After Saw 6’s “underperformance” (all of a sudden second place is underperformance?) at the box office this weekend, some entertainment industry wags are wringing their hands about whether this is the End Of The Sequel. I don’t know about you, but I find this hand-wringing to be a little premature.
First off, I am 100% sure that Saw 6’s failure to capture the weekend’s number one spot is the result of a torpedo job by the American health insurance industry. When the triumphant climax of the latest chapter in the most successful Western giallo franchise in recent history is (SPOILER ALERT) an orphan boy injecting hydrofluoric acid into every square inch of a health insurance executive’s body because the exec denied coverage to the orphan boy’s father when he needed a life-saving treatment, you know that Blue Shield and Pacificare and Cigna are going to do their best to make that film disappear before the general public starts getting some ideas of their own.
I think the lesson we’ve learned from the Saw 6 first weekend numbers is not that sequels are dying, but that there’s a lot more scary muscle behind the health insurance industry than any of us expected. I applaud Saw 6 for going after this monster instead of playing it safe. To those chickenshit film execs solely worried about the bottom line, I say don’t throw out the idea of the film franchise. Without the Idea Of The Sequel, we might never have gotten to enjoy Beetlejuice 2.
