Bad Movies Come In All Colors

For hundreds of years white Europeans perpetrated a crime against humanity with their treatment of Africans. They (the Africans) were ripped from the arms of their families, brutally shipped across the Atlantic in conditions inferior to the cattle trade, and sold into a life of constant labor and abuse. Now, white America, this blight upon our history is revisiting us in the form of terrible movies that generate inconceivable profits. That’s right, bitches, it’s payback.

I have several theories as to why movies that are cast with an all-black cast can reliably generate a profit. However, before I delve into those completely unfunny comments, I want to point out just a few of the movies that I’m talking about. I’m going to use the Internet Movie Database as my source of popular sentiment for a movie and Rotten Tomatoes to summarize the critics’ opinions. Poke around on each of those sites and familiarize yourself with their rating systems.

Image 1: Ice Cube preparing to pop a cap in some bitch.

Are We There Yet
IMDB rating: 3.4/10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 13%
Budget: $30M
Gross: $61M (will probably settle at $90M)

This is the most recent spectacle of bad cinema that bolsters my point. In this movie, Ice Cube exits Lorenzo’s Benzo, puts his AK in the attic, and jumps into some shtick with a bunch of kids and pratfalls. Now I’m not saying that this movie sucks (I haven’t actually seen it) but I am saying that if the trailer is any indication of the amount of entertainment that one can expect from this movie, then you’d be better off being fisted by King Kong than sitting through 30 minutes of this film. Note that my opinion, panning by the great majority of the IMDB reviewers, and the disdain of 87% of movie critics haven’t stopped this film from grossing $61M in its first two weeks in the theaters.

Image 2: Hijinks are sure to ensue on any vacation from which this picture was taken.

Johnson Family Vacation
IMDB rating: 3.5/10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 7%
Budget: $12M
Gross: $32M

Prior to this year’s feel-good family flick mentioned above, we had last year’s dreadful Johnson Family Vacation. In this movie Cedric the Entertainer dances at a picnic after getting ants in his pants and then sprays his date with shaken beer bottles. OK, so I admit that I may not have actually imbibed the salient points of the trailer relative to the Budweiser ads that were airing at the same time but, shit, I was watching these things at 32X speed on my Tivo so it was nearly impossible to tell one Cedric sell-out from another. Anyway, the box office gross covered the costs times three and that doesn’t even count DVD sales which may have easily topped the box office receipts.

Image 3: Two dudes that are definintely not white chicks.

White Chicks
IMDB rating: 4.7/10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 12%
Budget: $20M
Gross: $70M

One of the reasons that Keenan Ivory Wayans provided for ending In Living Color was the lack of interest in continuing a show that was nearly entirely based on making fun of blacks. With that history behind them, the Wayans brothers are now targeting whites. 9/10 critics hated this movie but that didn’t stop someone in America from throwing $70M at this film in its short run. And then there were rentals. With using blacks as the butt of their jokes in their past, and whites as the target in the present, you Mexicans had better watch out for the movies the Wayans brothers will be producing in a few years.

Now, I’m not saying that all of these all-black-casted movies are terrible. My claim is that there is something about the industry that produces these movies that is not weeding out unsuccessful attempts. For every reasonable attempt such as Coming to America or Boomerang there are three movies such as Soul Plane and The Wash.

My theory for the success of these movies is the deep-seated feeling of differentness that most of the white media implies of blacks. For those that grew up black in the USA over the last forty years, about 98% of the faces seen on television and movies from birth until recent memory would have been white. As our country pulls itself out of our embarassing history, African Americans are able to create and produce movies that act as theatrical depictions of the people that they are seeing every day. In exchange for a army of white faces that used to dominate film and television, a few choices as to the representatives of the art are now available. All that I’m asking is that the collective audiences of America apply pressure with our spent dollars to be certain that financially successful movies stay good. And while we’re at it, the legends that are being written of the stars that exist in this emerging market shouldn’t get shelved in the annals of history with the likes of other no-talent fools like Tom Arnold and Anthony Michael Hall. Peace out.