BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

In A Sea Of Blockbusters, Blake Lively's 'The Shallows' May Win Big By Playing Small

This article is more than 7 years old.

In a rather surprise development, Sony shuffled The Shallows from its planned June 29th date to June 24th. The weekend of June 24th turns out to be a very crowded frame. You've got Broad Green Pictures and Amazon Studios's The Neon Demon apparently going at least semi-wide (it's a lot of fun if you know what you're getting into), you've got STX Entertainment's big summer offering Free State of Jones, and, oh yeah, you've got 20th Century Fox's Independence Day: Resurgence.

Sony wouldn't be shifting their Blake Lively versus a shark thriller into the firestorm unless they had confidence in the product. Or maybe they just smell blood in the water in terms of that Friday's big sequel tentpole offering. While the last trailer was great and the TV spots are starting to sell some impressive steak along with the sizzle (there is one spoiler image I wish I had avoided), there isn't much buzz for a mega-sequel dropping ten days from now.

The other reason for the date change, being optimistic on all sides, is that in a summer filled with sequels and franchise installments, The Shallows looks and feels outright revolutionary by virtue of its small scale and (comparatively) small stakes. It's about Blake Lively, who gets attacked by a shark while surfing and must fight to survive. That's it. No world-building, no sequel set-up, no planet-in-peril finale, no Easter eggs.

The Shallows looks like an old-school studio programmer B-movie. It's just a sharp looking movie with a well-known celebrity (whose last movie legged it to $42 million from a $13m debut) and a terrific final trailer. I wanted to post it last week, but life got in the way, so this whole post is an excuse to make up for that.

It's a dynamite piece of unconventional marketing, which not only entices and intrigues but reassures audiences that they haven't seen the entire movie in 2.5 minutes. With studios seemingly overselling every movie as a big-budget franchise tentpole offering, the one that isn't is the one that ends up seeming special.

Courtesy of Sony

If it works, and I am optimistic as a Jaume Collet-Serra fan (the guy is a master of B-level Hitchcock that Hitchcock himself would have enjoyed) that it does, then Columbia/Sony may want the holiday weekend to provide a second-weekend bump after a buzzy debut. It does seem like a perfect summer movie, and of course it was a glorified B-movie horror thriller about a giant shark that kickstarted the modern summer movie season in the first place.

Maybe the online buzz isn't translating to mainstream interest, but with a movie like The Shallows, a relatively inexpensive bruised-forearm offering in the middle of the summer, it doesn't need to be a blockbuster (or set up a franchise) to be a hit. And in the summer of 2016, when everything is a tentpole, the explicitly non-tentpole sticks out as the special one. We'll know soon enough (maybe it's terrible), but I wanted to write about it.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedInCheck out my websiteSend me a secure tip