The Snowman (2017) and the Effect that Social Media had on Movies

The modern age of the internet changed the way that people look at movies. Before the internet, movie discussion was much more confined. Movies gained traction through word of mouth, as people talked to the people who lived near them about what they thought was good or bad. The geographical friendships that people made based on who was around them at any given time. And, because people were limited on who they knew, interests didn’t always fall in the same area.

That changed with the internet. As it rose to prominence in the 1990s, movie forums, chat rooms, and such places grew. People who were interested in movies found these websites and frequented them. They discussed what they liked about certain movies, or looked for any bits and pieces of news about what was coming out. It was easier to find people who had similar interests. The beginning of the internet echo chamber had begun, though it wouldn’t be until social media that people could refine the content to only see what they wanted. Social media made it so that people could, if they wanted to, only see content that completely agreed with their perspective.

There were a few other sides of social media that, combined with the echo chamber effect, changed the way people watched movies. The first was that production news became much more accessible. People shared headlines on a frequent basis whenever anything was announced by anyone. The second was memes. Movies, trailers, celebrities… Social media users make memes out of anything. If they could make a joke out of something, they would. Everyone else would, too. The final thing social media brought to movie culture was blogs. There were blogs before places like Myspace, Twitter, and Facebook existed. But, much like news headlines, social media allowed more people to share their thoughts, their writing, and other people’s writing. This blog wouldn’t exist without that.

Each of those aspects of social media are relevant to how people perceive many of the movies they watch. Each one can be harmful in its own way. As much as people found people to share their interests with, people they wouldn’t have been able to find were they not connected by the internet, they also let in those three things that destroyed any realistic set of expectations that people could have for a movie. People go into a movie with too much baggage to truly appreciate what it is.

Movie news is the first step to the creation of any movie. Studios release little tidbits about their movie to get people excited. Casting is announced so that potential audiences know who will be in the movie. Movies are sold on star power Sometimes things go a little further than, with a list of people considered for leading roles before an announcement is made about who was cast. Some people will be disappointed in the casting choice, wanting someone else in the role. This could lead to a grass is greener situation where, when they finally see the finished movie, they think that their choice would have been better for the role. It’s an unfair comparison that doesn’t truly let a performance sit on its own.

Most superhero movies go through this sort of treatment. A list of actors in consideration will be announced for a movie, only for the list to be whittled down to the person who gets the role. Doctor Strange had a myriad of actors up for the part before Benedict Cumberbatch was chosen to play the superhero. Others, such as Joaquin Phoenix, Ewan McGregor, and Ethan Hawke were up for the title role. They each could have brought something else to the role, and they were each someone’s favourite choice to play the character. It went to Benedict Cumberbatch, though. Some people wouldn’t be able to get past the casting choice because of the announcement of who else was up for the part.

The other big piece of news that could cause people to think negatively of a movie involves pieces of the story becoming public knowledge. Spoilers are always a big issue when it comes to people’s enjoyment of a movie. The less they know about a movie, the more pleasantly surprised they will be when they finally see it. But between trailers, story leaks, and assholes on the internet who need to know and share everything about a movie before it gets released, it’s hard to go into a movie without a fully formed idea of what it will be.

To use another Benedict Cumberbatch movie, Star Trek Into Darkness had an issue with spoilers affecting how people went into the movie. When it was announced that there would be a second movie in the Kelvin timeline of Star Trek films, people automatically assumed that Khan was going to be the villain. J.J. Abrams and the Bad Robot people said that the villain wasn’t going to be Khan, and that Benedict Cumberbatch would be playing a new villain named John Harrison. Fans wouldn’t take that as true, however, and kept demanding that J.J. Abrams just say it was Khan. When Star Trek Into Darkness was released, John Harrison ended up being Khan. People didn’t even wait a day to jump on social media and scream out that they knew it was Khan all along. That speculation and subsequent spoiler ruined any surprise for people who wanted to go into the movie without any knowledge of what was going to happen.

