'Eclipse' and 'Last Airbender' Will Battle Schumacher's 'Twelve' Over July 4 Weekend

An interesting marketing move

By: Brad Brevet
Published: Friday, March 26th 2010 at 11:10 PM

Hannover House has just announced they will release Joel Schumacher's Twelve on July 2nd, pitting it in direct competition with Paramount and Nickelodeon's The Last Airbender and Summit's The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, which opens on June 30, the Wednesday prior.

The move is said to be in an attempt to offer counter-programming to the to Eclipse with a marketing strategy targeting young adults, 18 to 34 years old, with internet, social networking and other alternative media dominating over traditional advertising modes. And will to read the quotes from Hannover C.E.O. Eric Parkinson, it may not sound like they are looking at a limited release, but in fact they are only pushing for 250 theaters.

"We had been considering both June 18 and July 16 as possible release dates," said Parkinson. "We expect a lot of traffic in theaters for the Fourth-Of-July holiday weekend. It's a great opportunity to expose Twelve to millions of moviegoers, and in many cases, to capture overflow business. We embrace this bold strategy and anticipate favorable results."

Parkinson added, "We had been considering both June 18 and July 16 as possible release dates, but every weekend this summer will have two or more major new releases and finding the best opening was a challenge. Looking at the competitive release options, we felt that the edgier and slightly-older appeal of Twelve would be a great alternative to the younger-skewing Eclipse and Airbender for the major, Fourth Of July holiday weekend."

Twelve premiered at the Sundance Film Festival where Roger Ebert said, "The film is very well acted, and dark, dark, dark. The director is Joel Schumacher, assured and fearless on a small budget and short shooting schedule which seems to add spontaneity. Schumacher is not fashionable with Sundance types, and I suspect this will emerge from the festival with reviews that don't concede its power. But it will perform."

Kirk Honeycutt at The Hollywood Reporter seemed to like it, but says, "Schumacher's cast is uniformly solid, but the sheer number of characters retained by Melamed from the novel makes it impossible to give each the screen time he or she deserves. One could imagine a miniseries based on this story that could follow the many personalities into further deliciously ill-considered escapades."

The film is based on the Nick McDonell novel of the same name, and follows a high school dropout-turned-drug dealer. His lucrative life sours when the dealer's cousin is brutally murdered on an East Harlem playground and his best friend is arrested for the crime. McDonell wrote his novel when he was only 17, which depicted teenage drug use and decadence on the Upper East Side.

The picture stars Chace Crawford, Emma Roberts, Rory Culkin, 50 Cent, Ellen Barkin, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlie Saxton, Zoe Kravitz and Kiefer Sutherland as the film's narrator.

It's been a while since one of Schumacher's films really hit home. For me I would say the last film of his that was truly memorable for me was A Time To Kill (which I love) and before that Falling Down and The Lost Boys are obvious favorites. I recently watched the direct-to-video release Blood Creek featuring Michael Fassbender as a 70-year-old possessed demon Nazi (no lie), which wasn't too bad, but it was a ridiculous horror and not much more.

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