By the way, when I finally saw The Dark Knight yesterday afternoon, they showed a trailer for Body of Lies, but I doubt it generated much sales for David Ignatius last weekend. For one thing, the trailer barely acknowledges the novel as the film’s source material, unlike the heavy emphasis placed on the comic book roots of the Watchmen movie. For another, the Body of Lies trailer is a complete mess; all I could tell afterwards is that Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio are angry at each other about something. But there was also a trailer for Blindness, based on a novel by Nobel Prize-winning José Saramago, and with that pedigree displayed prominently in the context of laying out a tantalizing story with Julianne Moore in the center of things. I’d be very interested to hear how sales of Blindness did last weekend, and how they do in the weeks to come…
(You could argue that Batman fans can’t be expected to care about Nobel-quality literature—a sloppy and dangerous assumption at best—but I’d expect that people who like Christopher Nolan’s directing style just might be interested in a film by Fernando Meirelles, especially when the two films have equally fantastic premises.)