Scott Blasts 'Kingdom of Heaven' Marketing

Honestly, with the number of years director Ridley Scott has devoted to Hollywood and how much he know about the business by now, I thought he would at least be above this sort of childish finger-pointing and scrabbling but I assume that is not the case. Scott has placed the blame of Kingdom of Heaven’s failure at the domestic box office (scraping barely forty-seven million dollars by the end of the summer season) on 20th Century Fox’s marketing team, claiming that had they sold it as a religious/political piece it would have done much better. Here’s a thought as to why the film failed – it was a bad movie! Not that difficult to figure out. Kingdom of Heaven, which opened to a disastrous nineteen million dollars in the first weekend of May (the same weekend in which Van Helsing in 2004 grossed fifty-one million dollars and X2 in 2003 opened to eighty-five million dollars), had horrible review (amassing only a thirty-nine percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and if marketing was to blame then the precipitous drops after its opening weekend would have been minimal thanks to word of mouth but that didn’t happen. In fact the film dropped like a rock thereafter (fifty-one percent in its second weekend alone). I think someone has an ego problem here and it’s not me.