Impatient to finally experience The Phantom Menace, fans of Star Wars bought tickets to Meet Joe Black just to see the trailer for the first installment of George Lucas’ prequel. So the SF space opera saga overshadowed Death itself. A look back at an unprecedented event in the history of the seventh art!
A myth revisited… and threatened!
Signed Martin Brest, Meet Joe Black (1998) offers us to discover death in a human body. The latter borrows the remains of Brad Pitt in order to discover the daily life of mortals. And it’s up to tycoon William Parrish (Anthony Hopkins) to serve as a guide.
Indeed, the messenger from the beyond imposes on him to accommodate him in his home in order to share a time the joys and dramas of the living. Claire Forlani portrays Parrish’s daughter, with whom the incarnation of Death gradually falls in love.
Meet Joe Black is considered as a very expensive film with its 90 million dollar budget. The reason ? The filming which fell behind, which resulted in an additional cost of 30 million dollars. Operation was also complicated due to very mixed reviews. What then of the length of the movie ? Three long hours that Martin Brest refused to amputate a minute.
At the end of its theatrical release in the United States, Meet Joe Black is a box office failurewith just $44 million in revenue.
But did you know thata large number of fans of Star Wars paid their tickets just to see the trailer of The Phantom Menacebroadcast before the film?
When Darth Vader becomes double Joe Black and his desires
Directed by George Lucas and released a year later Meet Joe Black, The Phantom Menace is the first installment of the saga in chronological order. But the fourth by its release date. After A New Hope (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983), fans actually had to take their troubles patiently. Sixteen long years before discovering the new trilogy open to The Phantom Menace. will follow Attack of the Clones (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005).
According to an article from New York Times, seventy-five theaters in twenty-six US states screened the trailer of The Phantom Menace before the projection of Meet Joe Black and Waterboy by Frank Coraci. It is parallel to the cinema Mann Village in Los Angeles that the long-awaited teaser is screened before the film Curfew by Edward Zwick.
According to The Hollywood Reporterthousands of people thus took a place for Joe Black only to see the trailer of The Phantom Menace. And many of them then left the room, before the start of the screening of the film.
