
You would think that a comedy with four Oscar-nominated or Oscar-winning actors would have a high enough profile to make it into theaters, and yet
The Maiden Heist, starring Christopher Walken, Morgan Freeman, William H. Macy and Marcia Gay Harden went straight to DVD. To be sure, there were specific business problems challenging its distributor, the Yari Film Group, but
The Maiden Heist also faced the problems of the modern movie business in general, where studios seem averse to releasing any entertaining film that doesn't feature an immediately marketable hook like talking robots, talking animals or talking robot animals. If
The Maiden Heist's cast were in a grim, grueling drama, that movie would probably make it into theaters for Oscar time; since they're in a light, bright and breezy caper comedy, and have an average age well above the industry's target demographic, someone somewhere calculated the cost of a release to theaters against the potential profits and made the call to put it on the silver disc of DVD as opposed to the silver screen of the theater.
And I'm not going to say that
The Maiden Heist would have made buckets of cash if it played theaters, or rail against the way the movie business seems to be running these days, but I will say that
The Maiden Heist works remarkably well on DVD, where it plays slick and slight and funny. Walken plays a security guard at a Boston museum, who loses himself for hours in one of the gallery's classic 19th-century paintings, a portrait of a lady by the sea. One day, though, he's told that to make room for more modern pieces, the painting of the maiden is bound for Copenhagen. This, to Walken is unacceptable; it turns out it's also unacceptable to Morgan Freeman's guard, an amateur artist who's fascinated by a painting full of cats, and William H. Macy, who's grown a little too attached to a bronze nude statue that's bound for Denmark as well. ...
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