Q&A With Timothy Hines, director, H.G. WELLS' THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

As we were nearing our release date, theater deals started caving in on the movie, sight unseen. The reason sited again and again was fear of reprisal fromParamount. From our point of view this was odd, as exhibitors should have foreseen this in advance. It is still odd to us that people waited until the last minute to pull our picture. We were dealing with the theatrical pulls day and night. We are an independent production company. The large studios employ hundreds of people and multiple advertising firms to handle publicity. In our case, we have to do both.

As I said above, there was much of fear of reprisal from Paramount. They supply many movies a year to theaters and we have one movie and one upcoming. When it came right down to it, people backed out of deals for our movie, sight unseen. We don't know how much of this was pressure from Paramount or just exhibitors general fears. We know there was some pressure, as was documented by Susanne Ault at Variety Business News and in an article in Forbes. I don't believe this was from people at the top, but there are many employees working for the multiple corporations that are putting out the Dreamworks version. It' s easy to see how these people may have taken it upon themselves to protect their interests. I've seen the argument that we are too small to matter and that this is delusional on our part, but there is documentation. Many people have told me that Paramount people threatened them not to do business or stories on us. Cinefantastique told us they were threatened. Forbes told us they were threatened and changed the tone of their piece. Many websites told us there was pressure placed on them. Several theaters said they needed the future product and couldn't go through with a theatrical release after all, even though we had deals. Look I don't blame them. Business is business. I have no hard feelings about it. And as I said, we know of some documented cases of pressure. But whether these were isolated incidences or something more, well, we'll probably never really know. And truly, I don't care one way or another at this point. It's worked out for us. I'm happy with our distribution. Recent articles have come out on CNN online and others that a recent AOL poll showed that some 80% of movies are watched on DVD now anyway. If Paramount has put out efforts to shut us out of the theatrical market, it is probably because they know that the public can be unpredictable in what it wants. People  bought pet rocks after all.  And we might have, just might have been a theatrical success. Sure the chances were slim that we could've put a dent in their box office take, but there was probably no way they were going to run that risk. As I said we'll more than likely never know and I'm not losing any sleep over it.

Budget.