Now that things are at the release stage of a film, and spoilers have been discussed, it’s time to bring up the idea of memes. Social media loves memes. People love to make jokes out of anything they can and drive those jokes into the ground. Movies and television are only one of the places that people get material for memes, but they are a big source of that material. Screenshots from a movie will be taken out of context and made into punchlines for likes on Twitter. Or for someone’s own amusement. It doesn’t always happen when are released.

The Snowman was a 2017 detective flick about Harry Hole (Michael Fassbender), a detective working alongside new transfer Katrine Bratt (Rebecca Ferguson) to solve a missing women case that turned into a series of murders. They determined that every time a woman was abducted and killed, there was a snowfall. There was also a snowman outside every location where someone was taken and/or murdered. Would they be able to solve the case before more people were attacked?

The Snowman garnered some overwhelmingly negative reviews upon its release. That was a little unfair to the film. It was a solid murder mystery, detective story with some good performances and a great setting. There were some issues with it. The name Harry Hole was laughable, and Val Kilmer gave an extremely odd performance as he was coming off throat cancer recovery. But, overall, it was a decent detective flick that got more hate than it deserved.

Much of the distaste for the film seemed to be in the way people came into it. Part of the movie involved a cat-and-mouse game between the killer and the detectives. The killer would leave notes for the detectives. One of the posters for The Snowman, released well before the movie hit theaters, featured one of the notes. It had a cartoon sketch of a snowman and the message “Mister Police, you could have saved her, I gave you all the clues.” That poster, specifically with the childish design of the note, became a meme. People made jokes about the movie when the poster got released. Then the movie came out. There was no way for people to not think of the movie as a joke along the lines of the memes they had made for weeks before. It only made sense for them to go into the movie with that mindset after social media had already declared the movie a joke.

Another 2017 movie that became a joke before its release was The Mummy, starring Tom Cruise. When the trailer was released for the film, it was accidentally released without a lot of the audio. There were screams and a little bit of crashing, and that was it. People started to put their own audio into the trailer and release their own versions. People enjoyed doing that more than they enjoyed the trailer when it was released with proper audio. They enjoyed making the memes more than the movie because the movie had become the joke by the time it was released.

The final way that social media could harm a movie is through the constant blogging and reviewing of movies. Since the rise of social media, it has become much easier for people to share their opinions on everything. Through a blog, much like this one, someone can long form write about a movie and share that writing with other people. Through something like Twitter, a person could quickly spurt off some words about the movies they see. More people do this sort of stuff, leading to more discussion of movies, and more discussion of the same movies.

With the rise of the blog, specifically, more people were able to start their own film websites that they could share links to on social media. More film sites meant more reviews. More sites competed for people to read their reviews of the same movies, meaning that there were more reviews of the same movies. It also meant that more sites tried to get their critic credentials so that they could go to early screenings of things and get their writing out there before other sites and publications. The issue with this is that there could be a burnout about a movie before it gets released to general audiences.

This overabundance of reviews for the same movie becomes much more apparent during awards season. Many of the movies in contention for awards don’t get a general release before awards start being given out. They might screen in Los Angeles and New York to get their Academy qualification. They might play a few festivals. But when it comes time for awards, they’ll send out screeners to critics and voters to try and build some buzz. It’ll usually work. The critics will talk endlessly about the movies that they think could be in contention for the top awards. They will talk for months, from around the time of the Toronto International Film Festival in September until the Academy Awards in February or March. By the time general audiences can see the movies, they’ve experienced burnout and the movies can’t always live up to the expectations that were set by the people who saw them earlier and talked endlessly about them.

Social media changed the way that people interacted in their daily lives. It connected people from across the world who might not have otherwise ever talked to each other. It allowed people to share their opinions with the world, or whatever people across the world would read them, instead of simply talking to their buddies at the bar after a long day at work. Social media also allowed for an echo chamber effect, where many people would be talking about the same thing to an overwhelming extent.

When it came to movies, there were three major ways that social media helped fuel the discussion. People were able to easily get movie news well before a movie’s release, including casting, story leaks, and set photos. This meant that people could see the movie being made and judge it based on those components before it was finished and released. The second was that everyone would make jokes about the movie because the social media very much became a world of memes. This might cause people to think less of a movie before seeing it. Then there was the side of things where a movie got released to some people, or all people, and the discussion felt overwhelming. It could lead to exhaustion or burnout, thus affecting someone’s feelings about the movie. Social media could do all that and more.

