Last night The Wrap‘s Steve Pond posted an amusing summary about the recent Battle of Biutiful. “At the moment, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s film stands as the second most divisive in the short history of indieWIRE’s criticWIRE poll,” he reported, “trailing only Harmony Korine‘s Trash Humpers.
“Among the critics polled, Sasha Stone gave it an A+; Robert Koehler gave it an F. In between: an A, an A-, two C+s, two C-s, and a D+.
“And Anne Thompson, who liked the film quite a bit, was left wondering what its commercial prospects could be: ‘This movie will be lucky to land a micro-distributor, much less Sony Pictures Classics or Focus…a movie like this needs a tsunami of critical praise to draw any audience at all. It will be lucky to pass the $1 million mark in the U.S.’
“In other words, reaction was all over the map. And that’s when things got ugly.”
Meanwhile, the L.A. Times Stephen Zeitchik reported that the Weinstein Company will probably make a deal to distribute Inarritu’s film.