wombat_socho

Yeah, but the big money behind Narnia didn't come from the studios, it came from Walt Anschutz (http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.18886/article_detail.asp), who isn't part of the studio system. True, he worked with Disney, but without him the movie would have languished in preproduction while some crack-addled scriptwriter tried to figure out how to wedge in a hot Aslan sex scene (http://home.nvg.org/~sk/SolSec/aliensex.html). (Bad Traveller RPG pun intentional.)

Oh, yeah - I thought I saw this article (http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.18591/article_detail.asp) in the Wall Street Journal ("Stupid Hollywood", third item down) but I found a link. In 2004 the 113 G/PG-rated movies grossed $1.3 billion while the 540 R-rated films pulled in $622 million...and only 4 of the top 25 grossing films were R-rated. Top movie among those, of course, was Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. So if Hollywood is all about the money, they have a really odd way of showing it.

On a somewhat related topic, Serenity (http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=serenity.htm) appears to have done well enough overseas that with DVD sales, it'll have made money - which I hope means that Universal will pony up for a sequel, and maybe do a decent job of promoting it this time around.