Social media has been only one of many ways that the film world changed through the growth of the internet. It connected people in many ways that hadn’t existed before. It allowed them to see different sides of movies, as opposed to the trailers and films they saw in the theater or on television. Instead of talking to the relatives or friends from their hometown, people were able to meet others from around the world and connect on shared interests. The world grew. The film world grew. And things have never been the same since.

Now for a few notes:

• The Snowman brought Val Kilmer back to Sunday “Bad” Movies for the third time, following his work in 7 Below (week 137) and Delgo (week 148).
• Michael Fassbender made his second Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance this week. His first was in Jonah Hex (week 249).
• Johnny Otto returned from American Ultra (week 261) to appear in The Snowman.
• Finally, Alec Newman was in both The Snowman and The Marine 6: Close Quarters (week 327).
• Have you seen The Snowman? What were your thoughts about the movie? How do you feel social media helped shape the film landscape? Let me know on Twitter or you can drop a comment and I’ll see it that way too.
• The comments and Twitter can also be used to leave suggestions about what movies I should be checking out for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts. If there’s a movie that you think would fit into the Sunday “Bad” Movies repertoire, let me know. I always like to hear about movies I might not already know of.
• Head on over to Instagram to check out what Sunday “Bad” Movies has to offer. It’s some fun stuff, most of the time.
• And now it’s time to look forward to the next post. Sunday “Bad” Movies began with a Star Wars knock-off called Starcrash (week 1). I’m journeying back into that territory again with a movie that played off both Star Wars and Star Trek. You might not know what movie I’m talking about. I’ll be taking a look at 1980’s Galaxina for next week’s post. I hope you’ll join me for that one. It should be fun. See you then.

Sniper (1993), Sniper 2 (2002) and Sniper 3 (2004)

One of the major goals of a studio is to find financial success through the movies they release. An easy way to do that, once a hit movie is made, is to build a franchise around that movie. There might be diminishing returns as the series drags on, but people who saw and liked the first film will likely shell out money to see another. Hopefully more after that, too. The box office will be booming as the single movie turns into a franchise and, if the studio gets really lucky, a mainstay for general audiences.

Sometimes that doesn’t quite work out. A movie might be successful, but it lacks the built-in audience when it comes to sequels. Things fizzle out two or three movies into the franchise and the studio cuts its losses. That’s especially true of theatrical releases. There would be no point for a studio to make a movie if it wasn’t going to make back the budget. Or so things were until the growth of home video. At that point, franchises started popping up based on anything a studio felt like making more of.

Some comedies got the direct to video treatment, but it was truly the action and horror genres that flourished. A studio could make a movie for cheap, release it on VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, or video-on-demand, and make a quick buck. In between their tentpole theatrical releases, they could put out sequels to movies that people enjoyed in decades past. Any old intellectual property that wasn’t worthy of a big budget reboot or remake could get this treatment.

One surprising action movie that got the treatment was Sniper. Released in 1993, Sniper was about Master Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Beckett (Tom Berenger), a sniper stationed in Panama. He was paired with Richard Miller (Billy Zane) on a mission to assassinate a rebel general and the Colombian drug lord funding the rebellion. They travelled through dense jungle to find their way to their targets while avoiding an enemy sniper who was out to stop them.

Sniper was about as run-of-the-mill as an action movie could get. It paired a seasoned veteran with someone who was essentially the fish-out-of-water type. That was the standard buddy cop pairing, only without the buddy cop rapport or any comedy. They were given a mission and they fulfilled it. There was some friction between the two main characters which climaxed in a violent encounter between the two, before they had to put their conflict aside for the greater good. Someone was injured. The final escape from enemy territory called back to the opening scene, where Beckett lost his sniping partner during a botched escape. Everything came full circle with some fun, simple action in between.

