Audiences are getting another chance to see a big-screen Crash.
Fresh off its Best Picture Oscar, the film is heading to more than 150 theaters Friday for an encore run. The length of the engagement is "open-ended" pending its performance, says Steve Rothenberg, president of theatrical distribution at Lionsgate.
Crash, set over the course of 36 hours in a Los Angeles teeming with tension and deep-rooted prejudices, originally opened in May 2005 and grossed $53.4 million domestically. The film was released on DVD in September and sold 3.8 million copies by Feb. 1, according to Lionsgate.
Some 17,500 copies of the DVD were sold Monday, more than half of last week's tally of 33,000 copies, and it currently ranks number two on Amazon.com's top sellers list in the wake of its three Academy Award wins, including Best Original Screenplay and Best Editing, and earlier accolades, such as the Screen Actors Guild Award for its ensemble cast.
Whether the film's awards will translate into ticket sales is iffy. Large theater chains such as Regal, AMC and Century have a policy against playing films that are available on video.
And even hugely popular films do not necessarily attract repeat theatergoers, especially when people can be at home watching the same thing from their living rooms. Gladiator, which grossed $187 million in theaters and then went on to win Best Picture at the Oscars, was rereleased afterward but only scraped up $1 million on 577 screens, according to Variety.
Crash does have shock value in its favor. The racially charged drama scored the evening's biggest upset Sunday when it beat out frontrunner Brokeback Mountain for the top award. The film has also made headlines for the behind-the-scenes legal wranglings of its producers.
For the homebodies out there, a special edition DVD of Crash is scheduled to hit stores in April. Lionsgate has also said that there are talks for an FX series based on the film that will reprise the roles of its major characters.
Now that's quite a pileup.