Welcome to a new dawn in movie promotion. The Hollywood studios are running scared. Gone are the days where any publicity was good publicity. To New Line, Snakes on a Plane was proof that internet hype doesn't translate into a $30 million opening weekend.

Movie critics bashed Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, yet the audience still came out in droves. Hell, the movie is nearing one billion dollars worldwide. The same could be said of The Da Vinci Code, a big summer novel adaptation which was greeted at the Cannes Film Festival with boos. But yet, the film has already became the fourth biggest film of the year (#21 of all time) with $753 million in worldwide gross.

So why preview the movie for critics at all, especially if you strongly feel you might have a stinker in your hands? This is the current state of the movie business, and the Industry is looking at the issue in a totally skewed light.

Over the past year, the trend of studios not screening movies to the press has hit a peak. This week alone, critics have been shut out of Crank, The Wicker Man and Mike Judge's Idiocracy. But why?

Let's take a look at the list of films this year which have not been screened for the press:

BloodRayne
Date Movie
Doogal
Family Reunion
Grandma's Boy
Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector
Material Girls
Phat Girlz
See No Evil
Silent Hill
Snakes on a Plane
Stay Alive
The Benchwarmers
Ultraviolet
Underworld: Evolution
When a Stranger Calls
Zoom

Okay, at first glance what do you immediately notice?

That's right, the list is full of bad movies. So bad in-fact, other than Snakes on a Plane, no movie on the list has revieved a rating higher than a 6.6 on the Internet Movie Database or over a 28% on RottenTomatoes.

If you read my article from earlier in the week titled "2006: The Worst Movies of All Time", you may have noticed that seven of the above 17 films have already been voted into imdb's list of the 100 worst movies of all time (Bloodrayne, Date Movie, Doogal, Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector, Material Girls, Phat Girlz, and Zoom). Actually, Material Girls takes the top honors, with Zoom and Phat Girlz also making the top 10. The fact that almost one third of the top 10 worst voted movies of all time were released in 2006, is a topic for another place and time (actually right here).

Bad Movies is the obvious answer, but not my point, so stay with me. It's very clear that the studios are afraid that bad reviews will hurt their back end. So the answer is to not screen the bad movies, right? Wrong.

Advance Screenings

The movie studios run advance screenings for nearly all of their films the week before opening night. So the movie studios aren't afraid of bad word of mouth, or they wouldn't be running these screenings.

Money

The only three films on the list to make over $50 million were Tyler Perry's Madea's Family Reunion, Underworld: Evolution and The Benchwarmers. Without those very-minor successes, the average film on the list makes around $20 million. If a movie makes that little money in it's opening weekend, it's considered a failure now-a-days. To give you a comparison, an indie film like A Prairie Home Companion made over $20 million in just 767 theaters. And ten of the above 17 films didn't even make that much money.

So what's my point?

The people won't go see bad movies?

WRONG, people love bad movies. Take a look at Little Man and RV, which have made a combined grand total of over $150 million worldwide.

That movie studios can't stop bad word of mouth with their critical ban? True, but also wrong.

My point is Hollywood isn't following the number one rule. A ruyle they created a long time ago:

"Almost any publicity is good publicity."

It's an old saying, and it still stands true in today's times.

Most of the films listed above are considered box office failures. Even without the big scarey movie reviewers to scare the audience away, the films still failed to make bank. So what could the missing ingredient be?

There are thousands of movie reviewers. After a quick count, I found more than 3,000 movie reviewers are listed on Rotten Tomatoes alone. And that's not all of them. Think of all the newspapers, magazines, internet websites, television shows...etc. Think about all the FREE publicity that these movie studios give up.

But Peter you say, "The movie studios must pay for all the screenings!?" Yes and No.

Remember the advance screenings we mentioned earlier? This is typically where a lot of movie reviewers get to screen the print. But not this week. You see, this week alone there have been nationwide screenings for both Crank and The Wicker Man yet press wasn't allowed in the front door.

So why leave the press out of the loop? With no extra costs associated with inviting local press into these events, why are the studios afraid? It seems like they have nothing left to lose.

The industry needs to learn that it wasn't internet marketing that hurt Snakes on a Plane, it was the reliance on one tool. You can't color a great picture with one crayon. The same could be said about when you're missing one of the colors.

Internet buzz might only translate into a $15 million opening weekend. But Internet, combined with print, billboards, radio, television and critical buzz will result into more than the sum of it's parts.

While movie-goers don't necessarily listen to the critical reviews, they do read them. It creates talk. Talk creates interest. Interest is buzz. And buzz gets butts in seats.