There was nothing about Sniper that truly set it apart as a movie that should get a sequel. The characters’ arcs had completely wrapped up. That might not be a huge deal because many franchises have characters’ emotional journeys being completed by the end of each movie. But that was still a thing in Sniper and still warranted a mention. It grossed a modest $19 million, which wasn’t enough to greenlight another Sniper film in 1993.

The main issue with moving the franchise forward, however, was the main character. There were two main characters who were thrown together for a mission. The seasoned veteran, Thomas Beckett, was an unlikeable character. He was good at his job, sure. That did not make him any more likeable. He was completely dismissive of Richard Miller. He went against any of Miller’s plans without telling Miller why until long after the changes were made. Thomas Beckett was given a couple of catchphrases that were each annoyingly blunt and violent. One of them was “one bullet, one kill.” He was basically saying to make the shot count, but in a way that it added to the body count. The other was “Put a bullet through his heart.” Really, that one had a bit of swearing in it, but the point was there. He was an abrasive ass, which didn’t make for the best character to follow.

Richard Miller wasn’t much better. He was a petulant man who projected that he had done more than he had. When a man was shooting at the helicopter he was in, killing other people who were on board, he pulled out his sniper rifle. However, he was too afraid to shoot. When the man was killed, everyone attributed it to his sniper work. He never clarified the situation, instead playing right into it. When he eventually did pull the trigger on someone, during the film’s biggest action sequence, he then snapped and tried to kill Beckett. He was mostly lost in an insane rage after having killed someone. Eventually, he turned things around to save Beckett, who had been captured by the psychotic henchman to the bad guys. The problem was that his personality was not one that people would want to watch time and time again.

Nine years after Sniper was released, the quality of low budget action had gotten better. It wasn’t great, but it was good enough that studios were willing to take chances on sequels to movies they made decades before. They chose Sniper and decided to bring only Tom Berenger back for what would be a television movie for Cinemax. It wasn’t a great idea to bring back an abrasive action hero like Thomas Beckett to anchor a franchise, but the sequel made the most of it.

When Sniper 2 began, Thomas Beckett (Tom Berenger) was a gun for hire. He wasn’t a mercenary. He was hired to train people how to hunt, and he hated it. The government and the military showed up with a mission for him and he jumped at the chance to get back into the fray. He was paired with a hotshot sniper, Cole (Bokeem Woodbine), who was doing a sort of community service after a court marshalling. They were tasked with assassinating a genocidal Serbian general, but things went awry during their escape.

The choice was made to bring Thomas Beckett back. It didn’t seem like a good choice because of how unlikable his character was in Sniper, but Sniper 2 brought some interesting traits to the character. The movie made it so that there was a reason he continued in the franchise. It was out of necessity, really. Continuing forward with a character whose only goal was to kill quickly and cleanly with no emotional investment would have made for a stale franchise that couldn’t grow. Something had to change.

Sniper 2 introduced the idea that Thomas Beckett was getting old and his skills were starting to fade, somewhat. He was still an expert sniper and could probably do any shooting job better than most. He also had a head on him that could help him evade any militarily dangerous situations. But there were a couple of setbacks to his skills that gave the character some emotional depth. The first was the result of a wound sustained in Sniper. Beckett had been tortured by the sadistic henchman of one of the targets. The torture involved a corkscrew being driven into his hand, rendering his trigger finger useless. Sniper 2 brought that back, with Beckett having to learn to use his rifle’s trigger with a different finger. The other thing added to affect his sniper skills was a case of double vision. Sometimes, while preparing to shoot, his vision would become blurry. He would need to refocus and regain his calm.

The other thing Sniper 2 did was pair Beckett with a more competent partner. Gone was Richard Miller and his angsty ways. In his place was Cole, who was a good sniper in his own right. His only issue was that he had been court-marshalled for murdering a DEA agent that he suspected had betrayed his team and gotten them killed. The new mission was his way of making amends to the higher ups. But it also gave him a death wish. He would risk his life for the mission in ways that someone trying to survive would not have. It made him good at the job after the assassination. It also made him somewhat more careless than Beckett.

