Yesterday’s “What Does Edge Under-Performance Say About Cruise’s Drawing Power?” piece got a lot of replies, but the best was written by HE regular Anna Zed. This might be the nub of it, I’m thinking. Maybe not the whole enchilada but a very significant portion:

“In the AMC in Arcadia where I saw Edge of Tomorrow there was a technical snafu of some kind after the warm-up trailers and ads,” she writes. “We had a blank screen for a full five minutes right at what was supposed to be showtime. I finally went off down the hall in search of an usher (no one else did). Typically, the theater had no idea that the full house was sitting there with no feature playing. The projection booth literally had nobody in it.

“I’m telling you this story because when I found somebody to complain to (all the way out front) I could not remember the title of the film.

“I told him there was a lights-out problem with ‘the Tom Cruise thing.’
“The guy said ‘huh?’
“I said again ‘the Tom Cruise movie.’
“‘Huh?’ again.
“Theater One.”
“Oh, okay, we’ll get someone there right away to fix the problem!”

“So what does that tell ya? I couldn’t remember the name of the damn thing and I spend all of my leisure hours reading movie blogs and had just bought a ticket to it, and the guy working in the theater didn’t even recognize what I was talking about.

“I think they should have gone with Live.Die.Repeat, as someone suggested somewhere on here.