Actress Essence Atkins has something to say about directors who cast certain Hollywood chicks for superficial reasons. Check out how the Haunted House star went in about Tyler Perry's marketing tactics only led to people not wanting to see his movie...
It's almost like a verbal slap to those who think Twitter followers trump everything in life. And as a black actress in Hollywood, which is arguably one of the hardest jobs, the casting of Kim Kardashian in a Tyler Perry film (Temptation) could feel like a slap in the face as well.
Jobs are few and far between for Black actresses. So when a director who controls more of his empire than most well-known directors chooses to overlook true talent for a simple marketing tool, you can expect for one of those said credible black actresses to speak about it.
While doing press for the home/DVD release of the hit film Haunted House--which already nabbed a deal for a sequel and was a hit at the box office--Essence Atkins said what most black actresses were thinking: Tyler Perry's "experiment" didn't work. And she explained to S2S why Twitter followers don't equate ticket sales at the box office:
"I found it interesting that Tyler did that with Temptation, hiring Kim Kardashian because she has 16 million Twitter followers, which would seem like a brilliant marketing plan [...] He has one of the biggest Twitter personalities out there in his movies, and he had one of the worst box office weekends [...] It’s not a failure, but it did worse than his movies usually do just based on him [...] I thought that was an interesting finding. Your experiment didn’t work. [...] People want to see good stories. It’s not necessarily that they want to see Kim Kardashian in a movie. They want to see her in a bikini. They want to see her with Kanye [West]. They want to see her on her show talking about her life with her sisters, but that doesn’t mean that they want to see her in a movie [...] The fact that people want to see their lives and the volatility of that…. I don’t think that it translates at all.”
VERY interesting. Your thoughts?