The combination of Thomas Beckett and Cole worked much better than the combination of Beckett and Richard Miller. They felt like much more of a team, where Beckett and Cole felt like two men who were forced together and never really meshed with one another. The connection was solidified all the more when, in the climactic showdown between Thomas Beckett and an enemy sniper, Cole was fatally shot. Beckett got rid of the enemy sniper and took Cole to the escape helicopter, where he held Cole until he died. It was a moment of connection between the two, in a way that was never present in the first film.

Speaking of that sniper battle, one final thing that Sniper 2 did to continue the legacy of Sniper was a specific shot. It wasn’t a camera shot. It was a rifle shot that was kind of a signature action move for the Sniper franchise. Thomas Beckett was one of the best shots in the business. As the movies, at least the first three, showed, he could outwit and outlast any sniper he was against. He knew how to distract them and get them to shoot at nothing so he could locate and kill them. The killshot was the shot, though. He always managed to shoot through their scope and into their eye. It went against his “put a bullet through his heart” mantra, which might be why that was dropped for the sequel. But it was something he continually did. His shooting got even better in Sniper 3.

The third Sniper film, and the first direct-to-DVD entry, brought back Thomas Beckett (Tom Berenger) on a new mission. The NSA sent him to Vietnam to search out an old army friend who he thought had died in the war. Thomas Beckett was paired with Quan (Byron Mann), a Vietnamese police officer, to take down that former friend, who was now the biggest drug kingpin in Vietnam. Through their mission, the pair of unlikely partners unraveled a conspiracy from the Vietnam war that could have major effects on the current American government.

Sniper 3 continued one of the threads that had been built through the previous two entries in the franchise. Thomas Beckett was still coming to terms with the loss of his trigger finger. Following the torture he endured in Sniper, and learning to depend on a different finger as his trigger finger in Sniper 2, a new layer was added to the story. There was an uncontrollable twitch in his hand. The double vision had disappeared as an obstacle, and the muscle spasm was there, instead. It wasn’t much of a problem for a sniper as good as Beckett, but it was a little bit of a setback.

The other major setback was that Thomas Beckett had to go face-to-face with a man who had saved his life in the Vietnam war. The man was presumed dead. Thomas Beckett had read a letter from the man to the man’s family at the man’s son’s wedding. Thomas Beckett considered them his family because they were the closest thing to a family he had. Finding out that his old war buddy was alive and a drug kingpin in Vietnam threw Beckett’s whole worldview out the window. It was a lie that had become a fundamental part of his life, unravelling before his very eyes. And he was sent on a mission to kill the person in the middle of it.

These two things came to a head in the climax. It wasn’t that Thomas Beckett had to overcome his own muscle spasm to put a bullet through his old buddy’s heart. That wasn’t it at all. The scene was as follows. Beckett and Quan had infiltrated the lair of the bad guy. Quan had been in a fight to the death with one of the bad guy’s followers, while Beckett found a good spot to set up his sniper’s nest. After Quan won the fight, the bad guy used him as a human shield against Beckett’s sniper rifle. Beckett couldn’t shoot the bad guy or else he would kill Quan in the process. The bad guy had one of his men hold a gun to Quan’s head to try and get Beckett to surrender. Beckett didn’t surrender. He used his knowledge of the muscle in his hand to shoot the guy with the gun in that exact spot, moving the hand, through the force of the bullet, to point at the bad guy and causing the finger to twitch, pulling the trigger, killing the villain. It was the crack shot to end all crack shots.

Thomas Beckett saved Quan’s life because of his respect for the Vietnamese police officer. Their relationship wasn’t always that way, however. Beckett had been tasked to kill his old friend much earlier in the proceedings, during a sting led by Quan and another officer. Beckett missed the initial shot and ended up in a shootout with a sniper who, obviously, got killed by a shot through the scope. This time, that shot was done with a pistol, though, making it more impressive. Beckett thought that Quan had set him up. It was only through some later interactions that they became a half decent action team. They didn’t have the emotional connection of Beckett and Cole, though.

