Yes, A&E did a movie about how passengers on Flight 93 rebelled against the terrorists hijackers and nixed a plan major terrorist attacks — but will audiences pay to see the same story at the box office?
If movie trailers are supposed to cause a reaction, the preview for “United 93” more than succeeds. Featuring no voice-over and no famous actors, it begins with images of a beautiful morning and passengers boarding an airplane. It takes you a minute to realize what the movie’s even about. That’s when a plane hits the World Trade Center. The effect is visceral. When the trailer played before “Inside Man” last week at the famed Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, audience members began calling out, “Too soon!” In New York City, where 9/11 remains an open wound, the response was even more dramatic. The AMC Loews theater on Manhattan’s Upper West Side took the rare step of pulling the trailer from its screens after several complaints. “One lady was crying,” says one of the theater’s managers, Kevin Adjodha. “She was saying we shouldn’t have [played the trailer]. That this was wrong … I don’t think people are ready for this.”
Question: is it still too painful for viewers, a story that they may have been willing to watch in huge numbers when free on TV but not one they’d go out of their way to see?
The answer is coming to a studio in California soon since there are more 911 movies planned….even one by (brace yourself) Oliver Stone. More from Newsweek:
“United 93” is the first feature film to deal explicitly with the events of September 11, 2001, and is certain to ignite an emotional debate before and after it opens on April 28. Is it too soon? Should the film have been made at all? More to the point, will anyone want to see it? Other 9/11 projects are on the way as the fifth anniversary of the attacks approaches, most notably Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center,” starring Nicolas Cage, opening Aug. 9. But as the harbinger, “United 93” will take most of the heat, whether it deserves it or not.
As the magazine points out, the question remains whether people will go to movie theaters and pay big bucks to see a dramatization of an event that remains supremely painful in the national psyche. Even in the case of the JFK assassination, another national trauma, it took years before Hollywood would seriously dramatize the events.
Watch the movie’s trailer HERE.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.