What do you think about The Hunt (2019), the movie Universal just pulled

I actually didn't know about this movie but I became a fan of Betty Gilpin from watching GLOW so I kinda want to see it. Universal pulled it from schedule after the recent shootings. My guess is that it'll be released quietly sometime next year.

Check out the trailers below and let me know what you think.

I thought the teaser had a nice creepy vibe to it but the full trailer makes it look a bit cheap.

Btw, speaking of The Hunt, if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend the 2013 movie of the same name by Thomas Vinterberg starring Mads Mikkelsen. It's a really terrific movie and according a MOTY list I made back then, it was the 4th best movie of that year!...

If you're curious but don't want to click on the link:

10. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
09. Like Someone in Love
08. Pacific Rim
07. The Conjuring
06. Stoker
05. The Act of Killing
04. The Hunt
03. The Wind Rises
02. Gravity
01. Blue is the Warmest Color

The whole turn of events regarding this film once removed from the horrible tragedy of last weekend is so insane it's comical.

First off, this isn't some original premise and I could list a couple dozen movies inspired by The Most Dangerous Game in some way, shape, or form. I mean, The Purge series, which is from the same creative team draws heavily on the same themes and should've been fresh in everyone's minds no matter how dumb they might be to complain about it as you would hope they would be able to connect the dots if they hadn't seen the trailer....but for those that have....HO-LY FUCKING SHIT.

Not only do they name drop The Purge in there, it's made explicitly clear who the protagonist is, and they show even more of the movie in it than freakin' Hobbs and Shaw and some folks still don't get it. Like in thinking they were being made a fool, they in turn did the job completely on their own by raising a stink. It's like the far right and left are in constant competition of trying to make themselves look like complete and utter dingbats, and we may just have a winner with this one.

Universal shouldn't have caved on the film's release, even if it does prevent further nonsense from going down.

Also, yes...the Mads Mikkelsen "The Hunt" is a fantastic film.

I hadn't heard anything about this movie until this past week. This is the first time I've seen the trailers. I thought people were upset because they thought the movie has some political message? It just looks like a horror movie to me. I mean, "wealthy elites don't care about average people," isn't even controversial. Average people on both sides of the American political divide believe that.

Edit: In general, I've always felt that movie studios/game publishers/etc. should not acknowledge real world events like this. Because acknowledging these events and then releasing the game/movie/whatever anyways seems hollow.

Remember E3 after the Pulse nightclub terrorist attack? People got on stage, acknowledged it, then showed their games about shooting people. In this case, I think the proper thing to do would've been to either not acknowledge it, OR acknowledge it and say, "Hey, we're not gonna show a live demo of our graphic shooter on stage right now. A demo video will be available on our YouTube channel."

I know, video games don't cause real world violence. I'm just saying, to me, it feels hollow to hear companies talk about this stuff and then conduct business as usual. We're all adult (consumers) here. Trust us to be able to engage with this shit--be that real world shit or entertainment shit--on our own terms.

I don't feel like a fake thing intended for entertainment should be beholden to real-world tragedies. It's a fucking movie. This is some "video games cause violence" inanity. Recognizing that fiction isn't reality really isn't difficult. Moreover, the only similarity this movie and recent events even share is people shooting people, and if we're going to collectively start flipping out about media depictions of that, well, good luck. The Hunger Games trilogy was on basic cable this weekend. Should I get upset about them airing that in light of recent events?

Look, I'm all for figuring out a solution to mass shootings as a real-world issue, but censoring fictional media featuring depictions of vaguely similar shit doesn't actually do anything or help anyone. Ironically, if the media didn't immediately make every mass shooter infamous by plastering them all over the news, that could potentially help, but no, let's tackle fictional issues within fictional media. That'll get it done, with a stamp of approval from dumbass politicians here to save us all from marginally disagreeable themes in entertainment properties.