The first three Sniper movies showed what a studio could do to try and make a franchise work. They took what seemed like a one-off action flick from 1993 and turned it into a successful direct-to-video franchise. They fleshed out the main character enough to make him somewhat enjoyable to watch. They added some emotional depth and decent main character relationships. They also never shied away from the trademarks of the franchise. The mantra of “one shot, one kill” was always there, as was the shooting a sniper through the scope shot. It was growth with callbacks. It worked.

Sniper wasn’t nearly the only movie from that era to be resurrected in the direct-to-video world, but few were quite as successful in that market. There are only so many intellectual properties that people will want to see continued, years later, in a different film format. Many have been unsuccessful in capturing that same audience magic and stopped after one, maybe two, direct-to-video entries. Few franchises have continued to an eighth entry.

Much of the success that people find in franchise filmmaking is focused on box office returns. How much each installment can make in a wide theatrical release constitutes how many movies get made in a given series. Few people think about the direct-to-video market and the long-lasting franchises that have made a name for themselves there. Yet, there are many under-the-radar franchises that have kept chugging along in that market. They may not all be good, but they’re there. They have an audience. And, to some people, they’re just as fun as the big budget, theatrical fare.

Now for a few notes to close things out:

• Sniper was directed by Luis Llosa, who also directed Anaconda (week 80).
• Sniper 2 was the second Sunday “Bad” Movie directed by Craig R. Baxley, who directed Stone Cold (week 423).
• Linden Ashby was featured in Sniper 2. He was also in Anaconda 4: Trail of Blood (week 80), Mortal Kombat (week 140), and Beta Test (week 397).
• Tom Berenger was the only actor to be featured in Sniper, Sniper 2, and Sniper 3.
• Rex Linn had a small part in Sniper, which made him a Sunday “Bad” Movies three-timer. His other movies were Drop Zone (week 132) and Zombeavers (week 142).
• Billy Zane played Richard Miller in Sniper. He also showed up in Going Overboard (week 67) and The Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption (week 380).
• The final three-timer was Byron Mann, who was in Catwoman (week 174), Street Fighter (week 280), and Sniper 3.
• Hank Garrett was in Sniper and Baby Geniuses (week 50).
• Aden Young popped up in Sniper. He also popped up in I, Frankenstein (week 217).
• Sniper 2 featured Dennis Hayden from Wishmaster (week 410) and Bokeem Woodbine from Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies (week 410).
• Dom Hetrakul returned from The Marine 2 (week 30) to be in Sniper 3.
• Finally, Denis Arndt was in Sniper 3 and Anacondas: Hunt for the Blood Orchid (week 80).
• Have you seen any of the first three Sniper movies? What did you think of them? What do you think of the franchise as a whole? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments.
• I’m always open to suggestions about what I should be checking out for the Sunday “Bad” Movies. You can get a hold of me in the comments or on Twitter to tell me all about the movies I should be getting my eyes on.
• The Sunday “Bad” Movies account on Instagram is always another fun place to find me.
• Reader, I gave you all the clues. You could have stopped this. Next week, I’ll be writing about 2017’s The Snowman. Come on back to see what I say about that one. See you then.

The Beautician and the Beast (1997)

Certain movies could only exist within a capsule of that exact time. They were perfectly timed to come out when they did, the way they did. It’s as though some higher power led everything to that specific moment. Whether the movie was a success or a complete and utter failure, it had to happen. Everything was set up perfectly. There was no other way that things could turn out. The movie was meant to be.

That was the case with The Beautician and the Beast. The perfect confluence of the elements of the time came together to make a movie that could only be released in the mid-to-late 90s. It had a television star playing a character geared specifically to what she was known for playing. It had clear references to movies of that specific time. It even had a post-Cold War setting which would frame the story in a somewhat interesting light. These were all elements that could only be a part of a movie from the late 1990s.

The Beautician and the Beast took Joy Miller (Fran Drescher) out of her normal life and placed her in a far away land. She was a beauty instructor in New York who saved a bunch of animals from a burning school science lab. This impressed Ira Grushinsky (Ian McNeice), a Slovetzian diplomat. He hired her to be the live-in teacher of four children: Katrina (Lisa Jakub), Karl (Adam LaVorgna), Masha (Heather DeLoach), and Yuri (Kyle and Tyler Wilkerson). She ended up falling in love with their father, President Boris Pochenko (Timothy Dalton), while also helping him see the errors of his dictatorial ways.

