Grindhouse Proves that Tarantino's Audience Isn't as Hip as They Thought?

According to The Weinstein Company, the target audience for the Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez double feature known collectively as Grindhouse apparently are not as hip and savvy as is generally thought. Grindhouse wound up in a disappointing fourth place in its opening weekend, lagging behind even the formulaic Ice Cube remake of a remake, Are We Done Yet? Some questioned the wisdom of the entire enterprise; the kind of movies to which Grindhouse pays homage hasn't been seen on American movie screens in over three decades. The marketing, therefore, relied heavily on the both the reputation of Tarantino and Rodriguez, as well as the supposedly elevated hipness of the audiences of these two cutting edge directors.

The only problem is that the real audience for Grindhouse may well have begun and ended with the two directors themselves. Movie audiences brought up on the blockbuster mindset of the past three decades have little access to the kind of exploitation films that Grindhouse intended to pay homage to. (Unless they regularly watched Mystery Science Theater 3000, anyway.) And since television networks rarely even show good movies made before 1980, today's younger set really has little idea of what the Grindhouse experiment was all about. This fact was proven by virtue of the reality that, at least according to the Weinstein Company, some audience members left after the first feature, not even realizing that Grindhouse is composed of two different feature length films. Keep in mind that these reports are coming directly from The Weinstein Company and may be an invention in order to explain the disappointing reception of Grindhouse.