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"A blockbuster western from the Coens" - words you never thought you'd hear spoken

Kim Hollis: True Grit has already become the highest earning Coen Brothers movie of all-time with $86.7 million after 12 days in release. It has earned $12.4 million more than No Country for Old Men, with Oscar season just now heating up. Why is this film different than prior releases from the Coens in the eyes of consumers?

Reagen Sulewski: It's much less Coen-y on the front end, for a start. Going to a straight up western, and a remake at that, jumped the hurdle for a lot of consumers who are resistant to the quirk that the Coens often bring to their films. And of course, it just looks plain fantastic - I think you'd have gotten close to this result no matter who directed it if it came out looking like this.

Tony Kollath: There's the familiarity factor: True Grit is recognizable among the movie-going public as a major western, regardless of whether or not they remember it as John Wayne's Oscar winning role. There's the pedigree factor: Jeff Bridges as a recent Oscar winner brings a lot of cache. There's the accessibility factor: as Reagen stated and Roger Ebert alluded, both in the trailers and on screen, it's the least quirky Coen picture. Then, there's the mind-control factor: Bridges, as the voice of the Hyundai TV spots airing for the past several weeks, has implanted into the general consciousness a subliminal command to go see the film.





Josh Spiegel: I'll continue the broken record and emphasize this film's lack of quirk (which isn't a bad thing, mind you) as a big selling point. Also, this is a PG-13 Coen film, which is rare. It's also kind of for the whole family, in some weird way, which brings in audiences. Finally, it's really, really, really good. Solid word-of-mouth becomes even more powerful during the holiday season. Westerns as a whole aren't saved by True Grit's performance, but the film is proof that the genre can work when done right.

Shalimar Sahota: Maybe there are people out there who are finally realizing just who the Coen Brothers are? I'm with Tony, in that there's a lot of factors here. Jeff Bridges is at the peak of his career, the reviews are hot, and the trailer is solid (the use of Johnny Cash's God's Gonna Cut You Down in the trailer is perfect). Also, I thought this would likely start small and expand, but instead Paramount has gone all out, choosing to open this wide...at over 3,000 venues. I thought that was rather unusual, but after seeing its opening weekend total, it's a move that obviously paid off.

Brett Beach: I would heartily agree with Shalimar's surprise that Paramount went straight for the 3,000 plus screens. The execs must have been crossing their fingers that the Coens would deliver something commercial and when they saw that they had just such a film, they made the smart play of getting it out all at once. This is also, after a fashion, a film for the family (more so I would imagine than Little Fockers) even with the scenes of violence that had to be trimmed just enough to avoid an R. The ads were able to play up the action elements (just about all of them) and apparently those who go for that aren't miffed that, to quote one of my girlfriend's aunts: "the first half moved too slow and the second half went too quickly." (I would agree with that assessment but don't consider that a negative.) With its Biblical themes and Old Testament air of "eye for an eye" judgments and reckonings, this may also be finding unexpected favor with, for lack of a better phrase, the church-going folk who turned out en masse for The Passion of the Christ.

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