Fran Drescher was a driving force behind The Beautician and the Beast becoming the movie it was. Before her true influence can be explained, however, a major trend from the 90s must be brought up. Throughout the 1990s, studios kept tossing sitcom stars into film careers. They were successful in one arena. Why wouldn’t they be in the other? Sometimes it worked and other times it didn’t.

Tim Allen made one of the biggest transitions when he first made the leap into film. He managed to have one week in 1994 where he starred in the number one television show, Home Improvement, and the number one movie, The Santa Clause, while also having his book, Don’t Stand Too Close to a Naked Man, as the number one bestseller. Jennifer Aniston was another success to come out of 1990s comedy, parlaying her time on Friends into a successful film career that is still going strong today. Okay, maybe not today. The pandemic might have put that on hold. But it was going strong until the pandemic. Christina Applegate’s show Married with Children started in 1987, but it ran well into the 1990s with 11 seasons on the air. Then she had a pretty good movie career with comedies like Anchorman and Bad Moms along the way.

Other stars didn’t shine so bright on the big screen. Courteney Cox went from Friends to the Scream movies. Outside of that, her film career didn’t go too far. Her television career kept chugging along though. Same with Matthew Perry. He had some big movies during his time on Friends. After that, he kind of just stuck with television, being in series after series after series. And then there was Matt LeBlanc, whose film career kind of started and ended with Lost in Space. Outside of Friends, there was Saved by the Bell. When the show ended, Elizabeth Berkley wanted to shake her teen persona off and be taken seriously as an actor. She made Showgirls and… The reputation of that movie stunted any film stardom potential she had. French Stewart couldn’t become a huge box office draw after 3^rd Rock from the Sun ended, though his co-star Joseph Gordon Levitt found a lot of success.

All in all, there were many actors being pushed from their sitcom roles onto the big screen. If they could be part of the success of a network television show, they might be able to bring in some money at the box office. That’s what studios thought. That’s why Fran Drescher was brought in for The Beautician and the Beast. Her show, The Nanny, was a huge success. It ran from 1993 until 1999, and the movie was right smack dab in the middle of it, at the height of its popularity. She captivated television audiences. She could captivate movie audiences, too. It was the 1990s comedy mentality.

Now that the overall trend of the 1990s has been discussed, Fran Drescher, herself, can come back into play. She was an actor with a very singular persona. Her character in The Beautician and the Beast had some similarities to her character in The Nanny. Joy began the film as a beautician, much like the main character of The Nanny was a cosmetics saleswoman. Both characters began looking after the children of a wealthy man. In The Beautician and the Beast, she became their teacher. In The Nanny, she became their nanny. Both characters fell in love with the wealthy man, a dictatorial President in The Beautician and the Beast, and a Broadway producer in The Nanny.

It felt as though the main character from The Nanny had been grafted onto The Beautician and the Beast to play into the popularity that Fran Drescher had. People liked her because of her television character. Having a film character who was essentially the same would be an easy way to replicate that television success.

One other Fran Drescher element had to be brought to the film, as well. When she got the role in The Beautician and the Beast, Fran Drescher got vocal lessons to reduce her accent. The producers weren’t fans of that. If they were going to cast Fran Drescher as the lead in their film, they wanted Fran Drescher. Part of what made her stand out from other actors and comedians of the time was her nasally, New York accented voice. It was one of her trademarks. Getting rid of that accent would remove one of her trademarks and one of the reasons people might want to see the movie. In the end, she spoke much closer to how she was known to speak than the non-accented, non-nasally voice she was going to go with.

The final influence that Fran Drescher had over the film was in the story, and that brought about another trend of the 1990s. The Disney Renaissance was well underway. It began with The Little Mermaid in 1989 and lasted for a decade. It was a new age of popularity for the Disney films after they fell out of favour in the 1970s and 1980s. The third movie in the Disney Renaissance was one of the biggest inspirations that the movie took when Fran Drescher signed on. The Beautician and the Beast. Beauty and the Beast. Get it?

