Meet the feeble

Delighted to see a precipitous (if not Cloverfield-level) second-week drop for the loathsome (no, I didn't see it) Meet the Spartans, but a few words on it before it drops from sight. Around the time of my year-end summary, I discussed (with no fewer than two people) whether Epic Movie counted as a sequel or part of a series with the other [Adjective] Movies; since Meet the Spartans is likely to show up on the 2008 list, we might as well sort it out now. Josh Levin's entertaining Slate review points out that audiences will stop going as soon as they realize the movie they're considering was made by the same people who made Epic Movie and Date Movie. "Film"makers Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer seem to be in agreement; Meet the Spartans used Epic Movie 2 as a working title before someone thought better of it. (Despite successful first-weekend returns and $79 million or so worldwide, Epic Movie currently rests at #61 on the IMDb's Bottom 100 list and has clearly engendered some bad feeling.)

So it's clearly a sequel. On whether or not the whole thing's a series:

Date Movie billed itself in 2006 as from "two of the six writers of Scary Movie." That'd be Friedberg and Seltzer, though neither of them would be asked to return for Scary Movie 2, even though it went into production almost immediately after the first installment hit.

A third writer, Phil Beauman, would go off in another direction (or more accurately, the same direction with a different project) to co-write and co-produce Not Another Teen Movie, which isn't all that great, but certainly better than the Friedberg/Seltzer flicks.

After Date Movie made healthy money – plus, its IMDb rating of 2.7 is temporarily keeping it out of the Bottom 100, which currently tops out at about 2.5 – Friedberg and Seltzer moved on to Epic Movie, and then very quickly on to Epic Movie 2.

However, this means that Spartans actually has no creative personnel in common with Not Another Teen Movie. While Date, Epic, and Spartans were all produced at New Regency and distributed by 20th Century Fox, NATM was at Columbia and Scary Movie at Dimension. It seems like a non-issue, except that an alternate working title for Meet the Spartans was Not Another Scary Epic Teen Date Movie. While it's not a legal issue with regard to title copyright (plus, a quick check yields Not Another Tolkien Movie, Not Another Indian Movie, Another Gay Movie, Not Another Jewish Movie, and a spate of similarly titled XXX offerings, all post-NATM's 2001 release), it's still a clear attempt at capitalizing on someone else's work. Which, of course, I tend to cover pretty heavily here.