@notnert427: fwiw, a lot of this decision probably has more to do with whether the studio thinks the news might actually lower box office returns of the film. The movie wasn’t scheduled to come out until September 27th, but the next 2 months were going to be when all the marketing (trailers promoted everywhere, press interviews, etc.) would take place. The actual release of the film being over 6 weeks away feels like enough of a distance from the shootings, but the marketing being scheduled for right now is the problem.

The studio suits probably have some forecast that The Hunt really needs a lot of marketing for people to be aware of it at all, since it doesn’t really have huge stars in its cast and the only big draw is “vaguely associated with The Purge.” So there’s probably some thought process that the marketing clashes too much with the current news cycle to actually be effective. I’m sure the studio would rather that the creators be able to talk freely about the movie in interviews, instead of having to say “check out this ultraviolence, but also my heart goes out to everyone in Dayton and El Paso.” If the current news cycle about gun violence muddies the marketing too much, the movie’s marketing push just serves as a sad reminder about the shootings and doesn’t get people amped to see the movie, and at worst the marketing push could be considered in poor taste so close to the IRL shootings.

Anyway, I’d guess that the suits working at movie studios have some prior market data that indicates violent movies in theatres perform worse after violent tragedies such as terrorist attacks, shootings, etc. It’s just how people behave, I guess, and the suits are delaying the movie to hopefully get a better return on their investment later. It also suggests to me that their forecast for this movie must have already been that it might barely turn a profit and doesn’t need any more road bumps sabotaging its visibility/desirability, and/or the movie’s marketing campaign was minimal enough that the studio could easily put it on hold and delay the entire movie 6 months or whatever.

The only thing I find distasteful is how unoriginal of a premise hunting "the most dangerous game" is in 2019.

@bisonhero: Yeah, you're probably on to something. Still, I take issue with the cycle of people and the media acting all appalled at this stuff for a couple of weeks every time it happens and then it's back to normal. The outrage all feels a bit hollow, and it's pretty dumb that a movie can simply have unfortunate timing and suddenly become verboten.

Regardless of whether the movie should have been pulled or not, it seems to me that the movie was deliberately using charged language ("deplorables") to score cheap outrage publicity.

So I read some more about this movie. Interestingly, both a conservative outlet and a liberal outlet had writers that came to the same conclusion: Yeah, the wealthy elites in the movie are hunting conservative "red state" folks...but also the "red state" folks are the ones righteously fighting back. The viewer is meant to sympathize with the people fighting back and being hunted, because hunting people is fucking atrocious no matter who does it.

It was a good point to make.

Thought this was about the Vinterberg film Jagten/The Hunt.

@tds418: Intentional or not, the trailer has become a wonderful litmus test to gauge the reaction of those that deserve to be mocked and the people that feed on their stupidity for political gain. I don't know which is the saddest in this particular situation, those that genuinely don't get it, or those that voiced opposition based simply on the cluelessness of their President.

@shiftygism I've read your post like 5 times and still have no idea what you're trying to say.

@tds418: While stupidly isn't exclusive to the Republican party, some are doing a bang up job making it seem so with the reaction this film has received over the last few days.

I was actually going to see this movie. Why would they pull it? I mean “The Most Dangerous Game” came out in the early ‘30s

The fact that blaming media for real world tragedies that result from the actions of completely sick individuals, has again come as far as it has is pretty disheartening and scary. As if delaying the release of a politically-charged film holds any sort of real weight... no one was going to be offended by The Hunt's existence solely for it coming out when it was supposed to.; there are many other reasons people would find to complain. It's sad that the studio caved to this kind of pressure when it will solve absolutely nothing. And why does it begin and stop with this movie? The logic behind it is flimsy at best. It's not as outrageous as The Interview's release being pulled all together, but it's still an utterly retarded move that doesn't surprise me in the least.

Sucks, too, because I saw the trailer for it before Crawl and thought it looked pretty entertaining.

It's back!

I actually just heard about this movie today. I find it pretty funny it got banned before. Reminds me of The Interview with Franco.

@casepb: They had the bluray on racks for $8 within weeks!