.
The premise is stupid. And it doesn’t play out as satire. It plays out as tacky and violent. Plus, if you can believe this, there is an Ivanka lookalike as one of the people stalked. That is sick right there. I detest Ivanka, but I think it’s over the top to put a lookalike on screen and blast it.
Even if it did play out as satire, not even all Democrats understand satire, and you’d be hard put to find a Republican who does. It would be taken as gospel by all the deplorables, and would lead to increased violence by them against us. Therefore, I was thinking until I read to the bottom of this comment, why does it upset Trump so much? But with the inclusion of an Ivanka lookalike, now it all makes sense.
I think it may be as simple as that. The Ivanka clone had the same very blond hair and very dark eyebrows. It was an unmistakable casting choice — and a disastrous one, IMO.
sounds like it was written specifically to cause trouble. Do we know the political leanings of the script writers or the producers? We know the right wing does not have any actual sense of humor, just nastiness.
Democrats are so very scary. Watch out!
This has nothing to do with Democrats in the real world. This film has nothing to do with anything in the real world. I hope it’s never released, truth be known. It’s a bad picture. At least, from the trailer it looks horrendous.
Wait, wait…so someone at Blumhouse thought that rehashing “The Most Dangerous Game” for the nine billionth time with an eye towards the Trumpist market was a guaranteed hit? Hope they did it on a shoestring because the costs will eat them alive otherwise.
$18 million bucks to make. Hardly a shoestring. I don’t wish anybody any bad luck in business, but seriously, this was not a good picture to make. “Red State v. Blue State?” From what little I saw, the script is a pure hack job, contrived, derivative, cliched. I guess I have to take my hat off to the people who made it at all. A lot of studios just passed on the script and I think that was the call to make.
That’s just DECLARED budget, Ursula. A good rule of thumb for any Hollywood movie’s actual cost is to multiply the declared budget by two to three times, I recall. So potentially, we may be looking at losses between 32 to 60 million.
Where do you get this information from? I worked at a few production companies and when we did a budget, man, that was it. It wasn’t like you could just run over insanely. Who does business like that?
Hollywood apparently does business like this all the time. What you saw on the production end budgrt was just what it took to make the film. That doesn’t count marketing and any other incidental costs related to distribution and promotion. Again, the general cost to include those is, as a rule of thumb, two to three times the official budget. Might be different on the lower end of things but if Universal is partnering with Blumhouse, extra costs will come in there somewhere.
It sounds absolutely ridiculous and atrocious.
It’s violent and tacky and stupid. I wish they had left the trailer up so you could see for yourself.
The only thing is I don’t think this is really what set Trump off. I think he was pissed at news reports that the West Hollywood location of Soul-Cycle was being picketed.
I’m thinking Tommy Lee’s epic rant against Trump on Twitter myself. I give him points for balls-out bravery but am intelligently concerned for his safety after that.
Such a shame, just when we get our hopes up that it was a ” pre-cardiac event in progress.”
You know, anybody who keeps pumping down McDonald’s cheeseburgers is not going to be healthy. I don’t know how he eats like that, seriously.
This is good news…..the Republicans were already feigning their manufactured outrage and would certainly cause the deplorables to be whipped into a propaganda frenzy.
The irony here, and I guess that’s what was intended as “satire” is that the “good guys” are the deplorables and the bad guys are the rich liberal elites.
I watched the trailer, and all I got of its “plot” was rich people hunting poorer people. (I don’t have the sound on, so I can’t hear anything, and they never caption them.)
Can you post a link to the trailer? Thx.
There is no link. The trailer was removed from the internet Saturday afternoon. I happened to see it Friday night.
I’m glad it’s not being released, it sounds utter shite. And it would get “the base’s” panties in a knot. But there doesn’t seem (going by what I’ve read) to be any racial element at all. Which means, once again, Adolf Twitler is talking out of his ass.
I saw white people killing white people in the trailer. It was not about race.