20th Century Fox is in heated mouth battle with Warner Bros, Disney, Universal , Sony and other Studios over it's decision of releasing the new SW prequel trailer with it's "Alien IV" movie opening next month.
After 20 years of screen absent, the Star Wars Trilogy SE has made close to 300 Million dollars in just the domestic re-releases alone. Fox knew of it's popularity and tested the Star Wars trailers on the critically mediocre "Independence Day (ID4) " months ahead of it's January 97 released date and found that the lure worked. The plan made ID4 a financial hit by sucking away opening days of ticket sales needed by competing movies as words of mouth from "Star Wars" fans spread like plague.
The other studios argues that by repeating the process with the prequels (The new movie is not due out for release until 1999, ) 20th Century Fox will have an upper-hand in it's opening days and week's thought-out as they plan to bait the over populated Star Wars fans into going to a movie that they would not have initially gone to see. They also sited that Fox would assume it had already won the distribution bid on the world's most lucrative picture saga that have not even taken place yet. Sony marketing heads stated that it's Fox dirty trick and nothing more other that a strong hype material for "Alien 4" and to further garnish the scantily needed ticket shares.
Another anonymous studio execs added, "Fox is setting itself up for embarrassment and let-downs if they loose out on the distribution bid. By continuing and pulling the trick this will only infuriate and motivate other studio to bid harder to get the release rights." he continues, "Judging by the 300+ million write-off of flops such as "Speed 2" and the probable "Titanic" it look's as though Fox is not in a position to financially countered any of it's competitors bidding chips. At least not on a track record and resume' wise."
LucasFilm has no comments. Nor have they stated that they were involve in the process.
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