The setting had to change from Beauty and the Beast, however. It needed to be modernized to fit the character type that Fran Drescher played during the 1990s. There couldn’t be a New York beautician in classical France without the use of time travel elements that they didn’t want or even consider for the film. Instead, it was set in the modern day in the fictional country of Slovetzia. It was an Eastern European country in the post-Cold War era.

Post-Cold War era politics weren’t the primary focus of The Beautician and the Beast, but they did come into play through the burgeoning relationship between Joy and Boris. The politics also came into play through the relationship that Katrina had with a revolutionary. The movie was about the romantic aspects; however, the romance couldn’t be realized without western democracy slowly finding its way into the dictatorship of Slovetzia. Joy’s American ways rubbed off on Boris Pochenko. He learned to meet his people. He didn’t have to be a strong fist that would strike down if they stepped out of line. He could find a connection with them and let everyone be equals, or closer to equals. He was still in charge of the country. But he was going to see the people as people rather than his followers.

The Beautician and the Beast could only be made around the time it was made. It pulled in influences from much of what was going on in Hollywood and the world. The producers cast someone from a popular television sitcom. The movie was fitted to her strengths and many of the elements that helped make her popular. The story was inspired by the Disney Renaissance that was going strong at the time. And a post-Cold War setting was utilized, albeit in a fictionalized European nation. Did it succeed by pulling in all the elements? Not necessarily. It flopped critically and at the box office, and became a punchline in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. But it happened.

Some movies encapsulate the time in which they were made. They strike upon things going on in the world. They tie in many of the trends lighting the box office and the Nielsen ratings boxes on fire. The producers throw everything into the film to try and strike while the iron is still hot. Sometimes it will work like gangbusters. Other times, it will die upon release. Either way, it’s always fun to look back at a movie and see how of its time it was. That was the case here.

Now let’s get some notes out of the way:

• Showgirls (week 170) was brought up in this post.
• Marianne Muellerleile made her triumphant return to Sunday “Bad” Movies this week in her fourth appearance. She was previously in Jingle All the Way (week 160), Norbit (week 227), and The Hottie and the Nottie (week 395).
• The great Timothy Dalton now has three Sunday “Bad” Movies under his belt. He was in Flash Gordon (week 81), Sextette (week 141), and now The Beautician and the Beast.
• Another three-timer was Marshal Silverman, who was in Wild Wild West (week 296), Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment (week 400), and The Beautician and the Beast.
• Fran Drescher was in both The Beautician and the Beast and Santa’s Slay (week 263).
• This was the second time Michael Lerner appeared in a Sunday “Bad” Movie. The first was Godzilla (week 282).
• Heather DeLoach returned from Balls of Fury (week 349) to appear in The Beautician and the Beast.
• The Beautician and the Beast saw the return of Celeste Russi to Sunday “Bad” Movies, after first appearing in Mannequin: On the Move (week 378).
• Finally, Timothy Dowling showed up in Pixels (week 407) and The Beautician and the Beast.
• Have you seen The Beautician and the Beast? What did you think of it? What are some other movies that could only be made when they were made? Give me your thoughts and opinions in the comments or on Twitter.
• If there are any movies that you think would fit in with the movies I cover for Sunday “Bad” Movies, let me know about them. You can find me on Twitter or in the comments and drop a line to what I should be checking out for future posts.
• Sunday “Bad” Movies is on Instagram. There are trailers, scenes, pictures, posters, and other fun stuff going up there on a regular basis.
• Now for a quick preview of next week. It’s going to be a franchise week. I haven’t done an action franchise in a bit, so I thought I’d toss one of those in here. This franchise began in 1993 and has been going ever since. Well, maybe not ever since. It took nine years just to get a second film. I’m only going to check out the first three, since the franchise is currently eight movies long. Eight would be a little too much to handle in one post, so three it is. I’ll be watching and writing about Sniper, Sniper 2, and Sniper 3. I hope you join me next week when another post goes up.