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player ready...If “Against the Ropes,” coming to theaters Friday, sounds like something you might have seen before, that may be because you almost did.
The movie was originally scheduled for release last spring. But Paramount Pictures postponed its launch due to, the studio said, the invasion of Iraq.
In hindsight, perhaps, that decision might have made more sense than it appeared to at the time. Lots of releases–“The Hunted,” “Tears of the Sun,” “The Real Cancun”–crashed and burned at the spring box office last year. Then again, “Anger Management” did just fine.
Still, the folks behind “Ropes” feel that they made the right decision at the time.
The film stars Meg Ryan as the fictionalized version of Jackie Kallen, the first woman to succeed in the testosterone-drenched field of prizefighter managing. Former sports journalist Kallen took the petite blond actress to matches, instructed her through hours of videotape viewing and, of course, spilled her guts about the ups and downs of being a lone woman in a man’s business.
“Ropes” producer Robert Cort said he made the call to postpone the film. “I started in this business in marketing, and I learned a great deal about timing with movies. I felt that we had a great movie, but we had the selling challenge of Meg [not in] a romantic comedy. That’s a legitimate challenge, and we felt we would have to do a bombardment of TV to convince the public that this was a really good time.”
Hard to do when most broadcast time was devoted to covering actual bombardments on the other side of the world.
“Everybody was getting all crazy about it,” adds the movie’s director, actor Charles Dutton, who also claims to have asked studio head Sherry Lansing to delay the launch. “They thought that films they put out during the war, such as ‘The Core,’ did 60 to 70 percent less business due to timing.
“I was a little worried, because the longer you hold a picture, the perception becomes that there’s something wrong with it.”
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale ([email protected]) and Victoria Rodriguez ([email protected])